What Happened to the Space Western?

[Music] as someone who enjoys a wide variety of media I have come across an equally wide variety of genres and while many have piqued my interest or even managed to make me a fan none have quite stuck with me like the space Western if you don't know a space Western is exactly what it sounds like it's a hybrid genre that takes elements from both westerns and science fiction to create something completely unique and this combination of past and future may initially sound somewhat silly or even contradictory ideas that might be forming in your head may be that of Outlaws wielding laser guns horses riding alongside spaceships the entire movie Cowboys and Aliens however while those do exist and are actually quite fun the complexity of this hybrid goes much deeper in fact the blending of sci-fi and Western archetypes are responsible for several of the best and my favorite pieces of fiction Firefly try Gun Borderlands the expanse Cowboy Bebop even Star Wars has ties to the genre which is only exemplified by spin-offs like the Mandalorian and Star Trek the Original Series was considered by its creator Gene Roddenberry to be part of this group as well if you look at the space Western's defining works you will easily find some of the most influential stories and franchises of all time many of them transcending the limitations of Pop Culture itself and becoming so ubiquitous that I'm sure many of you were surprised to hear me mention them in this video and it's exactly that surprise that caused this video to be made in the first place the fact that many have not heard of one of my favorite genres of all time despite having seen many of its products is a bit disheartening so let's take a brief look at this strange mishmash of ideas and influences let's try to understand why it took off like it did why it works as well as it does and why it might not be talked about as much as it deserves let's talk about what happened to the space Western unsurprisingly the Western genre has roots leading all the way back to well the old west considering that early western films like 1903's The Great Train Robbery took place at a time when trained robberies were still a thing that regularly occurred however what might be somewhat more surprising is that science fiction has roots going back just as far with the iconic French Adventure film trip to the moon having actually been released a year prior in 1902. the Western and science fiction genres then had a rather symbiotic growth as they both experienced ups and downs in nearly perfect opposite sync with one another the silent film era was largely dominated by cowboy movies following The Great Train Robbery until 1927 with the Advent of sound that same year Metropolis released as the first feature-length sci-fi film 1939 then saw the release of Stagecoach and the meteoric rise of John Wayne following him came the explosion in popularity of Godzilla in 1954. and whereas the Western had its golden age in the 1940s to 60s science fiction similarly dominated pop culture from the 60s to 80s back and forth these two genres always shared the Limelight with one ready to break back into the mainstream the moment the others seemed to be reaching its limits and this back and forth was with good reason as the typical trappings of Science Fiction and Western worked quite well together often times both look at some form of New Frontier and the people looking to colonize or explore it they both involve rapid evolutions of technology and Society popular character archetypes include lawmen and Space Rangers working against criminals and masterminds contending with the rightful inhabitants of the land they're occupy and their stories can follow Grand Adventures across large distances easily digestible in episodic or movie formats therefore it should be no surprise that these two massive cultural Staples would not only share the same spaces but more often than not share ideas ideas with each other shows like Twilight Zone would introduce classical Western plot lines and characters Lost in Space would go a step further and blend both genres into its premise Star Trek would be eventually pitched as a wagon train to the stars as it intentionally took the format of the hit NBC Show Wagon Train where every episode featured a group of settlers exploring the frontier and solving the problems of those they come across properties like Westworld and Stephen King's Dark Tower even became wholly original in the way they walked the line between Both Worlds unable to be categorized as simply one or the other however the official Inception of the space Western came about the same way many other hybrid genres did that being through the spread of Pulp magazines early fiction magazines printed on cheap wood pull paper as far back as 1896 these collections of short stories offered a much broader range of genres and creative settings mostly due to the fact that they were inexpensive mass-produced and typically considered low brow therefore 4 writers of Pulp Fiction had a much easier time just putting anything to paper that came to mind which resulted in an astounding amount of combinations as taking existing tropes and mashing them with something else was one of the easiest things to write the most well-established and popular tropes at the time just happening to be those of cowboys spaceships and the supernatural fantasy westerns horror westerns horror fantasy science fantasy science fiction westerns space westerns any and all blends of different popular media became the norm in Pulp magazines and were pumped out by aspiring authors also yes science fiction Western is considered different to space Western by some they even have two different Wikipedia Pages the split essentially being determined by which genre seems to be the base of the story I'll just be using them interchangeably for the most part though because I don't really care the first official space Western to be written and called as such was actually C.L Moore's shamblow printed in a 1933 issue you of weird Tales weird Tales was a primarily fantasy and Supernatural magazine which was the birthplace