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 Contents: Old
West Pg. 1
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West Pg. 2 | Old
West Pg. 3 |
1890 and beyond
(Cowboy
& Ranching) |
Fiction and non-fiction
The Old West has had a lasting
impression on the American psyche, and the fiction concerning the
Old West has been a popular genre, featuring authors such as Zane
Grey and Louis L'Amour. Movies such as those featuring
John Wayne
and Clint
Eastwood, radio dramas, television, pulp novels and
comic books all had popular Old West themes.
In German culture the genre was
so popular that it spawned another genre, the Kraut-Western. Karl
May is the best-selling German writer of all time. His Wild West
adventure novels featuring the protagonists Old Shatterhand and
Winnetou.
Non-western genre television and
movies use the Old West as a setting occasionally as well, such as
the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next
Generation and Star Trek: Enterprise.
The old west has comic book
representation. Older Western comics include Tex Willer and the
Two-Gun Kid. Jonah Hex is a Western hero that is a conscious
subversion of the genre. Loveless is another comic.
Cowboy Action Shooting is one of
the fastest growing American sports today, combining marksmanship
with the theatrics of a historical reenactment of the gunslinging
Wild West days.
Locations and Characters
Some famous locations and characters originate in fiction such
as the television shows Gunsmoke and Bonanza, and
Western movies and fiction. For example, while Dodge City, Kansas,
the setting of Gunsmoke, was briefly a wide-open town and
Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were lawmen there,
Marshall Matt
Dillon and the other regular characters of Gunsmoke are fictional
characters. Likewise, while Virginia City, Nevada was a
significant mining boomtown, the Ponderosa Ranch and the
Cartwright family of Bonanza are fictional.
Considerable poetic license has
been taken with numerous actual events and characters such as
Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid as they have been portrayed in ways
which reflect contemporary concerns more than the historical
record. Certain books and movies such as Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, Shane, High Noon, and the novel The
Virginian stand out. The American Old West has recently
experienced a renaissance period in entertainment via the
television series Deadwood and the video games Red Dead
Revolver and GUN.
Movies
While the Western has been popular throughout the history of
movies, it has begun to diminish in importance as the United
States progresses farther away from the period depicted. The
western film genre often portrays idealized themes, such as the
conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature
(usually in the name of civilization) or the confiscation of the
territorial rights of Native Americans.
A sub-genre of Western film,
referred to as Spaghetti westerns, emerged in the mid-1960s.
Spaghetti Westerns are so named because most of them were made in
Europe, especially Italy. The Spaghetti Western removed many
conventions of earlier Western films because of cultural
differences and generally lower budgets. Typically, the cast and
crew of Spaghetti Westerns hailed from the countries that were
producing the film (such as Italy or Spain). Because of this, when
Spaghetti Westerns were shown in the United States, they required
large voice-overs for much of the cast. Poor lip-synching became
synonomous of Spaghetti Westerns. However, American actors often
took the lead roles in these films in order to boost publicity.
Some well known actors who appeared in Spaghetti Westerns include
Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Yul Brynner, James
Coburn, and
Charles Bronson.
Western movie locations usually
form the backdrop that identifies the genre. Tom
Mix, Hopalong
Cassidy, Gene Autry and
The Lone Ranger films were usually shot
near Lone Pine, California, where since the early 1920s, over 300
movies have been filmed. It was director John Ford who first
pioneered the "out of California" on-location western,
when he began packing up the crew and heading out to Monument
Valley, Arizona to film big budget movies like Stagecoach (1939).
Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, southern Arizona became the new
location for Westerns to be filmed. Hundreds of Westerns were
filmed in and near the expansive Old Tucson studio in Tucson,
Arizona.
While many Westerns were filmed
in California and Arizona, most of them depicted Texas. This was
done consistently, despite the fact that the landscapes of Arizona
and California have distinguishing traits that make them very
different from Texas. For example, the famous Saguaro cactus, with
its characteristic "arms", is found only in the Sonoran
Desert of southern Arizona and Mexico. Also, many westerns set in
Texas show landscapes with Joshua trees in the background. Joshua
trees only grow in California and Arizona.
Western films, until recent
times, were loaded with anachronisms, especially in such things as
firearms, with Winchester 1894-model rifles being used in movies
set in the 1870s. One reason for this was that many actors
portraying cowboys in cheaply-made, early films were hired with
their own horses and gear. The Model 94 was far more popular in
the early 20th century than were earlier repeating and single-shot
rifles which would have been more appropriate, and this is what
they brought to the set. A few moviemakers preferred accuracy and
realism, but until audiences began to demand this in the late
1960s, the Winchester 94 was the rifle of choice in Hollywood, and
the Colt Single Action Army-type revolver is known worldwide as
the "cowboy pistol," despite the fact that the vast
majority of revolvers carried in the Old West were of the
cap-and-ball type. Since the late 1960s, however, films have shown
more of the wide variety of arms used during the period. For
instance, Jack Elam carries a revolving rifle during part of Rio
Lobo (1970).
Western Literature
Cowboy poetry is a form of poetry that focuses on the culture,
features and lifestyle of the West, both the Old West and its
modern equivalents. It is not defined by any particular scheme or
structure, but by subject matter. Western novels, or cowboy
novels, portrayed the west as both a barren landscape and a
romanticized idealistic way of living.
Semi-Western
Certain fictional works, while not Westerns in of themselves,
have undeniable influences of the romanticized old west. These
include television series Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity,
along with the role-playing game Deadlands, the Dark Tower
fiction series by Stephen King, and the video game series Wild
ARMS. However, because the definition of a "Western"
is somewhat ambiguous, it can be difficult to define what does and
does not include western elements. Some works, such as anime
television series Cowboy Bebop, and role-playing game Deadlands
have been noted by fans as having elements similar to those in
Westerns, though such claims have generally not been substantiated
by their creators.
It is a common misconception that
Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo was influenced by certain
spaghetti westerns, though quite the reverse is true. A Fistful
of Dollars, starring Clint
Eastwood, was a remake of Yojimbo
in a western setting, as was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai,
which became The
Magnificent Seven.
In a mix of Western and modern
societies, the 1950s radio and television series Sky King
covered the exploits of "America's favorite flying
cowboy." Skyler King, who owned the Flying Crown Ranch, his
niece Penny, nephew Clipper, and various townspeople of Grover
City, Arizona, lived in the post-World War II transitional period
of the American West, and dressed in the appropriate Western garb
of the time. In some episodes, Sky was shown using his airplane, Songbird,
to perform some ranch chore. Sky generally did not wear a pistol
but kept one in his plane, and when needed would take a long gun
from the rack near the door to his home. The series plots were
generally some form of the classis Western theme of "making
the wrong things right."
Some "Westerns" are not
set in the West at all (such as most of those involving
riverboats, which were rare west of the Missouri River), or even
in North America. The 1990 film Quigley Down Under is the
tale of a cowboy who goes to Australia. Though not set in the
American West, MGM includes this in their "Western
Legends" line of videos.
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