DEFA’s so-called “Red Westerns” sought to tell well-researched stories about the American West from the point of view of the Native Americans, in which exploitative US settlers and the cavalry—the capitalists—were most often the bad guys. Genre films—including children's films, comedies, Westerns, war films, science fiction, musicals and spy films—were an important part of East German film production. An attempt to ideologically counteract and economically compete with entertainment films and television from the West, the genre films drew millions of viewers into movie theaters and became box-office hits and films always presented an ideological twist.