title: Gluten

text: Celiac disease (CD) is a chronic, multiple-organ autoimmune disorder primarily affecting the small intestine caused by the ingestion of wheat, barley, rye, oats, and derivatives, that appears in genetically predisposed people of all ages. CD is not only a gastrointestinal disease, because it may involve several organs and cause an extensive variety of non-gastrointestinal symptoms, and most importantly, it may be apparently asymptomatic. Many asymptomatic people become accustomed to living with a chronic bad health status as if it were normal, but they are able to recognize that they actually had symptoms related to celiac disease after starting a gluten-free diet and improvement occurs. Added difficulties for diagnosis are the fact that serological markers (anti-tissue transglutaminase [TG2]) are not always present and many people may have minor mucosal lesions, without atrophy of the intestinal villi.


title: Gluten

text: CD affects approximately 1–2% of the general population, but most cases remain unrecognized, undiagnosed and untreated, and at risk for serious long-term health complications. People may suffer severe disease symptoms and be subjected to extensive investigations for many years, before a proper diagnosis is achieved. Untreated CD may cause malabsorption, reduced quality of life, iron deficiency, osteoporosis, an increased risk of intestinal lymphomas, and greater mortality. CD is associated with some other autoimmune diseases, such as diabetes mellitus type 1, thyroiditis, gluten ataxia, psoriasis, vitiligo, autoimmune hepatitis, dermatitis herpetiformis, primary sclerosing cholangitis, and more.


title: Gluten

text: CD with "classic symptoms", which include gastrointestinal manifestations such as chronic diarrhea and abdominal distention, malabsorption, loss of appetite, and impaired growth, is currently the least common presentation form of the disease and affects predominantly small children generally younger than two years of age.


title: Gluten

text: CD with "non-classic symptoms" is the most common clinical type and occurs in older children (over 2 years old), adolescents, and adults. It is characterized by milder or even absent gastrointestinal symptoms and a wide spectrum of non-intestinal manifestations that can involve any organ of the body, and very frequently may be completely asymptomatic both in children (at least in 43% of the cases) and adults.


title: Gluten

text: Asymptomatic CD (ACD) is present in the majority of affected patients and is characterized by the absence of classical gluten-intolerance signs, such as diarrhea, bloating, and abdominal pain. Nevertheless, these individuals very often develop diseases that can be related with gluten intake. Gluten can be degraded into several morphine-like substances, named gluten exorphins. These compounds have proven opioid effects and could mask the deleterious effects of gluten protein on gastrointestinal lining and function.


title: Gluten

text: Non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) is described as a condition of multiple symptoms that improves when switching to a gluten-free diet, after celiac disease and wheat allergy are excluded. Recognized since 2010, it is included among gluten-related disorders. Its pathogenesis is not yet well understood, but the activation of the innate immune system, the direct negative effects of gluten and probably other wheat components, are implicated.


title: Gluten

text: NCGS is the most common syndrome of gluten intolerance, with a prevalence estimated to be 6-10%. NCGS is becoming a more common diagnosis, but its true prevalence is difficult to determine because many people self-diagnose and start a gluten-free diet, without having previously tested for celiac disease or having the dietary prescription from a physician. People with NCGS and gastrointestinal symptoms remain habitually in a "no man's land", without being recognized by the specialists and lacking the adequate medical care and treatment. Most of these people have a long history of health complaints and unsuccessful consultations with numerous physicians, trying to get a diagnosis of celiac disease, but they are only labeled as irritable bowel syndrome. A consistent although undefined number of people eliminate gluten because they identify it as responsible for their symptoms and these improve with the gluten-free diet, so they self-diagnose as NCGS.


title: Gluten

text: People with NCGS may develop gastrointestinal symptoms, which resemble those of irritable bowel syndrome or wheat allergy, or a wide variety of non-gastrointestinal symptoms, such as headache, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, atopic diseases, allergies, neurological diseases, or psychiatric disorders, among others. The results of a 2017 study suggest that NCGS may be a chronic disorder, as is the case with celiac disease.


title: Gluten

text: Besides gluten, additional components present in wheat, rye, barley, oats, and their derivatives, including other proteins called amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs) and short-chain carbohydrates known as FODMAPs, may cause NCGS symptoms. As of 2019, reviews conclude that although FODMAPs present in wheat and related grains may play a role in non-celiac gluten sensitivity, they only explain certain gastrointestinal symptoms, such as bloating, but not the extra-digestive symptoms that people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity may develop, such as neurological disorders, fibromyalgia, psychological disturbances, and dermatitis. ATIs may cause toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4)-mediated intestinal inflammation in humans.


title: Gluten

text: People can also experience adverse effects of wheat as result of a wheat allergy. As with most allergies, a wheat allergy causes the immune system to respond abnormally to a component of wheat that it treats as a threatening foreign body. This immune response is often time-limited and does not cause lasting harm to body tissues. Wheat allergy and celiac disease are different disorders. Gastrointestinal symptoms of wheat allergy are similar to those of celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity, but there is a different interval between exposure to wheat and onset of symptoms. An allergic reaction to wheat has a fast onset (from minutes to hours) after the consumption of food containing wheat and could include anaphylaxis.


title: Gluten

text: Gluten ataxia is an autoimmune disease triggered by the ingestion of gluten. With gluten ataxia, damage takes place in the cerebellum, the balance center of the brain that controls coordination and complex movements like walking, speaking and swallowing, with loss of Purkinje cells. People with gluten ataxia usually present gait abnormality or incoordination and tremor of the upper limbs. Gaze-evoked nystagmus and other ocular signs of cerebellar dysfunction are common. Myoclonus, palatal tremor, and opsoclonus-myoclonus may also appear.


title: Gluten

text: Early diagnosis and treatment with a gluten-free diet can improve ataxia and prevent its progression. The effectiveness of the treatment depends on the elapsed time from the onset of the ataxia until diagnosis, because the death of neurons in the cerebellum as a result of gluten exposure is irreversible.


