Trivia
Producers originally planned to bring back Jock Ewing's character, but fans were against having anyone play Jock Ewing except Jim Davis. Steve Forrest appeared on the show as Wes Parmalee, claiming to be Jock Ewing, but it was revealed that he was not.
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When Victoria Principal opens the shower door in the infamous Bobby shower scene, actor John Beck was the one in the shower. The shock to Pam was supposed to be that he had been killed. The shot of Patrick Duffy was inserted later. Actually Pam would not have been shocked to see Mark (John Beck) in the shower considering that his character had been brought back during the "dream season" and she had married him earlier in the very same episode.
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Victoria Principal refused to appear in the final episode because there was a good chance the show would return the next season. She said she would only appear if she were 100% sure that the show wouldn't return.
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In episode 145 Peter's Principals, the character Clayton Farlow mentions he is taking Miss Ellie to see Camelot as there is an actor with quite a good voice playing the role of Arthur. Howard Keel, who played Clayton, had starred as Arthur in numerous stage productions of Camelot.
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Howard Keel refused to do a script reading for Dallas producers at his first meeting with them, saying he was a "lousy reader" and that "what they saw was what they got".
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Howard Keel was originally signed for two brief cameos in two episodes. His character, Clayton Farlow, was such a hit with viewers, however, it was decided to make him a regular.
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Originally, Linda Gray's Sue Ellen really didn't have a part, so it was up to her and Larry Hagman to improvise their scenes in the background. Fortunately, Leonard Katzman and others saw their work in the dailies of the episodes and Sue Ellen's character was fleshed out.
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Linda Gray was fired from Dallas after begging the executives to give her a chance to direct like Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy. However, Larry Hagman threatened to leave the show because he didn't feel they could have JR without Sue Ellen.
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Larry Hagman was not the first choice to play J.R. The part was offered first to Robert Foxworth who declined because he felt the character needed "softening". Foxworth later played a more sympathetic character on the hit prime-time soap Falcon Crest. Ken Kercheval was originally to play Ray Krebbs, while Steve Kanaly was to play Bobby Ewing. Linda Evans was to play Pamela, and Mary Frann was to play Sue Ellen.
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The "Who Shot J.R.?" episode was the highest rated single episode of a television series until the finale of M*A*S*H: Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen beat it in 1983.
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When Patrick Duffy was asked to return to the show in 1986, his wife told him that the only way it could happen is if his character had actually died in a dream. This led the producers to decide that Bobby Ewing's death (in addition to the entire 1985-86 season) was just a figment of Pam Ewing's imagination.
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When Jim Davis died in 1981, it was decided to write him off by first having his character, Jock Ewing, disappear in the Amazon and eventually having him declared legally dead.
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After Jim Davis died, a portrait of him hung above the fireplace at Southfork as a memorial to the actor. When Miss Ellie remarried in 1984, the picture was moved to the Ewing Oil set.
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The house used as the "Southfork Ranch" house was an actual Texas residence, owned by Joe R. Duncan, or J.R. Duncan. When the show became popular, tourists from all over the world visited the house day and night. The Duncan family was forced to sell the house and it is now a museum devoted to the show.
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Larry Hagman and Ken Kercheval were the only members of the cast to stay with the series throughout its entire run. However, Ken Kercheval does not appear in every episode, unlike Larry Hagman.
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Several actors including Charlene Tilton and Jim Davis were filmed firing the gun that shot J.R before it was decided who would be the shooter. The gun is on display at the real Southfork Ranch site in Dallas.
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When Steve Kanaly was talking about leaving the show due to his character's lack of development, it was Larry Hagman who came up with the idea to make the Ray Krebs character the illegitimate son of Jock Ewing in order to get Kanaly to stay
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In several of the early episodes of the series, Lucy and Ray were often portrayed as lovers. However, when it became revealed that Ray was Jock's illegitimate son, his affair with Lucy was never mentioned again.
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When Barbara Bel Geddes first left the show, Larry Hagman suggested that his real life mother, Mary Martin play Miss Ellie.
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Several former cast members returned for the final episode including Linda Gray, Jack Scalia, Ted Shackelford, and Joan Van Ark. Victoria Principal was also invited to participate but declined.
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Spinoff show Knots Landing was actually created first, but the producers were unable to sell it. They developed Dallas instead and when that became a success, and the network asked for a spinoff, they were able to dust off the Knots Landing idea.
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Producer Leonard Katzman went to New York and hired a crew to film Patrick Duffy's scenes as a soap commercial. He then took the first part of the scene and edited it into the series.
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Barbara Bel Geddes is only nine years older than Larry Hagman, though they played mother and son. Hagman is 18 years older than Patrick Duffy, who played his younger brother, though we assume them to be only a few years apart in age.
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Miss Ellie and Donna Krebbs belonged to a ladies organization called the Daughters of the Alamo.
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The characters of Clayton Farlow and his son, Dusty, get their surname from the show's production manager Wayne A. Farlow. Also the maiden name of Clayton's first wife, and Dusty's mother was Wayne.
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A character named Louella Lee Caraway, a secretary at Ewing Oil during the first four seasons, was named after staff writer Louella Lee Caraway.
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Morgan Fairchild played Jenna Wade, Bobby's childhood sweetheart, in a 1978 episode. When Jenna was seen again for two episodes in 1980, she was played by Francine Tacker as Fairchild was busy working on her own series 'Flamingo Road' (1981)_. In 1983, with Flamingo Road now canceled, the producers approached Fairchild to reprise the role but she declined feeling that she did not want to return to a small role. However, the producers decided to recast the role with Priscilla Presley and the character became a series regular for five years. Fairchild later claimed that her mother never forgave her for turning down a role in her favorite soap.
