Any story set in the American West during the frontier era. Generally from about 1865, the end of The American Civil War, to 1890, the year the US Census Bureau declared the frontier closed.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Western genre is Older Than They Think; in fact, it predates the classic Western era. It has its roots in the early 19th century novels of James Fenimore Cooper (set in the then-frontier, which was well east of the Mississippi at the time) and his imitators, as well as 19th century "dime novels" — meaning that, like the gangster films of The '30s, the genre was originally pretty much contemporary with its source material. In fact no less a figure than Wild Bill Hickok was already a star in dozens of embellished stories by the time he died in 1876. By the turn of the century a lot of the stock Western tropes had already been established in popular imagination: see Western Characters.
Westerns made a very early leap to film with The Great Train Robbery in 1903. William S. Hart (Hell's Hinges and many other films) became the first big star of movie Westerns. Westerns remained popular throughout the next few decades, though their golden age truly arrived in the 1930s. What also comes to a surprise to many is that Westerns are almost as old as a literary genre in Europe as in America, due to the success of the aforementioned James F. Cooper spawning imitators starting with works like Tokeah (1829 in English, 1833 in German) by Austrian Charles Sealsfield (real name: Carl Anton Postl). Other pioneering European works were Die Regulatoren von Arkansas (1846) by German Friedrich Gerstäcker, Le Coureur de Bois (1850) by Frenchman Gabriel Ferry, and The Rifle Rangers (1850) by Thomas Mayne Read from Ulster. European film Westerns also date back to before World War I, one being made by Sergio Leone's father Vincenzo, who went by the name Roberto Roberti. This led to the beginnings of the "Kraut" and "Spaghetti Westerns" in the 1960s.
Enormously popular on TV and in the movies in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, there were about 50 American western TV series running at about the same time over when there were at most 3-4 TV networks, not including First-Run Syndication. The major series included: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Branded, The Wild Wild West, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Rifleman, The Big Valley...
In recent decades the genre has become increasingly rare on TV, though it has never entirely vanished from public view: The '70s had Kung Fu, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and Little House on the Prairie; The '90s brought Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Deadwood was a critical success in the Turn of the Millennium; and The New '10s have seen such efforts as Godless, Hell on Wheels, and HBO's Westworld.
Common plotlines include a Cattle Drive, a Train Job, and a Bank Robbery.
There's a "Wanted!" Poster on every wall and it's more savage the further south you go.
Much has been made of the distinction between the "classic" Western and the "revisionist" Western, the former being shiny and heroic, the latter Darker and Edgier and often embodying a paradox: "Civilization can only be defended from barbarians by men with guns, but once you pick up a gun, you become a barbarian yourself." However this distinction - which essentially arose in the 1970s, when a more serious and more political critique of mass entertainment arose - is only defined in the fuzziest of terms, and many of the conventions analyzed and criticized were not imposed by the genre itself but by the general self-censorship of the media, and thus the "classic Western" never remained static, while "revisionist" points of view and deconstructions of tropes would become mainstream soon enough.
For instance, you can't get much more "classic" in a Western movie than Stagecoach (1939), but that already was an attempt by John Ford to turn as many of the then-existing conventions on their ear as possible and to go as far as he would be allowed to under the constraints of The Hays Code. It did not help to make the distinction any clearer that every decade some new Western will be promoted as "finally a realistic portrayal" of life in the Old West or among Native Americans, usually by implicitly or explicitly badmouthing all previous movies as "unrealistic" and "romanticized". For instance, one of the most famous modern examples of the Deconstruction of the genre is Little Big Man about a man adopted by a Native American tribe who are apparently the only "civilized" people depicted in the West, with the European colonizer population a bunch of violent idiots, with General George Custer being the worst of the murderous bunch. In fact, one of the major blows to the genre being taken seriously was the blockbuster success of Mel Brooks' celebrated comedy, Blazing Saddles: not only did it mercilessly poke fun at the genre's conventions, but also spotlighted the historical elements of the period that most westerns chose to ignore like minority groups, systemic racial oppression and its brutalities. After that kind of hilarious ribbing allowing the exposure of historical truths to make its point easily, any attempt to produce a western without any mention of the latter risked coming off as ridiculous and blinkered.