title: Gluten

text: Gluten ataxia accounts for 40% of ataxias of unknown origin and 15% of all ataxias. Less than 10% of people with gluten ataxia present any gastrointestinal symptom, yet about 40% have intestinal damage.


title: Gluten

text: In addition to gluten ataxia, gluten sensitivity can cause a wide spectrum of neurological disorders, which develop with or without the presence of digestive symptoms or intestinal damage. These include peripheral neuropathy, epilepsy, headache, encephalopathy, vascular dementia, and various


title: Gluten

text: movement disorders (restless legs syndrome, chorea, parkinsonism, Tourette syndrome, palatal tremor, myoclonus, dystonia, opsoclonus myoclonus syndrome, paroxysms, dyskinesia, myorhythmia, myokymia).


title: Gluten

text: The diagnosis of underlying gluten sensitivity is complicated and delayed when there are no digestive symptoms. People who do experience gastrointestinal problems are more likely to receive a correct diagnosis and treatment. A strict gluten-free diet is the first-line treatment, which should be started as soon as possible. It is effective in most of these disorders. When dementia has progressed to an advanced degree, the diet has no beneficial effect. Cortical myoclonus appears to be treatment-resistant on both gluten-free diet and immunosuppression.


title: Gluten

text: People with gluten-related disorders have to remove gluten from their diet strictly, so they need clear labeling rules. The term "gluten-free" is generally used to indicate a supposed harmless level of gluten rather than a complete absence. The exact level at which gluten is harmless is uncertain and controversial. A 2008 systematic review tentatively concluded that consumption of less than 10 mg of gluten per day is unlikely to cause intestinal damage in people with celiac disease, although it noted that few reliable studies had been done. Regulation of the label "gluten-free" varies.


title: Gluten

text: The "Codex Alimentarius" international standards for food labeling has a standard relating to the labeling of products as "gluten-free". It only applies to foods that would normally contain gluten.


title: Gluten

text: By law in Brazil, all food products must display labels clearly indicating whether or not they contain gluten.


title: Gluten

text: Labels for all food products sold in Canada must clearly identify the presence of gluten if it is present at a level greater than 20 parts per million.


title: Gluten

text: In the European Union, all prepackaged foods and non-prepacked foods from a restaurant, take-out food wrapped just before sale, or unpackaged food served in institutions must be identified if gluten-free. "Gluten-free" is defined as 20 parts per million of gluten or less and "very low gluten" is 100 parts per million of gluten or less; only foods with cereal ingredients processed to remove gluten can claim "very low gluten" on labels.


title: Gluten

text: All foods containing gluten as an ingredient must be labelled accordingly as gluten is defined as one of the 14 recognised EU allergens.


title: Gluten

text: In the United States, gluten is not listed on labels unless added as a standalone ingredient. Wheat or other allergens are listed after the ingredient line. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has historically classified gluten as "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). In August 2013, the FDA issued a final ruling, effective August 2014, that defined the term "gluten-free" for voluntary use in the labeling of foods as meaning that the amount of gluten contained in the food is below 20 parts per million.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The Ghana national football team represents Ghana in men's international football, doing it since 1957. The team consists of twenty players including the technical team. The team is nicknamed the Black Stars after the Black Star of Africa in the flag of Ghana. It is governed by the Ghana Football Association (GFA) the governing body for football in Ghana and the oldest football association in Africa (founded in 1920). Prior to 1957, the team played as the Gold Coast. The team is a member of both FIFA and CAF.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Ghana qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 2006. The team has won the Africa Cup of Nations four times (1963, 1965, 1978, and 1982), while finishing as runners-up five times (1968, 1970, 1992, 2010, and 2015). After going through 2005 unbeaten, the Ghana national football team won the FIFA Best Mover of the Year Award and reached the second round of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, they became only the third African team to reach the World Cup quarter-finals, and in 2014 they competed in their third consecutive World Cup.


title: Ghana national football team

text: On 19 August 1962 at the Accra Sports Stadium, they played Real Madrid, who were at the time Spanish champions, former European champions and intercontinental champions, and drew 3–3.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Charles Kumi Gyamfi became coach in 1961, and they won successive African Cup of Nations titles, in 1963 and 1965, and achieved its record win, 13–2 away to Kenya, after the second of these. They reached the final of the tournament in 1968 and 1970, losing 1–0 on each occasion, to DR Congo and Sudan respectively. Their domination of this tournament earned them the nickname "the Black Stars of Africa" in the 1960s.


title: Ghana national football team

text: They failed to qualify for 3 successive African Cup of Nations in the 1970s, and qualified for the Olympic Games football tournaments, becoming the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to qualify for the Games, reaching the quarter-finals in 1964 and withdrawing after qualifying in 1976 and 1980. They later won the 1982 African Cup of Nations. After 3 failures to reach the tournament final, the 1992 African Cup of Nations saw it finish second.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Prior to the year 2000, disharmony among the squad which led to parliamentary and executive intervention to settle issues between 2 squad members, Abedi Pele and Tony Yeboah in the 1990s, may have played some part in the failure of the team to build on the successes of the national underage teams in the 1990s, and a generation of Black Stars players who went to the 2001 FIFA World Youth Championship final became the "core" of the team at the 2002 African Cup of Nations, and were undefeated for a year in 2005 and reached the final tournament of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The Black Stars started by succumbing to a 2–0 defeat to eventual champions Italy, and wins over Czech Republic (2–0) and United States (2–1) saw it through to the second round, where it lost 3–0 to Brazil.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Under head coach Milovan Rajevac, the Black Stars went on to secure a 100% record in its qualification campaign, winning the group and becoming the first African team to qualify for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In the final tournament, it is in Group D with Germany, Serbia and Australia. It reached the round of 16 where it played the United States, winning 2–1 in extra time to become the third African nation to reach the World Cup quarter-finals. It then lost to Uruguay in a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals, having missed a penalty kick in extra time after what would have been the winning goal to send Ghana to the semi-finals was prevented by Luis Suárez's handball, who was then shown a red card for his actions.


