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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