Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 142

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Popular Culture Review

American’s primary historical myths, the story of the conquest of the western
frontier, in ways that depart tellingly from the historical record as well as from the
Wild West of film and television in the 1950s and 60s. It delivers a more diverse
audience to its advertisers than tradional male-dominated Westerns (Himmelstein,
Television Myth 59 ), by re-working archetypal mythic figures and themes from
the American frontier story in ways that render them satisfying to the sensibilities
of a predominately female and increasingly multicultural audience of baby-boomers
who were raised on television, and for whom the “anti-authoritarian, anti-racist,
egalitarian, antiwar and ecologically -minded messages” (O’Boyle 79) of Disney’s
westerns (e.g.”Westward Ho, the Wagons”, 1956, “Texas John Slaughter” (tv) 1958),
and nature films (e.g “The Vanishing Prairie” ), are most likely to be their formative
exposure to the westward expansion. When Disney’s Davy Crockett (1954) matterof-factly informed three land-grabbing racists that “Indians have rights. They’re
just like anybody else...” he and his companion George E. Russel are merely
respecting the American concept of fair play” (O’Boyle 77).

The Frontier Myth Revisited
In an 1893 address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance
of Frontier in American History” Frederick Jackson Turner “maintained that...the
novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its
encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European
heritage in shaping American society “ (Smith 292). Nevertheless, in the late 20th
century, this myth has become increasingly troublesome, because along with
“individuality, self-reliance, resiliency, steadfastness” ( Carpenter 123) the frontier
story encompasses violence, sexism (Himmelstein, Television Myth 59), cowardice
(James 39), an adversarial relationship with nature,and unbridled expansion.
Rushing (1985) has noted that by the later 1960’s the myth began to lose wide
appeal. “Mythically the Western story does not mix well with the newer, primarily
urban, values of sexual and racial equality” (266). She persuasively tracks the
frontier to outer space in films such as the “Star Wars” trilogy and “The Right
Stuff’, where it met with surprising success, maintaining the original configuration
of strong white males pitted against a harsh environment and alien beings and
avoiding the awkward realities of the original setting. DQMW, however, has found
ways to transform the frontier myth in order to reflect prevalent values and popular
causes o f the 1990s and to embrace the m uticultural, cross-generational
predominately female audience which has become increasingly essential to the
survival of