Kung Fu: The Legend Continues Had A Crossover With A Show Canceled Three Decades Earlier

In 1995, "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" gave one of TV's first Western heroes a fitting sendoff into the sunset.

Clint Walker was famous for playing Cheyenne Bodie, the main character of "Cheyenne," a one-hour Western series that debuted in 1955. The show took place in the aftermath of the Civil War. Cheyenne was raised by a Cheyenne tribe — hence the name — and grew up into a force for justice across the Old West. The show ran for seven seasons on ABC before concluding in 1962.

"Kung Fu" was a beloved '70s TV show that debuted a decade later, also on ABC, and shared the same general timeframe as "Cheyenne." Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine), a martial-arts expert, spent the better part of three seasons searching for his last remaining blood relative.

Although "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" was set in the present and featured Carradine as the grandson of his namesake, the third-season episode "Gunfighters" was essentially a crossover with "Cheyenne" and a sequel to the first "Kung Fu." Almost the entire episode was set in 1905, where the original Caine encountered Cheyenne.

As far as modern viewers knew, Cheyenne was simply one of the few men of integrity who stood with Caine when an outlaw known as the Deacon (James Drury) terrorized a town with murder and mayhem.

The Deacon nearly altered the entire "Kung Fu" timeline by shooting Caine and kidnapping his wife, Lilly Montgomery Caine (Deborah Rennard), and their son, Matthew (Cody Jones). The plot entailed some fantastical time-travel shenanigans to account for present-day Caine (Carradine) swapping places with his grandfather in the past to rescue his father and grandmother. It all worked out when Caine, Cheyenne, and Deputy Clay Hardin (Clu Gulager) made short work of the villains. That turned out to be Walker's final on-screen role before his death in 2018. 

However, that wasn't the first time that Walker revisited Cheyenne. The 1991 TV movie "The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw" was set in 1906 and featured Walker's Cheyenne alongside Kenny Rogers' Gambler, as well as several stars from Western TV shows — including Carradine as Caine. That made it an even bigger Western crossover than "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues."