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The Saturday Afternoon Matinee on the radio were a pre-television phenomenon in the US which often featured Western series. Film Westerns turned John Wayne, Ken Maynard, Audie Murphy, Tom Mix, and Johnny Mack Brown into major idols of a young audience, plus "singing cowboys" such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Dick Foran, Rex Allen, Tex Ritter, Ken Curtis, and Bob Steele.
Several Euro-Western films, nicknamed sauerkraut Westerns [1] because they were made in Germany and shot in Yugoslavia, were derived from stories by novelist Karl May, and were film adaptations of May's work. One of the most popular German Western franchises was the Winnetou series, which featured a Native American Apache hero in the lead role.
When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV Westerns quickly became an audience favorite, with 30 such shows airing at prime time by 1959. Traditional Westerns faded in popularity in the late 1960s, while new shows fused Western elements with other types of shows, such as family drama, mystery thrillers, and crime drama.
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The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier (commonly referred to as the "Old West" or the "Wild West") between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.
One reason the genre became so prevalent was because of its deep ties to American culture and the stories that were already being told for years through books and serialized stories in magazine.
These films were produced by Italians and Spaniards and shot in their countries with big American stars like Clint Eastwood or Henry Fonda. Films such as those of Sergio Leone 's Dollars Trilogy spawned numerous films of the same ilk and often similar titles, particularly from the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s.
The term "Western", used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World magazine. [13] Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th-century popular Western fiction, and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form.