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Young King Cole, the 1922 Harry H. Pollard silent two-reel boxing sports melodrama short ("One of the the 'New leather pushers'"; this was the seventh in the popular series; based on a short story by H.C. Witwer) starring Reginald Denny, Hayden Stevenson, and Elinor Field. Note that this was one of a series of many two-reel Universal shorts. It started in 1922 with a series of six of them, each known by the generic title of "The Leather Pushers", and each was a boxing movie, but each was individually titled as follows: #1: Let's Go (1922); #2: Round Two (1922); #3: Payment Through the Nose (1922); #4: A Fool and His Honey (1922); #5: The Taming of the Shrewd (1922); #6: Whipsawed. A second series of six more two-reelers, appropriately titled The New Leather Pushers (1922), followed immediately: #7: Young King Cole (1922); #8: He Raised Kane (1922); #9: The Chickasha Bone Crusher (1923); #10: When Kane Met Abel (1923); #11: Strike Father, Strike Son (1923); #12: Joan of Neward (1923). A third series of six more episodes, still titled The New Leather Pushers (1923), followed: #13: The Wandering Two (1923); #14: The Widower's Mite (1923); #15: Don Coyote (1923); #16: Something for Nothing (1923); #17: Columbia, the Gem and the Ocean (1923); #18: Barnaby's Grudge (1923). A fourth series, still titled The New Leather Pushers (1923), but with Billy Sullivan replacing Reginald Denny in the leading role, followed: #19: That Kid from Madrid (1923); #20: He Loops to Conquer (1924); #21: Girls Will Be Girls (1924); #22: A Tough Tenderfoot (1924); #23: Swing Bad the Sailor (1924); #24: Big Boy Blue (1924). Because the name "The Leather Pushers" is prominent on all the advertising, these are often mistakenly listed as being chapters of a movie called "The Leather Pushers", especially because the producers advertised each movie as "A New Round of" to make a boxing pun! In 1930, Universal revived the series with a movie starring Kane Richmond, and there were a total of ten of these made at that time. In 1940, they tried yet again with Richard Arlen, Andy Devine, and Shemp Howard, but this time there were no sequels. Note that H.C. Witwer is virtually forgotten today, but in his time (the 1920s), he was perhaps America's foremost short story writer of stories dealing with sports, and he published over 400 stories in his lifetime, which was not a long life, because he sadly died in 1929 from liver failure, and surely would have written a great many more stories had he lived longer (he was just 39 when he died). Many of his stories were adapted into films, including "The Leather Pushers" series of boxing movies, and the "Racing Blood" series of horse racing movies, among many others. In 1929, he sued Harold Lloyd for plagiarism of one of his short stories in Lloyd's "The Freshman", and he died during the trial, but his wife continued the lawsuit after his death, and she was awarded $2.3 million (in 1929 dollars!), but the judgement was overturned, and she received nothing. Witwer produced some of the movies made from his stories, and it is sad that he is so completely forgotten.
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