Actaully the *traditional* Western played fast and loose with this turning the likes of Billy the Kid into heroes and the Earps into villians. While the Earps got a better shake in 1946 many 'villains' of old west history were still (and many still are) being portraid as heroes.
In a way, you're making my point for me, though. There was a time America's myth-makers gave good traits to bad men to make them palatable to audiences. Now they give bad traits to heroes to make them more "believable." You could argue that the movie version of Billy the Kid is in direct contradiction to the historical record, but hey people paid to see an entertainment not a documentary. The point is somebody realized that without making him "nicer" he'd never fly as a hero.
Whether the Earps were heroes or not depends on which side you're on. It can be argued -- with lots of corroborative evidence -- that they were little better than a rival gang to the Clanton's "cow-boys". The fact that Virgil and Wyatt had badges didn't really count for much...what went on in Tombstone was pretty much analogous to the "Bloods" and "Crips" of modern-day LA...a turf war. Wyatt, for instance, tracked down Curly Bill Brocius and gut-shot him in an act of retaliation for shooting Virgil...hardly a defensible piece of "police work", that.
But again, Hollywood saw the bare bones of a good story and re-cast it in terms of good and evil because -- at least once upon a time -- we needed to believe there was a difference between the two. Is that a bad thing? Well maybe if you get all your "history" from the movies, but not necessarily if you just take away a re-affirmation that good men can triumph sometimes.
Well considering the Western had been chugging along for well on to 50 years by that itme it could be the genre had simply reached the end of its lifespan and thanks in part to Star Wars/Star Trek the Scifi genre took its place.
Well, comics have been around longer than that, and competition from video games, etc may be a factor in *their* decline. But I don't think we can discount their abandonment of the youth audience as a factor, either.
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Yes, but in World War II you had the US firebombing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, Japanese-Americans interred on American soil without due process, and for years after that cross-burnings, lynchings, and other not-so niceties.
Except for the most part the US govenment helped keep a lit on such things. And if you tried to bring up such unpleasenties during the war you could have risked treason charges and after the was there was old Republican Sen Joe Macarthy and his House on Unamerican Activities Commity to stomp on your sorry head. Many people who would have brought such images to the screen were blacklisted and had to write and make movies under assumed names.
The government can only "keep a lid" on so much. It was no mystery to American citizens what had happened to their Japanese neighbors in WWII; they knew full well they'd been hauled off to camps. The difference is that we hadn't yet entered the culture of self-doubt and self-loathing that has dominated this nation since the 60s. You can certainly argue that back then we were arrogant and uncompassionate to the plight of others, but I'd argue that constant introspection and knee-jerk criticism of all our actions, in our society or in our government, hasn't improved us much as a nation. All it's done is sapped our will to do better and our belief that better things can even be done. Just look at how few people even bother to vote anymore...we've largeley given up and come to expect the worst from ourselves and our leaders. And for me, that trickles right down to having "heroes" with feet of clay. If we can't even fashion our comic book superheroes -- a patently ridiculous and juvenile concept from square one, anyway -- as paragons of virtue, then we've lost something, in my book.
I think the problem is that we woke up to the fact that mythic heroes had flaws that various forces had tried to cover up despite the truth sometimes being better. I ask you which is better - the idea of some perfect man becoming President of this nation or of a man who failed at nearly everything he did and was at one point was even suicidal but overcame everything and became President and strove to hold the nation together.
The first is the mythic Lincoln while the second is a far more realistic picture of the man. I ask you who is the more inspiring version?
To a young child, the mythic Lincoln is more inspiring, no question. To an adult, maybe the "real" one. Again, that's my point: Superman and Batman and the like used to be constructed as pure-hearted heroes for children. Now they're not. Which is fine for the 30-year-old comics fan living in his parent's basement, but what's left for the kids?
And anyway the truly "mythic" heroes are the fictional ones. Nobody suddenly "discovered" that Superman and Batman had "flaws" and a weak moral compass...they are make-believe characters who do and say only what writers make them do and say.
Do I want a white-washed version of JFK to be passed off as the real deal? No. But that's history...in order to learn from it, we have to see it warts and all. Myth-making is something else entirely. I want my heroes to be pure. If we're supposed to believe a guy came from another galaxy looking exactly like us, that he can fly and deflect bullets, that he can fool his closest friends with a cheap pair of glasses and that he would wear his underwear on the outside of his pants, I don't think it's too much more of a stretch to accept that he's a fine person with a strong moral center. Nothing is more hilarious to me than a comic book fan praising Spider-Man, the X-Men or Batman as somehow "realistic." If they really think those books bear any resemblance to the real world...even in their current forms...then they need professional help.
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