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Barbara Bel Geddes left the show in 1984 due to the producers not agreeing to her demands for a pay rise, and Donna Reed took her place the following season. When Bel Geddes decided to return in 1985, Reed was fired. Reed sued the producers of the show for breach of contract, who settled with her for an undisclosed sum of money. Ironically, Reed died (of cancer) in January 1986, mere months after she left the show which meant she would not have been able to continue for the duration of her contract anyway.
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Susan Howard was only supposed to appear once as Donna Culver, but she impressed the producers enough that she eventually became a regular.
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Several references were made during the show's run about Clayton Farlow having a past history of singing. Of course, Howard Keel, the actor who portrayed Clayton, was famous for his powerful bass-baritone singing voice.
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Miss Ellie did have an older brother named Garrison Southworth. Middle son Gary is named after him.
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Larry Hagman (John Ross 'J.R.' Ewing, Jr.) is the only actor to appear in all 357 episodes of the series.
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Larry Hagman (John Ross J.R. Ewing, Jr.), Patrick Duffy (Bobby Ewing), Ken Kercheval (Cliff Barnes), Linda Gray (Sue Ellen Shepard Ewing) and Steve Kanaly (Raymond 'Ray' Krebbs) are the only actors to appear in both the first and last episodes of the series.
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German broadcasting network ARD refused to translate and show seven episodes of season 1 to 3 because of controversial or "unnecessary" story lines.
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Early episodes alternately referred to the Ewings' company as Ewing Enterprises as well as Ewing Oil before finally just referring to it as Ewing Oil.
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While his grave in Pam's dream lists the year of his birth as 1949, in the "reality" of the series, Bobby's date of birth was given as 16 February 1950.
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Producers approached Howard Keel for the role of Jock Ewing after Jim Davis's death but out of respect for Davis, Keel turned them down and remained in the role of Clayton Farlow.
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Jenilee Harrison has the distinction of playing the only character to be killed off twice. Jamie Ewing Barnes was killed off the first time in the last episode of the "Dream Season" when she was blown up in her brother's car. The second time came midway through the next season, when she was killed while rock climbing in Mexico. Though the second death didn't occur on camera.
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When ratings fell in the late 1980s, CBS considered dropping the show's serial format and switching to self-contained shows.
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Susan Howard is the only cast member to write episodes of the series (9.23 "Sitting Ducks" and 10.23 "The Ten Percent Solution").
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In May 1981, Delta Burke landed the role of Katherine Wentworth but she was forced to turn down the part because she was contractually obligated to the then-yet-to-be-picked-up series Filthy Rich, which was a spoof of "Dallas".
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Barbara Bel Geddes appeared in all the episodes of the series, for her first six 1/2 seasons, missing 2, also, 1/3 due to her March 1983 quadruple by-pass heart surgery, allowing her to recover the following year, at the time Donna Reed replaced her and got fired, before returning to Bel Geddes's role for the 1985-86 season before her second departure at the end of the 1989-90 season, where she appeared in all the episodes for 5 more seasons, missing 4, for a total of 278 of the 357 episodes, and almost stayed through the entire run.
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The view of the Dallas skyline in the opening credits is approaching the city from the south on Jefferson Blvd.
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Larry Hagman claimed the show received more fan mail for Jeremy Wendell, played by William Smithers, than any other villain.
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Despite the competition between the two shows, Dallas and Dynasty shared many guest stars, including Brian Dennehy, Dale Robertson, Joel Fabiani and Tracy Scoggins.
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Patrick Duffy had wanted the lead role in the 1986 series Heart of the City. When Robert Desiderio was given the part (with a young Christina Applegate playing his daughter), Duffy decided to return to Dallas. Heart of the City lasted only 13 episodes while Dallas remained on the air for several more seasons. Desiderio later appeared in a recurring role in the Dallas spin-off, Knots Landing.
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Originally, the show was intended as a starring vehicle for Victoria Principal due to the fact that Pam would act as a buffer between the Ewings and the Barnses and J.R. would have been more of a supporting character. However, the producers were so impressed by Larry Hagman's portrayal of the immoral J.R. that he immediately was bumped up to be the show's main character.
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In Season 10, JR attempts to weaken OPEC's influence over the price of oil by hiring a group of mercenaries to blow up several oil fields in the Middle East. This storyline is loosely based on Texas businessman Ross Perot's mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1979.
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Instead of Bobby's shower scene cliffhanger, the original cliffhanger for Season Nine involved the revelation that Ben Stivers was supposedly Jock Ewing. In the Season Nine finale, Miss Ellie and Sue Ellen are shown searching Southfork for Clayton. Sue Ellen leaves to go to Ewing Oil and gets caught in the subsequent explosion intended for JR. The original plan was to then cut back to Ellie, who has stumbled into Ben's quarters in her search for Clayton. There, she discovers her letters to Jock and some of his other belongings. Ben arrives and tells her that the items are "his." This is basically the same scenario used in Season Ten for the scene between Ellie and Wes Parmalee when Wes first hints that he is Jock.
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Barbara Bel Geddes was living in New York when cast for the series. Throughout the making of the series, Bel Geddes would fly home to New York and back every weekend and on other breaks to be with her family.
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Barbara Bel Geddes was David Jacobs's first choice for Miss Ellie, she accepted the job only because she was flat broke much due in part of her savings after her husband's death, six years earlier.
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