Terry Pratchett

Subject: Re: [I] Westerns on the Disc
Date: 15/01/01
Newsgroup: alt.fan.pratchett

Darin Johnson writes:

>Not really true as I've heard it (somewhat recently too). One of the
> Clantons (which folklore says are the bad guys) tried to defuse the
> situation, but the Earp group (aka, the good guys) told him to get out
> of the way and they started shooting anyway.

I've always loved to imagine that there was a Western equivalent of Rincewind who'd just gone into the corral ten seconds before it all started to fetch his horse... I know that 'Little Big Man' has that feel to it, and so does 'Flashman and the Redskins', but I've accumulated such of lot of weird Western stuff it'd be nice to let it rip (you should hear what they used to cut whisky with, for example...)

My recollection is that the scene in 'Tombstone' was a pretty good attempt at following the 'consensus' script, but as others have pointed out, towards the end 'the West' was generating its mythology as it went along -- you fought with one eye on the bad guys and the other on the dime-novel writers.

Mind you, there was one guy who really was larger than life and is relatively unknown...one day he's going to turn up in a DW novel, worth a dime of anyone's money.

Picking up something else in this thread...it really annoyed me when Red Dwarf did its 'Western' episode. I thought: good, they'd going to parody the fact that sooner or later every sf/fantasy series does a very bad, very tired 'Western' bit (in the UK, usually set in a farmyard in Wales). But they just became yet another series to do it...although it wasn't too bad.

Terry Pratchett

---

---

The L-Space Web is a creation of The L-Space Librarians
This mirror site is maintained by R.R.Collier