The Western is usually set on the American frontier, but sometimes go farther afield to places like Alaska (North to Alaska, The Far Country), Mexico (The Wild Bunch, Vera Cruz, The Professionals), Canada (North West Mounted Police) and Australia (The Proposition, Quigley Down Under).
In terms of time, the genre's heyday (as stated above) is a 25-year span in the 19th century, but there are examples set earlier (Drums Along the Mohawk takes place during The American Revolution when upstate New York was frontier country) and later into the early 20th century (Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue ends with the title character getting hit by a car, and his The Wild Bunch ends with a gunfight dominated by a World War I-era machine gun. Likewise, Red Dead Redemption features early automobiles, machine guns, oil rigs, and a World War I-era US Army). An increasingly common period for the genre is the 1850's or thereabouts, because it allows for stories dealing with the evils of slavery (Django Unchained). Of course, any work dealing with the Texas Revolution will be set in the 1830's. For series that use Western tropes but are set in the modern day, see New Old West.
A subtrope of Period Piece. Often overlaps with Settling the Frontier. See also Western Characters, The Seven Western Plots, and Spaghetti Western. Also a reason why most people believe All Deserts Have Cacti - the majority of Westerns were filmed at Kirk's Rock.
When a series that isn't a Western visits The Wild West or borrows heavily from its imagery for a story, it is a Cowboy Episode.
Mix and Match Western subgenres
- Cattle Punk = The Western plus Science Fiction, Steampunk, or Punk Punk
- Space Western or Wagon Train to the Stars = The Western plus Recycled In Space
- Weird West = The Western plus Supernatural Fiction
- New Old West = The Western plus The Present Day or 20 Minutes into the Future
- Samurai Cowboy = The Western plus Feudal Japan
- Dawn of the Wild West = The Western plus Dawn of an Era
- Twilight of the Old West = The Western plus End of an Age
Western works indexes
For a list of tropes associated with Westerns, see Wild West Tropes.
Osterns (Easterns) are Westerns made in the Eastern Bloc, the most notable being East Germany's DEFA Westerns. Another example could be Wilcze Echa, Polish Ostern set immediately after World War II (with looters and guerillas instead of bandits) on the Polish-Czechoslovakian border.
Examples
- German comedian Otto Waalkes alluding to the genre in four words: "Westwärts, westwärts...bis Scharbeutz!" note
- All Star Western.
- Bat Lash
- The Belgian series Bessy, created by Willy Vandersteen and his studio, which features the adventures of a Lassie-like Collie and her owner, after a while shifted to serving the West German market. It ran from 1952 to 1980.
- Blueberry
- The French series Coeur brûlé ("Burned Heart", 1991-2000, seven albums) and Plume aux Vents ("Feather in the Winds", 1995-2002, four albums) by writer Patrick Cothias and artists Jean-Paul Dethorey and André Juillard are largely set in Québec in the 17th century, in the early days of the French colony there. They are parts of the larger cycle of series Les 7 Vies de l'Épervier.
- Gunsmoke
- Another long-running Franco-Belgian series was the more serious and realistic Jerry Spring (1954-1978), originally created by Jijé.
- Jonah Hex
- Judge Colt
- K-Bar Kate
- Kid Colt
- Some of the chapters of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck show young Scrooge's adventures as a cowboy.
- Lucky Luke, an Affectionate Parody of the western genre from the francophone part of Europe.
- The Masked Marvel
- After the rights to Karl May's novels fell into the public domain in 1962, his Western stories were adapted into several comic series. The most famous and most well-researched one (1962-1964), which also is in many ways truer to the novels than the films, was written and drawn by Helmut Nickel (whose main job was as a curator in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) for the West German Lehning Verlag.
- Before Asterix, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo collaborated on Oumpah-Pah, a humorous series set in New France (Canada) in the 18th century. The series has been collected into three and five albums.
- Rawhide Kid
- Another comic series produced in Belgium for the West German market was Silberpfeil — Der junge Häuptling ("Silver Arrow — The Young Chief"), which ran from 1970 to 1988.
- The longest running and currently best selling Italian comic book, Tex Willer, is a Western. Published since 1948, and thus actually predating the Spaghetti Western movies, it preceded them in using some of their famous tropes, such as a good attitude towards (some) Indians: the titular character is a Texas Ranger and "the White chief of the Navajos", had a Navajo wife, and walks the Earth righting wrongs with his trusty Indian friend Tiger Jack, his son Kit Willer, and most commonly, his also ranger friend Kit Carson.
