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Wednesday Western: Westerns to watch with your kids and grandkids
The movies on this list are, foremost, good Westerns.
I’ve already written about "True Grit," so I won’t formally include it on the list, but just know that, for anyone with older kids, it ranks at the top.
These are Westerns that are objectively good, revealing the beautiful possibilities of the genre while also remaining within the limits of acceptable viewing for the younger fans.
These options vary depending on the age of your kids or grandkids, so I’ve tried to account for that in the descriptions. My personal favorite is "
The Good, the Bad, and the Huckleberry Hound." In fact, I liked it so much that I’ll be devoting an entire Wednesday Western entry to it.
But first, let’s start with a prayer, from Roy Rogers:
Roy Rogers Cowboys Prayer
www.youtube.com
Home on the Range (2004)
The biggest surprise for me was "Home on the Range," an animated Disney movie from 2004 starring Roseanne Barr as a prize-winning cow.
It’s an objectively good Western, a good story. And, according to the little movie buffs at my house, this ranked the highest of all the Westerns on this list.
My kids are toddlers, so the movie might not land as well with older kids, although I doubt that. Every time we’ve watched "Home on the Range," it captures our attention.
There is some mild sexual innuendo, but that’s just modern Disney, nothing too bad.
"Home on the Range" is an absolute treasure hidden in the ideological morass that has taken over Disney and practically derailed its storytelling and art.
The opening song “
(You Ain’t) Home on the Range,” for instance, is a men’s chorus. The singers belt out the words with a frontier wildness that typifies the Western cohesion between the concert hall and the saddle. The song resembles a maximalist choral piece like “Follow the River” from "Night Passage" or the more
comical theme song to 'War Wagon."
But while “(You Ain’t) Home on the Range” sounds identical to the finest Western soundtrack gems, the lyrics are playful:
“Out in the land of the desperado / If yer as soft as an avocado / Yee-ha! Yer guacamole, son!”
Then, with the crack of the whip, the title rushes to the fore. Its bold, colorful fonts also pay tribute to the genre.
The rabbit performs the role of the yappy “DOGGONIT” grump established by Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan.
There is absolutely no fat on this movie. Everything line is useful, and the story is impressive for its only 76-minute run time. Is there a more Western move than making the movie 76 minutes, solidly under 90 minutes, the onetime threshold for a B-movie?
It’s silly, sure. But this silliness has the effect of making heavy realities lighter.
Judi Dench plays a matriarchal dairy cow who serves as second in command of Patch of Heaven. Jennifer Tilly plays a spacey yet emotionally intelligent heifer; Steve Buscemi is perfect as a ratty cattle poacher. Cuba Gooding Jr. voices Buck, a race horse so eager for action that when it arrives, he spazzes.
The central tension of "Home on the Range" is characteristically Western: an elusive cattle rustler known as Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid). This yodeling villain has been stealing longhorns at night. The ranches he robs are forced to sell. Alameda Slim scoops them up at the auctions in a bid to control the entire region. His alter ego during these purchases is Yancy O’Del, or for short “Y. O’Del.” Get it? Yodel. There’s tons of wordplay and parody like this throughout the film.
Patch of Heaven is the Eden stuck right in the middle of Alameda Slim’s growing territory. Pearl, the owner of the farm, is buried in debt and has three days to pay an impossible amount ($750). But even this paradisiacal setting is full of lightness and parody: possessive goats, rambunctious piglets, naive hens, and headstrong cows who accept the call to action.
The soundtrack was scored by legendary Disney mainstay Alan Menken, who creates deceptively simple masterpieces. This is a musical, after all. The film’s emotional collapse — every hero’s low point — is darkened by rain. You can feel this heaviness. Then Bonnie Rait starts singing "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again?” a song Menken wrote in the wake of 9/11.
Of course, there’s plenty of redemption to be earned in "Home on the Range." All of the elements are there: rivalries that become alliances, slapstick violence, betrayal, shoot-outs, and singing. Lots of singing.
