After touching all those bases, Dean finally got a chance to showcase his singing voice in the Walt Mattox production of HARMONY TRAIL (WHITE STALLION) (1944), with Ken Maynard, and WILDFIRE (1945), an Action Pictures/Screen Guild Cinecolor vehicle for Bob Steele.

In the first, Dean performed as part of a medicine show; in the second, he was a local sheriff who actually got the girl in Steele's film about a wild horse.  Both were directed by Robert Emmett Tansey, the veteran producer, director and jack-of-all-trades who would produce the initial entries in Dean's series at PRC.

With PRC's SONG OF OLD WYOMING in 1945, Dean finally got to be the star. It was the first of five color films he would make for that studio, making him the first star of a western series in color (other color westerns had been made earlier, but were not a series). Finally, he did something ahead of Roy and Gene, not to mention Monte Hale. Dean appears to have been unselfish about sharing good scenes with other actors. So Lash LaRue got to showcase his talents sufficiently in three Dean films to spin off his own series, David Sharpe got to show off his stunting, and Dean even let himself take a beating in one (although he eventually won the fight). He was a hero who could cry. He also did the unthinkable, gunning down a female outlaw in one of his last ones, something other heroes somehow always managed to avoid.

From L-to-R are: Sarah Padden, Emmett Lynn, Eddie Dean, Jennifer Holt and Al LaRue in his days before becoming 'Lash' in this 1945 PRC Cinecolor oater.  This was Dean's first starring western.

In his starring debut, Eddie played a ranch foreman who was reluctant to use his guns because of an incident in which a man was killed. He is suspicious of a new hire called the Cheyenne Kid (Al LaRue, not yet known as Lash), and with good reason: the Kid has been planted on the ranch by the outlaws seeking to steal it from Ma Conway (Sarah Padden). Only when the Kid learns that he is Ma's long-lost son does he switch sides and join Eddie in the final shootout, in which he is fatally wounded and has Eddie remove his boots so he won't die with them on. That leaves Eddie to win lovely leading lady Jennifer Holt.

ROMANCE OF THE WEST (1946) casts Eddie as an Indian agent. In the story, an Indian boy (Don Reynolds) is killed and Dean's character is moved to tears, unheard of (until then) for a western hero. CARAVAN TRAIL (1946) saw him as a wagon train scout turned lawman, rejoined by LaRue as a minor outlaw who Dean reforms and saves in the final shootout. COLORADO SERENADE (1946) featured ace stuntman David Sharpe as an undercover operative, whose action when he joins Dean and Roscoe Ates in a saloon fight must be seen to be believed. This was Ates' debut as comic sidekick Soapy Jones; the previous films featured Emmett 'Pappy' Lynn doing comic relief as a character named 'Ezra'. Lynn had wanted to leave the series earlier due to a personality dispute with one of the studio representatives, but stayed on as a favor to Eddie.

Above, Dean does battle with Bob Duncan. Above, Chief Thunder Cloud (Victor Daniels) and Eddie Dean in a scene from ROMANCE OF THE WEST (PRC, 1946), one of the several westerns starring Dean that were done in Cinecolor.