We come now to perhaps the finest romantic spanking ever seen on classic television (i.e. before the pornographic era): The Maggie Hamilton Story on Wagon Train. This is a very well-known scene thanks to CSR Resident Artist Dan Rivera, who captured it on video tape in the late 80's or early 90's and made it available on the old VHS Cinema Swats series (this is the version that has been available on YouTube, to which we're about to add our own).
We couldn't afford to buy Wagon Train on DVD just to extract the spanking scene, so we did the next best thing and captured it when a Chicago-based network reran the episode a few months ago.
Flint (Robert Horton) is of no mind to put up with any more of Maggie's shenanigans.
Our story is fairly simple: young Maggie Hamilton (Susan Oliver) isn't happy about moving west with her family, so she runs away from the wagon train and Flint (Robert Horton) is dispatched to rescue her from the many dangers of the open land and bring her back.
Flint catches up with Maggie and rescues her from a gang of marauders which had been shadowing the wagon train but didn't attack it due to the counsel of an Indian (played by Leonard Nimoy, who of course would work with Oliver several years later on the Star Trek pilot The Cage). The Indian points out that the whole train is too strong, but of course an isolated girl is another matter, and Flint has his hands full overcoming all of the gang.
After the rescue, the two spend the night together on the prarie, and Maggie seems to finally appreciate the hardships involved in trying to live off the land. This would in fact have been a better point in the story to place the spanking, but it waits until next morning, when Maggie reverts to her immature and selfish self and tries to escape from Flint using his own gun!
Somewhat improbably, Maggie actually pulls the trigger several times, but nothing happens because Flint has taken the precaution of removing the bullets from the gun (probably a wise procedure when dealing with brats). And then it's time for Maggie to get a lesson in growing up as OTK she goes!
One really good thing about this scene is that Flint lifts her dress up and spanks her on her bloomers! Of course, if we ever have to spank a woman dressed like that out on the prarie, we're going to take down the bloomers and anything else she may be wearing and spank her on the bare, but such a scene could not be shown on television in 1960. The OTK positioning is very good also.
"Ye-owwww!" Maggie discovers what all brats learn sooner or later - spanking hurts! Good acting by Oliver here, although Horton seemed to be laying on the swats pretty good so maybe it's not all acting.
Afterward, a tearful Maggie repents of her ways and apologizes. She has been spanked into submission, and we see here an example of what we call the ambiguity of spanking: although the story line makes this as close to a pure discipline spanking as possible, the M/F pairing tends to imply dominance/submission, and augmented by the youth and sexiness of this couple, the erotic overtones are inevitable and inescapable. It is in fact these overtones that have made this scene such a classic.
Subdued and repentant, Maggie has earned a nice hug - and there's no better conclusion to a spanking than that!
It's hard to believe that 54 years have elapsed since this episode hit the airwaves in April 1960! It might be appropriate to explain for the benefit of younger readers the explosion of Westerns at this time. The television medium was still quite young, and the Golden Age of the 1950's, good as it was, had to come to an end. It was very difficult to produce so many unique dramas and to do them live. The invention of videotape, the necessity of filling three hours of airtime every night for each network, and the desirability of amortizing the cost of sets over a period of months or years pretty much doomed high-quality original live drama to be replaced by mediocre series in which the same characters (and same sets, of course) appeared week after week. This lowered costs and made it possible to produce a much greater volume of material (it's easier to write a short play for known characters than it is to invent your own), with of course a terrible loss in the quality of the drama.
