I was a little kid growing up in the
1960’s. By all accounts I should have been a fan of westerns. Most kids my age
were. The 1950’s and 60’s were really the heyday of westerns. There was Gunsmoke, the longest running television
drama of all time. But besides Gunsmoke
there were tons of others: Cheyenne,
Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Laramie, Rawhide,
Bonanza, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, Branded, F Troop, Laredo, The Big Valley,
The Wild Wild West, The Monroes, Iron Horse, Cimmaron Strip, The Guns of Will
Sonnett, The High Chaparral. There were many more that I have not
mentioned. This is remarkable when you realize that there were only three
networks then (four after PBS came on, but they weren’t doing westerns). Most
people in America did not have more than three channels. How did they fit all these westerns in? And this is just the
television shows; if that wasn’t enough there were plenty of westerns at the
movie houses and western novels. America was western crazy. Kids were western crazy. Not
me. Why wasn’t I? Of the shows listed above I never watched any, except for F Troop, which was really more a comedy
than it was a western, and The Wild Wild
West, which was really more of a science fiction/spy show than it was a
western.
On the face of it westerns do have a
lot to offer. There are heroes, villains, conflict, and they can have compelling
characters. The performances were generally good. A lot of great actors got
started in westerns. So why didn’t I like them? Could it be racism? Westerns
often had stereotypic and one-sided portrayals of Native Americans displaying
covert or overt racism. Such depictions bother me today, but if I am honest, it
was not something I thought much about in the 1960’s. Little white kids back
then were not much exposed to the moral concepts of racism, at least not until the
late 60’s. And many of the television
westerns did not even have Native Americans in them. So unfortunately, I cannot
say that racism was the reason I disliked westerns.
How about violence? Westerns were
pretty violent. Lots of characters died, it is true. But violence was prevalent
on many of the shows of the day, from cop shows to war shows, to detective
shows. But TV violence in the 60’s was sanitized. If someone was shot, they
tended to die off camera. We never saw a victim’s guts spill out onto the road.
So the violence was muted and unreal. I don’t think anyone was ever traumatized
by TV violence in the 60’s. So that also is not the reason that I didn’t like
westerns.
It is hard to say why some people
favor one genre over another. Artistic preference is one of the things that
make all of us unique. I do remember that I thought of westerns as dirty and
dusty, and colorless. I was a kid who favored science fiction and silly
comedies (hence The Wild Wild West
and F Troop).
Later in life I came to a
reconciliation with westerns, ironically this was as the western was all but
disappearing from television. There were some good movies and an occasional brilliant
TV series (Deadwood). Were they
better than the older ones, or was I just more willing to give them a try? Who
knows? The western will never be my favorite go-to entertainment, but I can
enjoy a good story, well told, regardless of genre.
(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an
ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online
sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out
soon).
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