South of the Chisholm Trail

No studio reworked stock footage from their other western films more than Columbia Pictures, other than Warners/Vitaphone did when making a new Short out of footage from three other shorts, or a Short from a feature western. Vitaphone and the Warners' shorts department sold exhibitors the same footage as many as five different times under a different title.

And Columbia re-used their plots over and over again as plots in all of their early series-westerns , starring Buck Jones or Tim McCoy, were made over again (and again) in the series starring Ken Maynard, Bob Allen, Charles Starrett, Bill Elliott and Russell Hayden. The only Columbia western series that didn't rely on dusting off previously made films was the Ken Curtis-Hoosier Hotshots series.

But for this film, Columbia did a re-work of one of their A-westerns, 1941's "Texas" that starred Claire Trevor, William Holden and Glenn Ford. They, of course, dumbed it down, simplified it and altered it to fit The Durango Kid character, but bottom line the primary plot was essentially all "Texas", with similar characters and professions among the bad guys, and also inserted a few incidents and some of the dialogue from that film. And the climatic cattle-stampede through town from "Texas" was used in full.

Of course, subbing George Chesebro for the Edgar Buchanan and Frank Sully for the George Bancroft characters does tend to lose a lot in transition.