Which is possibly the most impressive part of 'Home on the Range." It’s able to capture the Western genre’s two branches: the Western hero (John Wayne) and the singing cowboy (Roy Rogers). These two factions typically remain separate. I do not know why.
Critics have been generally cold toward the film — no surprise there.
I prefer the more wholesome review by our friends at Common Sense Media: "I love it when Disney doesn't take itself too seriously. No one tried to reach for the stars or make this into a classic. 'Home on the Range' is just a cute little story about some not-so-contented cows who save the day. It modestly aspires to be nothing more than a lot of fun, and it does that job very well.”
Ridin’ Down the Canyon (1942)
I recommend "RIdin’ Down the Canyon" over the equally excellent "My Pal Trigger" because "My Pal Trigger" features scenes of horses being shot that could be upsetting. We still watch it, but I skip those parts.
"RIdin’ Down the Canyon" is part mystery, part musical, part coming-of-age story. It focuses on Bobbie Blake, a little boy who looks up to Roy Rogers. He dreams of starting a radio station with Roy Rogers someday.
It’s beautiful, wholesome stuff. Catholic Video
sells it as part of its Classic Family Movies Collection.
The jail scene — wow, it is good. The man literally plays a saw in a jail cell, in what is one of the most bizarre musical scenes in a movie I’ve seen.
As always, the Sons of the Pioneers are next to Roy Rogers, and so is Trigger, the gorgeous palomino, “the smartest horse in the movies”
There’s a death scene at 33:50 that lasts until 35:16. My kids are toddlers, so I skip it, but for older kids it might be fine.
This movie is so calm. All of the characters are so kind; even the villains have good manners.
Don’t watch the colorized version.
“Ridin’ Down the Canyon” was the movie that really sold me on Gabby Hayes. I discovered Gabby Hayes after knowing Walter Brennan. Gabby Hayes is much sillier. Lots of slapstick Gabby is wild. At one point, he leads a dance train. He gets more extravagant with each step, until he squats himself too low.
“Hey fellas, I sprang an axle,” he shouts, and then the Sons of the Pioneers sprint over to help, only to
sing “Blue Prairie.” It really just doesn’t get much better than that.
There's a lot of shooting. Good guys shooting bad guys. You get to show your kids and grandkids that if bad guys are a threat, there’s always a good man or woman able to rise up in the name of justice.
A Cowboy Needs a Horse (1956)
I’m stealing this one from film historian
Andrew Patrick Nelson, who begins his 15-week Western movie college class with this Disney short film.
As he points out, “This film does something which, when I stop to think about it, the Western film in animated form tends to do especially well: It distills the Western down to a level that is appropriate for children, while simultaneously using those distillations as fodder for satire that can be appreciated by adult audiences.”
At just under seven minutes in length, it’s by far the shortest film on the list, but it’s a good one. The theme song is lovely, clip-clop and all. It was written by George Bruns, the four-time Oscar-nominated, three-time Grammy-nominated composer of scores for the likes of "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961), "The Sword in the Stone" (1963), "The Jungle Book" (1967), "The Love Bug" (1969), "The Aristocats" (1970), and "Robin Hood" (1973).
We begin in a retro-futuristic home, as a little boy is dreaming. His bed transforms into a horse. A giant pencil appears and slowly dresses him in boots, spurs, hat, and gloves.
Like most of the animated movies here, the setting hints at the majestic red plateaus of Monument Valley.
Once he’s fully decked out in cowboy gear, the action begins: Indians on a cliffside start launching arrows at him. Luckily, he’s got a couple of six-shooters.
It’s a fast-moving little film, with many of the most important Western tropes: an outlaw, a stagecoach, a train ambush featuring TNT. A damsel in distress. More outlaws.
You can watch "A Cowboy Needs a Horse" at the
Internet Archive. You can also find it on YouTube.
West and Soda (1965)
Yes, there is such a thing as an animated spaghetti Western. In fact, director Bruno Bozzetto claims that it was his film, not Sergio Leone’s "A Fistful of Dollars," that launched the subgenre.
