In the earliest Ritter films the studios relied on rental horses, but Ritter wanted his own mount and bought White Flash in the hills of Skull Valley, Arizona, from horseman Jerome Eddy. He hired renowned trainer Glenn Randall—who worked with several famous movie horses—to school White Flash for films and personal appearances. The horse appeared with Tex at parades, rodeos, and stage shows, enhancing the sense that audiences were seeing the same star team from the movies. Ritter joked in an interview that fame had gone to White Flash’s head, quipping that “next, I suppose he’ll be wanting script approval,” an indication of how central the horse’s “celebrity” had become to his act. (AI-pulled from Texas History Notebook, B-Westerns).
One funny note: as I read the plot synopsis for the movie–Tex and his sidekick Stubby ride into trouble when hooded riders begin terrorizing the countryside and the local mining operation–I couldn’t stop thinking of that Woody’s Roundup episode in Toy Story 2.
