Golden Saddles, Silver Spurs

[first lines]

Narrator:
The Great American West before the turn of the century, or more specifically, the Great American West as Hollywood portrayed it in hundreds of films, will forever be indelibly etched in our minds. The Saturday matinee shoot-em-ups represented the innocent fun in a bygone era when everyone went to the movies and most of those who went loved Westerns, especially those early B-Westerns that Hollywood cranked out by the hundreds. Today names like Bronco Billy Anderson, William S. Hart, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Randolph Scott and John Wayne conjure up images of good guys and bad guys on horses fighting Indians, outlaws and land barons and just about every other evil that existed in the old West.

Narrator:
There is a period in every child's life when a cowboy on horseback is just about the most exciting vision imaginable. The forbidding landscape and the vast possibilities of the West has beckoned young and old for generations and as long as directors like John Ford and actor John Wayne were there to wrest poetry, beauty and drama from simple stories, the Western worked its magic on adults, too.

Narrator:
When women did appear, it was often as the rich rancher's daughter or the women dressing up the local saloon or worse. In a genre where the traditional masculine virtues of rugged strength and unswerving determination dominated the scene, women were usually relegated to the background. On the whole, they were either good or, if not bad, then no better than they should be.

Narrator:
One rather spectacular clich? that was born with the B-Westerns of the thirties until the demise of the species in the mid-50s: the heroine was, almost without exception, a biological freak, the apparent offspring of but a single male parent.

Narrator:
Yes, the thrill of it all! The memory brings goosebumps to the flesh and sends ripples of ecstasy through the bodies of those old enough to remember and for those young enough to enjoy them for the first time on video. The Western will live on in the hands of creative and innovative filmmakers - you can bank on that. The stars of the future won't be Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Bronco Billy or John Wayne, but they will be the Clint Eastwoods and Kevin Costners and whoever else is smart enough to know that there is gold in them thar hills, and it needs to be mined from time to time, to remind all of us of a time that was simultaneously tough and romantic, with heroes and heroines that will forever live in our memories.

[last lines]

Narrator:
It's time for us to hitch up and ride out of here until we meet again on the lone prairie... or lines to that effect, stolen no doubt from some Hollywood B-Western. Happy trails, pardner!