Spaghetti Western?

Here's a mystery that needs solving: What happened to all the wagon wheels?

When I was a kid it seemed like every pasta dish that did not require spaghetti was made with wagon wheel pasta. It was everywhere. Also, we called pasta "macaroni." Everyone did, even the Italian families.

Now you can barely find wagon wheel pasta anywhere. Neither the two local supermarkets nor the nearest Walmart have them (of course Target's grocery section is useless). What happened to the wheels?

Last year the Daily Meal site presented what it called the "Ultimate Guide to Pasta Shapes" -- guess what was left out?

Wagon wheels.

A few brands make them, but they're hard to find. Da Vinci pasta has them, but none of my local stores carry the brand. Italian brands Barilla and De Cecco have them, which I tracked down after some effort; Barilla's is only a mini version, preferable for soups and side dishes, but De Cecco's is the real deal, good for mac & cheese. I got the De Cecco in my local Italian deli. It was the only box they had.

You see that wagon wheel pasta is known in Italy as Rotelle, but the ding-dongs at Ronzoni, once New York's hometown pasta (but no more), use the name "Rotelle" for corkscrew pasta. Even Wikipedia pokes them for that:

"Rotelle should not be confused with rotini
(corkscrew-shaped pasta). Nonetheless, some manufacturers,
such as Ronzoni, produce a twisted pasta with that name."

The Italian word rotelle means wheels, Ronzoni. Smarten up.

I have a theory about the decline and fall of rotelle: it's linked to the fall of the Western as entertainment.

I'm serious. In the fifties and sixties, kids grew up with Westerns all over the TV -- in 1957 the three television networks aired 17 Westerns in prime-time; 18 if you count Micky Dolenz's show Circus Boy. Twenty years later there were three. Ten years after that it was "What's a Western?" As the Western faded in popularity, so did things like Western kitsch in home decoration, and so did the ability of wagon wheel pasta to get kids to eat. Sure, Western movies occasionally get made, but they're far different from what we once knew, and are either horribly violent, anti-American, or most often both. Not for kids. Not the kind of thing that moves the macaroni.

So I suppose the blasta from the pasta that is the wagon wheel will remain hard to find. It is a shame, because it makes an excellent macaroni and cheese.

(P.S.: Here's one for the weird time files; on the show Circus Boy (1956-1958), Micky Dolenz played Corky, a kid in the late 1890s who travels with a circus. Dolenz was 11 when the show started and is 74 now, which means that he's almost the age Corky would have been when The Monkees first aired. Old Man Corky could have watched Micky on The Monkees. Mind = blown.)