Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol are professors of Modern Languages at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the coeditors of The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022.)
Stories set on the North American frontier have been a transnational literary phenomenon for more than 200 years, beginning with the French novel Atalá (1801) by René de Chateaubriand, which became an astonishing international sensation in the years following its publication. Imagery from the novel appeared on French plates, furniture, clock faces, fairground souvenirs, popular prints, and academic paintings.1 In Russia, the story found champions in Alexander Pushkin, who brought more than one copy home with him from Paris, and Nicolai Karamzin, who published Chateaubriand’s novel in his magazine The Messenger of Europe in 1803.2 The Venezuelan Jacobin Simón Rodríguez, the childhood tutor and ally of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, translated Atalá a few months after its first publication, launching its journey to Spanish-speaking readers on both sides of the Atlantic. As Renata R.M. Wasserman succinctly puts it, “Chateaubriand achieved the cultural authority that allowed his views to shape the image of the Americas on both shores of the ocean.”3
“I have read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans…and The Pioneers…if by any chance you have anything else of his, do please leave it for me with Frau von Bogner at the coffeehouse.”
Franz Shubert
If Chateaubriand’s frontier tale signaled the beginning of the internationalization of the American frontier story, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41) was the first American frontier story to take Europe by storm. In France, his novels were so popular that publishers printed a dozen editions of Last of the Mohicans (1826) by mid-century, and another thirty by the start of the twentieth.4 Germans were also avid readers of Cooper. In 1852, Charles Godfrey Leland wrote of how Cooper was more of a household name in Germany than Shakespeare or Sir Walter Scott.5 Cooper’s novels reminded Germans of the ferment of historical change in their own past and present and allowed them the freedom to explore the implications of different responses to modernization.6 In his agonizing final hours of life, Franz Schubert rushed off a missive to a friend begging him to bring more Cooper for him to read on what would become his deathbed: “I have read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans…and The Pioneers…if by any chance you have anything else of his, do please leave it for me with Frau von Bogner at the coffeehouse.”7
Buffalo Bill’s tours of England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany in 1887-92 reinforced and expanded the visibility and attractiveness of the frontier myth on distant shores. The globalization of American dime novels, many of which starred Buffalo Bill, stoked the fires of untold numbers of young, European readers. As Fernando Eguidazu has shown, U.S. dime novels appeared in Holland in 1903 as translations from Fran Tousey’s Wild West Weekly and Buffalo Bill Stories. Later, between 1905 and 1910, these tales quickly made their way to Denmark, France, Germany Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Then came the imitations, the pastiche Western dime novels originally written in languages other than English that were in turn translated into other European languages.8 In Italy, where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show had made a deep and powerful impression, Italian language remixes of Buffalo Bill “codified” his memory and image and helped to cement the frontier archetype there.9
To a greater degree than print had done, television crossed linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries and universalized the Western around the world.
If popular serialized literature and cheap dime novels were key to making the Western a global mass phenomenon in the second half of the nineteenth century, the coming of television in the twentieth was central to maintaining the tremendous popularity and visibility of the genre as a form of storytelling and a compendium of its iconic imagery. Although a full account of the global scope and impact of the U.S. television Western has yet to be written, here we can offer a sketch of how it conquered the imagination of millions of viewers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To a greater degree than print had done, television crossed linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries and universalized the Western around the world.
Television entertainment began to take hold in the United States in 1948, with four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont) transmitting over one hundred stations. To bring Westerns to viewers, the nascent industry retooled popular radio programs and matinee B-Westerns to create successful programs like The Cisco Kid (1949), The Lone Ranger (1949), Hopalong Cassidy (1949), and The Gene Autry Show (1950). In this early incarnation, television Westerns primarily targeted children and promoted good citizenship through Gene Autry’s famous Cowboy Code, or Hopalong Cassidy’s fan club, which called for kids to be honest, obedient, hard working and patriotic.10 In 1955, Walt Disney produced three made for television movies about Davy Crockett starring Fess Parker that generated more than $100 million in merchandising sales, while ABC, CBS, and NBC began a “programming revolution” by making adult Westerns like Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Frontier (1955-1956), Cheyenne (1955-1962), and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp(1955-1961).11 In 1959, the first television Western to be broadcast in color, Bonanza, began its fourteen-year run, unparalleled except for Gunsmoke’s twenty years on the small screen. As we note below, Bonanza became a sensation, not only in the United States but also around the world.
