The mythical quality of the West has become an enduring feature of American twentieth century life. And nowhere is the myth so powerful as in the movies. Though motion pictures are a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon, the silent westerns represent "old myths in new packages"; one critic in 1919 even called them the "modern dime novels."

Silent film perpetuates old myths of the West, but it is in many ways a unique medium. Historically, it overlaps with the decline of the "Old West," so that it is at once an instrument for mythologizing and recording a dying frontier; indeed it often blurs the distinctions between history and myth in the personages of cowboys-turned-actors, outlaws-turned-directors, and western landscapes-turned-movie sets. Also, the silent film was a vehicle well suited for the transmission of myths to American audiences, many of whom in the earliest days of silent film were recent immigrants. By privileging action over language, silent film particularly suits the code of the Western.

The end of the silent film era brought forth the "talkies," feature films with action and language. From the 1920s through the early 1970s, there were hundreds of nationally distributed feature films which gave the viewing public the same kind of experience on a more sophisticated level.

Western radio shows in the 1930s and 1940s were followed by television shows in the fifties and sixties.While the 1970s saw the end of many long-running series and a few new shows, additional new series appeared in the 1980s. The "West" has been the stuff of television for close to 40 years. In 1959, there were no fewer than 35 Westerns running concurrently on television, and there have been over 145 made for TV westerns broadcasted from the 1940's through the 1990's. Some lasted a few episodes while others became a part of the American psyche.