Whether or not this is true, "West and Soda" — Bozzetto's first feature — is an oddly impressive work. Like Leone’s films, "West and Soda" both satirizes and celebrates cinema of the American West.
The story centers on lovely girl named Clementina (surely an allusion to John Ford’s "My Darling Clementine") and a cruel land baron named Cattivissimo (Italian for “very bad”), who is also referred to as the Boss. Like Mario’s villian Bowser rapaciously chasing Princess Peach, Cattivissimo is dead set on marrying Clementina — mainly for the verdant spread of land she owns.
His two sneering goons, Ursus and Smilzo, perform a familiar role: twin-like morons who lack any autonomy, much like Liberty Valance’s heckling cling-ons Reese (Lee Van Cleef) and Floyd (Strother Martin).
Right as Cattivissimo’s violence starts to ramp up, a familiar event occurs. Thunder rumbles and lightning shoots across the darkening sky as wind whips the shutters and doors. The storm passes, and from the desert emerges a lone figure, a revolver-twirling cowpoke named Johnny,
As one
reviewer puts it, the film's resemblance "to the spaghetti Westerns that were beginning to take shape" is not as pronounced as its debt to "the classic Gary Cooper and Glenn Ford ventures from the decade before.”
Your kids and grandkids will likely watch this out of curiosity. The animation style is scrappy yet bold, full of grime, imagery perfectly suited for the Italian Western. It almost resembles the 1948 version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," only with an edginess that gives it Western cred. Its total lack of realism is enjoyable and charming.
It’s a relaxing movie, with plenty of comedy. Excessive gunfights, lots of guns, war-prone Indians across the backdrop of Monument Valley. But in the middle of it all sits Clementina's paradise, where her dog loves to get hammered. Not exactly politically correct, but these days that’s exactly what we
don’t want.
Toy Story 2 (1999)
I had the chance to sit down with Ranger Doug, the vocalist/poet/songwriter/guitarist from the band Riders in the Sky.
Among their many impressive achievements, they recorded the "Woody’s Roundup" portion of "Toy Story 2." It won them their first Grammy.
Ranger Doug and I talked about the experience:
“It was kind of strange and stressful,” he tells me. “We were in the studio, and there was the head of Disney records, and there was John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, and there was Randy Newman, who wrote the song. And we got to go up something good. No mistakes. So there were about half a dozen Disney lawyers, let's face it. But it worked out well.”
“There's something kids just seem to love about the beat or something about the Western music,” he adds. “When I was a kid, I just liked it because I didn't get broken hearts and love affairs. Who knew about that? But riding a horse with your friends and singing songs in the open range? Oh, yeah, I'm all about that."
At Ranger Doug’s most recent Grand Ole Opry, country singer Scotty McCreery was inducted into the Opry, and he specifically asked that Riders in the Sky be there to sing "Woody's Roundup" for his child.
This whole time, my 4-year-old thought I was going to interview Woody from "Toy Story." She told everyone we met. He laughs.
“I think she’s standing outside the door, actually, and as soon as I leave this room, she's going to ask me how that went.”
He smiles, “Tell her it went great.”
An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)
On November 17, 1991, moviegoers had their pick of two competing animated features: "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West" or "The Little Mermaid."
"The Little Mermaid" clearly had top billing, with a budget almost three times bigger than that of "Fievel Goes West." Predictably, Ariel left Fievel in the dust, raking in $235 million compared to Fievel's box-office haul of $22.1 million.
Today "Fievel Goes West" is mostly noteworthy for having been
forgotten.
I too had forgotten about it, but once I hit play, I was yanked back in time to doctor’s office waiting rooms and box-shaped TVs that had to be rolled into the classroom. The VHS grain, the warp of the soundtrack.
Produced by Steven Spielberg, "Fievel Goes West" has a lovely animation style, similar to the rotoscoping of its iconic predecessors. Right at the start, we hear a familiar voice: Jimmy Stewart. John Cleese plays a duplicitous cat; Jon Lovitz plays a heinous outlaw of a spider.