title: Ghana national football team

text: In 2013 it became the only team in Africa to reach 4 consecutive semi-finals of the CAF Africa Cup of Nations twice, the first time since between 1963 and 1970.


title: Ghana national football team

text: It was sufficiently ranked by FIFA to start its qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in the Second round. It won the group, and in the following round qualified for the 2014 World Cup finals in November 2013, beating Egypt 7–3 on aggregate in a 2-legged play-off. It was drawn in Group G for the finals, where it faced Germany, Portugal, and the United States. It exited in the group stages recording 1 draw and was the only team to not lose to Germany in the tournament.


title: Ghana national football team

text: In the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, it reached the final, to be denied the title on penalties against Ivory Coast. While its 2017 Africa Cup of Nations campaign ended in a 4th place finish - the third one in 4 consecutive editions of the tournament - in the qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup, it finished behind Egypt and Uganda in their final group. At the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, it was eliminated by Tunisia in the Round of 16. In 2021, Rajevac was brought back, and the team ended up failing to win a match at the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations where it lost 2–3 to debutants the Comoros after an André Ayew red card to finish bottom of its group and thus fail to progress beyond the group stage for the first time since 2006. It drew 0–0 vs Nigeria and drew 1–1 in Nigeria to qualify for the 2022 FIFA World Cup on the away goals rule.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Adopted following the independence of Ghana in 1957, the black star has been included in its kits. The "Black Stars"' kits were sponsored by Puma SE from 2005, with the deal ending in 2014.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The "Black Star" kit is used instead of the original gold, green, and red coloured association football kit based on the colors of the Ghana flag. The "Black Stars" have used an all-white and partly black kit which was worn from the years 1957 to 1989 and from 2006 until December 2014.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Between 1990 and 2006 the Ghana national 3 team used the kit in the colours of the national flag of Ghana, with gold, green and red used, as in the team's crest and also known as the Pan-African colours. The gold with green and red kit concept and design was used in the 60s and 70s, and designed with gold and green vertical stripes and red shoulders. An all black second kit was introduced in 2008 and in 2015, Black Stars' gold-red-green coloured kit and all black coloured kit is to be reassigned to the position of 1st and 2nd kits following the induction of a brown with blue and gold coloured Black Stars 3rd kit in 2012.


title: Ghana national football team

text: There is no fixed home stadium. World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations qualifying matches have been played at the Sekondi-Takoradi Stadium in Sekondi-Takoradi, the Len Clay Stadium, Kumasi Sports Stadium and Abrankese Stadium in Kumasi, the Cape Coast Sports Stadium in Cape Coast, the Accra Sports Stadium in the Accra and the Tamale Stadium in Tamale. Some smaller, regional stadia (stadiums) were used in the 2002 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying and 2004 African Cup of Nations qualification qualifying campaigns.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The training facilities and training grounds are located at Agyeman Badu Stadium, Berekum Sports Stadium in Brong-Ahafo, the Tema Sports Stadium in Tema and the multi-functional Lizzy Sports Complex in Legon.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The Black Stars had no official head because of "corrupt" practices by the then president, Kwesi Nyantakyi. and vice-president George Afriyie, with Frank Davis as director of football, and Edward Bawa as treasurer. The Ghana Football Association (GFA) signed a CN¥92.2 million (US$15 million) deal with Ghanaian state-run oil and gas exploration corporation, Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), to sponsor the Black Stars and the renewable contract saw the oil and gas exploration corporation become the global headline sponsor of the Black Stars, with a yearly Black Stars player salary wage bill, following the gold mining corporations Ashanti Goldfields Corporation and Goldfields Ghana Limited (GGL), which had been sponsoring the Black Stars since 2005.


title: Ghana national football team

text: On 28 August 2013, Ghana Football Association (GFA) launched a TV channel and named GFA TV. The channel has the exclusive rights to broadcast all the Black Stars' matches. In November 2013, the Black Stars signed a 2013–2015 CN¥30.6 million (US$5 million) and an additional classified multi-million private bank sponsorship deal with the Ghanaian state-run private banking institution UniBank.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The Black Stars maintain an average stadium match attendance of 60,000+ and a match attendance high of 80,000+, such as in the case of its 2010 FIFA World Cup quarter-final against Uruguay in which was attended by 84,017 spectators.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Ghana's match against England on 29 March 2011 had the largest away following for any association football national team since the re-opening of Wembley Stadium in 2007. The match was watched by 700 million people around the world.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Following the team's appearances at the 2006 and 2010 World Cup tournaments they were greeted by some hundred avid fans dancing and singing at Kotoka International Airport in Accra.


title: Ghana national football team

text: A rivalry is with the Super Eagles, the national team of Nigeria. The "Battle of Supremacy on the Gulf of Guinea" is between 2 of the "most successful teams on the African continent". The proximity of the 2 countries to each other, a dispute between the different association football competitions and wider diplomatic competition for influence across West Africa add to this rivalry. The match between these 2 countries is called the Jollof derby.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Match schedules are broadcast in English as in the case of inter-continental matches and in Akan nationally by Adom TV, PeaceFM, AdomFM and HappyFM. During the scheduled qualification for the 2014 World Cup national broadcaster GTV, a sub-division of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), broadcast to the Ghanaian public home qualifiers with away qualifiers broadcast by the satellite television broadcasting corporation Viasat 1. The friendly match against Turkey in August 2013 was televised by Viasat 1 and the qualifiers for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2018 Inter-Continental Championships are scheduled for public broadcast by the corporations GFA TV, GBC and Viasat 1.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Products including books, documentary films, Azonto dances and songs have been made in the name of the team. These may be intended with commercial motives and are focused on previous and future World Cups or Africa Cup of Nations tournaments.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The following is a list of match results from the previous 12 months, as well as any future matches that have been scheduled.


