5) Mr. Benjamin Ernst and his son Buddy -- Hey Dude

Yippie kai yai WHAT?

Mr. Ernst is a good-natured but somewhat bumbling....shit, I can’t do this. I wanted to somehow include a reference to old-school Nickelodeon in here because it’s kind of my forte, but it's impossible to shoehorn this in because I never could sit through an entire episode of this show. Here is everything anyone ever needs to know about Hey Dude:

1) It was on immediately after Salute Your Shorts. This meant you’d get tricked into watching it -- or at least hearing the opening theme.

2) Sometimes TV Guide would say Salute Your Shorts was going to be on, and you’d wait around for it. But then it would end up being a goddamn episode of Hey Dude instead.

3) Something about killer cacti.

4) If an actor ever appeared on this show and then nothing else, someone will claim to have scored pot from them recently on the actor’s IMDB entry. The message board at the bottom will also feature a topic thread titled “Still alive???”

4) Twinkie the Kid, The Marlboro Man, The Frito Bandito -- various advertisements

The Magnificent Three

At first I was only going to include Twinkie the Kid, but I figured he needed some back-up from other Western-inspired heavy hitters in the advertising industry. According to his entry in Tobin’s Spirit Guide, “Twinkie the Kid is an anthropomorphized Twinkie appearing as a wrangler. He wears boots, gloves, a kerchief, and a ten-gallon hat.” Apparently, he has also a friend named Fruit Pie the Magician, but the less said about him, the better.

Downloading this this DLC spawns billboards all across the landscapes of America and Mexico, unlocks decals of corporate logos for your horse, turns all native flora into cigarette bushes and fauna into roaming cupcakes and zingers, and adds special town vendors who aggressively market Hostess, Marlboro and Frito-Lay products. All new copies of Alan Wake feature a similar DLC pack delivered as a mandatory update.

3) Jim West and Artemus Gordon -- Wild Wild West

Up to sundown, roamin’ around / See where the bad guys are to be found ‘n make ‘em lay down

There is something you need to know about me: The only song I know all the lyrics to is Will Smith’s eponymously named “Wild Wild West” -- but I have a damn good excuse! You may remember this classic mashup of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” and Kool Moe Dee’s “Wild Wild West." On top of adding a few whip crack effects and the dulcet tones of Dru Hill, Will Smith also managed to personally see to it that a cassette tape of the single for the song became permanently lodged in the tape player of the first car I ever owned, a 1995 Ford Windstar.

No matter what techniques I tried or what Faustian bargains I entered, the cassette would not disentangle itself from my tape deck. But don’t worry, it played perfectly fine and could self-rewind. Rather than risk breaking the deck -- or bother taking it apart -- my car became a world where time and space lost all meaning.

Metric distance no longer had any information to offer me -- I measured all distances between locations by the number of times I could listen to "Wild Wild West." Need to get from school to the Taco Bell down the street? No problem. That’s only 1.4 WWWs. Want to take a road trip to Canada? I hope you like glimpsing eternity four minutes and seven seconds at a time, chief.

But anyway…oh yeah, Jim West and Artemus Gordon. They could have gadgets and shit, or the whole mode could just be speed-running the game while trying to stay one step ahead of the saw blade zooming after the magnetic collar on your neck. Also, it would feature a big steam-powered spider and inexplicable robot man who works the spider's bellows (I’m serious.... I mean, what the fuck? Was that guy really supposed to be a robot or what?).

 2) The Three Amigos -- ¡Three Amigos!

Initially, it was a really tough decision whether to include characters from ¡Three Amigos!, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, or Wagons East! (also known as the film that killed John Candy). This is probably the only time in history that the words in the previous sentence will ever fall together in that particular order, so savor it while you can!  

What eventually won me over -- much the same way the opera scene in Final Fantasy 6 inevitably places it higher on “best of” lists than other Final Fantasys -- was remembering the scene where Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short gather around a fire at dusk and sing “Blue Shadows” on the world’s most purposely fake set. It’s a ridiculous pastiche of the classic western prairie -- coyotes, owls, and bobcats jump on set; stars streak across the sky; horses inexplicably sing; and a turtle talks to boot. The film also credits Randy Newman as a singing bush. Let’s see Billy Crystal compete with that!

Back to the Red Dead Redemption universe…teaming up as one of the three amigos for co-op missions specifically made for three players would be pretty amazing. You could pretty much replace the entire middle part of the game with the El Guapo plot from the movie, and I don’t think anyone would notice.

1) Cowboy Curtis -- Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

If you do a Google image search for “Cowboy Curtis,” the vast majority of results return this picture. It's a candid shot taken immediately after Cowboy Curtis created the heavens and earth.

Do I even need to say anything? This is an incredible character. Let’s look at the evidence:

1) Cowboy Curtis is the owner of the finest jheri-curl mullet I have ever had the privilege of viewing.

2) His lasso is made of rotoscoped magic, and it is thought to be a powerful artifact stolen from a mighty wizard king.

3) You would think Laurence Fishburne would look back on his Cowboy Curtis days as silly or with a little bit of regret after rebranding himself as Morpheus with the Matrix series. And you would be dead wrong. Fishburne gave his blessing for another actor to portray Cowboy Curtis if Pee-Wee’s Playhouse returned to the stage or TV, but says if another movie goes in to production, he will once again proudly don the mantle of Cowboy Curtis. Incredible.

4) His best friends include a genie and a king.

Horses With No Name

I considered the following characters, but they ultimately didn’t make the cut for the Top 10 for pretty obvious reasons:

Dr. Quinn -- Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
Punch & Judy -- Cowboy Bebop
Flint -- Mother 3
Mad Dog McCree -- The World’s Best Arcade Game
Otis, the owner of the Dude Ranch that they go to in that one episode of Malcolm In The Middle -- Malcom in the Middle
BraveStarr -- Look it up. I dare you!
The C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa -- Hahaha! This is too much fun!
TinStar -- OK, OK. I’m done, I’m done.

 
Time to hit the trail. See ya'll next time!