Thanks, everyone.
To answer a few questions: How many years have you been in Kyoto?
I've been here since 2003, though I had been coming for trips up to three months going back to 1994.
I would be glad of any insights into why some film genres are more popular then others. Is there a a lot of difference based on age?
That's a tough one to try and answer. Westerns, certainly, appeal to an older audience these days because as a viable movie genre it's been pretty dead since the mid-'70s and the ready-made audience that regularly went to those movies is now 30 years older.
Obviously, besides adult Westerns you had Roy Rogers and other B-stars that appealed primarily (but passionately) to kids, many of whom still love Roy even though they're now in their 50s and 60s.
As I said, I became a big Hopalong Cassidy fan about six or seven years ago when I was in my late-30s, via all those DVDs, but I think that's extremely unusual. Younger generations are certainly still regularly discovering films by Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and Eastwood, and probably to a lesser but still significant exent the more classical Westerns of Ford and Hawks.
However, I think the under-35 crowd has little use for B-Westerns and serials. When I reviewed For a Few Dollars More over at DVD Talk it got something like 5,000 hits its first week. My B-Western reviews rarely get more than a few hundred. Obviously somebody is buying all those Gene Autry releases from Image Entertainment, etc., but it's not the same crowd snapping up the latest Spiderman movie.
On one hand I think cable TV and home video have done a lot to revive interest in old movies, including A-Westerns. Criterion-style special editions and theatrical restorations of things like Major Dundee also have helped pull in a younger audience that might otherwise not have seeked these films out.
On the other hand, perhaps partly because so many B-Westerns have fallen into public domain and are no longer available in good condition, the only audience for those films seems to be an aging breed of die-hard B-Western fans, of which maybe I'm at the tail end. I'd like to think that maybe Bob Steele and the rest will suddenly become "hip" to younger generations, but I don't see that happening.
Posts by Stuart4th
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