title: Ghana national football team

text: Since 1957 it has had 32 different head coaches and 3 caretakers. C. K. Gyamfi led the Black Stars to 3 Africa Cup of Nations titles – in 1963, 1965 and 1982 – making Gyamfi the "joint most successful coach" in the competition's history. Fred Osam Duodu led the Black Stars to their 1978 Africa Cup of Nations title; Ratomir Dujković, Milovan Rajevac, and James Kwesi Appiah have led the Black Stars to World Cup qualification. 2 Serbian managers guided Ghana to the 2 first World Cup debuts. The team is being headed by Otto Addo who is the head coach and supported by Chris Hughton, George Boateng and Mas-Ud Didi Dramani as coaches of the senior national team, the Black Stars until the end of December 2022.


title: Ghana national football team

text: The football association of Ghana (GFA) administers national teams at different levels, including 1 for the local national team. The team is restricted to players who only play in the local league, thus the Ghana Premier League. It is nicknamed "Local Black Stars".


title: Ghana national football team

text: Ghana have qualified for 4 FIFA World Cup tournaments; 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2022. In 2006, it was the only African side to advance to the second round of the World Cup in Germany, and was the 6th nation in a row from Africa to progress beyond the group stages of the World Cup. It had the youngest team in the 2006 edition with an average age of 23 years and 352 days, and were praised for their improving performance. FIFA ranked it 13th out of the 32 countries who competed in the tournament.


title: Ghana national football team

text: In the 2010 World Cup, it progressed beyond the group stages of the World Cup in South Africa, and reached the quarter-finals where it was eliminated by Uruguay. It was defeated on penalty shootout after Luis Suárez hand-balled on the goal line into extra time, preventing a possible winning goal. Of the 32 countries that participated in the 2010 edition, FIFA ranked it 7th.


title: Ghana national football team

text: After beating Egypt 7–3 on aggregate in November 2013, it qualified for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. It was drawn in Group G with Germany, United States and Portugal. For the first time, it fell in the group stage, tying Germany 2–2 and


