Legend of tollywood John Wayne was the original cowboy. Then Clint Eastwood popularized the genre of movies starring cowboys, and many came after him. Cowboy: Literally means ‘A Boy who tends Cows’, traditionally ranchers who attend to cattle in N. America, mostly the region that is Texas now, who would dress a certain way (hat, scarf, cargos, leather shoes, etc.), apparently have some character traits common to all. What Hollywood made of them: Wild Wild West, guns, drawl in typical southern accents, horses and women. There’s Telugu hiphop and Tamil rap now, so imagine the fun of having a Telugu cowboy. Who could play a cowboy and get away with it in Telugu cinema? Ans: Superstar Krishna.
India’s first cowboy Mosagallaku Mosagadu was the first cowboy film in India. It was produced by G. Adiseshagiri Rao, directed by K. S. R. Das in the banner of Sri Padmalaya Films in 1971. This was the first Telugu movie to be dubbed into English, and it was screened in more than 125 countries, which is a record in Indian Cinema
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Mosagallaku Mosagadu was such a huge hit, that several ‘Telugu cowboy’ movies came after that. Krishna of course signed six cowboy flicks right after that including Manchivallaku Manchivadu to Dongala Dopidi. Padmalaya’s first production Agni Pariksha might have flopped, but cowboy flicks like The Good the Bad and the Ugly fired the actor-producer’s imagination. It was a tricky job to nativise the cowboy content, because it is esentially about the lifestyles of a sect of people (try making a Rayalaseema faction film in Hollywood). Arudra took it to the era of English-French colonizing our country. He also took various characters from cowboy movies, like Nagabhushanam’s character is based on ‘Ugly’ in the earlier mentioned movie and Krishna himself is a Robinhood of sorts entwinded in a revenge setting. Cows do not appear to play a role in either the original or this nativisationthis is called artistic liberty or in other more honest terms, the distortion of truth by popular media. Either ways, the public love it.