Buffalo Bill
(DVD Video) 

Special feature include: teacher's Guide [PDF format printable discussion guide, requires a DVD-ROM and Adobe Acrobat]; web links [text feature].

Editor, Penny Elliott Hays ; director of photography, Michael Chin ; original music composed by Joel Goodman.

Narrator, Richard Ben Cramer ; commentators, Paul Fees, Louis Warren, Charles Scoggin, Bobby Bridger, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Juti Winchester, L. G. Moses, Guy Dull Knife,

Originally broadcast on PBS as an episode of the television series American experience on February 25, 2008.

This film presents a portrait of the man who made the American West into the American story. For most Americans in the mid 1800s, the Wild West existed only in dime novels, but a young man from Kansas who had roamed the prairies in the war with the Plains Indians came to embody the picaresque frontier hero. As the frontier was rapidly disappearing, he realized he could market his life as entertainment, and millions around the world would pay for a taste of his Wild West. Tall, handsome, confident, and charismatic, he blurred the line between truth and entertainment, history and myth. Thus was a mere plainsman turned into an international celebrity and frontier hero, his meteoric rise to fame made possible by his genius and hucksterism. His name was William Cody, but the world remembers him as Buffalo Bill.

Not rated.

DVD; region 1; NTSC; 5.1 stereo. surround; widescreen presentation, enhanced for 16 x 9 televisions.

Closed captioned.