Zorro (1957 TV series)
American action-adventure western drama series

Zorro (also known as Disney's Zorro) is an American action-adventure Spanish Western television series produced by Walt Disney Productions and starring Guy Williams. Based on the Zorro character created by Johnston McCulley in his 1919 novella, the series premiered on October 10, 1957, on ABC. The final network broadcast was July 2, 1959. Seventy-eight episodes were produced, and four hour-long specials were aired on the Walt Disney anthology series between October 30, 1960, and April 2, 1961.
The series is set in Los Angeles of 1820, when it was still part of Spanish California and before Mexican independence. Zorro aids Hispanic settlers and indigenous peoples oppressed by the local rulers. A remastering, in which color was added, was released in 1992.
Plot
For most of its run, Zorro's episodes were part of continuing story arcs, each about thirteen episodes long. It had a structure similar to a serial. The first of these chronicles the emergence of Zorro/Diego to California in 1820, having returned from studying in Spain at the behest of his father, Don Alejandro, to help depose the greedy and cruel local Comandante, Captain Enrique Sánchez Monastario. After Monastario's final defeat, in the second storyline, Zorro must uncover and counter Magistrado Carlos Galindo, who is part of a conspiracy to take over rule of California.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zorro (1957 TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.