Viewing was spurred by nostalgia

A confession: I watched a cowboy movie on TV the other night.

It wasn’t very good, but there was no baseball available, and it struck a chord.

My ever-patient wife divided her focus between a baby blanket she is knitting and a novel she’s reading on her Nook.

I, instead, saddled up with the cowboys.

Maybe that’s just more evidence that I’m a product of my generation.

When I was growing up, cowboys and the cowboy mystique were not ancient history. They were not that far behind in the cultural rearview mirror.

Think about it, in the 1950s, you’d only have to go back about 60 years to run into real cowboy tales of derring-do. Turn the calendar back by an equivalent amount today and you’re at the 1950s.

In other words, the dream factories of Hollywood were only responding to simple nostalgia when they started cranking out the Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy two-reelers. They hit the moviehouses first.

But by the time my generation rolled around, they showed up primarily at kiddie matinees at the Main or the Key or the Hines. Or they showed up on local television stations like WHIO out of Dayton, Ohio.

Old movies — cowboy movies — filled time, and you needed to fill time to sell commercials. So it wasn’t unusual to see the same posse chasing the same gang of outlaws to the same hideout several times a week.

Sometime about 1962, American culture seemed to contract “cowboy disease.” Western TV shows flooded the airways. Ask anyone who was a kid at the time, and they’ll be able to recite the names of half a dozen shows off the top of their hat: “Cheyenne,” “Maverick,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Rawhide,” “Bronco,” “Bounty Hunter,” “Gunsmoke” and maybe a dozen more.

Critics derided them as “horse operas,” and they had a point. But some of them were pretty good, and most of them were entertaining, though uneven.

So what was the appeal?

In the beginning, it was the simple plot line that good defeated evil every time. The good guys won when Roy Rogers was in charge. Later, as the writers and audience became more demanding, the plots became more complex and the lines between good and evil became a little fuzzier. Adult westerns, they were called; though kids still watched a bunch of them.

And then, just about as quickly as the horse opera had conquered America, it nearly disappeared. TV was taken over by detectives, guys with .38 caliber snub nose revolvers tucked into the small of their backs while they worked undercover, guys at 77 Sunset Strip and even more exotic locales.

Maybe the “adult western” had pushed things too far. Maybe it was time to go back to simply good guys and bad guys. The market demanded something clear-cut.

As to the western movie, of course, it didn’t disappear. It continued to grow, and it continued to become more complicated morally and intellectually. Audiences watching “Little Big Man” in the 1970s had never seen anything equivalent when it came to holding a mirror up to this country’s history.

And westerns continue to be made.

Some, like the movie I watched the other night while my wife was knitting a baby blanket, are pretty crappy. Violence substitutes for dialogue. Moral questions like those raised in “High Noon” are trivialized.

Then again, I have to admit that when I encounter a horse opera, sometimes I just have to saddle up.