title: Ghana national football team

text: It has won the Africa Cup of Nations 4 times – in 1963, 1965, 1978, and 1982 – bettered by Cameroon and Egypt. As the first winner of 3 Nations Cup tournaments, it obtained the right to permanently hold the trophy in 1978. It qualified for the tournament 23 times, finishing as runners-up 5 times, third once, and 4th 4 times. Thus, Ghana has the second-most final game appearances at the tournament behind Egypt (who has 10) with 9. It holds the record of most consecutive semi-final appearances, with 6 straight between 2008 and 2017.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The Spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Leone's films and other core Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticized, or even "demythologized" many of the conventions of traditional U.S. Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: According to veteran Spaghetti Western actor Aldo Sambrell, the phrase "Spaghetti Western" was coined by Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez in reference to the Italian food spaghetti. Spaghetti Westerns are also known as Italian Westerns or, primarily in Japan, Macaroni Westerns. In Italy, the genre is typically referred to as western all'italiana (Italian-style Western). Italo-Western is also used, especially in Germany.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The term Eurowesterns has been used to broadly refer to all non-Italian Western movies from Europe, including the West German Winnetou films or the Eastern Bloc Red Western films. Paella Western has been used to refer to Western films produced in Spain, taking its name from the Spanish rice dish.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The majority of the films in the Spaghetti Western genre were actually international co-productions between Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, or the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: These movies were originally released in Italian or with Italian dubbing, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most "western all'italiana" do not have an official dominant language.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, and (sometimes) West German and American actors.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Most Spaghetti Westerns filmed between 1964 and 1978 were made on low budgets and shot at Cinecittà studios and various locations around southern Italy and Spain. Many of the stories take place in the dry landscapes of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, hence common filming locations were the Tabernas Desert and the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, an area of volcanic origin known for its wide sandy beaches, both of which are in the Province of Almería in southeastern Spain. Some sets and studios built for Spaghetti Westerns survive as theme parks, such as Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone, and continue to be used as film sets. Other filming locations used were in central and southern Italy, such as the parks of Valle del Treja (between Rome and Viterbo), the area of Camposecco (next to Camerata Nuova, characterized by a karst topography), the hills around Castelluccio, the area around the Gran Sasso mountain, and the Tivoli's quarries and Sardinia. "God's Gun" was filmed in Israel.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. The Lumière brothers made their first public screening of films in 1895 and already in 1896 Gabriel Veyre shot "Repas d'Indien" ("Indian Banquet") for them. Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in the French horse country of Camargue 1911–12.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In Italy, the American West as a dramatic setting for spectacles goes back at least as far as Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera "La fanciulla del West" (“The Girl of the West”) it is sometimes considered to be the first Spaghetti Western.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The first Western movie made in Italy was "La voce del sangue" produced by Turin's film studio Itala Film (1910). In 1913 appeared "La vampira Indiana"—a combination of Western and vampire film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Waleran in the title role as Indian princess Fatale. The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickok films, while the Germans released back-woods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one attracting most attention is probably Luis Trenker's "Der Kaiser von Kalifornien" (1936), about John Sutter. Another Italian western was "Girl of the Golden West" (1942). The film's title alludes to the opera "The Girl of the Golden West" by Giacomo Puccini, but is not an adaptation of it. It was one of only a handful of Westerns to be made during the silent and Fascist eras. Forerunners of the genre was also Giorgio Ferroni's "Il fanciullo del West" ("The Boy in the West", 1943) and Fernando Cerchio's "Il bandolero stanco" (1952), starring respectively Erminio Macario and Renato Rascel.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: After the Second World War, there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy or musical comedy. A cycle of Western comedies was initiated in 1959 with "La sceriffa" and "Il terrore dell’Oklahoma", followed by other films starring comedy specialists like Walter Chiari, Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello or Fernandel. An Italian critic has compared these comedies to American Bob Hope vehicles.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The first American-British western filmed in Spain was "The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw" (1958), directed by Raoul Walsh. It was followed in 1961 by "Savage Guns", a British-Spanish western, again filmed in Spain. This marked the beginning of Spain as a suitable film shooting location for any kind of European western. In 1961 an Italian company co-produced the French "Taste of Violence", with a Mexican Revolution theme. In 1963, three non-comedy Italo-Spanish westerns were produced: "Gunfight at Red Sands", "Implacable Three" and "Gunfight at High Noon".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In 1965, Bruno Bozzetto released his traditionally animated feature film "West and Soda", a Western parody with a marked Spaghetti Western-theme; despite having been released a year after Sergio Leone's seminal Spaghetti Western "A Fistful of Dollars", development of "West and Soda" actually began a year earlier than "Fistful"'s and lasted longer, mainly because of the use of more time-demanding animation over regular acting. For this reason, Bozzetto himself claims to have invented the Spaghetti Western genre.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns (or other Westerns in general) one cannot say which one of the films mentioned so far was the first Spaghetti Western. However, 1964 saw the breakthrough of this genre, with more than twenty productions or co-productions from Italian companies, and more than half a dozen Westerns by Spanish or Spanish/American companies. Furthermore, by far the most commercially successful of this lot was Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars". It was the innovations in cinematic style, music, acting and story of Leone's first Western that decided that Spaghetti Westerns became a distinct subgenre and not just a number of films looking like American Westerns.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In this seminal film, Leone used a distinct visual style with large face close ups to tell the story of a hero entering a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are non-existent. The hero betrays and plays the gangs against one another in order to make money. He then uses his cunning and exceptional weapons skill to assist a family threatened by both gangs. His treachery is exposed and he is severely beaten, but in the end, he defeats the remaining gang. The interactions in this story range between cunning and irony (the tricks, deceits, unexpected actions and sarcasm of the hero) on the one hand, and pathos (terror and brutality against defenseless people and against the hero after his double-cross has been revealed) on the other. Ennio Morricone's innovative score expresses a similar duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments on the one hand and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes on the other. Another important novelty was Clint Eastwood's performance as the man with no name—an unshaven, sarcastic, insolent Western antihero set on his own gain, with distinct visuals to boot—the squint, the cigarillo, the poncho.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The Spaghetti Western was born, flourished and faded in a highly commercial production environment. The Italian "low" popular film production was usually low-budget and low-profit, and the easiest way to success was imitating a proven success. When the typically low-budget production "A Fistful of Dollars" turned into a remarkable box office success, the industry eagerly lapped up its innovations. Most succeeding Spaghetti Westerns tried to get a ragged, laconic hero with superhuman weapon skill, preferably one who looked like Clint Eastwood: Franco Nero, John Garko and Terence Hill started out that way; Anthony Steffen and others stayed that way all their Spaghetti Western careers.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Whoever the hero was, he would join an outlaw gang to further his own secret agenda, as in "A Pistol for Ringo", "Blood for a Silver Dollar", "Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold", "Renegade Riders" and others, while "Beyond the Law" instead has a bandit infiltrate society and become a sheriff. There would be a flamboyant Mexican bandit (Gian Maria Volonté from "A Fistful of Dollars", otherwise Tomas Milian or most often Fernando Sancho) and a grumpy old man—more often than not an undertaker, to serve as sidekick for the hero. For love interest, rancher's daughters, schoolmarms and barroom maidens were overshadowed by young Latin women desired by dangerous men, where actresses like Nicoletta Machiavelli or Rosalba Neri carried on Marianne Koch's role of Marisol in the Leone film. The terror of the villains against their defenseless victims became just as ruthless as in "A Fistful of Dollars", or more, and their brutalization of the hero when his treachery is disclosed became just as merciless, or more—just like the cunning used to secure the latter's retribution.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In the beginning some films mixed some of these new devices with the borrowed US Western devices typical for most of the 1963–64 Spaghetti Westerns. For example, in Sergio Corbucci's "Minnesota Clay" (1964) that appeared two months after "A Fistful of Dollars", an American style "tragic gunfighter" hero confronts two evil gangs, one Mexican and one Anglo, and (just as in "A Fistful of Dollars") the leader of the latter is the town sheriff.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In the same director's "Johnny Oro" (1966) a traditional Western sheriff and a mixed-race bounty killer are forced into an uneasy alliance when Mexican bandits and Native Americans together assault the town. In "A Pistol for Ringo" a traditional sheriff commissions a money-oriented hero played by Giuliano Gemma (as deadly but with more pleasing manners than Eastwood's character) to infiltrate a gang of Mexican bandits whose leader is played typically by Fernando Sancho.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Just like Leone's first Western, the following works in his Dollars Trilogy — "For a Few Dollars More" (1965) and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966) — strongly influenced the further developments of the genre, as did Sergio Corbucci's "Django" and Enzo Barboni's two Trinity films, as well as some other successful Spaghetti Westerns.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: After 1965 when Leone's second Western "For a Few Dollars More" brought a larger box office success, the profession of bounty hunter became the choice of occupation of Spaghetti Western heroes in films like "Arizona Colt", "Vengeance Is Mine", "Ten Thousand Dollars for a Massacre", "The Ugly Ones", "Dead Men Don't Count" and "Any Gun Can Play". In "The Great Silence" and "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die", the heroes instead fight bounty killers. During this era, many heroes and villains in Spaghetti Westerns began carrying a musical watch, after its ingenious use in "For a Few Dollars More".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Spaghetti Westerns also began featuring a pair of different heroes. In Leone's film Eastwood's character is an unshaven bounty hunter, dressed similarly to his character in "A Fistful of Dollars", who enters an unstable partnership with Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), an older bounty killer who uses more sophisticated weaponry and wears a suit, and in the end turns out to also be an avenger. In the following years there was a deluge of Spaghetti Westerns with a pair of heroes with (most often) conflicting motives. Examples include: a lawman and an outlaw ("And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave"), an army officer and an outlaw ("Bury Them Deep"), an avenger and a (covert) army officer ("The Hills Run Red"), an avenger and a (covert) guilty party ("Viva! Django" aka "W Django!"), an avenger and a con-man ("The Dirty Outlaws"), an outlaw posing as a sheriff and a bounty hunter ("Man With the Golden Pistol" aka "Doc, Hands of Steel") and an outlaw posing as his twin and a bounty hunter posing as a sheriff ("A Few Dollars for Django").


