Cowboys of the Silver Screen Honored

Cowboy boots are an integral part of American cultural consciousness.  (Call us biased, but we truly believe this!  Why else would there be so many western- and cowboy-themed restaurants and western wear stores in, say, Japan?)  You could also point to any number of indicators as additional proof of this, such as, oh, a whole genre of movie where everyone wears them.  (We’re so adamant, we had to get grammatically incorrect there!)

This fascination with six-shooters, spurs, and lassos in the Wild West has been with us since the inception of the open range, but it really crystallized as a central part of our psyche with the popularization of Western films.  The fact that these films often casted such capable, charismatic actors as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers didn’t hurt their popularity.

There’s further proof that cowboy boots, along with the men who wear them, are important to us: backing by the U.S. Postal Service.  That’s right: according to an article posted on the Los Angeles Daily News website, a series of commemorative stamps honoring some of these legends of the Western genre of film.  Autry and Rogers are portrayed, as are two other notable actors famous for working in the field, Tom Mix and William S. Hart.

Designed by Robert Rodriguez, an illustrator who has helped design a dozen other stamps, these actors are portrayed in a romantic, idealized way that reflects the themes of these movies very well.

All four actors were known for performing roles as cowboys that were fundamentally good, arrayed against forces of chaos, such as bandit gunslingers, that they strove to overcome.  As Rodriguez says, quoted in the Daily News article, “They weren’t Clint Eastwood-style heroes…They were the real heroes.”

Appropriately, all four men are illustrated wearing their trademarked cowboy hats.  No word on whether any of them are wearing Justin boots, one of our favorite brands—these stamps are, after all, rather small, so they’re basically just headshots.