or heroine, many cap guns were also named with western-sounding names, like: "Stallion 45", "Pony", "Mustang", "Pioneer", "Cowboy", "Texan", "Colt 45", "Rodeo", and such. Children all over the world emulated their heroes by collecting and playing with these toy guns. However, when the Western television shows began to fade away and the heroes retired, the cap gun continued to be produced in military and secret agent modes until the popularity of the tie-in toy guns also diminished, and eventually all of the famous cap gun manufacturers either sold out to other toy companies or started manufacturing other types of toys. There were many types of cap guns, including guns from small Derringers to larger rifles, and even working miniatures of most of them. One of the last famous ones to sell widely was a toy rifle named after the television show, The Rifleman, which aired from 1958 through early 1963. Other shows lasted longer, such as Gunsmoke (which had 20 seasons lasting through 1975), but these did not have as much 'kid-appeal' as the earlier shows, and the sales of toy cap guns began to decline. The pistols were generally offered in 3 styles: the semi-automatic, the revolver (which actually had a revolving cylinder carrying a disk of caps), and the mock-revolver which looked like a regular revolver, but opened to load a roll of caps. Almost all of the early models used either roll caps or circular disks of caps, but in 1950 Nichols Industries came out with a large model called the Stallion 45, which had a revolving cylinder into which individual bullets were loaded, which each had two parts. The circular cap was placed into the 2-piece bullet and then when the gun was loaded and fired, it seemed more realistic. Eventually several companies used this idea and a few years later Nichols invented a plastic bullet that was snapped into a hollowed-out version of the regular 2-piece bullet with a compression spring inside. When the gun was fired, the spring pressure "shot" the plastic pellet out of the end of the barrel. Eventually Mattel also came out with a similar model called "Shootin' Shells." Mattel produced an automatic firing cap weapon styled after the Thompson submachine gun. Pulling back on a slide, which simulated the charging handle of the real Thompson, prepared the gun for firing by tensioning a spring. When the trigger was pulled the