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The theme of age in "For a Few Dollars More", where the younger bounty killer learns valuable lessons from his more experienced colleague and eventually becomes his equal, is taken up in "Day of Anger" and "Death Rides a Horse". In both cases Lee Van Cleef carries on as the older hero versus Giuliano Gemma and John Phillip Law, respectively.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: One variant of the hero pair was a revolutionary Mexican bandit and a mostly money-oriented American from the United States frontier. These films are sometimes called Zapata Westerns. The first was Damiano Damiani's "A Bullet for the General" and then followed Sergio Sollima's trilogy: "The Big Gundown", "Face to Face" and "Run, Man, Run".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Sergio Corbucci's "The Mercenary" and "Compañeros" also belong here, as does "Tepepa" by Giulio Petroni—among others. Many of these films enjoyed both good takes at the box office and attention from critics. They are often interpreted as a leftist critique of the typical Hollywood handling of the Mexican Revolution, and of imperialism in general.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" there is still the scheme of a pair of heroes vs. a villain but it is somewhat relaxed, as here all three parties were driven by a money motive. In subsequent films like "Any Gun Can Play" (which's Italian title, ""Vado... l'ammazzo e torno"", is itself a quote from Leone's masterpiece), "One Dollar Too Many" and "Kill Them All and Come Back Alone" several main characters repeatedly form alliances and betray each other for monetary gain.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: "Sabata" and "If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death", directed by Gianfranco Parolini, introduce into similar betrayal environments a kind of hero molded on the Mortimer character from "For a Few Dollars More", only without any vengeance motive and with more outrageous trick weapons. Fittingly enough Sabata is portrayed by Lee Van Cleef himself, while John Garko plays the very similar Sartana protagonist. Parolini made some more Sabata movies while Giuliano Carnimeo made a whole series of Sartana films with Garko.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Beside the first three Spaghetti Westerns by Leone, a most influential film was Sergio Corbucci's "Django" starring Franco Nero. Django was one of the most violent Spaghetti Westerns. The titular character is torn between several motives – money or revenge – and his choices bring misery to him and to a woman close to him. Indicative of this film's influence on the Spaghetti Western style, "Django" is the hero's name in a plenitude of subsequent westerns.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Even though his character is not named Django, Franco Nero brings a similar ambience to "Texas, Adios" and "Massacre Time" where the hero must confront surprising and dangerous family relations. Similar "prodigal son" stories followed, including "Chuck Moll", "Keoma", "The Return of Ringo", "The Forgotten Pistolero", "One Thousand Dollars on the Black", "Johnny Hamlet" and also "Seven Dollars on the Red".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Another type of wronged hero is set up and must clear himself from accusations. Giuliano Gemma starred in a series of successful films carrying this theme – "Adiós gringo", "For a Few Extra Dollars", "Long Days of Vengeance", "Wanted", and to some extent "Blood for a Silver Dollar – "where most often his character is called "Gary".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The wronged hero who becomes an avenger appears in many Spaghetti Westerns. Among the more commercially successful films with a hero dedicated to vengeance – "For a Few Dollars More", "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Today We Kill... Tomorrow We Die!", "A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die", "Death Rides a Horse", "Django, Prepare a Coffin", "The Deserter", "Hate for Hate", "Halleluja for Django – "those with whom he cooperates typically have conflicting motivations.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In 1968, the wave of Spaghetti Westerns reached its crest, comprising one-third of the Italian film production, only to collapse to one-tenth in 1969. However, the considerable box office success of Enzo Barboni's "They Call Me Trinity" and the pyramidal one of its follow-up "Trinity Is Still My Name" gave Italian filmmakers a new model to emulate. The main characters were played by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who had already cooperated as hero pair in earlier Spaghetti Westerns "God Forgives... I Don't!", "Boot Hill" and "Ace High" directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. The humor started in those movies already, with scenes with comedy fighting, but the Barboni films became burlesque comedies. They feature the quick but lazy Trinity (Hill) and his big, strong and irritable brother Bambino (Spencer).


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The stories lampoon stereotypical Western characters such as diligent farmers, lawmen and bounty hunters. There was a wave of Trinity-inspired films with quick and strong heroes, the former kind often called Trinity or perhaps coming from "a place called Trinity", and with no or few killings. Because the two model stories contained religious pacifists to account for the absence of gunplay, all the successors contained religious groups or at least priests, sometimes as one of the heroes.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The music for the two Trinity westerns (composed by Franco Micalizzi and Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, respectively) also reflected the change into a lighter and more sentimental mood. The Trinity-inspired films also adopted this less serious and often maligned style.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Some critics deplore these post-Trinity films and their soundtracks as a degeneration of the "real" Spaghetti Westerns. Indeed, Hill's and Spencer's skillful use of body language was a hard act to follow and it is significant that the most successful of the post-Trinity films featured Hill ("Man of the East", "A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe"), Spencer ("It Can Be Done Amigo") and a pair of Hill/Spencer look-alikes in "Carambola". Spaghetti Western old hand Franco Nero also worked in this subgenre with "Cipolla Colt" and Tomas Milian plays an outrageous "quick" bounty hunter modeled on Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp in "Sometimes Life Is Hard, Eh Providence?" and "Here We Go Again, Eh, Providence?"


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In 1975, Terence Hill still could draw large audiences in the post-Trinity caper story Western "A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe", and the following year Franco Nero achieved likewise as a Django-style hero in "Keoma". However, by the end of the 1970s, the different types of Spaghetti Westerns had lost their following among mainstream cinema audiences and the production had ground to a virtual halt. Belated attempts to revive the genre included the comedy film "Buddy Goes West" (1981), the Spanish-American coproduction "Comin' at Ya!" (also 1981) shot in 3D, and "Django Strikes Again" (1987).


