ABSTRACT
Elton John's poignant 1970s ballad of cowboy heroes from the silver screen is a reminder of the enduring nature of the cowboy hero in adult memory. Indeed, if you ask many adults in North America and the U.K. born between the 1940s and early 1960s the question “Who did you want to be?”, they will respond, even without the added prompt that this choice should be based on movies or television shows that they watched, with the name of a Western hero: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Zorro, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Hop-along Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid – and occasionally, from a female respondent, there will be a reference to Annie Oakley or Dale Evans. Many will go on to recall a particular photograph of themselves decked out in a cowboy/cowgirl outfit, a Davy Crockett jacket or coonskin hats and so on, or will relate a particular incident of playing cowboys. However, unlike many enduring characters of children's popular culture – Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Barbie, Archie, Winnie-the-Pooh – which “live on” in the sense that their adventures continue to be produced over several generations, the cowboy/cowgirl hero is one whose time has mostly come and gone. We have discovered relatively few people who were born in the late 1960s and onwards who have any association with cowboy memories whatsoever. At least that was the case prior to the release of the highly successful Pixar—Disney Toy Story movies which feature the Cowboy Woody doll as the protagonist (along with Jessie the Yodellin’ Cowgirl who appears in Toy Story 2).
