Billy the Kid Trapped (1942)/His Brother's Ghost (1945)/Billy the Kid's Range War (1941)/Billy the Kid's Gun Justice (1940)

  Rob got a pack of twenty Billy the Kid movies for free as part of some promotion.  He didn't want them so I said I'd give them a shot.  They're each about an hour, featuring Olympic gold medalist Buster Crabbe as Billy the Kid in various scrapes.  They're not presented in any sort of order on the discs, and IMDb lists about 36 films in the series from 1941-1946.

This first one, Billy the Kid Trapped, opens with three characters in jail.  We learn that Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe) and his friends Jeff (Bud McTaggart) and Fuzzy (Al St. John) are about to be hanged for murder.  They are busted out by unknown persons and flee, before discovering that they are being framed for crimes by three doppelgangers led by Stanton (Glenn Strange).  Stanton wants further control over the town of Mesa City and plans to use Billy's reputation to drive out his opposition. 

  The sound transfer on this was just awful. 

Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe) is in town to help some sharecroppers being driven off their land.  When Andy Jones (Al St. John) is shot, Billy gets his twin Fuzzy (Al St. John) to pretend to be a ghost in order to scare the raiders. 

  I take it back.  Apparently Bob Steele wore the mantle of Billy the Kid before Buster Crabbe.  Looks like he only starred in three films, though.  Hilariously, he was also in The Big Sleep, which I just watched. 

Here, Billy (Bob Steele) and Fuzzy (Al St. John) are once again being framed for murders they didn't commit.  This time, it's to scare a young heiress (Joan Barclay) away from completing her stagecoach line.  The two are being pursued by a U.S. Marshal named Jeff Carson (Carleton Young), but he's not completely convinced that they're guilty.

According to these movies, Billy the Kid was a blameless do-gooder who just got a bum rap. 

  Billy the Kid (Bob Steele) and his pals Fuzzy (Al St. John) and Jeff (Carleton Young) Blanchard now, instead of Carson, need a place to hole up for a while until the law eases up off of them.  Jeff suggests his uncle's ranch, but when they get there, the ranch is being occupied by a woman (Louise Curry) and her father (Forrest Taylor), neither of whom have ever heard of Jeff's uncle.  They've only owned the ranch for a few months and are having trouble keeping it from being repossessed by Cobb Allen (Al Ferguson), a scam artist strangling their water rights.  It's up to Billy the Kid to provide justice.  Gun justice.