Constructor: Michael Dewey
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: "HAPPY TRAILS" (35A: Theme song of a classic western, visually suggested six times in this puzzle's grid) — I don't know the title of the "classic western" without looking it up, but I'm gonna guess "The ROY ROGERS Show" ???? ... yep, that's it. The show starred ROY ROGERS and his third wife DALE EVANS. Today, the "HAPPY TRAILS" are meandering strings (or "trails") of letters that spell out synonyms of "happy":
The HAPPY TRAILS:
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Wow, we're really going back today. Though their show was bygone well before I was born, these two were still in public consciousness when I was a small child, as was their song, so I was not completely in the dark. I have no idea how I know the song, or at least the part of the song that goes "HAPPY TRAILS to you / Until we meet again ..." Must've been a superfamiliar cultural tidbit, or pre-digital meme, or what have you. Maybe "Looney Tunes" picked it up, that's certainly how I learned about most music / culture from before my time. I think ROY ROGERS went on to found a chain of restaurants, as did DALE EVANS ... no, wait, that's Bob Evans (any relation to Dale? I have no idea). Looks like ROY ROGERS and DALE EVANS have the same number of letters in their names, and somebody decided to make a puzzle about it. The idea probably sounded good. In fact, it kinda sounds good now. Put the stars' names in symmetrical positions, then put their theme song in the middle as a revealer and make a bunch of "happy""trails" around the grid. If I'm describing it, sure, you might buy it. Seems clever. In practice, however, "trails" (or answers that go off the normal Across / Down directions) do what they always do: put tremendous pressure on the fill and make it predictably mediocre-to-painful. I was wary right away, at O'MEARA (the crosswordesiest golf name of all in the "Longer Than 4 Letters" category), and by the time I had ridden the bygone cowgirl DALE EVANS over to the bygone Mac app ICHAT, I was starting to make faces. The bygone names kept coming: EBAN ... LEEZA ... Then the fussy made-up little phrases ILOSE and ILLGO. By the time I got to that SE corner, with the ACEY G-MAN and *especially* THE ICE (!?!?!), I wanted to stop. I didn't not care about the handful of "HAPPY TRAILS" that awaited me. I wanted to take the horse back to the barn and go get some coffee.
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Relative difficulty: Medium
The HAPPY TRAILS:
- ELATED
- GLAD
- JOYFUL
- JOLLY
- CHEERY
- MERRY
The Roy Rogers Show is an American western television series starring Roy Rogers. 100 episodes were broadcast on NBC for six seasons between December 30, 1951 and June 9, 1957. The episodes were set in the prevailing times (1950s) rather than the old west. Various episodes are known to be in the public domain today, being featured in low budget cable television channels and home video.
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The thing that happens when you take an answer off the Across / Down axes is that ... say you've got a standard (STD!) 8-letter Across answer. Put it in, and now you've got eight Downs that run through it, and each one now has one fixed letter. That's eight fixed letters. Now put that 8-letter on a diagonal instead of an Across and what do you get: the same eight fixed letters for the Downs that have to run through it, *plus* eight more fixed letters for the Acrosses that have to run through it. Locking letters in place really restricts your freedom to fill cleanly, and you essentially double the pressure on the grid when you run an answer on a diagonal. Plus, all those answers with pressure on them are all adjacent to one another. The grid is still fillable, but the results are not likely to make anyone truly ... happy. Today's answers aren't perfect diagonals, but the same idea applies—there's hardly an answer in the entire grid that isn't affected by the theme. I see a handful of Acrosses here and there. And as for Downs, KNOSSOS and WIT are the only Downs in the whole puzzle that doesn't run through at least one theme square. With a theme this dense, it's very hard to make the fill sing. Considering the level of difficulty, this grid is probably filled reasonably well. Basically we get a BUSLOAD of theme instead of CAPFULS, and so the fill creaks throughout. The theme is quaint, and will bring back nostalgic (possibly happy) memories for some portion of the solving audience, but for many others it will be a "????" and so the fill will be all they really have. And at best it's just OK.
I struggled only in the middle, where I didn't know which -SAT was at issue (28A: Princeton Review subj.), and I couldn't remember Mrs. POTTS (28D: Mrs. ___, "Beauty and the Beast" character), and worst of all I had SPREE for SPEED (32D: Tear). Ironically, I *knew* the [Suburb of Boston], LYNN being far more grid-common than that other infamous suburb of crossword-destroying fame (which remains a ONER in the Shortz Era):
