Balladeer’s Blog’s end of year retrospective continues with July’s best:
DANGEROUS DAN: NEGLECTED GUNSLINGER – Another look at a forgotten gunslinger whose life was at least as exciting as any of the big names from the old west. Click HERE.
DEFY DEMOCRAT TYRANTS THIS FOURTH OF JULY – A look at the Democrats’ many offenses against the rest of us, while they consider themselves fit to dictate the conditions under which we live. Click HERE.
SUPERHERO PANTHEON OF HARVEY COMICS – Decades ago Harvey focused on superheroes like the Human Meteor, Black Cat, Spirit of 76 and Doctor Miracle plus so many others. Click HERE.
AMERICA: PART OF THE ALIEN FRANCHISE – With Democrats as the Xenomorphs, Republicans as Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the rest of us as the humans trying to survive. Click HERE.
JOHN BULL – The neglected British gunslinger whose real name is still unknown. Click HERE.
SUPERHERO PANTHEON OF FOUR STAR PUBLICATIONS – Forgotten 1940s and 1950s superheroes like the Grenade, Torpedoman, Yankee Girl and Red Rocket. Click HERE.
MAVERICK (1994): MOVIE REVIEW – A detailed look at the movie and the James Garner television series which preceded it. Click HERE.
MARTIN LUTHER KING PERSON OF COURAGE LEO TERRELL ENDORSES TRUMP – Trump doubled his share of the African-American vote from 2016, getting the largest share of that vote of any nominal Republican in several decades. Click HERE.
MORE COOL BUT NEGLECTED FOOTBALL HELMETS – From teams like the Railsplitters, the Electrons and more! Click HERE. Continue reading
DJANGO: AN OPERA – Here at Balladeer’s Blog I love sharing my enthusiasms. My blog posts where I provide contemporary slants to Ancient Greek Comedies to make them more accessible have been big hits over the years, so now I’m trying it with operas. A little while back I wrote about how Philip Wylie’s science fiction novel Gladiator could be done as an opera. This time I’m addressing the 1966 original version of the Spaghetti Western titled Django. 
LANGUAGE: Spanish. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that most of my fellow English-speakers find English-language operas to be silly. The prosaic nature of the forced rhymes in a language we are well-versed in does seem to rob opera of its mystique and its grandeur. 
Scene One: The opera would open with a stage version of one of the most iconic visuals from the 1966 film. Our title character, DJANGO, clad in his long blue jacket with his well-worn Union Army uniform underneath it, slowly, wearily drags a coffin behind him as he walks along singing his mournful song. He pulls the coffin via a rope slung across one shoulder. 
And with many people home from work for the day the 2020 Frontierado Holiday Weekend has started! The actual holiday is tomorrow, August 7th, but many of you have indicated that you’ve taken to getting started on the Thursday night before, or “Frontierado Eve” I guess we could call it. 
Or if you prefer your drinks with no mixers there’s plenty of the OFFICIAL bourbons of Frontierado – 
MORE WILD, WILD WEST (1980) – Awhile back, Balladeer’s Blog reviewed the 1979 telefilm 
Robert Conrad was back as Jim West with Ross Martin once again appearing as his sidekick Artemus Gordon. But that’s about all that went right.
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS STARTED IN DODGE CITY – The Las Vegas in this article is Las Vegas, NEW MEXICO, not the more famous Las Vegas in Nevada. This lesser known Las Vegas held a degree of renown from the 1846-1848 war with Mexico onward. Its earliest history dated back to the 1600s. 
When he was age 16 Charles’ well-to-do parents gave up trying to force him to continue his schooling at an eastern military academy and let him move to Montana, where, clad in a brand-new buckskin outfit, he worked on a friend’s sheep ranch north of Helena. It took skill with a gun and a true survival instinct to live through encounters with rustlers, hostile cattlemen and their hired gunmen but Charles, already being called Kid Russell, thrived and felt more at home in this rough and tumble lifestyle than among his family’s hoity-toity friends in St Louis high society. 
COMIN’ AT YA! (1981) – Directed by Ferdinando Baldi, Comin’ At Ya! is often credited with starting the pointless and bizarre 1980s revival of 1950s-style 3D movies. The film stars Tony Anthony, famous to us Spaghetti Western fans for the movie series in which he played a gunslinger called the Stranger. He appeared in others, as well, some reasonably good and others, like Blindman, so bad as to be virtually unwatchable. 
Our main character, Triple H, ain’t havin’ it and sets out to recover his new bride and set free the other unfortunate women seized by the Thompson Gang. Needless to say he’ll also kill every member of the gang as well as some of the snobbish, upper-class Mexican aristos – male and female – who buy the ladies at an elegantly-appointed mansion/ former convent now used for slave auctions. 
JOHN BULL – Very little is known about the early life of this mysterious British expatriate who became a famous gambler/ gunslinger. Even his name is in question – for obvious reasons – since “John Bull” had already been a standard nickname for British men in general for over a century. 
For the next few years nothing can be pieced together except tales about “John” winning some big pots, losing others, gunning down sore losers and sometimes fleeing gold or silver camps with angry, shooting victims of his card-sharp skills on his trail. In 1865 or 1866 Bull arrived in Virginia City, NV where he met notorious gambler/ gunslinger 
All that and a great musical number during an excellently mounted 1870s Fourth of July Celebration. Injun Joe gets a much more merciful end in this movie than he did in the book, so that’s a plus, too. 
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