It's a pity the only Western themes we have had since are Lone Ranger and a few sets with The Lego Movie. I say it's high noon for a new Western theme!

So turns out that there is a limit to how much one can write, so I'm splitting this into two comments.

I'm seeing a lot of people wanting a resurgence of a Wild West theme, and I find that very interesting. I don't know how to think about it because would The LEGO Group ever want to do it? The Wild West is a very American thing, I'm curious what the European market and the greater international market would think of a Wild West theme. I don't think about it for Pirates because the history of exploring the globe is something everyone learns (well, at least in the west, so Europe and the Americas) and that also brought about pirates. Not to mention that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, while not necessarily bringing about a resurgence of love for all things pirate (there would have been way more copycat adventurer type movies if it did), captivated enough audiences with great swashbuckling adventure that it will be remembered and people will be nostalgic for it.

Another thing that makes me question why there would be a resurgence is because I don't know of any Wild West stuff being popular right now with the exception of Westworld, which isn't even wholly Western. I think the reason there were sets in the 90s is because of the nostalgia effect that hits every generation. They look back to what they loved twenty to thirty years ago and guess what was big in the 60s when the kids that grew up to be designers in the 90s? Westerns in TV and Cinema, similar deal with Pirates. I don't know if there's anything going on right now that's really clamoring for that. I never saw Lone Ranger, but I heard the movie didn't do well, and that could just be because Disney was banking on name alone to sell the movie and so kids are being dragged to a thing their parents remembered seeing on TV (Except not unless through syndication, so maybe grandparents were taking their families but they would complain that it's not the right Lone Ranger so why even bother going? Anyway...) so maybe the time for Westerns of Cowboys and Indians has kind of died.

In recent history most Westerns tend to be in the modern day, not in the time of one road storefront towns, wandering nerdowells, and high noon gun duels. It's about how rough life is when the towns are so far apart, you have no cell service, and the feds can't get out to you to help with organized crime. Or it's a very skewed version that's some comedic deconstruction of the Western Stereotype or is just a big graphic piece that kids aren't seeing to then become nostalgic for in the future. Not to mention, Westerns are sloooooow. Sometimes they're just straight up boring. That could be because the writing just isn't that good or because these movies are more intended for mature audiences that actually have an attention span for more than five minutes, but I know I watched some Westerns when I was even 13 and I was bored out of my skull, so imagine kids today getting excited for a Western.

And now we get to the subject that is the worst of them all. While I don't think this way, the Native Americans would be gross stereotypes that combined the most popular cultures into one. Now from one perspective, that's good because there is no specific region, but at the same time, you say that they are all the same, too, and that's not true. While I really don't care because it is a toy, you know that a million people would be getting upset about how misrepresentative the theme is. There was an old Random Set of the Day that was part of the Islander subtheme of Pirates, and people were already saying how grossly stereotypical it looked and how awful it was to combine the Polynesian cultures with other island tribes and making it into one entity. Here, you have Native Americans living in among some cliffs with a river in a bit of an arid climate, living in a Teepee, and have a Totem Pole. That's at least combining three if not more cultures together. To be honest, although it would destroy everyone's fun, the theme is not worth having around for the headaches that would be the political arguments that would spring forth. So now you're just left with the Cowboy aspect, which is not bad, but you'll also have people wondering if there would ever be any Natives for all your pioneers and cowboys to come across, and it would be disappointing if they never did. If I remember correctly, the latest iteration of Pirates only had Pirates and Imperials, no islanders, it's a bit of a shame.

Or maybe a theme resurgence would be baller and nobody would question it. People are weird.

@Lordmoral: A story-driven theme featuring a Western historical setting might be a little fraught since the history back then involved so much racism and genocide and so forth. Notice LEGO took specific care to ensure there was no overlap between the initial cowboys/settlers/bandits wave and the later Indians wave. The interactions between those groups tended to be contentious and exploitative in a way that Native American communities are still dealing with the consequences of. Showing interactions between these groups creates a dilemma: show friendly relations between Native Americans and settlers can be seen as sanitizing historical atrocities, while showing the brutal reality of those interactions does not make for very kid-appropriate play or storytelling. If LEGO wanted to make a game inspired by Native American culture it might be safest to use an approach like the classic Ninja theme by focusing exclusively on the native culture and not on their conflicts and relationships with outside cultures.

@Roebuck: For me the most politically incorrect (or, let’s not mince words, offensive) thing about the portrayal of Native Americans in the classic Western theme was in the facial features that broke from minifigure design standards of the time just to invoke racial stereotypes (e.g. big bumpy noses and squinty eyes on the Indians when most other minifigs in any theme including Wild West/Western had plain black dot eyes and no noses whatsoever).

Also offensive was the way the theme combined cultural traits from numerous unrelated Native American cultures into one conglomerate culture that any real Native American or even third-graders studying such cultures could tell didn’t accurately depict ANY of them. Totem poles are associated with Pacific Northwest tribes, buffalo skins and tepees with Great Plains tribes, canyon, desert, and cliffside settings with Southwest tribes, canoes with various cultures but chiefly ones in forested regions where the materials actually existed to make them, and so forth. It smacked of the type of Hollywood portrayal of Indians that originated from ignorant white perspectives in which all that mattered was showing all the things about Native American cultures in general that felt most primitive and foreign to white settlers. Islanders, a favorite theme of mine, has similar obvious issues in hindsight… anyone here ever heard of a Caribbean or Pacific island culture that had even the slightest access to zebra skins?

More recent indigenous cultural portrayals in the Collectible Minifigures have generally been less blatantly racist or insensitive… though there are some things like the skull motifs on the Aztec and Tiki Warrior that I’m uneasy about with regard to their sensitivity to the real cultures that inspired them. I’m aware that skulls are a fairly universal cultural symbol (after all, we all have them), but they tend to be emphasized in many Eurocentric portrayals of “savage natives from far-off lands”, so without insights from people with that cultural background it’s hard to know if skull-patterned jewelry and trinkets are based on reality or on racially biased fictional portrayals.