- Hergé had a lifelong fascination with the North American Plains Tribes, so it was no surprise that in Tintin - Tintin in America, a story that pits Tintin against Al Capone, the hero somehow ends up on an Indian Reservation. In the 1930s Hergé also did the ephemeral series called Popol et Virginie au Far-West, a funny-animal Western.
- Varmints
- Gordon Bess's Redeye (1967-2008) was another newspaper strip.
- The old newspaper strip Rick O'Shay had the distinction of being illustrated for a time by Chuck Jones's wife, Marian.
- Tumbleweeds, a long-running (1965-2007) Newspaper Comic strip by Tom Ryan.
- Old West, a continuation of Rango (see the Film section below).
- See Index of Film Westerns for an index of movie westerns.
- Sergio Leone's iconic Spaghetti Westerns:
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, known as much for its score as its story.
- A Fistful of Dollars
- For a Few Dollars More
- Once Upon a Time in the West
- A Fistful of Dynamite
- The film adaptations of Louis L'Amour:
- The film adaptation of Shane.
- Sartana
- John Ford is perhaps the most important director in the genre, responsible for must-watch films like:
- Howard Hawks also did a number of classic westerns, mostly starring John Wayne:
- High Noon
- The Magnificent Seven
- The Proposition, a western set in Australia
- Quigley Down Under, another western set in Australia.
- Back to the Future Part III, sort of.
- An American Tail: Fievel Goes West
- Young Guns and Young Guns II
- Silverado
- The Quick and the Dead
- The Wild Bunch, a violent western set in the Twilight of the Old West, directed by Sam Peckinpah.
- White Sun of the Desert — the most famous Soviet Ostern
- True Grit
- Anthony Mann directed a series of excellent '50s films, starring Jimmy Stewart, that employed elements of Film Noir in an Old West setting.
- Winchester '73
- Bend In The River
- The Naked Spur
- The Far Country
- The Man from Laramie
- Deconstructions such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Dead Man, and parodies like Blazing Saddles and Support Your Local Sheriff.
- Tombstone
- Known for epitomizing the hero of the modern Western, Clint Eastwood directed quite a few of them as well:
- Unforgiven is a Spiritual Successor to Clint Eastwood's many western characters.
- The Outlaw Josey Wales
- Pale Rider
- High Plains Drifter
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Unfortunately, most modern audiences only know it for the line "We don't need no stinking badges!" as relayed through Blazing Saddles.
- West German movies based upon the work of author Karl May, like Der Schatz im Silbersee.
- The German comedy Der Schuh des Manitu is a grand spoof of these movies.
- The DEFA Westerns, their East German counterparts.
- Undead or Alive
- The Unforgiven
- The Burrowers
- The Warrior's Way
- Maverick, a rare example of a western comedy.
- 3:10 to Yuma (1957) was a 1957 western film which was remade in 2007.
- Rango is an animated film by ILM that is an Affectionate Parody of western films in general.
- Cinderella 3D, the Mock Buster of the above film. They try to make it interesting by placing Cinderella in the west, but it just falls flat.
- Once Upon a Texas Train
- Posse, a 1993 western directed by Mario Van Peebles.
- Django
- Quentin Tarantino has directed two spaghetti-style westerns.
- Django Unchained (2012), a revenge story about an ex-slave out to rescue his wife.
- The Hateful Eight (2016), an Agatha Christie-esque thriller
- Utu (1983), a New Zealand Western where the Maori fill the role of the Indians.
- Bone Tomahawk is a horror/western.
- Heaven's Gate infamous for it Box Office Bomb status that turned into somewhat of a Genre-Killer.
- The Apple Dumpling Gang is a children's entry from Disney.
- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is an animated Western presented from the point of view of a wild horse.
- Dances with Wolves is a film about the Native American experience, deconstructing much of the genre's mythology.
- The Good, the Bad, the Weird is a South Korean film heavily inspired by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Part loving homage to Spaghetti westerns, part Affectionate Parody of them, and an original western in its own right. Set in Manchuria during the early years of the second Sino-Japanese War, the film depicts a stoical bounty hunter, an unhinged hitman and a hapless thief who are pitted against each through their own goals surrounding a mysterious treasure map.
