Term Paper on Wanted Dead or
Alive
Wanted Dead or Alive presents the first and foremost extensive view
at how the American West has been depicted in popular culture.
Subsequent to the Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the
birth and development of the pop culture West in the context of
American history, noted experts explore developments in popular
Western fiction, major forms of live Western entertainment, trends
in Western movies and television shows, images of the West in
popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and
advertising.
Millions who have never been there through advertising,
entertainment, and other media know the American West across the
America. The book describes the Wild West since the late 1800s,
where the artifacts of popular culture have manufactured and
maintained a myth of the American West in which chronicled realities
have become convolutedly intertwined with legend. These objects
stretch out from dime novels, film, and television to food
packaging, and coloring books. Popular culture allows an escape to a
time and places where new beginnings were conceivable, where legends
and heroes were made, and where there was always adventure to be
found.
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Entertainment
He most important beginning was the Buffalo Bill and the Wild West
Show. Giving an account of the Buffalo Bill, the book writes about
him in detail, and shows how the west became popular among the
masses. Born in a log cabin in 1846, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody
worked for a wagon train at age twelve, and became a Pony Express
rider by age fifteen, entrapped for beaver, prospected for gold, and
scouted for the army during the Indian Wars. His adroit shooting
while hunting buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad earned him the
sobriquet "Buffalo Bill" after he claimed to have killed more than
4,000 bison in less than 18 months. Cody began his acting career in
1872 when he starred alongside Texas Jack in The Scouts of the
Prairie, a traveling play drafted and produced by novelist Ned
Buntline. The play sensationalized the lives of real-life scouts
Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill, who took a break from hunting and
guiding to act as themselves in the production.
The fruition of The Scouts of the Prairie incited Cody to develop
his own Wild West show, which became the most successful traveling
entertainment the world has ever seen. To redo from memory the drama
of life on the frontier, Cody recruited real cowboys, Mexican
vaqueros, and Indians, including the legendary Sitting Bull, who had
as a matter of fact fought against white enemies. The Wild West
Show's Indian war dances, stagecoach chases, and buffalo hunts were
carefully thought about as living history lessons. After touring
Europe, Buffalo Bill and his manager Nate Salsbury formed a new,
exalted Wild West Show known as the Congress of the Rough Riders of
the World. The new show presented at the Chicago World's Fair of
1893 to huge success. Situated at the entry to the fairgrounds, the
Wild West Show attracted many of the 27,500,000 people that went to
the fair. Few saw only the Wild West Show and then left, more than
satisfied. The enlarged Wild West Show and Congress of the Rough
Riders featured a more international cast, including US Cavalry,
British Lancers, German Uhlans, Russian Cossacks, Japanese Samurai,
100 Sioux Indians, and Western cowboys and cowgirls.
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Books and literature
Novels of Western adventures, popular in the late 1800s, incited an
interest in the West that reached far and wide the region's borders
and was a seemingly a force in the conception of the Western as a
genre. The low-priced, popular fiction allured to young,
working-class audiences and was bejeweled in mammoth serial editions
at newsstands and dry goods stores in the eastern United States. As
conventional adventure stories of Wild West, the novels combined
both fact and fiction in adventures that needed to be glib and
exhilarating to an increasingly literate public.
Film and Television
The book gives a detailed account of how the west was captured in
the film and television. As with the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
that created a lasting tradition of the West whose influence
extended to film, radio, television, and beyond. Edwin S. Porter's
The Great Train Robbery (1903) is carefully thought about by many to
be the first true Western film, notwithstanding the fact that it was
filmed in bucolic New Jersey. The ten-minute drama featured
molestation, posse pursuit, and shootout, elements typical of the
Western that were pioneered by Bill Cody in his Wild West Show.
Porter's film inscribed the beginning of an epoch in American
filmmaking. For the next sixty years, 1/3 of all films produced in
the United States were Westerns, and between 1960 and 1975, nearly
600 Westerns were produced in Europe.
John Ford raised the genre from inexpensively made Saturday matinee
"B" films to a sober adult genre with incomparable refinement,
richer Western paragons and themes, in-depth and complex
characterizations, and larger profitability and acceptance. The
notable relic film Stagecoach (1939), that included Ford's favorite
setting of the grand Monument Valley of the Southwest was named for
seven Academy awards. While Ford's epic films invocated to a
grown-up audience, radio and television created Westerns for a
youthful audience with such characters as Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone
Ranger and Roy Rogers.
The peak of TV Westerns that occurred in the late 1950s through the
1960s, when up to 24 Western serials was televised each week. Even
cartoon characters borrowed on the Western enigma, including
Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam. The Western
celebrations as a archetypal morality play in which conflicts are
resolved in clear, violent action between ranchers and farmers,
Indians and settlers, and outlaws and civilization. Dominated by the
cowboy, the Western taught the contrast betwixt right and wrong, the
good guys versus the bad guys, the white hats opposite to the black
hats.
Indian ‘Kitsch’
While one of the repetitive characters in the story of the West,
stereotypical images of American Indians in popular culture define
and oversimplify the Indian to a majority of Americans. Cigar store
Indians, food packages, toy mattocks, gleaming braves on baseball
caps and football helmets blur the cultural identities of
individuals and the 400 different native cultures in the world. The
representation of the feathered gladiator has found its way onto a
medley of things including the nickel and stamps for the common
people, and, for those who could afford it, convolutedly crafted
silver spoons by Tiffany & Company.
Commercial products
Commercial products from bread and tobacco to baking powder and
coloring books dilapidated on the fashionableness of the West and
the representation of the Indian in order to allure to customers.
The utilization of names and images of indigenous peoples for
advertising and team mascots has caused a number of upholding groups
to raise cognizance and bring lawsuits against parties that they
feel are exploiting Indian culture. Where, over the last thirty
years, more than six hundred colleges, universities, and high
schools have altered or dislodged their use of Native American
mascots.
Thus the book not only gives a detailed account of the West in
popular culture and the way it gained momentum, but also how it is
still depicted in the lives of most of the American popular culture
through entertainment channels, television, films and other media,
and the commodities promotion.
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