Looking through the lens of pop culture, it can sometimes seem that the Spaghetti Western genre begins and ends with Sergio Leone.
The same lens can also reduce the samurai genre down to the work of Akira Kurosawa.
Not that being so completely defined by two masters of cinema is such a bad thing, but those sorts of associations can crowd out a lot of quality work and narrow down the “acceptable” parameters of a given genre.
It can also obscure overlap, and Westerns of all stripes have a surprisingly symbiotic relationship with samurai pictures.
John Ford inspired Kurosawa, Kurosawa inspired Leone (among others), and shifting tastes in the 1970s produced a number of hybrid stories combining Western elements with Asian martial arts if not samurai specifically.
There was Kung Fu with David Carradine on the small screen.
There was the rather notorious Billy Jack and its even more dubious sequel.
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