Red Ryder lived in Painted Valley with his aunt the “Duchess”, his partner Buckskin, his Indian ward Little Beaver and his horse Thunder. The hero was first seen in a series of short stories by writer-cartoonist Fred Harman, who adapted it as a comic strip for the Los Angeles Times in 1938 before it finally became a series of thirty-minute radio shows.
Radio broadcasting was the cheapest form of entertainment, and it provided the public with far better entertainment than most people were accustomed to. As a result, its popularity grew rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and by 1934, 60 percent of the nation's households had radios.