There’s a new ranger in town

With apologies to David Letterman, here are the top 10 ways that the WB’s “The Lone Ranger” movie (airing at 8 tonight) is different from any other incarnation of the Masked Rider of the Plains that you might have seen or heard before (the show ran on radio from 1933 to 1955 and on television from 1949 to 1957):

10. In its original versions, the Lone Ranger really was a Texas Ranger, a square-jawed lawman named John Reid. The WB’s hero is a slack-jawed Harvard Law School student by the name of Luke Hartman (played by Chad Michael Murray).

9. Originally, the Lone Ranger was the sole survivor of a nasty daylight ambush in which his brother and other Rangers were killed. Hartman is the sole survivor of a vicious nighttime ambush in which his brother and other rangers are killed.

8. The daylight attack was carried out by the Butch Cavendish gang; in the new show, the raid is conducted by a gang of Regulators in the hire of crooked businessmen. They are led by a dude in granny sunglasses named Kansas City (Dylan Walsh).

7. In previous incarnations, a solitary Indian rider named Tonto happens upon the survivor and nurses him back to health; on the WB, an Indian named Tonto (Nathaniel Arcand, channeling Jackie Chan) happens upon Hartman and takes him back to his village, where....

6. Hartman is nursed back to health by the healing hands of Tonto’s sister, Alope (newcomer Anita Brown), a major babe. (The earlier Lone Ranger didn’t have much interest in the opposite sex; Hartman not only notices them, he fantasizes about them.)

5. The original Lone Ranger, being a Ranger, knew how to fight, shoot and track bad guys; Hartman needs all the help he can get from Tonto, who reminds him that “knowledge is power” and to “go with the flow,” and from the tribal shaman (Wes Studi), who tells Hartman, “There is sight and then there is insight.”

4. The great white horse Silver was always a swift and courageous steed; in the new show, he also acts as Hartman’s “spirit guide.”

3. The WB’s “Lone Ranger” includes some trite characters and predictable dialogue. Oh, wait, that is one way in which it is similar to the earlier shows.

2. Three words: No silver bullets.

And the No. 1 way the new version is different: The “William Tell Overture” rocks on electric guitar.

That alone tells you that the audience for whom this “Lone Ranger” is intended probably isn’t old enough to remember the earlier versions. But then, each generation deserves its own Lone Ranger, Spider-Man or other mythic hero.

While the WB awaits rating numbers to help determine whether to turn its “The Lone Ranger” into a series, those who would like to hear and see the originals can catch the radio show on Mondays at 9:30 p.m. on the “Drama Hour” on KNX-AM (1070). The television version, with the square-jawed Clayton Moore, can be seen weeknights on cable’s Westerns Channel.