Wow I can’t believe you just dug up my memory of Cactus McCoy! I used to love playing those!
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Same, I have so many childhood memories with these old flash games, and now it’s like they never existed. The world seems to have forgotten about them.
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Really great thread!
My interest started, like most, from seeing the Dollars trilogy. For me this was British TV probably early eighties. I remember buying a Morricone LP (Vinyl) that contained the music from all three. Still have it but no longer have a record player.
For a long time the only SWs I’d seen were the Leone films (all of them) and a number with LVC in them (Day of Anger, Death Rides a Horse, Sabata). Two years ago I saw Django for the first time and it reignited my passion. My sons fuelled it by buying me The Great Silence and The Big Gundown on BluRay as my Christmas presents.
I’ve now seen 80.
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A spaghetti western on TV was an event in the 80s. Although if they weren’t made by Leone they were screened very late at night. I recall watching: ‘Death Rides a Horse’, ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and ‘A Professional Gun’ in 1981; followed by ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ and ‘The Good the Bad and the Ugly’ three years later. I started collecting VHS tapes in the mid-80s, although at that stage not many Italo-westerns - just the UK releases of ‘Blood at Sundown’ (with the iconic Garko sleeve) and ‘Seven Dollars to Kill’, plus ‘Cinq gachettes d’or’, a French VHS with Bud Spencer on the cover.
It wasn’t until I saw ‘The Big Silence’ (yes, that was the preferred English title back in the 80s/90s) and ‘A Bullet for the General’, shown on successive Sunday nights in August/September, 1990 on Alex Cox’s ‘Moviedrome’, that I became an aficionado of the wider genre. In the early 90s, a few labels started releasing these movies uncut, in the correct ratio and with sleeve notes etc.
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Interesting how video games were the gateway drug for the young. For me it was a childhood steeped in '30s to '60s American Western films and TV series (The Virginian, Casey Jones, Alias Smith and Jones, Kung Fu, come to mind).
Although I enjoyed many of these, my interest in the genre was limited, but I attribute the impact of first watching FFD to those years of exposure. Everything about Leone’s film, from the border-town vibe, anti-heroism, the sardonic, darkly comic sensibility, and operatic, stylistic exuberance, chimed as electrifying counterpoints to all that genre convention priming. I guess you could call it the shock of the new.
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In the early 2000s, when I was in my early 20s. I had been a massive cinema fan and would-be writer/director for several years already, and Quentin Tarantino was(and still is) one of my favorite filmmakers, and I was aware of ‘Kill Bill’ a few years before it came out, and in following news about the upcoming film, I read about how it would be heavily ‘Spaghetti Western’-influenced.
Now, I had vaguely heard of Spaghetti Westerns here and there, but I decided to delve into them to build up to the upcoming ‘Kill Bill’, and the moment I did so, I became an instant massive life-long fan, and it’s one of my very favorite genres/subgenres to this day, and in fact, I’m a filmmaker and I’ve even taken a stab at the genre myself with my Spaghetti Western/Giallo-esque film, “Dead Ringo”, which I wrote and directed myself(among other things).
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It started 49 years ago…
To be precise, it was Easter Monday, 1976, when ‘The Good, The Bad & The Ugly’ was broadcast on BBC1.
My life has never been the same…
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What was the exact date of Easter Monday 1976 ?
I remember seeing bits of the film, only … because there was an electricity power strike in NI petty local politics getting in the way of great art … a disgrace!
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Easter Monday was later that year too - 19th April.
In the Radio Times’ synopsis they called Clint’s character Joe not Blondie.
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… and ‘Setenza’, rather than ‘Sentenza’ … when in the English version he’s only ever referred to as ‘Angel Eyes’
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A few years ago, I trawled through the internet and found a company that was selling old ‘Radio Times’, so I bought the one (featured above), for the week in 1976 that ‘GBU’ was shown.
I also bought (and still have) ‘Radio Times’ magazine editions for the weeks in 1979 (July/August), when ‘Fistful of Dollars’ and ‘For A Few Dollars More’ were broadcast…
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Regarding my love affair with Spag. Westerns beginning with ‘GBU’, in 1976, it says a lot for how good the film is, that it blew my mind, despite only being in a 4:3 format. Then again, we didn’t, in those days, realise how much picture image we were missing out on.
The fact remains, that the film impacted my life so much that I became addicted to Eastwood as a mythological character, and grabbed every opportunity thereafter to snip out and treasure every ‘Man With No Name’ image that I could find - not so many in the days before computers!
And then, of course, I had to collect the ‘Dollar Western’ paperbacks…all that were available until I eventually beheld Clint riding into town in BBC TV’s 1979 broadcasts of ;Fistful; and ‘For a Few’.
It’s hard to believe now (with ‘Arrow’s’ editions of the Trilogy coming out) that we used to have to wait several years between each viewing…
How did we manage that? It was all that we had…and we were grateful to Leone, Morricone, and Eastwood for providing us with those golden nuggets that we occasionally found while sifting through the TV schedules…
I must admit that, the most difficult thing to accept - since watching ‘GBU’ for the first time’ - is realising that almost 50 years have flown by…
Proudest moment:
Chatting to Fabrizzio Gianni (assistant Director on ‘GBU’) on the phone in 2017, and discussing his involvement with the scenes shot in the Betterville Prison Camp.
Least proud moment
Turning down an invitation to meet him for lunch in Edinburgh, all expenses paid, for an exclusive interview.
My life was in tatters because my wife had left me…and I was mind-fucked, big time. I didn’t give a shit. I suppose we all live and learn…But I’m still pissed off that I missed the opportunity.
Here’s to Easter Monday, April 19th, 1976…BBC 1…thank you for changing my life. Not only my first SW, but also my first can of beer…
If I could wish for one thing…it would be to experience the superlative thrill of that first viewing all over again…the coolness, the images, the iconic characters, the music…so damn good.
Not only that, but my family were all still alive then, and I miss the ones that are no longer here.
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Exactly the same here - except that I only got to watch it as far as Tuco’s second hanging before my dad decided I was too young for this kind of thing (I was 11). Plus, we only had a black and white TV, which gave scenes such as the opener an almost unearthly bleakness.
So that fired up my imagination - and one element of this was the feeling that I had seen part of an X film (as films for over-18s were then rated) and got a glimpse of a different, grown-up world. I wanted to hear the music again, so I bought Big Western Movie Themes by Geoff Love and his orchestra - but it was the version of the Fistful of Dollars theme on this that just blew me away (I still love the way it stands out from the other tracks, with a completely unique sound). From then on, I was hooked.
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Same here…
Pictured below, this is the version of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ that I treasured from 1976 onwards, until I picked up a copy of the original Morricone soundtrack LP.
This version, though, still holds a very special place in my heart…
I still have the LP…
Our personal child-hood memories are everything we have to hold on to, and nobody remembers them when we are gone…
Good days, reading the ‘Dollars’ paperbacks by Joe Millard, Brian Fox etc, and only imagining how good it would be to watch the real thing on TV…
…
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Hi folks. Newbie here. My introduction was via my father in the 80s much like some mentioned above. I was weaned on SW, dirty harry & kung fu movies from the age of 8! My father was also into records and music which got me obsessed with listening to and collecting records. I eventually got into soundtracks and library music, and Italian lps became an interest to rekindle the sounds I have grown up with. An expensive hobby but here we are 45 years and 12000 records later 
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Ouch!
That’s some serious collecting there amigo. Respect.
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