[MUSIC] From the silent film Kansas Saloon Smashers from 1901 to current day big screen blockbusters.

From popular bands to comic books, from literature to TV classics, the state of Kansas has itself become something of a pop culture icon.

[MUSIC] To get into the topic of the state's place in popular culture and how Kansas communities capitalize on those connections, Don and I sat down at the Cottonwood Ranch.

It's interesting I think because it seems like Kansas is almost a character in and of itself.

It's not just a state.

When Kansas comes up in things, in pop culture, it seems like that means something.

There's something about the state, about who we are as people here.

I think you could go down a lot of different rabbit trails on the topic of pop culture in Kansas.

You could talk about various famous people, famous entertainers from here.

For example, Haddie McDaniel, first African American actor to win an Oscar.

And what was she in?

Gone with the Wind.

Yes, I knew that.

One I didn't realize until doing research for this was that Buster Keaton was born in Kansas and so many other names.

Doc Adams that played in Gunsmoke was from Kansas.

Yes, that's right.

And that's a lot of Kansas.

He was from around my hometown of Larned actually.

More currently, musicians, actors, recent television show that's been popular, Ted Lasso.

Jason Sudeikis is from Kansas, but he also set his character Ted Lasso as being from Kansas.

So that's a current example.

Paul Rudd, you know, Ant-Man from the Marvel movies.

Annette Bening.

Bill Curtis, who is a journalist.

Yeah.

And musicians, yeah, you think of the band Kansas.

Perhaps one of the most iconic things that shows up from Kansas in literature, TV shows, movies is not a person at all.

It's the world's largest bowl of twine.

Yes.

I mean, that's, it's an iconic thing.

It is an iconic thing.

Cocker City.

Cocker City or you got to go see it?

Along Highway 24, US Highway 24.

So there's a lot of ways to approach it, I think, in talking about the topic.

But I, but of course, if you look at the earlier movies, of course, they're dominated by the Western.

They were.

And you've got those famous characters that show up so many times in Western things related to Kansas.

Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, all of those kinds of characters.

It's interesting how various communities in Kansas have really leaned into some of these pop cultural references and identities.

One prime example, fairly recently, is what is now referred to as the Gunsmoke Trail.

Yes, the Gunsmoke Trail is an active thing or become very active.

I'm going on these routes that takes you to the town that are mentioned and a lot of history.

Well, I'm Julie Roller Weeks.

I'm the director of tourism for the City of Abilene.

And we're at the Dickinson County Heritage Center today.

It is a stop on the Kansas Gunsmoke Trail.

If you think about Gunsmoke, it's the longest running television Western show ever.

It ran for 20 years and it still plays on TV today.

So several years ago, I was scrolling Facebook and came across a post and it said, are there still places in Kansas that relate to Gunsmoke that you can visit?

Yes, absolutely.

We know Boot Hill and Dodge City, but I wondered if Abilene had a connection.

So I started doing some research and found out that at one point, Marshall Dillon needed some help from his good friend, Wild Bill Hickok, and called him from Abilene to come and help him.

And the more I started looking at this and the interest from this group that had 140,000 people in this group still talking about this show, I reached out to some friends in Hays and Dodge City and Wichita and said, what do you think if we formed the Kansas Gunsmoke Trail?

We love the cowboy story, but they need to have kind of a framework to know how to visit.

And our four towns are laid out geographically really well to make that a good trip.

And they all jumped on board incredibly enthusiastically and we formed this trail.

And it started originally just as a blog of things to see in our communities that relate to the cowboy story.

From there, it became a website and a digital passport where people can go and collect points along the way and earn Gunsmoke themed prizes.

And now it is a bus tour that we have bus tour operators operating who are coming to Kansas to follow this trail to learn about Kansas and its Gunsmoke connection.

So today we're in Abilene, Kansas.

So we have the Abilene and Smoky Valley Railroad.

We have Old Abilene Town, which during the summer travel season, they have the gun fighters perform and the Alamo Saloon.

And it's just a great wild west town.

We're at the Dickinson County Heritage Center.

You can see a bust of Wild Bill Hickok.

You can see a replica of his gun and just learn about our cowboy story that way.

Hays has a number of great murals and businesses that tie into this.

They have a Wild Bill Hickok statue as well.

Wichita has Cowtown Museum, which is another great cowboy themed attraction.

Wonderful businesses as well that connect to this story.

If you want to have a custom cowboy hat made, you can certainly do that in Wichita.

But the story doesn't stop there.

We know so many other Kansas towns were also mentioned in Gunsmoke.

We have a number of great Kansas cow towns that we'd encourage people to go out and explore as well, from Ellsworth to Caldwell, Larned, all over.

We have a really robust cowboy story.

And then Dodge City is the crown jewel of all of this.

Boot Hill Museum, the Gunsmoke exhibit that they have there is truly remarkable.

My name is Keith Wondra.

I'm the curator at Boot Hill Museum here in Dodge City, Kansas.

Gunsmoke started out as a radio show and then in 1955, it adapted for television.

By episode count It's the second longest running American television show by episodes.

It was a weekly television show.

It's always centered around Marshall Matt Dillon, who was played by James Arness.

Some of the other characters were Amanda Blake, who was Miss Kitty.

And then you had Milburn Stone, who was a Kansas native.

He grew up near Frizell, Kansas.

In 1964, Ken Curtis came on to the show and he played the character of Festus, who was Marshall Matt Dillon's trustee sidekick.

I think it made Dodge City world famous.

I think at the time it was famous for its cow town, but by the 1950s, you had people coming down to see the cemetery, the supposed Boot Hill Cemetery and a few other things at Dodge City.

But once you got the Gunsmoke craze, that brought everybody in.

Even when guests still come to the museum.

They always asked for Miss Kitty or Marshall Dillon.

The cast first came here in September 26, 1958.

They were greeted by the Kansas governor, who was George Docking.

And then they had a parade through town.

They stopped near the corner of Second and Walnut and they renamed Walnut Street into Gunsmoke Avenue.

And then they went to the Boot Hill Museum and they dedicated the Front Street replica.

After Dodge, they then went to Larned, Kansas and they had a parade and then also had the festivities at what is now Fort Larned National Historic Site.

They've all donated some items that we have up in the Gunsmoke exhibit, Miss Kitty's dress.

We still get a major draw from Gunsmoke.

We've had people that have come just to Dodge City to see the Gunsmoke items we have.

It's still a major draw.

It depends on the age of the guests that come in, but it's still a major draw.

I think that cowboy story is just something people, they romanticize about it.

Think about Toby Keith and "Should Have Been a Cowboy" and the song was written in Dodge City and I think that still just resonates today.

In the 90s it was one of the most popular songs ever, but it's still just telling that story of our cowboy culture and I think that's something that people from all over the world want to experience.

It's interesting thinking about the model of heroism associated with Gunsmoke and with Matt Dillon and well-intended moral heroes.

Definitely a separation between the good guy and the bad guy.

Absolutely.

Another prime, big, iconic example of that for Kansas would probably have to be Clark Kent.

I'm Christopher Weitrich.

I'm the owner and founder of the Smallville Festival here in Hutchinson, Kansas.

Our biggest goal in our community is to provide some fun, provide something back to the community and to hopefully bring in some tourism.

So the festival began actually as an idea.

In 2012, a few friends had the thought that there's some similarities between Hutchinson and the fictional town of Smallville from the television show.

We decided to take it City Council just to see, hey, maybe we can change the name for one day.

Shockingly, they voted five to zero to rename the town for a day in June of 2013.

So after that happened, I thought we need a festival.

So every year we see something new pop up.

We have a store right down the street here that sells eyeglasses.

Their storefront is full of comic book style art representing Clark Kent and claiming to be where he buys his glasses.

We do see a lot of businesses change their logos or displays in their buildings.

Our newspaper has many times changed the front page of their daily print for our week to say the Smallville News.

Every year we find more and more businesses that want to participate and do something fun.

Visit Hutch is a big part of that because they promote the tourism in the city.

Our City Council, actually when we go get our proclamation every year, sometimes they'll surprise us by putting on a mask or a cape or sometimes they'll have a Superman shirt on.

They'll change the backdrop of City of Hutchinson.

Hutchinson to City of Smallville.

So it's pretty cool.