- Frozen II may be set in Scandinavian Europe, but it has heavy Western vibes, like people riding, Elsa breaking a bronco, canoes, vast nature, Scandinavian versions of Native Americans, a wandering troop of soldiers at the frontier. Justified when you consider that Northern Scandinavia was a frontier of its own until about World War I, with gold rushes, natives, bandits, even gunfighters
- See also Western Literature.
- The Virginian, the father of 20th-century Western literature.
- Almost every novel written by Louis L'Amour.
- Including The Californios
- Lonesome Dove. And most of the other novels by Larry Mc Murtry, to varying degrees.
- Blood Meridian, albeit Bloodier and Gorier and Darker and Edgier than most westerns to the point of near-unrecognisability
- The Dark Tower novels by Stephen King, most notably The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla and Roland's backstory in Wizard and Glass, borrow extensively from this genre. The latter story even lampshades this when the other members of his ka-tet ask if the tale he's going to tell is a Western. A puzzled Roland replies that it does, indeed, take place in the Western Baronies...
- Decomposing Angel set in the 21. century and not a horse in sight.
- Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser
- Zane Grey novels.
- Winnetou and other novels by German author Karl May.
- The Tecumseh novels by German author Fritz Steuben (Egon Wittke).
- Die Söhne der großen Bärin ("The Sons of the Great She-Bear") and its sequels by German author Lieselotte Welskopf-Henrich. The film adaptation of the first was the first of the DEFA Westerns.
- Many of Bret Harte's Gold Rush stories qualify, and are one of the earlier examples, since he wrote in the mid-to-late 1800s. Harte invented several Western character types including the Forty-Niner (naturally), Chinese Laborer and Chinese Launderer, the Schoolmarm, and the Professional Gambler. Harte's stories prefigure the kind of Western like Maverick or Support Your Local Gunfighter, which have a somewhat humorous tone but are set in a Wretched Hive.
- Stephen Crane's story The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky is a humorous western, telling of a seedy town's marshal returning with a Mail-Order Bride, who while neither young nor that pretty is seen by him as cultured and sophisticated. He habitually has conflicts with a drunken Retired Outlaw, and the latter's plans to duel him to the death in the street falls apart because he's so discomfited learning that his rival has gotten married.
- Johnston McCully's Zorro stories probably qualify, although they're set back when California still belonged to Spain.
- The Lone Ranger stories by Fran Stryker.
- The Western Mysteries
- The novels of J.T. Edson.
- The novels of Jack Schaefer, most notably Shane, the source material for the famous film.
- The Ben Snow mysteries by Edward D. Hoch.
- Almost everything by Walt Coburn.
- The Worst Shots in the West is obviously one, and a Tall Tale too.
- See also Western Series.
- The Big Valley - a 60s-style Western, with reasonable diversity and plenty of moralizing.
- Bonanza
- Deadwood
- Gunsmoke
- The Rifleman
- Justified - A modern day Western of sorts set in Kentucky.
- Little House on the Prairie, a classic Western Family Drama
- The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. : The Western meets zany comedy and some snazzy Steampunk...
- Best Of The West was an earlier (1981-1982) comedic take on the western.
- The Dakotas
- The Gospel Bill Show - A Christian-produced, kid-oriented Western series.
- The Wild Wild West: The western meets James Bond.
- Branded: The Western meets The Fugitive.
- The Lone Ranger: The TV show is the Ranger's best-known incarnation, but he had previously appeared in novels and on radio, and has since appeared in comics, film, and animation.
- Have Gun – Will Travel
- Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, another rare example of a Western Family Drama slash Nineties Adventure Show
- Lonesome Dove, an adaptation of the book.
- Hell on Wheels: Gritty drama following the expansion of the Railroad.
- F Troop: Sitcom set at a western Army outpost.
- The Young Riders: The Pony Express
- Strange Empire, a unique example of a Western centered around women.
- My Friend Winnetou (originally titled "Mein Freund Winnetou" and "Winnetou le Mescaléro"), a 1980 German-French-Swiss co-production loosely based on Karl May. It ran for 14 episodes and (of course) starred Pierre Brice in the title role.
- Kung Fu is a crossover with the martial arts genre, featuring a half-white, half-Chinese hero Walking the Earth.