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Some movies that were not very successful at the box office still earn a "cult" status in some segment of the audience because of certain exceptional features in story and/or presentation. One "cult" Spaghetti Western that also has drawn attention from critics is Giulio Questi's "Django Kill". Other "cult" items are Cesare Canevari's "Matalo!", Tony Anthony's "Blindman" and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent's "Cut-Throats Nine" (the latter among gore film audiences).


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The few Spaghetti Westerns containing historical characters like Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid etc. mainly appear before "A Fistful of Dollars" had put its mark on the genre. Likewise, and in contrast to the contemporary German Westerns, few films feature Native Americans. When they appear they are more often portrayed as victims of discrimination than as dangerous foes. The only fairly successful Spaghetti Western with an Native American main character (played by Burt Reynolds in his only European Western outing) is Sergio Corbucci's "Navajo Joe", where the (supposedly) Navajo village is wiped out by bandits during the first minutes, and the avenger hero spends the rest of the film dealing mostly with Anglos and Mexicans until the final showdown at a Native American burial ground.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Several Spaghetti Westerns are inspired by classical myths and dramas. Titles like "Fedra West" (also called "Ballad of a Bounty Hunter") and "Johnny Hamlet" signify the connection to Greek myth and possibly the plays by Euripides and Racine and the play by William Shakespeare, respectively. The latter also inspired "Dust in the Sun (1972)", which follows its original more closely than Johnny Hamlet, where the hero survives. "The Forgotten Pistolero" is based on the vengeance of Orestes. There are similarities between the story of "The Return of Ringo" and the last canto of Homer's "Odyssey". "Fury of Johnny Kid" follows Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", but (again) with a different ending—the loving couple leave together while their families annihilate each other.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Some Italian Western films were made as vehicles for musical stars, like Ferdinando Baldi's "Rita of the West" featuring Rita Pavone and Terence Hill. In non-singing roles were Ringo Starr as a villain in "Blindman" and French rock 'n' roll veteran Johnny Hallyday as the gunfighter/avenger hero in Sergio Corbucci's "The Specialists".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The story of "A Fistful of Dollars" was closely based on Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo". Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone for plagiarism, and was compensated with the exclusive distribution rights to the movie in Japan, where its hero, Clint Eastwood, was already a huge star due to the popularity of the TV series "Rawhide": Leone would have done far better financially by obtaining Kurosawa's advance permission to use "Yojimbo"'s script. "Requiem for a Gringo" shows many traces from another well-known Japanese film, Masaki Kobayashi's "Harakiri".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: When Asian martial arts films started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of Spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting story-lines but rather by directly including martial arts in the films, performed by Eastern actors—for example Chen Lee in "My Name Is Shanghai Joe" or Lo Lieh teaming up with Lee Van Cleef in "The Stranger and the Gunfighter".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Some Spaghetti Westerns incorporated political overtones, particularly from the political left. An example of such a film is "Requiescant", featuring Italian author/film director Pier Paolo Pasolini as a major supporting character. Pasolini's character is a priest who espouses Liberation theology. The film concerns oppression of poor Mexicans by rich Anglos and ends on a call for arms but it does not fit easily as a Zapata Western, as it lacks the typical hero pair of a flamboyant Latin revolutionary and an Anglo specialist.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: "The Price of Power" serves a political allegory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and racism. The movie concerns the assassination of an American president in Dallas, Texas by a group of Southern white supremacists who frame an innocent African American. They are opposed by an unstable partnership between a whistle-blower (Giuliano Gemma) and a political aide.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Though the Spaghetti Westerns from "A Fistful of Dollars" and on featured more violence and killings than earlier American Western films, they generally shared the parental genre's restrictive attitude toward explicit sexuality. However, in response to the growing commercial success of various shades of sex films, there was a greater exposure of naked skin in some Spaghetti Westerns, among others "Dead Men Ride" (1971) and "Heads or Tails" (1969). In the former and partly the latter, the sex scenes feature coercion and violence against women.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Even though it is hinted at in some films, like "Django Kill" and "Requiescant", open homosexuality plays a marginal part in Spaghetti Westerns. The exception is Giorgio Capitani's "The Ruthless Four – "in effect a gay version of John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – "where the explicit homosexual relation between two of its male main characters and some gay cueing scenes are embedded with other forms of man-to-man relations through the story.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In the 1960s, critics recognized that the American genres were rapidly changing. The genre most identifiably American, the Western, seemed to be evolving into a new, rougher form. For many critics, Sergio Leone's films were part of the problem. Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" (1964–1966) was not the beginning of the "Spaghetti Western" cycle in Italy, but for some Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of an American genre.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian Western, describes American critical reception of the Spaghetti Western cycle as, to "a large extent, confined to a sterile debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western." He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, "bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre."


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Pauline Kael, Frayling notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how a film such as Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" (1961) "could exploit the conventions of the Western genre, while debunking its morality." Frayling and other film scholars such as Bondanella argue that this revisionism was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the Spaghetti Western genre as a whole.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In 2007 a retrospective took place, as part of the Venice International Film Festival, which wanted to pay homage to the genre. The retrospective included 32 films:


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Spaghetti Westerns have left their mark on popular culture, strongly influencing numerous works produced in and outside of Italy. In later years there were "return of stories" "Django Strikes Again" with Franco Nero and "Troublemakers" with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Clint Eastwood's first American Western film, "Hang 'Em High" (1968), incorporates elements of Spaghetti Westerns.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: American director Quentin Tarantino has utilized elements of Spaghetti Westerns in his films "Kill Bill" (combined with kung fu movies), "Inglourious Basterds" (set in Nazi-occupied France), "Django Unchained" (set in the American South during the time of slavery)., "The Hateful Eight" (set in Wyoming post-US Civil War), and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (about fictional American actor Rick Dalton sometimes working in Spaghetti Westerns).