Yeah, every time we do this, we find someone new that wants to be a part of it.

And that's what's really fun about it is the community has just continued to embrace it for this long and we're building something now that's going to be even bigger than what we've done before.

After our initial year of the festival, we also started a Comic Con.

One of my friends actually became the owner of the Comic Con while I ran the festival downtown and that ran for about 10 years.

And each year he would bring in guests and celebrities, writers, authors, artists, and we just had a great time.

We got to meet some great Superman actors, actors from the television show Smallville, even Lee Merriweather from the original Batman TV show who played Catwoman.

So he brought in a lot of cool celebrities that the community got to meet and it brought in fans from all over the place to Hutchinson.

When I think back to the origins of why Kal-El landed in Kansas and grew up to be Clark Kent, I think a lot of it is just based on the morals.

Growing up on a farm, learning hard work, having parents that were fairly strict and wanted him to learn how to use his abilities for good and being part of a community where he was able to give back and be a hero among the community before he became Superman.

He has his powers because of the yellow sun, but I think personally I believe he's a superhero because of the things he does, the way he grew up, the way he was taught and raised.

Anybody can be a hero and that's one of the things we try to promote at our festival.

We actually try to honor first responders and local heroes and in doing that we hope that we can inspire others to be a hero to the community as well.

So we have done smoke, we have Superman, but probably the thing people associate as much if not more than anything else would be, I'm assuming, Dorothy and Toto and the Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz starts out at Kansas too with a big tornado on a farm and a young girl gets swept away into an area that they really don't know that's strange to her, but she was able to adapt.

And the interesting thing too is, I mean, the Wizard of Oz as a story is not just about the movie that's so famous.

The books made it famous early part of the 1900s.

There were actually two other movie versions made before the Judy Garland movie.

There is a community here of course in Kansas that's really leaned into that heritage as well in the story of the Wizard of Oz and that would be Liberal.

Hi, I'm Sally Fuller.

I'm director of Visit Liberal.

We became the home of Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz.

The story goes that Max Zimmerman, who owned an insurance company here, had gone to California for a conference and people kept seeing his name tag that said he was from Kansas.

And they would say to him, "Oh, have you seen Dorothy and Toto?"

My name is Nathan Dow.

I am the director of Dorothy's House, which I am standing on the steps of.

Max Zimmerman was in California and legend has it that in a California diner, he was asking the locals there, "If you ever came to Kansas, what would you want to see?"

Naturally, quite a few of them said the place where Dorothy grew up.

So Max came back and said, "People need a place in Kansas where they can go see Dorothy and Toto.

Let's be that place.

Let's give them that place."

Unfortunately, Dorothy is a fictional character.

And so back then especially, there was nowhere in the whole state you could find a Dorothy's home.

We decided to fix that.

So we brought out this local farmhouse from 1907.

A family donated the farmhouse.

They moved it into town onto the grounds of our historical museum and created Dorothy's house and had the then governor, John Carlin, of Kansas declare us Dorothy's official hometown.

So we say that this is Uncle Henry and Auntie Em's room and this is Dorothy's room.

And if you look at this little black and white photo right outside of Dorothy's room, that photo is from MGM Studios.

It shows their version of the Dorothy's room set.

So you can see that our Dorothy's room pays homage to that Dorothy's room as much as we can right down to Toto's little dog bed.

Then we added the land of Oz multiple years later.

Our set was actually created by a Topeka artist named Linda Windler and her parents.

Initially opened in a Topeka mall.

Eventually, the mall ran out of space.

They were looking for a permanent home for this wonderful exhibit.

We already had Dorothy's house.

So we asked why not add the land of Oz and it's been here ever since 1992.

So the Wizard of Oz series starts with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum published in 1900.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz became the basis for the famous 1939 Wizard of Oz film.

But there are actually a lot more Oz books than that.

Baum himself wrote 14 as well as some kind of Oz adjacent books.

But when Baum passed away, the publisher Riley and Lee didn't want to be finished with such a famous series.

So they decided to hire another writer, Ruth Plumlee Thompson, to pick up where Baum left off.

When she was done, they hired someone else and someone else and someone else.

And in all, there were 40 Oz books published by Riley and Lee, which today we call the famous 40.

