{"id":2618,"date":"2014-02-03T23:01:12","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T03:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=2618"},"modified":"2014-02-03T23:01:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T03:01:12","slug":"the-reel-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/the-reel-west\/","title":{"rendered":"THE  \u201cREEL\u201d  WEST"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\">My generation grew up in the golden age of TV Westerns.\u00a0 One we regularly watched in our home was \u201cThe Rifleman\u201d starring Chuck Connors.\u00a0 A fellow nostalgia buff took the time to splice together all of lead character Lucas McCain\u2019s shootouts.\u00a0 The body count he came up with was \u2026 120.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Budget ten minutes to see it here: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nrOPVo5GFY4\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nrOPVo5GFY4?rel=0\" height=\"315\" width=\"420\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Takeaway lessons:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">My generation grew up with TV role models who racked up three-figure body counts, sometimes four at a time, and managed not to go out and perform mass homicides for real.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The Western gunfighters of mid-20<sup>th<\/sup> Century television apparently had bad-guy-seeking bullets. Notice how often the lead character shoots from the hip, with his muzzle angled starkly upward, and the camera then cuts to bad guys some distance away clutching their chests and falling.\u00a0 Simple geometry tells us that if Chuck Connors had been firing live ammo, a huge number of his bullets would have gone harmlessly over the heads of his targets.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Those gunfighters also had time machines. Presumably, \u201cThe Rifleman\u201d was set in the 1870s-1880s. The stylized large-loop-lever signature gun of the star is a Model 1892 Winchester.\u00a0 The gun nerds tell us that the props Connors used consisted of a rotating battery of three of them, two \u201992 Winchesters and one South American copy, the El Tigre.\u00a0 A stud inside the trigger guard of the lever hit the trigger as the action closed, allowing his rapid spray of shooting. Of course, with this device in place, every time you jacked a round into the chamber, your gun would fire.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Those gunfighters could also defy the law of gravity. The Winchesters had open-top actions. When Connors did his trademark one-handed flip to chamber a round, in real life the cartridge would have fallen out of the top of the rifle before it came back level, and the chamber would be empty when he pulled the trigger.\u00a0 Hollywood lore has it that Connors\u2019 prop rifles were fitted with studs to keep the \u201cfive-in-one\u201d blanks (so called because they were shaped to fit five different calibers) from falling out when he did that stunt.\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t the rifle go off when he merely chambered a round?\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t telekinesis: the stud inside the lever was adjustable.\u00a0 Only thing was, you had to be in league with the scriptwriters and the propmaster, who would make sure that device was adjusted properly before that particular scene was shot.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Those gunfighters faced zombies before George Romero thought of them.\u00a0 Watch carefully \u2013 in different episodes, the same character actors playing bad guys get blown away again and again.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Yes, it\u2019s true\u2026we gun people love to make fun of gun stuff that appears on the entertainment screens.\u00a0 The hell of it is, though, those \u201cHey, wait a minute, I smell contradictory BS\u201d moments come in the study of ACTUAL past gunfights, too\u2026and unless something newsworthy comes up in the meantime, we\u2019ll discuss THAT next in this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My generation grew up in the golden age of TV Westerns.\u00a0 One we regularly watched in our home was \u201cThe Rifleman\u201d starring Chuck Connors.\u00a0 A fellow nostalgia buff took the time to splice together all of lead character Lucas McCain\u2019s shootouts.\u00a0 The body count he came up with was \u2026 120. Budget ten minutes to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}