All my son knows of cowboys he learned from Red Dead Redemption. I’m not going to yell about how all the game did take ideas from Western Movies and Novels and repurposed them almost wholesale¹. No, I’m here to tell you I failed as a father. 

I learned Cowboy movies at my father’s feet. The ease of consuming modern media (the fast there’s more than two TVs in my house now) means my children aren’t forced to watch John Wayne and Clint Eastwood the way I was. They know not the joys of a Leone marathon or the boring Sundays when TBS played nothing but Ford movies. It occurred to me, Red Dead Redemption could be part of the solution.

Unlike my brother and me, my son’s all hopped on Cowboy jazz. He’ll willingly participate in watching western movies. 

As an experiment, we watched a more recent remake of a movie based on a novel². Everyone knows it as “True Grit.” 

Despite my father’s best efforts, I’m not really a fan of the Duke, and I think anyone who prefers his version to the Coen brothers’s be crazy³.

My son loved the movie, 9/10. This gives me two freedoms. First, we’re gonna watch more Cowboy stuff together. Second, mumbling around the house like Rooster Cogburn makes me funny rather than depressing, occasionally. 

In no particular order, here are some of the movies I intend to watch:

• Tombstone

• The Dollar/No Name Trilogy

• 3:10 Yuma

• Some (dammit) John Wayne Movie (Probably Rio Bravo)

• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

• Other Eastwood Cowboy Junk

• The Quick and the Dead

• Tremors

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1. For that see one of our many Podcast

2. So maybe it’s not technically a remake but a remaigning or something with re- and -adaption. I don’t care, I’m rambling about semantics at this point.

3.The book was better!