of stories like Call of Cthulhu and Conan the Barbarian however more one of the first female sci-fi and fantasy authors published her story about an outlaw spaceship pilot named Northwest Smith The Fairly widespread success success further driven by the decline of superhero comics in the 1940s and the ban of horror comics by the comics code Authority in the mid-1950s which left science fiction and Western stories to fill in the gaps in the market and grow even more this growth then naturally spread out to film and television and the rest is history history that did not come without its critics though as any story or setting related to pulp magazines had quite a negative reputation attached to it mostly due to the popular consideration that pulp was a lesser form of fiction and so all of the combination genres originating from it had claims of unoriginality or lack of writing Talent leveled at them with one of the most popular combinations the space Western earning the most hatred in October of 1950 Galaxy's science fiction magazine a very popular collection of stories from authors such as Ray Bradbury Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke ended their very first publication with a certain story it followed Cosmic Outlaw bat dursden Landing his spaceship on an alien planet and being held at Blaster point with an incredibly dense sci-fi jargon-filled description of the event across a single paragraph and following this obvious Pastiche was the exact same story with the science fiction elements removed underneath both being a single quote sound alike they should one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and Impossible Planet if this is your idea of Science Fiction you're welcome to it you'll never find it in Galaxy now this is a very self-serious statement from Galaxy proudly demonstrating sci-fi nerd's number one pastime of gatekeeping their own genre but it is the most common critique of many space Western stories at the time one clearly stating that the shared elements didn't exceed The Superficial though unfortunately for Galaxy their self-aggrandizing put down of the genre does pale in comparison to the write-up done by the turkey City Writers Workshop considered one of the leading sci-fi writer collectives at the time they also took a jab as part of their published writer's lexicon that said space Western the most pernicious Suite of used furniture the grizzled space Captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a jovian Brandy then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a galactic rim job as should be obvious from that rather poetic takedown despite the initial spread of our blossoming hybrid there was quite a lot working against it and it would seem the space Western genre was subject to the same fate as many others being that it couldn't sustain itself separate from its Inspirations people simply saw West turns with sci-fi Concepts tacked on or sci-fi stories borrowing Western tropes and the explicit combination of the two would always earn a label of lazy writing however while media in the style would die down for quite some time the transformation of the genre would eventually come ironically preceding the Death Rows of its predecessors foreign you see the death of the Western in the 1960s and to a lesser extent the death of traditional science fiction was due to the same reason they were even popular in the first place governing much of the American Media production cycle for the era was something called the motion picture production code simply called the haze code after its creator the haze code was a self-regulating censorship guideline that came into being after the film industry's morals were called into question in the early 1930s preferring to self-censor then be regulated by the government the code listed out many now hilariously strict defenses that movies must not violate in order to be released these offenses include such favorites as pointed profanity ridicule of the clergy sympathy for criminals promotion of non-traditional values and excessive or lustful kissing so because of the haze code any Western that sought to have any structure varying from the traditional law enforcement entity Saves the Day from Evil criminals was forbidden any sci-fi film not following a space hero promoting Christianity and the nuclear family was prohibited and as such traditional code following sci-fi and westerns launched into success since other genres like horror couldn't adapt at all but these stories did get quickly tiresome after 30 or so years without much change so the traditional quickly came out of fashion and was just as quickly supplanted by the revisionist revisionist westerns also called anti-westerns are considered to be any product of the genre that seeks to subvert the typical Western tropes they include criminal or otherwise flawed protagonists they bring up deeper psychological themes and they typically stray from any concrete morality so of course the haze code prevented them from being produced on American soil which is why the sub-genre was actually popularized in Italian made films dubbed Spaghetti Westerns which were unbeholden to such censorship as Quentin Tarantino once wrote on the subject in the late 1960s American westerns let the Italians take over because Italian movies weren't tired they seemed like a response to the westerns that we've been seeing forever the combination of the surreality and the violence they don't seem that violent now but they seemed very violent then because they didn't take it that seriously a lot of the heroes were young guys from earlier American Western TV series but they dressed cooler they acted cooler they were the perfect thing for the 1960s Revolution that was happening at the time ironically enough Spaghetti Westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars or The Good the Bad and the Ugly became so successful that they are now considered to be definitive genre Staples despite the fact that they exist in part as a form of counterculture and many American films would follow their lead after the termination of the haze code in 1968. meanwhile