Cult-TV Theme Watch: Cowboys

America’s great heroic myth is the one of the frontier. 

Brave pioneers traveled west -- not knowing what they would find -- then tamed the land, defeated corruption, and built a civilized nation. 

For a generation of kids raised in the mid-20^th century, the Cowboy of the western frontier represented the ultimate hero.  These children grew up playing Cowboys and Indians on school playgrounds and winning gunfights with their cap-gun six-shooters.

These kids were also weaned on popular TV programs such as Gunsmoke (1955 – 1975), Wagon Train (1957 – 1965), Bonanza (1959 – 1973), and my favorite TV western, Have Gun – Will Travel (1957 -1963) starring Richard Boone as Paladin. 

When I went to kindergarten in 1975, kids still played Cowboys and Indians occasionally, but a big shift was on the horizon, thanks to Star Wars (1977) and that film’s reshaping of the pop culture landscape.

Today, the myth of the lone rider who comes to town, fights evil, and rides off into the sunset has morphed into the story of the superhero, an urban, high-tech crime fighter.  Yet cult television series often still sees fit to revisit the Old West milieu, the Western format, and the story of the cowboy.

Originally, no doubt, cult-television’s predilection to vet an “Old West” or cowboy episode came from the fact that Westerns were extremely popular, and science fiction…was not.   

The Twilight Zone frequently set stories in the Old West, for instance, and after it folded, Rod Serling developed his own cowboy show starring Lloyd Bridges, The Loner (1965). 

Meanwhile, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966 – 1969) was sold to NBC as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” a Western reference, and it featured at least one episode set in a re-creation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral (“Spectre of the Gun.”)

Uniquely, as the 1960s morphed into the 1970s, science fiction television programming began to dissect the accepted standards of the Western format and Cowboy myth, questioning the use of gun as a tool for achieving justice. 

In The Prisoner (1967) episode “Living in Harmony,” for instance, Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) was drawn into a Western world where he ostensibly was the marshal or sheriff.  Yet he refused to carry a gun, even to protect himself. 

Similarly, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (1969 - 1972 featured an episode titled “The Waiting Room” that concerned a kind of purgatory for gunfighters, where each had to face a personal reckoning at the hands of a very sinister competitor, one who would always win.  The idea underlining the episode was that if you lived by the sword (or the gun, for that matter…), you would also die by the sword.

As late as 1978, the cult-tv cowboys re-iterated their stand against violence, and in particular, gun violence.  In Battlestar Galactica’s “The Lost Warrior,” for instance, Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch) played the role of the reluctant cowboy, a re-casting of the central character in Shane (1953).  Here, Apollo would use violence and his laser gun only as a last result in a conflict between a peaceful settlement and a corrupt boss who deployed a Cylon Centurion – “Red Eye” – as enforcer.

Another episode of the same series, “The Magnificent Warriors,” also played to other cowboy conventions, remaking The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Time travel has often been a handy tool to get heroes from the future into the cowboy past.  Doctor Who (1963 – 1989) is notorious, for instance, for its poorly-received 1966 serial called “The Gunfighters,” which saw the Time Lord land in Tombstone, Arizona.  Despite this, the Doctor – now played by Matt Smith -- is slated to return to the Old West soon in “A Town Called Mercy.”

Oppositely, a 1986 sci-fi TV series called Outlaws brought five real life cowboys (led by Rod Taylor’s Sheriff Grail) into the Reagan Decade to battle our modern criminals. Outlaws lasted only twelve episodes, but the series developed a cult following nonetheless

In the summer of 2011, Cowboys and Aliens played in theaters, reminding us all that science fiction and the heroes of the Old West still mix. 

Just not always successfully…