When my oldest son, Sam, was two, I often sat down to watch Sesame Street with him. I enjoyed the subtle adult humor of this preschool show and I loved hearing him laugh as we watched the Cookie Monster. That was a regular feature of our days together.

By the time he was six, I sometimes got him up in the late evening to watch old horror movies like Godzilla. He didn’t seem to mind or be frightened by the rather unusual entertainment I enticed him into. Who knows — perhaps I was a bit scared and wanted company. We sat and watched those old movies late in the night when most of the family was asleep.

Fifty years later, we are at it again. Sam returned home this past summer of 2021 and moved in with me after his grown children all headed off to college. Although most nights he stays up much later than I do, we enjoy an hour or so of watching television together after dinner. We are rediscovering this shared pleasure.

We began by watching a series Sam suggested that was completely new to me, since I am mostly a PBS junkie. It was based on the successful Star Wars movies that had appeared on the big screen when Sam was a teenager. The hero of this new series was called The Mandalorian. He travels from planet to planet saving good people and vanquishing bad guys. There was a lot of fighting and swashbuckling and eventually the rescue of a small green creature called The Child. The Mandalorian always protects this little alien who is also known as Baby Yoda. The mission for the Mandalorian was to return the Child to his own people somewhere on a planet far, far away.

After watching the series, I began to do a little research on the Internet. One reviewer said that the character and format of the Mandalorian series was based on an old television series called “Gunsmoke.” Really? I had watched that popular western as a teenager and enjoyed it. But was it really a model for “The Mandalorian”? So Sam and I decided to find an old “Gunsmoke” segment and watched it together to see what we could make of this suggestion. Sam had not seen “Gunsmoke” nor even heard of it, so off we went.

It was an interesting transition to remember a black-and-white show that I watched long ago on my small television in 1955. It was filmed in some dry barren natural setting in a depiction of the Old West.

We had viewed “The Mandalorian” on our large flat-screen television and it featured spaceships, special effects and creatures of the galactical variety. But we began to see some similarities. Both central characters were strong and intimidating men with a heart of gold. Both were enforcing law and order in the world around them. In “Gunsmoke,” we discovered episodes where decisions were more subtle and complex than I remembered. There were adult and complex issues for Marshall Dylan of Dodge City to decide about and enforce. As a youngster, in the 1950s, many of those issues went right over my head. We began to see why a reviewer suggested the similarities — and why “Gunsmoke” was so popular for 20 seasons.

We took our own quest and journeyed through western movies of bygone days to compare them to “Gunsmoke.” We watched episodes of “The Lone Ranger,” then movies like “High Noon,” “Shane,” “They Died with their Boots On” and “Johnny Guitar.” Our media exploration led us a long way from “The Mandalorian” but we were better informed by the time we finished. And we had a lot of fun along the way.

It turns out that numerous scenes, even those set in deep space, are common riffs on old Western traditions. For example, “The Mandalorian” included scenes like those in which a stranger enters a saloon as music plays in the background and the room becomes silent as people turn to check him out. Or two men stare each other down in the dusty street as they prepare to draw their pistols  Or close shots of our hero’s boots as he makes a grand entrance into a dangerous situation. Even in a recent cartoon movie, “Rango,” we saw these elements.

Now, fifty years later, Sam and I laugh or feel sad or draw our breath with the tension of approaching danger, but the discussion and sharing of it together is pure pleasure once again.