This article first appeared in the May 2021 digital edition of Equestrian Life. To see what's in the current issue, click here.

My Friend Flicka was a 1943 movie, and later a TV series.

© RGR Collection: Alamy Stock Photo

My Friend Flicka

By Suzy Jarratt

Although it was the first television series ever filmed in colour, My Friend Flicka was originally shown in black and white. Only 39 episodes were ever filmed in 1956-57, but these were broadcast in syndicated reruns right up to the 1980s.

The world was first introduced to Flicka, meaning “little girl” in Swedish, through a book written by Mary O’Hara, who had been a Hollywood screenwriter during the silent film era. She married a Swede who had worked horses in the US Army Remount Service and they brought a ranch in Laramie County, in Wyoming, smack in the middle of the American Mid-West. To help make ends meet during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mary began writing Wyoming ranch stories. My Friend Flicka was published in 1941 and became an immediate bestseller.

In 1943 it became a feature film starring Roddy McDowall playing 10-year-old Ken McLaughlin; in the same year he also played Joe, the juvenile lead in Lassie Come Home.

Country Delight, an American Saddlebred, played the main role in Flicka, while the six doubles were all Arabians. McDowall didn’t like any of them. “I had really liked Lassie,” McDowall once said, “but the horse was a nasty animal with a terrible disposition – she kept stepping on my feet – in fact all the Flickas were awful!”

Interesting to note that McDowall’s stunt double for this, and most of his other childhood film roles, was Monty Roberts, who was to become the celebrated “horse whisperer” and a friend of Queen Elizabeth’s....

Read the full article in the May 2021 issue of Equestrian Life here!