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silrana
2011-02-04 04:15 pm UTC (link)

He also had the benefit of excellent timing. When Star Wars first came out, a good portion of the viewing public was sick and tired of Hollywood's increasingly convoluted attempts to create 'Art'. A perfect expression of it was the 1974 Statler Brothers song, "What Ever Happened to Randolph Scott?" which has the lyrics, "Everybody’s trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears./True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years./You gotta take your analyst along to see if it's fit to see."

So when a good old-fashioned popcorn adventure movie came out, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys and swashbuckling, people flocked to it. It was something the whole family could enjoy, and it didn't take a five hour discussion afterward to figure out what you just watched. So I think a lot of people latched on to him, and Spielberg shortly thereafter, because they were making fun movies.

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	cmdr_zoom 2011-02-04 08:34 pm UTC (link)
	Agreed. Excellent point on context. There's probably also some post-Vietnam stuff in there too (we want another Good War!). (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sorchar 2011-02-05 03:43 am UTC (link)
	Completely off-topic, my mom was a huge Statler Brothers fan and I loved that song as a kid. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	silrana 2011-02-05 03:49 pm UTC (link)
	I love them, too. A whole bunch of my family were fans, so I got to go to their shows several times when I was a teen. That was back when it was the original four, and they were great entertainers. They loved to crack (deliberately) corny jokes between songs, and Harold Reid, the bass singer, was a complete ham. It was a lot of fun. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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