darker science fiction was being produced via novel and television which similarly played against type resulting in much deeper themes and Explorations the same time that the haze code was relaxed allowing for films to take a breath of fresh air stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep were published bringing with them deep existential questions three years prior Frank Herbert's Dune imagined a more nuanced and political future than ever before sci-fi quickly expanded in complexity and formed a similarly revisionist and experimental sub-genre known as New Wave science fiction funnily enough Galaxy magazine is seen as sort of a pie Pioneer in this field though the developments are best described by author Ursula K Le Guin who says I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960 and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers the breadth of subject the depth of treatment the sophistication of language and technique and the political and literary consciousness of the writing so once again sci-fi and westerns had transformed hand in hand and arose From the Ashes of their previous forms to create something new this death of the traditional heralded in a new age of fiction that considered so much more than was previously imagined and after enough time these new stories brought about a more complex relationship with each other that resulted in the Revival of articular hybrid foreign so fast forward to the 1980s and Star Wars and Star Trek have no both included Western elements in mostly science fiction stories one as we talked about taking an episodic wandering structure directly from a western show the other taking a large combination of influences from various pulp magazines and other films most notably building characters such as Han Solo and Boba Fett directly off of archetypes present in famous spaghetti westerns and taking other elements from everything from Buck Rogers to Akira kurosawa's the Hidden Fortress what's important though is that both of these franchises would become inconceivably successful due to their unique Inspirations this leads to the beginnings of a renewed interest in Western and science fiction combinations notably the film Outland and the show's Brave star and Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers which were all properties explicitly about Cowboys in space all put out in the 80s though unfortunately despite its attempts to Stand Out Outland had wanted to revisit the traditional Western and not its newer form as seen by the common comparison that the movie was simply pre-existing classic High Noon In Space so the movie came out to mediocre reviews and measly sales and only lent more Credence to the criticisms from sci-fi purists everywhere as did bravestar and all the other sci-fi Western Concepts at the time though Galaxy Rangers retained one bit of Legacy which I'll touch on later no the 80s seemed to be still too early for the reinvention of the space Western attempts at Revival would never come to full fruition and even the larger franchises would slowly shed their Western elements as they embraced other sub-genres like Space Opera as a core of their being so the entire decade would come and go without much development but that isn't to say that nothing was developing at all in fact possibly the most important piece of the puzzle would come together during this time a third piece of the trifecta that would finally unlock true potential in the medium one so influential as to single-handedly change the landscape of media itself and one with history so intricate it could be the topic of its own video that piece being cyberpunk [Applause] film Noir as a genre of fiction shares much of the same history as science fiction and westerns coincidentally also originating from Pulp magazines and the popular subsect of prime fiction it started out following simple premises with detectives solving cases then the genre matured in the 60s and began to subvert itself with that subversion spinning off into what is now known as neo-noir and with a focus on anti-heroes sociological themes and political tensions neo-noir fits right in with other revisionist fiction so well in fact that a combination of it and darker New Wave sci-fi as introduced with do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep would combine together to form cyberpunk a type of neo-doir speculative fiction in which advanced technology juxtaposes itself with societal collapse cyberpunk represents a critical advancement in media during its Inception some of the building blocks of the cyberpunk genre include 1977's Judge Dredd 1981's William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic and 1982's katsuhiro otomo's Akira alongside many of the writings of science fiction authors at the time a surprising few of which ironically belonged to the turkey City Writers Workshop considered the cradle of cyberpunk though almost every other preceding work in the genre barely holds a candle to the cultural influence of 1982's Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott and based on our previously mentioned Philip K dick novel The Story of a grizzled detective hunting down Androids and bringing into question the meaning of humanity grew to be arguably the most influential sci-fi cyberpunk and neo-noir story of all time the only possible competition it might have being acura's film adaptation released only six years later in 1988 which took more from the punk side of cyberpunk as that was to Japan what Noir was to America following a teenage biker gang in Neo Tokyo it too asked many deeper questions about humanity and corporate exploitation though notably with less scenes of people sitting in chairs and more scenes of motorcycles doing cool slides to vastly oversimplify Akira and Blade Runner quickly garnered incredible cult audiences and critical Acclaim both are considered by many to be the best films ever made and watching either you can clearly understand why and with both properties concurrent success they worked to open a much wider bridge between Japanese and American Media a bridge that had been slowly forming as early as the