Essanay specialized in Westerns featuring " Broncho Billy " Anderson, and Kalem sent Sidney Olcott off with a film crew and a troupe of actors to various places in America and abroad to make film stories in the actual places they were supposed to have happened.

The most popular Spaghetti Westerns were those of Sergio Leone, whose Dollars Trilogy ( A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ), featuring Clint Eastwood and scores by Ennio Morricone, came to define the genre along with Once Upon a Time in the West.

While we would recognize many of the genres as Westerns, gangsters, musicals, etc., often the cycles were significantly more specific.

In addition to Westerns and the science fiction films, three of his early major roles were in noir films, Kansas City Confidential of 1952, Vice Squad of 1953, and The Big Combo of 1955.

It was used by critics in USA and other countries because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.

The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include Western movies that were produced in Europe but not called Spaghetti Westerns, like the West German Winnetou films or Ostern Westerns.

Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1980.

Most Spaghetti Westerns were made on low budgets, using inexpensive locales.

The main characters were played by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who had already cooperated as hero pair in the " old style " Spaghetti Westerns God Forgives ...

During the 1920s and 1930s, action-based films were often " swashbuckling " adventure films in which Douglas Fairbanks wielded swords in period pieces or Westerns.

Before production, John Ford shopped the project around to several Hollywood studios, all of which turned him down because big budget Westerns were out of vogue, and because Ford insisted on using John Wayne in a key role in the film.

Western films were enormously popular in the silent era although, in common with all films of this period, relatively few of the thousands of silent Westerns made have survived to the present.

Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio, just like other early Hollywood films, but when location shooting became more common from the 1930s, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming.

Spaghetti Westerns were characterized by the presence of more action and violence than the Hollywood Westerns.

Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although they were also to provide a showcase for other noted actors such as Jason Robards, James Coburn, Klaus Kinski and Henry Fonda.

But those films were more based on Classic Westerns.

In the 1990s and 2000s, hour-long Westerns and slickly packaged made-for-TV movie Westerns were introduced.

The film was something of a departure for Wayne and Ford, who were both known mostly for Westerns and other action-oriented films.

Many of Fleming's silent films were action movies, often starring Douglas Fairbanks, or Westerns, and with his robust attitude and love of outdoor sports he became known as a " man's director ".

In the tradition of their B Pictures, the studio followed up with a series of rapidly produced popular Westerns, such as Maverick, Bronco, and Colt. 45.

When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV Westerns quickly became an audience favorite.

The series from the 1950s to the 1970s also included a number of titles licensed from popular movies and television shows: Lassie, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, many television Westerns, and Walt Disney's Spin and Marty and Annette, ( from the serial featuring Annette Funicello that aired on The Mickey Mouse Club ).

The rugged terrain surrounding Gallup was popular with Hollywood filmmakers during the 1940s and 1950s for the on-location shooting of Westerns.

The Alabama Hills are a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially Westerns set in an archetypical " rugged " environment.

Other popular genera in early television were TV Westerns and soap operas, both of which were adapted from the radio medium.

In 1949, he released the films to television, where they became extremely popular and began the long-running genre of Westerns on television.

" Westerns were popular with audiences, but critics lamented the loss of other program formats, which had quietly vanished from the three networks ' schedules.

Westerns continued to be popular on television, and all three networks scheduled several Western series.

In the late 1950s, Lockhart guest starred in several popular television Westerns including: Wagon Train and Cimarron City ( in the episode " Medicine Man " with Gary Merrill ) on NBC and Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, and Rawhide on CBS.

Leone conceived of the Old West as a dirty place filled with morally ambivalent figures, and this aspect of the spaghetti Western came to be one of its universal attributes ( as seen in a wide variety of these films, beginning with one of the first popular spaghetti Westerns, Gunfight at Red Sands ( 1964 ), and visible elsewhere in those starring John Philip Law ( Death Rides a Horse ) or Franco Nero, and in the Trinity series.

When the stadium was being built in the 1960s, Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns were very popular in Greece, and the stadium's nickname is a reference to Eastwood's 1965 film For a Few Dollars More ( which had the Greek title Duel in El Paso ), as the stadium's backdrop reminded people of the scenery in the movie.

Renaldo as The Cisco Kid with DiabloIn the late 1940s, Renaldo starred in several Hollywood Westerns as The Cisco Kid, and in 1950, he began playing the role in a popular television series that ran until 1956.

He also has a long-standing interest in popular culture, and has written about Toy Story and Westerns, among other facets of American life.

* Encore Westerns: Western movies and popular series from classics to contemporary favorites, one of only two Encore channels currently airing series programming ( consisting of classic western series airing during the morning and late afternoon hours ); formerly called Westerns from 1994 to 2005.

These include frock coats, ponchos popularised by Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns, short Mexican jackets with silver embroidery, fringe jackets popular among outlaw country, southern rock and 1980s heavy metal bands, and Duster coats derived from originals worn in the Wild West.

Jean, who thought the episode was " great ", stated in the DVD commentary for the episode that he " never been able to quite figure the fans disliked the episode out ", and speculated that, since Westerns have not been popular since the 1960s, " they Simpsons fans just don't care about them at all.

Fuller became an immensely popular character actor, guest-starring in dozens of TV series ( primarily in Westerns ), including Crossroads in 1956, The Big Valley, Official Detective, The Californians, The Restless Gun, The Lawless Years ( in the role of " Cutie Jaffe " on May 7, 1959 ), Panic !, Buckskin, M Squad, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Lux Playhouse, Highway Patrol, Lawman.

One of the first popular political Westerns, still highly regarded as one of the genre's best, was Sergio Sollima's 1966 film The Big Gundown, with Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milian.

When Asian Martial arts films started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of Spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting story-lines but rather by directly including Martial Arts fighting in the films, performed by Eastern actors – for example Chen Lee in My Name Is Shanghai Joe or Lo Lieh teaming up with Lee Van Cleef in The Stranger and the Gunfighter.

Some Westerns call the situation their Eastern nations the ‘ Holocaust for baby girls ’.

Generally these took two forms: either straight Westerns shot in the Eastern Bloc, or action films involving the Russian Revolution and civil war and the Basmachi rebellion.

In 2007, the series was televised in the United States on the Encore Westerns channel, with two episodes on weekdays, between 5-6 pm ( Eastern Time ).