In the United States, radio and television syndication companies prerecorded programs for sale to advertisers in regional markets, with pricing tied to the size of those markets.12 Because live broadcasts were primarily limited to primetime hours, syndicated programs were key to populating other time slots. The international expansion of this practice did not begin until the early 1950s, when enterprising production and distribution companies began to get U.S. programs on foreign television sets. One of the earliest and most enterprising pioneers in this practice was a syndication firm named Fremantle Corporation, which worked for William Boyd Enterprises. Boyd had starred as Hopalong Cassidy in fifty-four films for Paramount Studios between 1935 and 1943, and subsequently made another dozen Hoppy films for United Artists. In 1948, he had the foresight to buy the rights to the character he played and created a firm to capitalize on his image and brand. As Michael Kackman explains in a groundbreaking study on the subject, Fremantle pushed Hopalong Cassidy programming out to Europe, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and Australia. By 1955, subtitled Hopalong Cassidy television programs were appearing in Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, and Venezuela. The program also appeared on European screens, but the program was not popular enough to monetize Boyd’s ambitious merchandising plans.13
Ziv had the program dubbed in various target languages, which made it more accesible to international audiences, and sent a marketing team around the world in a DC-6 to screen it to prospective international advertisers and to provide advertising strategies for marketing Ziv programs locally.
The television series The Cisco Kid, which descended from an O. Henry short story published in 1907, together with nearly thirty feature films (1914-1949), and a popular 1940s radio program, was syndicated internationally and more successfully than Hopalong Cassidy. Morleen Getz Rouse shows how the Frederic W. Ziv Corporation, the largest syndicator of radio and television in the immediate aftermath of WWII, owned the rights to The Cisco Kid and began to aggressively market it globally in 1953 through the firms Towers of America Inc. and International TV Programs Inc.14 Ziv had the program dubbed in various target languages, which made it more accesible to international audiences, and sent a marketing team around the world in a DC-6 to screen it to prospective international advertisers and to provide advertising strategies for marketing Ziv programs locally. By the end of the 1950s, Ziv was spending more than $25 million on international syndication, with The Cisco Kid and other programs screening in Belgium, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Switzerland, among others. Thanks to international screenings of feature films featuring Cisco, Ziv’s television program about the same character, a King Features Syndicate comic strip by Rod Reed and José Luis Salinas that ran between 1951 and 1967, and a comic book that was distributed internationally, the Cisco Kid became one of the most recognizable and iconic cowboy characters in the world, alongside Red Ryder and The Lone Ranger, whose cultural reach was also transnational. In Mexico City in 1940, for example, a movie critic praised a popular Mexican Western titled El Charro Negro by saying that “We finally have our Cisco, or our Kid, whatever you want to call him.”15
Nancy Reagin reports that Bonanza was so influential that some television historians refer to German television in the 1960s as “the Bonanza decade.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, Bonanza (1959-73) was the most popular and widely viewed U.S. television program around the world. As of 1966, we can estimate that more than 300 million people in sixty-two different countries saw the program dubbed in one of seven languages (Arabic, German, Portuguese, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish.) Al Hulsted writes that in Thailand, the program ran twice in one night; first in English then with an interpreter providing narration and dialogue in Thai.16 Lorne Greene, one of the stars of the program, reported that a Russian diplomat said that the program was popular in Soviet Russia thanks to a pirated television signal out of Helsinki. In Japan, Kabuki actors—whose diction and oratorical style was more theatrical and traditional than modern Japanese speech—dubbed the program, infusing it with familiar and invitingly classical tonalities and associations. The program was voted the most popular in Spain and Belgium,17 and in West Germany, Nancy Reagin reports that Bonanza was so influential that some television historians refer to German television in the 1960s as “the Bonanza decade.”18 David Dortort, the executive producer of the program, speculated that the global reach and appeal of Bonanza related to the program’s family values and patriarchal theme.19 Although dressed in the trappings of a Western, Bonanza’s treatment of family, particularly filial loyalty and home life, gave it extra appeal.
These are only three snapshots about international television syndication in the 1950s and 1960s but they illustrate the power of television as a vehicle for disseminating the iconography of Westerns around the world. Although television sets were expensive, and limited to middle- and upper-class consumers, they were also sites of communal bonding and gathering. A 1965 magazine article about the worldwide impact of Bonanza, for example, featured separate photographs of Africans and Latin Americans congregating to watch the show around television sets in public places.20 Unlike print, television Westerns could be experienced directly by people who did not know how to read, and they became a pretext for weekly conversations and discussion across class and ethnic boundaries. Television serialization bred a sense of presence, continuity, and immediacy that print could not realize. Did you see Bonanza last night? What did you think? Although motion pictures, comics, and pulp fiction did a lot to infuse the twentieth-century global imagination with cowboys, saloons, spurs, and revolvers, television Westerns made them a fact of everyday life and child’s play.
NOTES
1 Putter, “Introduction,” 1; Wakefield, “Chateaubriand’s Atalá,” 13-14.
2 Barratt, “Chateaubriand in Russia,” 155; Neuhauser, “Towards the Romantic Age,” 151.
3 Wasserman,“Chateabriand’s Atalá and the Discourse of the Exotic,” 40.
4 These numbers are based on Worldcat database searches for translations of Fenimore Cooper. Subsequent mention of the number of translations and editions of books is also based on this method.
5 Leland, “From Mr. Charles G. Leland,” 38-9.
6 Penny, Kindred by Choice, 35-6.
7 Thorpe, “Cooper Beyond America,” 522-39.
8 Eguidazu and Gimeno, Del folletín al bolsilibro, 82.
9 Laegrid, “Buffalo Bill,” 1, 204.
10 Kackman, “Nothing on but hoppy badges,” 85-7; McGillis, He Was Some Kind of Man, 169-70.
11 Newcomb, Encyclopedia of Television, 2521.
12 Newcomb, Encyclopedia of Television, 2627.
13 For an overview of the global marketing of Hopalong Cassidy, see Kackman, “Nothing on but hoppy badges,” 88-90; 92-3.
14 Our précis of the F.W. Ziv Corporation is drawn entirely from Moreleen Getz Rouse, A History of the F.W. Ziv Corporation, 232-7.
15 Alfaro, Raúl de Anda, 46.
16 Our overview of the global popularity of “Bonanza” in Thailand, Russia, and Japan is drawn from Hulsted, “Bonanza,” 18-21.
17 For popularity of Bonanza in Belgium, see Hulsted, “Bonanza,” 21; for Spain, see Revista Española de la Opinión Pública, 214.
18 Reagin, “Socialist Indians,” 71.
19 Hulsted, “Bonanza,” 20.
20 Hulsted, “Bonanza,” 21.
WORKS CITED
Barratt, Glynn R. “Chateaubriand in Russia, 1800-1830.” Comparative Literature Studies 9, no. 2 (1972): 152-72.
Hulsted, “Bonanza,” Electronic Age. Vol. 25, no. 1 (1965/1966), 18-21.
Kackman, M. “Nothing on but Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William Boyd Enterprises, and Emergent Media Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (2008): 76-101.
Laegreid, Renee M., “Buffalo Bill, the Italian Hero of the Prairies” in The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, edited by Frank Christianson. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.
Leland, Charles G. “From Mr. Charles G. Leland” in Memorial of Cooper, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1852, 38-39.
Neuhauser, Rudolf. Towards the Romantic Age: Essays on Preromantic and Sentimental Literature in Russia, The Hague, 1974.
Newcomb, Horace., Cary O’Dell, and Noelle Watson. Encyclopedia of Television. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.
Penny, H. Glenn. Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Putter, Irving. “Introduction.” Atala/René: A New Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952, 1-13.
Reagin, Nancy, “Socialist Indians and Capitalist Cowboys: The Uses of Westerns in Both Germanies” in The Cold War and Entertainment Television, edited by Lori Maguire, 69-82. New Castle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
Revista Española de la Opinión Pública, (September/December 1965): 214.
Rouse, Morleen Getz, “A History of the F.W. Ziv Radio and Television Syndication Companies: 1930-1960.” University of Michigan, 1976.
Thorpe, Willard. “Cooper Beyond America.” New York History 35, no. 4 (1954): 522-39.
Vega Alfaro, Eduardo D. L. Raúl de Anda. Guadalajara, Jalisco, México: Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro de Investigación y Enseñanza Cinematográficas, 1989.
Wakefield, “Chateaubriand’s Atalá as a Source of Inspiration in Nineteenth-Century Art , ” Burlington Magazine 120 ( January 1978 ) : 13-22 .
Wasserman, Renata R. M. “Chateaubriand’s ‘Atala’ and the Discourse of the Exotic.” Dispositio 14, no. 36/38 (1989): 39-67.
Illustration credit: Tile design by Christopher Conway and Barbara S. Moore. Television set clipart by Microsoft Word featuring unrestricted illustration on the screen from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs (“A Cowboy” [1895-1905] by Detroit Photographic Company, LC-DIG-ppmsca-17855.)
