Southfork ranch was made popular by the 1978 television series "DALLAS", Lorimar Productions began filming this show and it became wildly popular all over the world. Dallas aired in over 96 different countries and the Southfork Ranch still has over 100,000 visitors annually for tours and parties.
The show was the first of it's kind, meaning the story line carried over from one episode to another, unlike the shows that were popular in the past, (I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, M*A*S*H, Carol Burnett Show, and Laugh in) just to name a few. This might be a foreign concept for young people today, only because they never experienced television before Dallas. The most watched episode of Dallas was "who shot J.R?" and still today there has never been a cliffhanger close to that magnitude.
The Southfork Ranch has attracted people from all countries of the world on a daily basis. Most recently there has been an influx of younger generation Europeans. One young man from Europe actually changed his name legally to "J.R Ewing" after the main character on the show and has J.R's picture tattooed on his arm. In Romania there are 3 houses that are replicas of the "Dallas house" knows as Southfork, due to the popularity of the show in that country.
Big name stars like Johnny Cash, Alan Jackson, Martina McBride, Travis Tritt, Brooks and Dunn, and many more have visited the ranch for various parties and events. Annually there are over 1400 events such as weddings, family reunions, anniversary parties, and most famously the Cattle Barons Ball which raises funds for cancer research.
The notion that the Southfork Ranch gained it's popularity in the early 80's and is still popular with events and especially tours, shows me the impact the show Dallas had on the world. No one involved in the making of the series could have imagined the impact that a fictions story about an oil family from Dallas would have had on the world.
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