- Again, Disney's Zorro probably counts, despite being set in old Spanish California, before the Mexican War.
- Maverick is a show about a lovable wandering gambler (and his brothers), starring James Garner. The inspiration for the above-mentioned film of the same name.
- The Cisco Kid is exceptional for featuring a couple of Mexican guys as the heroes. Was also one of the very first color TV series.
- Here Come the Brides: Set in Seattle, and loosely based on the story of the Mercer Girls
.
- Played for laughs in Cactus Canyon.
- El Dorado (and its variations Gold Strike and Lucky Strike) take place in the Southwest desert.
- One of the tables in Psycho Pinball is called "The Wild West".
- The Cisco Kid
- Fort Laramie
- Frontier Gentleman
- Frontier Town
- Gunsmoke
- Have Gun – Will Travel
- Hopalong Cassidy
- The Lone Ranger
- Riders Radio Theater
- The Six Shooter
- Tales of the Texas Rangers
- Winnetou, a ten-part West German radio drama series was first broadcast in 1956. In 2000 an ensemble of German comedians led by Jürgen von der Lippe recorded it again for fun, using the original scripts. The latter version was also produced on CD.
- Werewolf: The Wild West
- Deadlands
- Champions supplement Western Hero
- GURPS Old West
- Aces & Eights by Kenzer and Company
- Boot Hill by TSR
- Sidewinder: Wild West Adventures (d20) by Citizen Games
- Call of Juarez
- GUN
- Hard West, Turn-Based Tactics in the Weird West
- Lethal Enforcers II: Gunfighters
- The Red Dead franchise:
- Outlaws
- Sunset Riders
- Secret Ponchos
- The Desperados series of Commandos-like stealth strategy games
- The Desperados III
- The 1866 and 1860's Old America Game Mods for Mount & Blade
- The earliest example is probably the 1975 Midway arcade game Gun Fight
- Wild Western
- Wild ARMs
- High Noon
- Bank Panic
- Blood Bros.
- Dead Man's Hand
- The Westerner
- Fallout: New Vegas is basically traditional Fallout set in The West.
- Then you have the New Vegas Bounties mods, which are basically a series of Western-themed themed quests, involving bounty hunting, wanted posters, outlaws, and revolvers.
- 1979's Sheriff is this. It's also Shigeru Miyamoto's first game, and one of Nintendo's earliest.
- Rolling Western is going to be this but with an armadillo and tower defense.
- Westerado.
- The Westward series by Sandlot Interactive, excluding Westward Kingdoms(set in medieval times)
- Gun Smoke (Capcom game unrelated to the TV series)
- Boktai isn't exactly a Western itself, but draws heavily on the genre.
- Dust: A Tale of the Wired West
- Fistful of Frags
- The Town with No Name is an Affectionate Parody of the genre.
- West of Loathing
- West Cowboy
- The Unwaking setting in The Wanderer's Library is this with a fantasy twist.
- CliffSide is a web animation pilot blending horror comedy themes set in a western setting. It features the adventures of the deadpan Jo, "Two-Bit Jerry" Waylon and Cordie the Spider Girl.
- Poison Ivy Gulch
- Next Town Over, a steampunk western published on the web and in print.
- In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, they follow the adventures of Bloaty the Tick and Squirmy the Ringworm (two parasites living on Spunky) as they go off to the "new frontier" (all the extra weight Spunky has gained). The (mis)adventure follows the setup of a Western; the new setting is a Wild West setting, and Bloaty and Squirmy become sheriffs who have to get rid of a gang of outlaw mosquitoes that have been terrorizing the town.
- Quick Draw McGraw
- The Ricochet Rabbit & Droop-a-Long segments on The Magilla Gorilla Show.
- The Italian cartoon West and Soda is an Affectionate Parody of the genre.
- Sheriff Callie's Wild West bills itself as "the first Western for pre-schoolers".
- WinneToons (2007), a 26-episode German series very, very loosely based on Winnetou I. It also spawned a 2009 animated film based on Der Schatz im Silbersee.
- The Legend of Calamity Jane is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Both the Format Films and the Filmation versions of The Lone Ranger.
- Filmation's The New Adventures of Zorro is set in old Spanish California.
- Almost any Looney Tunes short starring Yosemite Sam will have him either as a cowboy or a pirate.
- The White Cowboy
