The film created an additional stir when it debuted on ABC television on September 25, 1966.The date was dubbed "Black Sunday" due to the loss of business at movie theatres on account of its popular airing.He is instructed in the preliminary line-up:You gonna fit in real good, of course, unless you get rabbit in your blood and you decide to take off for home." The reverse of the word, woodpecker, referred o a literally red-headed and red-necked bird.Its second meaning was sexual - the foreskin of a penis (or prepuce) - literally the ""peckerhead."" Another related, similarly-defined term in the film was "Whicker bill."]In the plot, tenant sharecropping farmer""s high-school aged son Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess) was pressured to not forget his place in life and to pick cotton in the fields for rich Southern cotton plantation land-owner Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill).On a radio, they learned of roadblocks, and their plan was to impersonate medics in order to escape, and to keep the children alive for a short while, to bolster their story.