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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Western novels, films and pulps gave birth to Western comics, which were very popular, particularly from the late 1940s until c. 1967, when the comics began to turn to reprints. This can particularly be seen at Marvel Comics , where Westerns began c. 1948 and thrived until 1967, when one of their flagship titles, Kid Colt Outlaw (1949–1979 ...
[2] Westerns were popular with audiences, but critics lamented the loss of other program formats, which had quietly vanished from the three networks' schedules. The addition of Westerns and game shows came at the direct expense of the live dramatic anthology series seen during the Golden Age of Television. [3] All times are Eastern and Pacific.