My husband sits for hours and watches that show and other 60’s-70’s westerns on TV. He says nothing else is fit to watch.
There is some truth to that.
BTW, one friend and I were discussing changes to american culture since the 19th century and he said something interesting. He said that if “gunsmoke” was truly authentic, they’d have had a human waste ditch running through the town. He was just making the point that many of our shows and movies back then really sanitized the whole experience in the western US in the 19th century.
I’m a huge fan of Louis L’Amour books and have his entire collection of books as well as many of them on audio. This includes many interviews with him regarding life in the REAL west of the 1800’s. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.
Watching the show a few months ago, never having seen it but being familiar with Bonanza and Gunsmoke, I thought it more soap opera like. It turned more on talk and relationships than action. I was wondering how long it ran.
I was raised on Westerns like Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen, and all those John Wayne Westerns from the 1930s and 1940s. I think those shows and movies were a large part of the makeup of my character. Sure, my parents raised me to be moral and scouting encouraged morality, but there was nothing like show after show and movie after movie where the bad guys cheated, lied and stole but always lost to the good guys, who had to do things the right way, morally.
That code of the west really burned itself into a young mind and helped to make me a moral person. What do the young have today? Nothing but anti-heroes and zombies. It is sad.
Me too...except for baseball, that's certainly fit to watch.