crossover success of films like Godzilla which then strengthened with the influence of Kurosawa on both George Lucas and Sergio Leone and was surprisingly crossed with the adventures of the Galaxy Rangers one of the first anime style shows to be produced in the United States a show in fact animated by Tokyo movie shinsha the very same Studio that helmed acura's production following the 1980s then the two films would keep this back and forth going inspiring more films on either side than one could list in a single sitting even just the previously mentioned cool motorcycle slide having an incomprehensible list of diverse properties that would later pay homage to it with the most relevant successors being those that finally brought about the rebirth of the space Western I am of course talking about Trigun and Cowboy Bebop foreign written in 1995 by yasahiro naito follows an outlaw in the 32nd Century by the name of Vash the Stampede it is perhaps one of the purest space westerns we've talked about since the traditional era of the genre as it follows very clear Western and science fiction Aesthetics while taking themes from both equally though while the aesthetic and appeal of Trigun might seem somewhat traditional the story is anything but following a pacifist main character with a large bounty on his head and featuring many themes of gray morality it is distinctly revisionist with its violent abstaining regretful protagonist even being a common Trope in many films such as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and its contemplation on Humanity having a clear neo-noir Edge to it the science fiction elements that it uses lean in that direction as well the fact that humanity is colonizing the desert Planet setting of the manga because they depleted Earth of its resources is something directly mentioned by Blade Runner and many cyberpunk stories therefore it should be no surprise that while the manga and 1998 anime adaptation were decently popular in Japan they would also become supremely popular in America especially with its premiere on Adult Swim's late night broadcasts but naturally you can't mention anime popular in America and Anime that aired on Adult Swim for that matter without mentioning the first and most successful to do it Cowboy Bebop an exiled Hitman former cop amnesiac con artist hacker child and their pet Corgi all living together aboard the spaceship Bebop is the stage we set when talking about shinichira Watanabe and sunrise Studios iconic 1997 anime and what an anime it is people have made entire video series Breaking Down the Nuance of Cowboy Bebop and its use of Western Noir and science fiction elements in fact it seems to be a rite of passage that I am no stranger to every pasta aspect is delivered perfectly from animation to shot composition to choice of Wonderful yokano soundtrack but the success and acclaim of the series is by no means due to any single piece of that puzzle but rather the way in which they fit together from its first episode Bebop makes clear that it has mastered the use of its Inspirations and understands perfectly well why it is using each one spaceships fly over Dusty towns jazz music plays over a gunfight at a bar cyberpunk hackers interact with Noir criminals who interact with Western villains who all feel totally at home in this world and while every part has a clear origin that it could be traced back to their seamless integration elevates the story being told to such a degree that it sticks around with anyone who watches it and every ounce of Praise I have laid upon it is an ounce magnified tenfold by those around during its release as this show would not only become critically acclaimed but also spread the popular Clarity of anime far outside of Japan carrying the legacy of Akira forward 90s and early 2000s that the space Western genre peaked as Trigun Bebop and other anime like Outlaw Star were dominating their own subsect of Pop Culture so as expected America was next in line to push the medium forward which they responded with by creating Firefly released in 2002 and created by Joss Whedon Firefly is one of the most likely properties to come to mind when thinking of the space Western mostly due to it being the most forthright and bold with its design palette having over-the-top traditional Western imagery dressing the set with more Americana than anything prior taking strong cues from the Civil War era to the point of making several characters Veterans of a futuristic Civil War in Universe the entire show is Unapologetic about what it is and what it is is incredibly pulpy this pulpy appearance then is very reminiscent of the genre's past whereas Star Trek was wagon trained to the Stars it seemed Firefly was taking cues from its own favorite long forgotten media the though with a definitively modern approach to Storyteller or modern at the time with whedon's signature quippy dialogue and conflicting characters he even pitched the show by saying this is about nine people looking into the Blackness of space and seeing nine different things however this balance of older and newer ways of thinking did not pan out as well as could be hoped with firefly being canceled only 11 episodes into its 14 episode season as it seemed their Network FOX didn't care for the concept from the start they famously bickered with Whedon over major production decisions before the first episode even aired then ran the season out of order on the lowest viewed Friday time slot behind commercials that advertised a different tone of show then mixed the entire thing when it inevitably didn't Garner Stellar ratings it's hard to debate whether or not the show itself had flaws worthy of cancellation due to Fox's near surgical attempt to run it into the ground and that debate has been brought up by the Die Hard fans of the show since news first broke Die Hard fans that rallied enough to get a conclusion in the form of 2005's Serenity the sequel film but if there's anything to be learned from the untimely death of firefly it's that simply taking elements from sci-fi and Western and making a clever show of it isn't enough to guarantee success as becoming