I’ve updated all of the above lists (ignoring any that don’t qualify).
I’ll do my usual new year’s update in January so please do submit any lists you’d like to be considered. Rules are there if you’d like to read them.
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How is it , like at beginning or Bills suggestion ?
I think we should change the whole “alternative Top 20” to extended favorite list, Your Top 20 + 20 more.
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I second this opinion. I always thought a top 40 reflects more , than a boring top 20. Sorry, but the most top-twenty-lists of the members will be almost the same, with some little differences.
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What bothers me most about the alternate list is that, as an example, a film like Arizona Colt that is in my top 20 I have to also include in this list because it does not feature in the official top20. Which bumps out a film I’d otherwise like to include in my alternate list. This only gets worse the more picks you have in your original list that this also applies to, leaving your alternate one less representative of how you actually feel and omitting a certain number of titles you would have otherwise included from getting a mention.
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To be fair, when we came up with these lists, there were precious few methodology discussions 
The Alt list was always thought of more of a didactic product: a segway for people to discover some films aside from the “usual suspects”, kind of a list of films for people to watch once they’ve transitioned from beginner to intermediate :).
I personally am open to tweaking the rules and computations for these lists, just my two cents of how we got there
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Bill’s idea of posting a top 40 was actually not to get a top 40, but a way to solve the problem that the rules how the alternate top 20 should be compiled are not always understood. As several lists posted here still show.
(correct me Bill, if I’m wrong)
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That’s right Stanton, that’s what I’m trying to say. The official list still shows the next 30 films outside of the top 20 anyway, so there’s your alternative list right there, from 21 to 40. So just posting your combined two lists together would make for a simpler solution.
Actually, in the voting thread, all films which got votes are shown, and I think at least from # 50 to 100 the film’s position in the ranking gives a fair indication of its popularity amongst the genre fans. In the lower ranks it then becomes of course more and more arbitrary.
It seems to me we are losing sight of what the Alternative Top 20 was set up for.
The purpose of the Alt list was aimed at new fans discovering the genre and had the message of:
“So you’ve seen the Top 20 Spaghetti Westerns that we all know about, here’s another 20 you may not have heard so much about but which our members would recommend.”
It was set up at the outset with a different scoring scheme to the main Top 20 on the understanding that once you get to a larger number of films rating something as your number 32 favourite over your number 37 favourite becomes more and more arbitrary. Hence the one film one point system for the Alt Top 20. It’s a subtle difference maybe but it is a difference. It’s why around a third of the films which are currently in the Alt Top 20 don’t appear in the Official Top 40.
As to why people often find it so difficult to understand the principle of naming their 20 favourite films which don’t currently appear on the official Top 20 I have no answer. I genuinely don’t know why it continues to trip people up. It seems a super simple idea to me but I have to accept that lots of people do so it’s obviously a thing. But despite that, I would be loathe to change it now after all these years of compiling it just because some people find it confusing. Apart from anything else, asking people to submit a Top 40 from now on would mean Stanton would have to create a whole new scoring scale for it and throw out everything he has done up to now.
Unless of course folks would rather we just delete the Alt Top 20 altogether and leave it to newcomers to just scroll further down the to look at the lower reaches of the Top 20 page. We could always do that and some people probably already do just that but I don’t see any harm in keeping an alternate list. The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned. And the only person putting any work in is me and I don’t mind.
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I know it shows more, I’m not new here.
But honestly I don’t mind if you guys are happy with it, I know at this point its probably too much to overhaul like Phil says. I was just exploring the question that got raised again, it seems to keep coming up from time to time from different users.
Ok, thanks for that explanation. No I got the whole sense of it. My interpretation was wrong, obviously.
The next time , I will read more properly.
No, I think the new idea was to post 40 films only for the alternate top 20, than you can pick the 20 real alternate from these 40 by eliminating the 20 from the top 20.
By that it doesn’t matter if one understands the rules, you pick the ones which qualify. With 40 films named the 20 alternate ones must be automatically part of the list.
But yes, ha ha, indeed, so far it did not crossed my mind, in that case we could also use the complete lists for a new voting … ahh … hmm, tricky …
The top films are often the same, yes, but that’s only while the quality gap is quite big between Leone, the best Corbuccis and the rest.
The idea to make a top 40 or even a top 50 was discussed here every few years, but so far it is already difficult enough to get some new top 20 lists.
I’m not sure if enough members are interested to make larger lists.
And I doubt that the results would be very different.
And apart from that all it is mostly so that if lists reflect the expected, they are often called boring, but if they are full of lesser known films, everybody calls them odd.
But apart from the usual classics the lists are quite varied.
But frankly said, when I first saw such a SW list, and I surely wasn’t surprised to see the Leones or Django being at the top, but there were several other films I did not expect to get so many votes. I absolutely did not expect Death Rides a Horse to be in the top 20, so far in all the books and essays I had read about SWs before the year 2000, this film was barely mentioned, and I myself thought it was pretty forgettable after watching it in the 90s on TV.
And there are films in the top 50 like El puro and Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead which I never had heard of, which were not even released in Germany theatrically.
While a film which was often discussed like The Hills Run Red did not even make the top 100.
In the end such lists are basically not made to generate surprises for those who are already knowledgeable. So they maybe boring for some, I can’t change that.
I think your are right Stanton. This was just my first opinion as a newbie.
But after I realized what this lists are really about it all makes sense to me.
Ill try now to built my alternative top 20.
But one point is still important, the lists should be subjective, the lists should name the favourite films, those one enjoys the most, not those one thinks are the “objectively” best.
Ideally the 20 you would keep if you had to destroy all the others, the 20 so called island films
I’m happy to do that if folk prefer and find it easier. I often have to extract films that don’t qualify anyway. These days I don’t mention it, just leave them out.
As long as the Alt Top 20 is really more of a swdb community curated alternative list rather than simply our Top 21-40 I am also fine with any tweaking of the methodology… As long as it’s clear to the readers what the list purpose is (I always thought of the alt list as more of a editorial thought exercise and competition to the other one rather than a “best ones minus the top 20” computation)
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Then as always -
01 E per tetto un cielo di stelle
02 Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte
03 Dio perdona … io no
04 Amico , stammi lontano almeno un palmo
05 Il momento di uccidere
06 Anda muchacho , spara
07 Un dollaro tra i denti
08 C‘e Sartana … vendi la pistola e comprati la bara
09 Navajo Joe
10 Vado … l‘ammazzo e torno
11 Una ragione per vivere e una per morire
12 Un dollaro bucato
13 Texas Addio
14 California
15 Per 100.000 dollari t‘ammazzo
16 Ballata per un pistolero
17 W Django !
18 Joko invoca Dio … e muori
19 Black Jack
20 Matalo !
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Added to the total. Thanks
I’ve been lurking this forum and using Swdb for about 15-20 years now, but I’ve never been very active and I have never submitted a lost. So excuse me if my question is kind of dumb, but is there a set voting time for my Top 20 and Alternative Top 20? Or can I submit a list any time I like?
Also the films from the Top 20 you can’t vote listed on the Alternativ Top 20 page currently doesn’t match the films on the official Top 20. Intentional? Not updated?
When are lists updated and scores newly calculated btw?
Sorry for all the questions. I’m sure answers could potentially be found somewhere here, but there are a lot of posts.
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