as I get i lil bit nostalgic selling the whole DVD collection, I wanted to start a discussion on the early days, when we all started to watch SWs.
Here is my story :
I’m from France, and In 1999, I was a student.
At that time, I had a girlfriend, and she had access to a nice library where we could take VHS tapes.
I had a passion for dance (I still have it) and I started to borrow all the dance movies (Fred Astaire…).
By chance I discovered the Leone movies on VHS, and I watched it… and I fell in love with SWs !
I remember more or less talking with my parents about westerns, and they mentioned Clint Eastwood, so it leads me to the library
But my SW knowledge was limited, I didn’t know 700 SW were produced…
Internet was not very helpful in 1999, so I guess I discovered other SWs through movie dictionnaries
I remember the first one I discovered after the dollar trilogy was Django, I really wanted to watch this one !
At that time I began to buy DVDs from amazon in the US (not sure about the exact date), and I ordered Django/Django 2 from Anchor Bay Entertainment (I kept this one as a souvenir).
That’s how I started my dvd collection.
I discovered later on Wild East DVDs (I also kept “a fistful of trailers” as a souvenir) and of course the SWWB !
I remember how passionate the topics were, and I want to thank you all (sorry I don’t remember the pseudonyms from the early days) because I learned a lot with you guys !
Not too long ago, maybe 3 years ago. I’m a relatively young member of the Spaghetti Western fanbase, mid teens. I was playing a lot of games and got one, I forgot what it’s called, but it wasn’t in the Red Dead series. It was a western game and that’s really all I remember. But it got me into westerns, and I was fortunate enough to find that “A Fistful of Dollars” was free on the YouTube Movies tab, which is essentially YouTube’s built-in streaming service. I watched it and started getting obsessed. Sure, I got into John Wayne movies, but not nearly as much as Spaghetti Westerns. Clint Eastwood essentially became a role model to me. I watched Django Unchained and then realized that it had roots in a spaghetti western, so I watched that too. Now I’m a Red Dead Redemption fan with no life, a fanboy of Sergio Leone, and I own a replica of Clint Eastwood’s poncho.
I got into them after renting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from my college library. It wasn’t the first Spaghetti Western I’d seen, but it was the first one I really appreciated.
Ah sorry for the late reply, it was probably the incredible characters and awesome direction of Leone. Both gave the story such a grand, dramatic feeling that really captured my imagination. You’re right, though, about all those other elements being superb.
My first introduction to SW was when the Dollars trilogy were first shown on British TV; . A Fistful of Dollars August 1st 1975, For a Few Dollars More December 30th 1975 and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly April 19th 1976.
Then I started going to the Scala Cinema (London) from 1978 and they all-nighters of various genres including SW.
Much the same here, except my first (and only) Scala spaghetti was a FFD/Django double bill.
Also in the mid '70s, I saw 5 Man Army and Sabata on TV. They seemed few and far between. Remember seeing posters for Once Upon A Time in the West outside French cinemas, before it got a UK TV release.
I was increasingly enthralled with each new Leone release. Then I started collecting SW soundtracks on vinyl, ordering them from a company in Italy. I had to wait decades before I saw most of the associated movies; some I’ve yet to see.
During the 1980s early video rental phase I worked my way through a bunch of them: good, bad and ugly .
Then came Alex Cox, who sorted the wheat from the chaff, pulling out some of the better ones for his TV retrospectives.
Interesting question. My answer might be a bit different from most people here since I’m relatively young. I remember being a massive fan of the video game Red Dead Redemption (2010) as a teenager. Around that time, I watched a couple of (at the time) modern westerns like 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and Open Range (2003), but I didn’t really care for them - I didn’t like them at all, nor were they anything like the game. I basically knew nothing about the western genre at that time, nor did I bother to get into it since I didn’t like the films I saw.
A few years later, I saw someone mention spaghetti westerns in a discussion about Red Dead Redemption. That led me to Once Upon a Time in the West, but I didn’t like it at first. It’s an amazing film, and one of my favorite spaghetti westerns now, but probably not the best introduction to the genre. So after that, I didn’t watch anything further.
Then, after an even longer gap - about seven years - Red Dead Redemption 2 came out and was a massive disappointment for me since it was more of a mix of 2000s/2010s westerns and 21st-century period drama TV shows, rather than a proper sequel or something in the spirit of RDR1 which was 75% spaghetti western and 25% american 60s/70s western. So, I decided to give The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a shot to scratch the western itch that Red Dead 2’s hype created but never satisfied. I immediately fell in love with the genre after that. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with spaghetti westerns.
Yeah, I’ve played it. Red Dead Revolver is an interesting game - it blends American and Japanese game design philosophies, but the result isn’t particularly great. It’s janky, and the enemies are total bullet sponges, but it’s definitely unique and has a lot of charm. Gun (2005) was alright, but it felt a bit uninspired.
Both are PS2 games at the end of the day, so they were pretty limited from a technical standpoint, and haven’t aged too well. Gaming made a massive leap from the PS2 to the PS3/360 era, both aesthetically and in terms of game design and mechanics… and unlike these games Red Dead Redemption has aged extremely well. It’s physics are still insanely impressive even today. I also think ps3/360 era graphics really complemented the game - they fit that semi-cartoony world of spaghetti westerns that the game was clearly inspired by. The ps3/360 era visuals allowed them to give the game an aesthetic they wouldn’t be able to pull off with today’s hyper-realistic visuals. It was made during the perfect era for that type of game.
I think there will come a time when people start appreciating the PS3/360-era look more - kind of like how people now enjoy the graininess of old film cameras or the aesthetics of pixelated games. It’s not quite the cartoony PS2 graphics, but it’s also not the ultra-realistic look of the PS4/PS5 era. It’s somewhere in the middle. The rendering techniques from the PS3/360 era have aged extremely well, aesthetically.
This is such a nice thread It’s interesting to read your stories. Here’s mine:
I’ve always liked Wild West as an aesthetic. We’ve always had Lucky Luke comics in the bookshelf, used to watch The Daltons with my brother, and I watched my brother play Cactus McCoy. My dad likes westerns, and when I was 13, I noticed that he would watch westerns when they were on tv. I then started to watch them with him.
Around the same time, I discovered the Red Dead games. It’s one of my favorite video game series and I’ve played all 4 of them. I haven’t played rdr2 that much, though. My brother prefers it while I’m a bigger fan of the first Red Dead and Red Dead Revolver. I’ve watched a gameplay of Gun too but haven’t played it myself yet.
The first Spagh I saw was Death Rides a Horse when I was 14. I was really hyped when I realized that the plot of Red Dead Revolver was hugely influenced by the film.
I saw the Dollars trilogy for the first time when I was 14 or 15, and saw OUaTitW when I was 16.
I had a Jack Palance phase when I was 17 and watched It Can Be Done Amigo and God’s Gun, but didn’t realize at the time that they were Spaghs.
In August 2022, I noticed that there will be an Italian western on the tv, so me and my parents sat down on the couch at 9pm and started to watch it. The film was Trinity Is Still My Name. We fell in love with it, but something about the film really struck a chord with me. I had to see more. I found They Call Me Trinity on YouTube and watched it. It was amazing. I also developed a huge crush on Terence Hill and started to watch more of his westerns. I was absolutely hooked, and discovered more and more Spaghs. That’s when I realized that I had discovered a new hobby and a new film genre that I’ll love until the end of the world
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It’s interesting to read your stories. Here’s mine: