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Site of the Week - CowboyPal

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Roy Rogers and Trigger. Gene Autry. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. CowboyPal has them all and more. Devoted to the cowboy stars who headlined B-movie westerns, those films of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s with modest budgets, straightforward plots and lots of action, you'll find no spaghetti westerns or anti-heroes here, only "white-hatted good guys who saw wrong and tried to right it," according to Joe Konnyu, the site's founder.

Konnyu started the site in 1995 as a way for fellow enthusiasts to chat about collections of movies, videos and comics, but found himself spreading information about western festivals and answering questions about old-time cowboys and films. The site has since expanded to features such as a daily trivia question (example: Name the four doubles that Roy Rogers had for the original Trigger and Trigger Jr.) and a "hosses and riders" page that highlights the famous horses of the cowboys. You can also buy "Saturday Matinee Double Feature" DVDs (a new one is offered every week) that Konnyu edits to include cartoons, serial chapters and two films -- an effort to "share the experience of how these movies were presented to us as kids," said Konnyu.

His favorite westerns? My Pal Trigger, in black-and-white, a fictionalized version of how Roy Rogers found Trigger, and The Golden Stallion, another Rogers movie about a roaming herd smuggling diamonds across the Mexican border under their hooves, filmed in glorious Trucolor. Konnyu, who now runs the site full time, got hooked on westerns as a kid growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri. He'd spend a dime on Saturday mornings at 10:30 to "escape the ordinary" and watch stars like Rex Allen, Johnny Mack Brown, Whip Wilson and many others on the big screen, back when soda was just a nickel. The memories of those days created his need to ensure that "nostalgia seekers like me have a place to roost."

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