How the West Was Fun

For Christmas, my folks bought me season two of the 1960s spy-western The Wild Wild West. Robert Conrad is quick with his guns and his fists, Ross Martin is quick with his gadgets and disguises, and both men are quick with a quip as James West and Artemus Gordon. These two Secret Service agents regularly foil megalomaniacs who are bent on either ruling the world or destroying it (often both) sometime during the latter 1800s. Makes sense -- insane supervillains showed up long before their were movies and TV shows to feature them or rocket-equipped Aston Martins to thwart them.

Conrad worked with a stunt company to choreograph two outrageous fight sequences per episode that took the Western's typical barroom brawl and gave it a few shots of Jolt Cola. Had the great John Wayne ever gotten into a fight like this, he'd have found himself alone and holding a chair while the action went up the stairs, across the balcony, out on the roof and back down into the street. Martin's Artemus Gordon was much more than a sidekick; Martin himself once said his role was a show-off's paradise because of the more than 100 different characters and accents he played when Gordon was in disguise.

The show lasted four seasons, with one of the knocks against it being the high level of violence. Although the fight scenes look way over the top today, it's hard to imagine that TWWW's violence could earn a cancellation. So much for those bold, rule-breaking 1960's.

Anyway, if you've a hankering for some gadget-heavy gunslinging fun, there's pretty much nothing out there like TWWW, so you could do a lot worse than telling Mr. Netflix to send you some episodes.

PS -- avoid the 1999 movie with Will (An African-American secret agent in the 1870s? What's not to believe?) Smith, Kevin (Hate me all you want; I still get to go home to Phoebe Cates) Kline and Kenneth (Apparently I needed the money) Branaugh. It would in fact be one of those ways that I mentioned above in which you do a lot worse.