People like Westerns because they represent a time of freedom.
James Arness
The Western was always considered a poor relation when critical acclaim was handed out. But from the late 1940s and deep into the 70s cowboys, indians, sheriffs and masked men rode the wide country and were the undoubted champions of the television programming schedules. Even though the greatest stars, directors and producers from Clayton Moore to Chuck Conners, Clint Eastwood to James Garner and John Ford to Spielberg himself all climbed aboard the Wells Fargo stage into the West, and their lavish fare was generally frowned on and became unsung deadwood in a genre that was kicked into the dust over twenty years ago. Many of those star-studded shoot’em ups are in danger of being forgotten; not in popular memory perhaps, but in the writing of television history.
Here McGivern accords them all their due significance as she says her warm ‘howdie’ to Johnny Ringo, Annie Oakley, Bronco, Sugarfoot, all the residents of Dodge City, Laramie and the Ponderosa. Almost two hundred made-for-television Westerns are studied and accompanied by exciting and rare stills to stir and resurrect the memories.