K. Gordon Murray

K. Gordon Murray (1922–1979) was an American producer, most notable for his redubbing and re-releasing of foreign fairy tale films for U.S. audiences. He is often cited as the "King of the Kiddie Matinee". Murray also marketed many of the Mexploitation luchador films such as Santo films popular in Mexico, changing Santo's name to Samson and dubbing them in English.

Among his more famous contributions are Little Red Riding Hood (1960), Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters (1962), Rumpelstiltskin (1955), The Golden Goose (1964) and Santa Claus (1959), which he also narrated under the pseudonym "Ken Smith".

Born in Bloomington, Illinois, where many of the leading circus performers of the time spent their winter seasons, Kenneth 'Kagey' Gordon Murray, son of an Irish-American funeral home director, occasionally spent his boyhood in the company of those struggling artists. By his teenage years, Murray had set up a "corn game", what would today be known as a bingo parlor, in one of his father's cemetery tents. He then took that corn game out on the road with West's World Wonder Shows Carnival, eventually rising to the position of manager.

During the winter season at Bloomington, Murray set up a network of quasi-legal slot machines. By the late 1930s, Murray was using his circus friends' various connections to aid a casting director to hire little people to act as Munchkins in the 1939 MGM movie, The Wizard of Oz. Shortly afterward, Murray married his longtime sweetheart, Irene, a college graduate from Illinois State University. In 1949, Ken and Irene settled in Hollywood, where Cecil B. DeMille hired Murray to help promote his circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth.

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