Daniel Boone had a long and fascinating life and he's still the prototype for those classic American frontier characters. He set a standard which people in later generations like Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and Buffalo Bill were measured by. His life would warrant a mini-series.
Any resemblance to that life and the film Daniel Boone which was RKO films big budget item for 1936 is purely coincidental. They don't even get the name of his wife in the character Heather Angel plays right.
I will say that George O'Brien does make an impressive looking Daniel Boone and it's definitely in the tradition of a hero for the kiddie trade. This colonial era film plays like a western, but even the great Cecil B. DeMille made some of the same mistakes with his big budget epic Unconquered that starred Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard and was set in the same era.
Another and more infamous colonial frontier character makes an appearance in Daniel Boone. John Carradine plays a lean and mean Simon Girty and his performance here might have led John Ford to cast him in a similar role in Drums Along The Mohawk.
Girty may have been one of the first diagnosed cases of Stockholm syndrome. As a kid he was captured by the Indians and adapted so well to their lifestyle that he sympathized with them and their cause the rest of his life. He sided with the Tories during the American Revolution so he's come down to us as a renegade and traitor.
But as far as I know he and Daniel Boone never even met, let alone become antagonists. Simon Girty lived almost as long as Daniel Boone. Girty died in 1818 at his farm in Ontario, Canada where he's not exactly a hero, but doesn't have the bad reputation he has on this side of the Great Lakes. Boone of course died in 1820 and the action here takes place in the 1770s.
The film might have been better had one of the bigger studios done it. Daniel Boone was a project for MGM or Warner Brothers not RKO Pictures.
