The series became so well-known, that there was even a Walter Lantz cartoon starring Woody Woodpecker that parodied Racket Squad. Although the opening credits featured only a few bars of dramatic music, the much more elaborate end-credits were set to a piece of music called "Parade of the Chessmen," composed by Joseph Mullendore, which received a full commercial recording and release on RCA Victor by Boddy Morrow. The original episodes (total 98 shows) ran for a total of three seasons, after which the series enjoyed more than a decade of life in reruns on local stations across the United States. Produced at Hal Roach Studios, Racket Squad initially went on the air as a first-run syndicated series, but was picked up by the CBS television network in 1951. This was sometimes laced with bittersweet consequences, however, as when a key sympathetic figure died, or when terrible cruelties were inflicted on innocents in the course of whatever scam was being perpetrated (this was especially true in an episode involving a fraudulent old-age home whose residents were being abused and neglected). In the end, as with most American television series of the era aimed at a mass public, Braddock would swoop in near the end of the story, after an initial investigation, and make the arrest. The tale would then be told using a varying company of actors, some of them - such as James Gleason (in one of the more poignant portrayals) - known from films, playing out stories of fraud and deception, involving crooked charities, phony inventions, land swindles, rigged gambling operations, and other scams. Each episode would begin dramatically enough, with a patrol car pulling up in tight close-up on the words "City Police" filling the screen to a dramatic three-note theme, before cutting to a police office at a board, announcing through a microphone, "Captain Braddock, Captain Braddock - ready!" Then it was into Braddock's office where Hadley, in his rich baritone voice, would explain the truth behind the dramatization we were about to see. The series star was movie and radio veteran Reed Hadley, who portrayed Captain John Braddock, the head of a city police department's Racket Squad (more often referred to as the bunco or frauds squad). Like Jack Webb's Dragnet, Racket Squad sought the imprimatur of realism by announcing that its stories were taken from actual police cases. But in its time, it was one of a relatively small group of dramatic series to make the leap from first-run syndication, which was how it started out, to one of the major networks. Racket Squad was among the more successful independently produced television crime series of the early-middle 1950s, and endured long past its first run - indeed, most viewers born after 1946 who remember it recall the series from countless syndicated reruns that lasted well into the 1960s.
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