And Dorothy's house brings in thousands, tens of thousands of visitors every year.

And people come to Kansas to specifically do the Wizard of Oz things that there are to do in the state.

And I always tell them, if you're going to make a trip, you might as well do it all, which includes us and Sedan's, Yellow Brick Road, and Wamego's Wizard of Oz Museum.

And they're all very different, but all still very iconic to the movie.

Another thing, though, when we're talking about the film itself and not just the original book story, is this idea that the film was popular when it released in cinema.

And in fact, it released in theaters several times, but it didn't really catch on as sort of one of the most famous films ever made until it started airing on television in 1956.

And pretty soon after that, it was airing year after year after year.

It sort of became mandatory holiday viewing for a lot of people.

We'd gather around the TV as a family to watch The Wizard of Oz when it came on.

It was just a thing for my generation.

And I think we still love to show our grandchildren and have them have that same nostalgia for the movie.

I don't know why L. Frank Baum chose Kansas, why he made Dorothy a farm girl in Kansas.

Maybe he associated Kansas with tornadoes.

Maybe he just associated Kansas with farms and farm life.

But for some reason, he decided that Dorothy was a farm girl from Kansas.

So we really lean into being the home of Dorothy Gale.

And we recently put up a 10-foot Dorothy slipper slide that you can come go down.

It's big enough for adults, and trust me, adults go down it.

It's 10-foot at the back of the heel.

It's 18 and a half feet from end to end.

And it's right on Highway 54 across, on the grounds of the Tourist Information Center, but right across the street from Dorothy's house and the Land of Oz.

So we continue to add items to our community that that mark us as the home of Dorothy Gale.

And I think that people would agree that the main message from the movie, there's no place like home, is still a message that everybody can get behind.

And children still love the movie.

And parents and grandparents still show the movie to children.

We see little Dorothy's and Totos all the time.

Just this week, we had a little girl come in.

She was probably four or five, but she had on ruby slippers with little heels, and she was prancing around and showing those shoes off.

It's still very loved.

Children still watch it.

People still show it to them.

So I think the question of why exactly Wizard of Oz caught off in the way it did is a question a lot of people have wrestled with, both in Kansas and kind of just studying media in general.

And there's a lot of different answers people have come up with.

I think it's probably a combination of things myself.

One of the big ones is that when L. Frank Baum set out to write this story, he wanted it to be the American fairy tale.

He wanted it to be a kind of classic story anyone could see themselves in, especially any kid.

And so I think that follows through not only in the books, but to the movie where, yes, it's about Kansas and it's set in Kansas.

And yet I think it's the idea that Dorothy could be from anywhere and still have this journey and still learn this lesson about home.

I think that's what really appeals to people.

And I also think that's what makes it such an interesting connection for the state of Kansas to have, because for all of these people who grew up on this movie and on this story, Kansas has the connotation of home.

And so we just want to reinforce that idea of, yes, Kansas has this amazing fantasy connection through this film, but at the same time, it's also this real place.

And we think when people come out here, that's a really interesting thing for them to discover.

And we really think that's a big part of what makes the story so universal.

So with the pop culture in Kansas, the pop culture was historic, as is now.

So there's a lot of things to see, whether it's a force for military campaigns went out during the Indian wars or even prior to that, the sites in Eastern Kansas when Kansas was a territory and the controversy on that.

So I think we could maybe even call this instead of pop culture, maybe pop history, because there are certain things in here that are very popular that identify Kansas.

It's not only with the Great Plains and the cattle trails and transportation trails, including the railroads with the Kansas Pacific and also the Ashland Peak in Santa Fe.

I just recently did a big conference in Wichita.

These were people from all over the world, not just the United States.

There were people there from Russia and Romania.

And they were talking about what they expected of Kansas and what they actually found in Kansas.

And two of the things that we talked about were that it's a myth that Kansas is flat, but it's not a myth that the people in Kansas are incredibly welcoming and hospitable.

That is true about Kansas.

It was true when Dorothy was a little girl, and it's true today.

The fact that family is important, that there's no place like home, that the peace and the tranquility of farm life, those are all still very relevant today, and they're all still out there for anybody that wants to discover them.

I think it's the beauty of Kansas.