When did the wild west stop being cool?

[Thotas]

My thanks to S'Mon for providing a fine concrete example to demonstrate the abstract point I was trying to make earlier with the comment about finding plothooks in the moral baggage.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wild west?

Not cool?

Someone forgot to tell Terintino!

 

[S'mon]

My thanks to S'Mon for providing a fine concrete example to demonstrate the abstract point I was trying to make earlier with the comment about finding plothooks in the moral baggage.

Yes - inevitably the Western is always being reinvented for the current generation. A Roy Rogers Western may be as hard to relate to now as a Charlie Chaplin movie - though I've seen at least a few latre '40s/early '50s westerns that seemed much grittier & truer-to-life than anything from the 1990s. Most of us these days don't want to play in a Western setting where all the goodies are white, the Injuns are subhuman fiends existing solely as disposable rifle-fodder, and blacks & Mexicans don't exist. OTOH many of us don't want to play in a Western where the gentle Native Americans live in Harmony with Nature and the white settlers (apart from the required protagonist) are abhuman fiends existing solely to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of western civilisation. It takes all sorts.

 

[S'mon]

And let us not forget, for those to whom "High Plains Drifter" was too subtle, "Pale Rider".

LOL I loved them both, but Rider does kinda hit you over the head with it...

 

[dead]

Brian Blume

What happened to Brian Blume?

How many editions of Boot Hill were made?

Is Boot Hill a real geographical landmark in the US? What's its significance?

 

[Melan]

The wild west stopped being cool? Why wasn't I informed of this?
(Just watched a Fistful of Dynamite and For a Few Dollars More last week - two of the three best westerns ever made.)

 

[JDowling]

...Is Boot Hill a real geographical landmark in the US? What's its significance?

on a brief google search:

Boot Hill was the name given to the cemetery in Dodge City. It was so-called because so many men were killed during acts of violence and therefore "died with their boots on". Later Boot Hill became the name of most cemeteries in wild west towns.

from: Here

validity of information is only as good as the site I quoted from, so it is largely questionable until varified or denied by someone who knows better

EDIT: a museum site backs up at least the origon of the name:

Step back into the 1870's as you walk down the boardwalk of Front Street at Boot Hill Museum. A western history village museum located on the original site of Boot Hill Cemetery in downtown Dodge City...

from: Dodge City Visitor Guide

 

[GSHamster]

I think the western has been played out. I mean, has anything new in westerns happened since Unforgiven? I think that over the years we've pretty much seen every story that really can be told in a (pure) western.

I do think that many of the themes of westerns live on, but the day of the western is mostly passed.

 

[Frostmarrow]

For me, the wild west stopped being cool with the realease of Young Guns and Young Guns 2. I don't know why because I actually like the actors of the brat pack.

 

[trollwad]

"Personally, I'm unable to romantisize the west when I know that a bunch of Native Americans were killed because of the crime of having something that we wanted. And that a lot of Chinese died building the railroad. And that Manifest Destiny made life hell for a lot of Mexicans. And so on...

But, yes. The stories of the American West was an American mythology that gripped the whole world for a time. And now, it has been replaced by...what?"



Then you must be unable to romantacize the medieval/fantasy era as well when muslims went on the jihad, mongols swept across the world, and europe engaged in the reconquista, crusades in the baltic and the middle east. In addition, I didnt realize that the fantasy game boot hill was responsible for those 'problems'

Evidently the new american mythology is political correctness. Which says something like, unlike every other civilization that has existed on the Planet, Americans must constantly cry about the wrongs in our past, most of which were far more moderate than in other situations. E.G. the US and England had slavery or were involved in the slave trade but unlike every other African and Islamic civilization with slavery, Anglo-American civilization not only was one of the few civilizations to ever give up slavery of its own volition, but it then stopped the slave trade and forced/encouraged african and islamic slave societies to give up slavery. It is instructive that virtually the first thing that the Mahdi's followers did when the ejected the British in about 1880 was to restart the slave trade and begin enslaving black africans.