Don Diego Vega, or de la Vega, better known by his nom de guerre, ‘Zorro’, first appeared in the serialised story ‘The Curse of Capistrano’, written by prolific American author Johnston McCulley in 1919. At that stage, the noble, masked vigilante owned a magnificent, jet-black stallion, matching his signature costume, but his horse remained unnamed.
That story was adapted for the 1920 film ‘The Mark of Zorro’, co-written, produced by, and starring Douglas Fairbanks and released by United Artists, the company he had formed with his wife, Mary Pickford, David Griffith and Charlie Chaplin the previous year. The most famous incarnation of Zorro, though, is in the Walt Disney television series ‘Zorro’, which ran for 78 episodes on ABC between October 1957 and July 1959. Starring Guy Williams, real name Armando Catalano, as the master swordsman, horseman and marksman, the series introduces a horse named ‘Tornado’, pronounced, as in Spanish, with the short vowel sound of the letter ‘a’ in the second syllable. The same name has been preserved in many later adaptations of the story.
Aside from his colouration, which befits the dashing, secretive persona of Zorro, himself, not to mention helping the bandit to slip through the fingers of his enemies at night, Tornado is portrayed as loyal, intelligent and intuitive. The Zorro story is set primarily in South California, where he keeps Tornado at his family estate, or hacienda, albeit in a secret cave that is only accessible via a labyrinth of secret passages. Thus, when Diego de la Vega visits Monterey, on the Central Coast of California, as he does in the second season of the Disney television series, logistics dictated that he ride a different, white horse, called Phantom – given to him by a dying soldier – when transforming into his alter ego so far from home.
In the Disney series, Tornado was played by a registered Quarter Horse named Diamond Decorator, a jet-black gelding who began his career as a racehorse, and various doubles with their own strengths. All the horses were trained by Corky Randall, whose father, Glen, trained Roy Rogers’ Trigger.