a cult classic does sometimes mean making a martyr of yourself first and so the space Western genre as a whole seemingly following fireflies trajectory quickly fell by the wayside in the mainstream in the mid-2000s the genre never did quite die in the years after with Chronicles of Riddick and many other successful properties being aired in the style specifically a ton of video games that would carry the torch in their own medium ranging from Starcraft to Borderlands to Outer wilds and one of my personal favorite shows the expanse has done a great job at using thematic connections of Noir Western and sci-fi in its rather luxurious story though ironically it also mirrored Firefly AI in more ways than one as it famously got canceled three seasons in only to be picked up by Amazon Prime because it was one of Jeff bezos's personal favorite shows which makes the story cyberpunk elements realistic in more ways than one yet while games shows and other bits of space Western media like the ones just listed would occasionally be very successful in the decades between Firefly and today very few of them would ever seem to carry the genre into the Limelight with them that is until one franchise would make the most unusual return to form in that of the Mandalorian [Music] foreign signature new love child is perhaps one of the most well-documented cases of piecemeal made success in modern history directed by John Favreau who would initially try his hand in the space Western setting with his 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens which released to terrible box office numbers and worst reviews almost half of which I can guarantee you being entirely a result of deciding to name the film Cowboys and Aliens the star of the Mandalorian Pedro Pascal then himself worked previously in similar fiction having co-starred in 2018's Prospect a micro budget film about frontiersmen searching for treasure on an alien planet in which Pedro plays a quiet morally gray mercenary teaming up with a child he was initially intending to kill and of course Star Wars has tried its hand at sci-fi and Western theme combinations in the past too as previously discussed with a New Hope and The Phantom Menace these three seemingly abandoned or failed Concepts would only come together to success in the 2019 Star Wars spin-off show in which a reserved Mandalorian Bounty Hunter must take care of an alien child amid a plot of conspiracy and Frontier danger showcasing excellent adherence to space Western tropes and a clear Simplicity that brings its themes to the Forefront the Mandalorian would release two fantastically High reviews and record-breaking viewership for Disney streaming service alongside massive pop cultural success essentially Reviving The Star Wars franchise single-handedly the show also brought mainstream recognition of the space Western back into Focus however with this mainstream success does come possible worry as the Mandalorian has peaked in pop culture in part due to connection with its franchise a franchise that notably tends to backslide out of the western genre and into its own convoluted sci-fi fantasy lore the longer it continues with further spin-offs such as book of Boba Fett receiving rather negative reception for this very reason now it is much too early to tell the long-term impact of the show but let's just say there's a reason that the main character is on the thumbnail for this video whether that impact turns out to be negative or positive it does carry a strong Legacy and earns itself a rather large seat at the table and being the most recent example of popular space Western media it is where our history concludes and our discussion begins to wrap up if there's anything I hope to have gotten across thus far is that the space Western as a child of many different genres and pieces of media takes more than just inspiration and aesthetic from all of them for one it also traces their history and rides in the waves of their success to understand that history is to in part understand the history of everything that came before though while this history as we've extensively covered does give us the events in which the space Western Rose and fell and rose again it doesn't give us any reasoning it doesn't explain why why did some of the most famous and influential Works tap into the genre why did the genre affect so many people so deeply including myself why does it stand out the most succinct explanation that I can come up with and one I thought long and hard about is probably the most simple and it's an explanation that might be quite obvious to you if you've been paying attention you see science fiction Western cyberpunk and film Noir all have one intrinsic commonality between them that being that they comment on our real world and its issues through the use of fictional spaces and arguably every story ever written has done this in some way after all they're written by people so they will inevitably have bias put into them but all the connecting genres just listed in some way or another lend themselves the best to these types of Stories the Golden Age of the western from the 1940s to 60s was massively influenced by the economic and cultural boom of America during that time they told the stories of the American hero and they celebrated the country's post-war Success Through celebration of its past triumphs in much the same way that science fiction depicted domestic Futures as an extension of positive outlooks on technology at the time come the 60s and 70s and these same genres reflected Watergate and the cultural revolution through their portrayal of those same settings anti-westerns with morally great characters were a direct commentary on the current divisive political situation peeling back the facade of Frontier heroism much the same way the facade was peeling back in government New Wave sci-fi then extrapolated on current fears through its use of dystopian Futures with cyberpunk taking this a step further to directly oppose corporate exploitation and technological oppression in the 80s and 90s all the while Noir and neo-noir would bring to light a dirty underbelly of crime corruption