Fess Parker, 85, who launched a nationwide craze of coonskin caps and toy rifles in the mid-1950s with his TV portrayal of rugged frontiersman Davy Crockett, and later starred as Daniel Boone in another TV buckskin drama, died March 18 at his home near Santa Barbara, Calif., where he had been a successful winemaker and real estate developer. The cause of death was not reported.

Parker had acted in a few westerns and TV shows when Walt Disney put the 6-foot-6 Texan in the title role of Davy Crockett for a series of three one-hour episodes that appeared in late 1954 and early 1955 on ABC’s “Disneyland” program. Parker and his sidekick, played by Buddy Ebsen, rafted down rivers, foraged in the woods, battled Indians and ended up in a fateful encounter at the Alamo.

The programs were an instant hit, prompting millions of children to buy coonskin caps, buckskin outfits, moccasins, guitars, lunch pails and “Old Betsy” rifles. On tour, Parker was besieged by thousands of fans.

“I will immodestly tell you,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, “it was bigger than anything, ever, including the Beatles and Elvis.”

The show’s theme song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” spent three months as the country’s No. 1 pop hit.

The show’s runaway success took everyone by surprise, including Disney.

“By the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo,” said Walt Disney, as quoted in Leonard Maltin’s “The Disney Films.” “It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero.”

After the Crockett phenomenon subsided, Parker starred in the 1957 Disney family drama “Old Yeller.”