After finally finishing grad school this week, I thought to myself, why not watch a movie? It had been ages and I figured my time had come to get reacquainted with the TV. Hell, how about a Western? Nothing seemed farther away from the reaches of Academia. I hoped that one of my newfangled streaming services could accommodate me. I sat down and began to hunt and peck through the interface on my television. Clicking on the “genre” menu seemed sensible. To my horror, I discovered that Westerns are apparently no longer considered a movie genre. But you know what is? Harry Potter.
My cable provider’s streaming service lists Harry Potter as a genre (that’s right, under the “Genres” menu tab) in its own right. Westerns are nowhere to be found. On Netflix, Westerns have been subsumed by the amoebic Action & Adventure megagenre. This reduction of the Western to a mere vestigial genre nubbin will not stand!
Harry Potter movies, I can’t stay mad at you. You’ve got moxie. In fact, maybe you can help…The only way I see getting the Western out of the gutter is to shoot the moon and hybridize it with every other genre, effectively making it the common thread. Everything will be a Western! It will be unavoidable. Harry Potter would be a great guinea pig for this experiment. Here are just a few possible titles to consider the next time you find yourself giving a pitch to a world-weary Hollywood executive:
-The Good, The Bad, and the Hufflepuff
-A Fistful of Quaffles
-3:10 to Hogwarts
-How Green was my Common Welsh
-Harry Potter and the Deathly Cheekbones
He who shall not be named...
Come on, who wouldn’t want to see an up-and-coming wizard in a gun-and-sorcery battle with Jack Palance, brought back to the silver screen through the magic of CGI? We have the technology, people!
OK, maybe all of this isn’t one of my best ideas. But my inner film & library nerd demands satisfaction.
Hybridizing Westerns with other genres?! Preposterous! Err…
I actually kind of love this Harry Potter idea. Can we cast Lee Van Cleef in the Snape role? Or would Eli Wallach be better in terms of the “we don’t know whose side he’s on” shtick?
You know, the funny part is that there is totally room for this in Rowling’s universe. Wizards exist everywhere that humans do, and they have been around just as long. Therefore, you actually could have a wizard’s duel on a dusty street in the old west with wands instead of guns.
I vote for Lee Van Cleef. He’s more unseemly. Don’t be surprised if you see a wizard duel short film at the OK corral making the circuit next year, fellas!