and violence that was surrounding everyone all those years every single one of these Rising tides of popularity for each genre reflected a real change in the problems and anxieties of the population at the time and the most influential stories were almost always the ones that tackled those problems most perfectly they were all made with a very conscious understanding of the world around them and their ability to convey that understanding in a fictional space is what sets them apart so for all these different genres to share this one aspect means it's the perfect place for a hybrid to push things even further to tell a story with a core message or theme that relates to all these separate settings simultaneously which can allow it to become greater than the sum of its parts and convey something more detailed and profound than its individual Inspirations and the key word here is potential space westerns have the potential to surpass their parent genres in the same way that many other hybrids can yet not all of them will in fact most of them will never come close and some may never try to begin with taking a western and adding spaceships is certainly fun but won't Elevate the material beyond that it doesn't have much else to say however it's when you reach deeper and incorporate themes and messages from multiple genres that utilize all of them that you create something unique Cowboy Bebop for example could exist as a story conceived solely in each setting it borrows from a plot about loneliness love lost and escaping one's past it makes for a convincing sci-fi western cyberpunk or Noir fiction yet the way it Blends them together is what makes its story so meaningful its strong sentimentality over living life despite regret is not just emblematic of the 90s Japanese landscape that it was created in or relatable to The Human Experience across many different points in time and the combination of genres it uses is what allows it to reinforce that relatability to take away any of them or to ground the story in just one would lessen the experience as confirmed by the text and the opening credits of the show the work which becomes a new genre itself will be called Cowboy Bebop so in essence the existence of shinichiro watanabe's 90s Masterpiece alone disproves Galaxy and turkey City's criticism their implication that combinations are lesser or unnecessary which is Ironically in part due to it being influenced by the genres that the critics helped nurture in the first place [Music] now I've touched quite a bit here on the strengths of the space Wester but it is in discovering that strength that we also reveal its weakness this core of the sub-genre as well as its parents being that they are strongest when they comment on the real world is also unfortunately why it seems to have been in Decline as a fundamental combination of topics that all have something to say about Modern Life the space Western is an incredibly specific product of its time in much the same way all those topics are the Western largely died out when its specific portrayal of the past wasn't as relevant anymore science fiction and cyberpunk released their Stranglehold on pop culture when fears of scientific exploitation and exploration were no longer at an all-time high and much the same the space Western peaked in the 90s and 2000s when the world itself was at a Crossroads between the past and future as seen with the turn of Millennium Firefly or as beloved and deserving of recognition as it is was a story told just a bit past its prime its usage of Americana and Frontier conflict were well handled but it wasn't released in a period that was especially receptive to them to be frank I don't think a lot of people wanted to root for a ragtag group of anti-government anti-heroes in a show that aired in September of 2002 and as we've later seen with the expanse and the outer worlds an embracing of these combined themes doesn't have the impact that it once did with the Mandalorian being a milestone but not a particularly well-defined representative of the genre though to be fair even Star Trek the Original Series was threatened with cancellation only two seasons in with NBC even slotting them into the so-called Friday night death slots the same as Firefly so perhaps the space Western has just naturally leaned towards cult classic more than cultural staple either way while I love and appreciate this strange hybrid genre after looking at its history it is quite easy to see what happened to it because it's the same thing that happens to everything else time moved on and left it behind and while the greatest works under its umbrella will still be appreciated far into the future they also aren't able to be replicated today Cowboy Bebop is not something that could be made outside of the year it originally was or by any other group of creators for that matter Trigun in particular showcases this as its 90s original and 2020s remake are fundamentally different they try to achieve different things because they were released in two different Landscapes but if there's anything we've learned from the Persistence of westerns and Science Fiction it's that it is quite easy to adapt as modern issues come and go as cultures shift and pastes change we may see a rise in a new type of space Western Media or perhaps something else entirely something that reflects the age we live in and takes influence from what came before to deliver something greater it may already be well on its way or it may take a while to get here but either way I hope it can create a legacy half as interesting as the one we've covered today foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 150,563

Keywords: lextorias, what happened to the space western, the future history of the space western, space western, science fiction western, sci fi western, space western movies, space western television, cowboy bebop space western, firefly space western, trigun space western, the mandalorian space western, blade runner, akira, the expanse space western, outland space western

Id: k4CRIHHFT4Y

Length: 38min 5sec (2285 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023