Cowboy Al Rides Again!

When was the last time you sat in a movie theater on a Saturday morning and watched Looney Tunes cartoons and a cowboy movie?

“Cowboy Al” Singer made it happen last Saturday at the Bantam Cinema, a small, historic and cozy place that’s been operating in the tiny town of Bantam, CT since 1929.

Yep, we saw Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Gabby Hayes in “My Pal Trigger,” preceded by “Porky’s Prize Pony,” “Drip-Along Daffy” and “Bugs Bunny Rides Again.”

If you wish you’d been there, you’ll get two more chances: “The Singing Cowboy” with Gene Autry on Aug. 3 and “Annie Oakley” with Barbara Stanwyck on Sept. 7. The shows begin at 11 a.m.

Cowboy Al, who runs the amazingly expansive Cowboy Al’s Wild West Museum in Litchfield, CT., had this vision of re-creating his childhood movie-going.

“Every Saturday my mother would drop me and my sister off at the movies in the Bronx, where I grew up,” he told my pal Jim Motavalli during an interview on WPKN in Bridgeport. “We would spend the whole day at the movies!”

Cowboy Al is 89 now but spry as ever and dedicated to preserving and showcasing the Wild West. His museum has been in full swing for the past four years in a series of buildings at his 42-acre Top-O’-World Farm. If you’re up for an entertaining road trip, call him at 1-201-888-9353. He’s open by appointment only — but it’s free!

“My Pal Trigger” attracted about 20 people to Bantam. Most of us were old-timers but it was nice seeing two kids in the audience. (One of them shouted excitedly at the screen during key plot moments.)

“This is Roy Rogers’ most popular movie,” Cowboy Al told us before the show began. “It’s got Gabby Hayes, Dale Evans and the Sons of the Pioneers. Roy sang too (‘Happy Trails to You’) and he was in the Sons of the Pioneers at the beginning.”

Cowboy Al added that Autry was the original singing cowboy star but when he got drafted into the Army, Rogers passed an audition “and he became ‘King of the cowboys.’”

“This is a dream come true!” Cowboy Al said of the movie series. “It took two years for this to happen! Sit back and enjoy the cartoons and the movie. Then enjoy Dale Evans riding in on a palomino, just like Trigger!”

He wasn’t kidding. Cowboy Al, ever the showman, was re-creating a stunt he pulled off to celebrate his 65th birthday. He rented a costume of the Lone Ranger and a white horse and galloped down the street in Tenafly, New Jersey with the “William Tell Overture” blasting from his saddle!

“Cars were beeping, people were shouting,” he told me when I interviewed him for Connecticut magazine’s issue of July 2022. “I looked pretty good! People thought I was Clayton Moore.” (That’s the actor who played the Lone Ranger.)

As promised, after we enjoyed “My Pal Trigger,” Cowboy Al gathered us outside — and up came a palomino, ridden by Kristina Deyo, the operations manager at the Bantam Cinema. She was decked out in full Western garb. Cowboy Al, sparing no expense, had rented the horse from Silver Brook Stables in Uncasville, CT.

All day Cowboy Al couldn’t stop smiling. As he told Motavalli in that radio interview, he loves cowboy movies because “It’s all good news, compared with what we’re facing today. It’s all happy. It brings back memories of happy days.”