Boomtown was a children's show on WBZ-TV in Boston, Massachusetts that ran Saturday and Sunday mornings from 1956 through 1974, and was hosted by singing cowboy Rex Trailer.

As originally conceived, the show was strictly a showcase for Trailer, who demonstrated trick riding and roping, sang cowboy tunes, and told western stories.

The first hour of the show always took place on a "bunkhouse" set, with no audience, where Trailer engaged in slapstick and improvised comedy with a sidekick, again a nod to the Howdy Doody format.

Trailer would then mount his palomino horse, Goldrush, and (in a filmed introductory sequence accompanied by his dramatic song, "Hoofbeats") ride across a "prairie wide" onto the western-themed Boomtown studio set to interact with his live audience for the next two hours.

Studio crews re-created the Old West on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton,[3] with the familiar landmarks of an old western town: hitching posts, opera house, storefronts and jail.

With a natural ease and charisma, Trailer regularly demonstrated his considerable cowboy skills, which he picked up while spending his childhood summers on his grandfather's ranch in Texas.

As the camera lingered on a close-up of the Pepsi logo, the radio (tuned to sister station WBZ-AM) was playing a Coca-Cola commercial.

Rex would appoint two children sheriff and deputy, and hand them a "wanted" poster showing another member of the studio audience thinly disguised.

As the music played, the entire "posse" would march through the sheriff's office, waving for the camera (and for their families and friends watching; the segment ensured that every child had a chance to be on screen at least once).

Rex Trailer settled in the Boston area permanently where he remained a major local celebrity decades after the final episode of Boomtown aired.

Trailer opened and closed each installment of the show with a live rendition of the Boomtown theme, a song that is said to have been "as sticky as the molasses used for grandma’s cookies on the old frontier.