Like many parents, I watch a lot of cartoons. Specifically, I watch an incredible number of TV shows and movies that feature anthropomorphic mice, cows, and horses.
My wife gave up on the movie: “There are too many characters, the plot is muddled, I don’t get it, how’s a kid supposed to?”
At one point, a bald eagle soars into a nest, then fields of wheat turn into golden American flags. The “Way Out West” musical sequence is excellent pro-America content.
I watched it with my 4-year old daughter. She loved it. The experience was connective, which is what a parent looks for in a movie.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)
Andrew Patrick Nelson and Matthew Chernov also included "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" in the episode of their podcast, "How the West Was Cast," devoted to animated Westerns.
As with "Home on the Range," I was surprised to discover "Spirit." I figured I’d watched every animated kids' movie.
The animation style is bold, a meld of rotoscoping-esque hand drawing and digital animation, all the more bold considering that it was made by DreamWorks Animation, home of "Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda."
The heavy-handed, though compelling, messages in the film aren’t contrary to rule #4 of Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code: “A cowboy must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.”
Its a strange movie: Matt Damon plays a horse. Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, but Bryan Adams randomly starts singing at one point.
The concept is incredibly creative, almost like a loophole in the Western genre: the American frontier from the perspective of a wild horse?
Oklahoma! (1955)
Growing up in Oklahoma, I heard variations of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "Oklahoma!" everywhere. Local productions of the musical were always a reliable field trip.
The color, the dialogue, the scenery. All fantastic. It’s an easy movie to watch. A bedtime movie. Those clouds.
A big reason that I love the 1940s-1950s era in film is that the content is extremely restrained and wholesome. I don’t see this as censorship but rather as quiet dignity. I have no problem with violence or nudity in movies. But I also admire any film, actor, or director able to reveal the depths of human comedy or drama without relying on either.
Beauty and the Bandit (1946)
This one is wacky enough to keep a kid’s attention.
The Cisco Kid is an interesting mythological figure in the history of the Western. The character is based on a sociopathic desperado in a story by O. Henry from 1907. Most subsequent portrayals depicted the Kid in a positive light, so in an oddity among Westerns, his legacy is far softer than his origin.
Ten years after "Beauty and the Bandit," the Cisco Kid would migrate to television, with Duncan Renaldo playing the Kid for a six-season run. He was also popularized by as a character in comic books and radio shows and, a few decades later, as a periodically recurring allusion in popular culture.
Part Mexican caballero, part Robin Hood, Cisco offered audiences the spectacle of a confident, dashing outsider in flamboyant outfits and confident facial expressions.
"Beauty and the Bandit" marked Gilbert Roland’s third appearance as Cisco the Kid, with three more to follow.
It’s an easygoing film, placing Cisco at the crossroads of love and money. Our bandido is flanked by beautiful women who threaten to distract him from his plot to seize a chest full of silver from a wealthy French businessman in a stagecoach. Certain that the silver actually belongs to peasants, Cisco pursues the Frenchman with his usual calm suavity. This threadbare plot unfolds into a story that’s wholesome in its dilemmas.
Stagecoach (1939)
Every kid needs to see "Stagecoach." I have watched it with my oldest toddler since she was 3. I skip Doc Boone’s drunk parts, but that’s about it. Keep your eye out for the Wednesday Western entry on "Stagecoach," by the way. It’s coming soon, and It’s got some neat surprises.
Honorable Mentions
"The Man from Snowy River" (1982)
"Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971)
"Round-Up Time in Texas" (1937)
"Three Amigos!" (1986)
"The Shakiest Gun in the West" (1968)
"The Undefeated" (1969)
"Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier" (1955)
"Silverado" (1985)
"City Slickers" (1991)
"Maverick" (1994)
"Back to the Future Part III" (1990)
"Cat Ballou" (1965)
"The Big Country" (1958)
"The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975)
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