"Look into my eye," Aliens.

"Soylent Green is people!" Soylent Green

Great film, The Magnificent Seven.

Tell me, Kevin, are American westerns popular down under?

I've heard that in Europe and other parts of the world, westerns are viewed in much the way that we view the knights of England or the Vikings of Norway or the samurai of Japan. America's historical legend is the gunfighter.

John Wayne is our Sir Gawain. The Magnificent Seven are our Seven Samurai. The Wild Bunch are our Knights of the Round Table.

I can live with that. 

Excellent point about The Wild Bunch--they would be the equivalent of roguish Robin Hood types, though only at the end (before that, they're just coldblooded killers). Not a good comparison to the knights.

My "John Wayne as Sir Gawain" was just carrying forward the conceit of comparing legends associated with their particular cultures. But yes, as you point out, the Old West is just a century ago (in some parts of the South, pockets of it still exist--when I was a younger man living in Arizona I'd carry a holstered pistol on my nightly strolls. It was perfectly legal and, in that part of town, advisable).

England has its knight, Japan its Samurai, and those figures of legend go back centuries. America's equivalent--the cowboy--only goes back decades, but we are a much younger country.

The interesting question--which, of course, we can only speculate about: Five hundred years from now, will mythologized stories of cowboys and indians be told as we now tell stories of King Arthur and his knights?