Western??


I picked up a big box set of TV Westerns, and this show was in it-3 episodes.
I watched them all, and Sky King seemed like a pretty neat lil TV show, but would you call it a "western"?
My TV westerns have horses in them. Not cars and airplanes.

Trust me,
Swan
My, you're nosey, aren't you?

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Say, where i'm living these nites has a cemetery with the remains of Sky King --Kirby Grant, the actor who played him. That show was a western of sorts. I guess you never saw the old 1930's flix with horses and trucks and busses and airplanes. etc. There were quite a few and John Wayne was even in some of them. There was even a Zorro like that, but can't remember the title of it. John Carroll was in it and he was an excellant singer and gave musical voice to The Fox. Not bad; I quite liked it.

Hell is the truth learned too late.

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They may have been in planes instead of horses, but there was a distinct Western feel to the series. Check out the characters' wardrobe! http://www.billshiver.com/wp-content/gallery/cowboys/skyking3.jpg

Other Westerness included the Arizona setting, the guns and sheriffs. And horses were used on occasion also.

While most Westerns were set in the 19th century, this one featured many of the same themes and motifs in a more modern setting. Similarly, the movie Bad Day at Black Rock is considered a Western even though it was set in the 1940s.

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Yeah...
It's just my preference. Westerns need horses. Not fossil fuels. Lol!

Trust me,
Swan
My, you're nosey, aren't you?

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I think it's a mistake to view westerns as 19th century. I was born in Manhattan and grew up in the New York area, attended university in New New England, and never saw the west except in the movies and TV until I was 23. I've lived in the western US since 1974 substantially more than half my life. As someone who was born and Easterner, I can tell you that there is a western way of life and for anyone who has never leved east of the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains it is impossible to describe or characterize. A western is simply a show or film about the western way of living. Even people who grow up in western cities tend to be mroe respectful of the outdoors and enjoy being outside...however, this is changing as the west becomes ever more populated. For what it's worth, I think Sky King is a western because it depicts a western way of living.

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Point taken. I'm born & bread a California native... Been livin' here 43 years.
Like I said... It's just a preference. My westerns have HORSES and 6-Guns.
But if you follow your kind of logic, "Every Which Way but Loose" and "Smokey & the Bandit" would also be considered westerns. Yuck.
No thanks.

Trust me,
Swan
My, you're nosey, aren't you?

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I'm from Chicago, and, I once met a woman from Hawaii who told me I was from the EAST !?!

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I'm from Chicago, and, I once met a woman from Hawaii who told me I was from the EAST !?!


That is not out of line. If you divide the USA into "East" and "West" the dividing line is traditionally the Mississippi River.

So, according to that (logical) division, you ARE in the East.

In fact, if the Mississippi is the dividing line, Minneapolis is "West" and St Paul is "East."

And, if you compare those two cities, they really are quite different, even though they are contiguous. St. Paul is old and bossy (they have Garrison Keillor for Pete's sake; the State Capital, historic districts, and they elect more Democrats), while Minneapolis is new and casual (they have sky-scrapers, the airport, modern design, and they tend to elect more Republicans).

If one views a map of the continental USA, and divides the country into a number of specific sections, of course you (and those in Minneapolis and St. Paul) live in the "Mid-West," but folks who do not live "on the mainland" or "in the lower 48" do not tend to be that specific.

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That's nice, but awfully narrow-minded of you. The West had ranchers, and some of those ranchers had gigantic ranches. I used to browse the Strauss Realty catalogue and often saw ads to sell million-acre (four million, even) ranches in Texas or Montana or Utah. (Come on, who wants to live in Nevada, Wyoming, or Oklahoma? Worse than the Australian outback.)

"Riding fences" was what ranch hands did most of, not "herding cattle". Or even sheep. And most of them never went into town and shot the place up.

Most of them had cars, too, but when they went into town, they took the plane, especially since the U.S. Government had not yet spent money to get them four-lane freeways to get there.

If you watch "Silver Streak" there is a little subplot where he gets thrown off the train yet again, and in trying to walk to some place where he can get back to the train, he stumbles upon a rancher living a gazillion miles from town, who takes him to town in her little open twin-seater. That's the West as much as any story about shoot-'em-ups and ten-gallon hats.

I'm not sure what Sky King and Penny did for a living, but I do remember they spent a lot of time using that plane helping their neighbors. They might not have been ranchers themselves, but their neighbors surely were. "I got a million head of sheep." Great way of life, no?

Okay, for the record, I know you're talking about the TV genre called "Westerns", and that it ain't a Western if it don't have the Ponderosa and Hoss in his ten-gallon hat, and stage coach robbers and wanted posters and a sheriff with a seven-pointed star.

That's too narrow, though.

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Yup. Many movies and TV series were what I like to call a "blend". More than one Roy Rogers movie had cars in it and it was filmed in the 1940s. Interesting to see the old cars in use in a film.

Most of what we call westerns took place in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Of course, back in the middle of the 19th Century, that was the western part of the United States. Everything to the West of those states was Indian Territory.

When Hollywood became involved, the western moved "West", as in Denver (Colorado), which is actually on the eastern edge of the Rocky Moutains (and doesn't have much in the way of trees, California, which was part of Old Mexico, and Idaho, which was part of the Oregon Territory. The last of the wagon trains went across the Oregon Trail in 1869 and then the railroad went through.

My grandfather was shot on the streets of White Bird, Idaho, just as the noon stage pulled into town. That was 1917, but that part of the country was so wild that electricity never extended to the ranches until the 1940s!

All that said, I'm with you on the cars and planes thing. My preference is the "old west" without the modern conveniences. But, as another said, those huge open range places (mostly in the midwest - great plains and east of the Rocky Mountains) are just too big to cover on horseback.

Even though it takes place in Australia, Quigley Down Under carries with it a good example of just how big a place can be. "We've been on his ranch the past three days," says one feller to Quigley as they take a slow oxen ride to the ranch...

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I've loved westerns all my life, and I've always considered Sky King a western. The main reason is that Sky King was a rancher, who just happened to live in the 20th century and flew a plane! Sky King was one of my favorite shows of the 50's, along with Howdy Doody, Roy Rogers, The Mickey Mouse Club, (with Zorro, Spin & Marty, and a couple of others) The Rifleman, and Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, which, like Zorro, was part of another show, which I can't remember. These are just a few of the many favorites I had as a kid in the '50's and '60's.

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