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The "Back to the Future" trilogy pays homage to Spaghetti Westerns (especially Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy) on a variety of occasions, most notably in the third film. The American animated film "Rango" incorporates elements of Spaghetti Westerns, including a character (the mystical "Spirit of the West", regarded as a sort of deity among the characters) appearing to the protagonist as an elderly Man with No Name. The 1985 Japanese film "Tampopo" was promoted as a "ramen Western". Japanese director Takashi Miike paid tribute to the genre with "Sukiyaki Western Django", a Western set in Japan which derives influence from both "Django" and the Dollars Trilogy.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: The Bollywood film "Sholay" (1975) was often referred to as a "Curry Western". A more accurate genre label for the film is the "Dacoit Western", as it combined the conventions of Indian dacoit films such as "Mother India" (1957) and "Gunga Jumna" (1961) with that of Spaghetti Westerns. "Sholay" spawned its own genre of "Dacoit Western" films in Bollywood during the 1970s.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: In the Soviet Union, the Spaghetti Western was adapted into the Ostern ("Eastern") genre of Soviet films. The Wild West setting was replaced by an Eastern setting in the steppes of the Caucasus, while Western stock characters such as "cowboys and Indians" were replaced by Caucasian stock characters such as bandits and harems. A famous example of the genre was "White Sun of the Desert" (1970), which was popular in the Soviet Union.


title: Spaghetti Western

text: American heavy metal band Metallica has used Ennio Morricone's composition "The Ecstasy of Gold" from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" to open several of their concerts. The Australian band The Tango Saloon combines elements of Tango music with influences from Spaghetti Western scores. The band Ghoultown also derives influence from Spaghetti Westerns. The music video for the song "Knights of Cydonia" by the English rock band Muse was influenced by Spaghetti Westerns. The band Big Audio Dynamite used music samples from Spaghetti Westerns when mixing their song "Medicine Show". Within the song one can hear samples from Spaghetti Western movies such as "A Fistful of Dollars", "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", and "Duck, You Sucker!".


title: Spaghetti Western

text: Video game studio Rockstar Games utilized aspects of the Spaghetti Western and paid homage to it in their series "Red Dead Redemption" along with its predecessor, "Red Dead Revolver".


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Detroit Lions are a professional American football team based in Detroit. The Lions compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the National Football Conference (NFC) North Division. The team play their home games at Ford Field in Downtown Detroit.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The franchise was founded in Portsmouth, Ohio, as the Portsmouth Spartans, and joined the NFL on July 12, 1930. Amid financial struggles, the franchise was relocated to Detroit in 1934. The team were also renamed the Lions in reference to the city's Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise, the Tigers.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions won four between 1935 and 1957, all prior to the Super Bowl era. Since the 1957 championship, the franchise has won only a single playoff game during the 1991 season and holds the league's longest postseason win drought. While they share the distinction of never appearing in a Super Bowl with the Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, and Jacksonville Jaguars, they are the only franchise operational for the entirety of the Super Bowl era to have never made it, as well as the only NFC team to have not done so.


title: Detroit Lions

text: Aside from a brief change to scarlet and black from 1948 to 1950 instituted by then head coach Bo McMillin, which was influenced by his years as coach at Indiana, the Lions' uniforms have basically remained the same since they moved to Detroit in 1934–silver helmets, silver pants, and either blue or white jerseys.


title: Detroit Lions

text: Glenn Presnell, the then last surviving member of the 1934 Lions, recalled that after the Portsmouth Spartans relocated to Detroit, team owner George A. Richards asked him and his wife to pick the Lions' colors from combinations that included red and white, orange and black, and blue and silver. The Presnells liked blue and silver the best, so Richards selected it. The blue used by the Lions is officially known as "Honolulu blue", which is inspired by the color of the waves off the coast of Hawaii.


title: Detroit Lions

text: There have been minor changes to the uniform design throughout the years, such as changing the silver stripe patterns on the jersey sleeves, and changing the colors of the jersey numbers. "TV numbers", which are auxiliary uniform numbers to help TV broadcasters identify players from the line of scrimmage, were added to the jersey sleeves in 1956. White trim was added to the logo in 1970, with outlines (white on the blue jersey, silver on the white jersey) added to the numbers in 1972; the color arrangement on the numbers on the blue jerseys was reversed in 1982. The silver facemasks became blue in 1984. In 1998, the team wore blue pants with their white jerseys along with grey socks but dropped that combination after the season. In 1999, the "TV numbers" on the sleeves were moved to the shoulders.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 1994, every NFL team wore throwback jerseys, and the Lions' were similar to the jerseys used during their 1935 championship season. The helmets and pants were solid silver, the jerseys Honolulu blue with silver numbers and the jersey did not have "TV numbers" on the sleeves. The team wore solid blue socks and black cleats. The helmets also did not have logos, as helmets were simple leather back then. The Lions also wore 1950s-style jerseys during their traditional Thanksgiving Day games from 2001 to 2004 as the NFL encouraged teams to wear throwback jerseys on Thanksgiving Day.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 2003, the team added black trim to their logo and jerseys. The face masks on the helmet changed from blue to black with the introduction of the new color. In 2005, the team introduced an alternate, black, jersey.


title: Detroit Lions

text: For 2008, the team dropped the black jersey in favor of a throwback uniform to commemorate the franchise's 75th anniversary. The throwback uniform became the team's permanent alternate jersey in 2009, replacing the former black alternate. The Lions officially unveiled a new logo and uniforms on April 20, 2009. The logo was given a flowing mane and fangs, while the typeface featured a modern font.


title: Detroit Lions

text: On February 1, 2017, the Lions announced a new typeface, logo, and the complete removal of the color black from the team identity. While the previous logo was retained, the border was changed from black to silver. The Lions then unveiled the new uniforms on April 13, 2017, which include blue pants for the first time since 1998, and an alternate all-silver uniform; the facemasks also became chrome. The Lions also added the initials "WCF" to the left sleeve as a permanent tribute to William Clay Ford, who owned the team from 1963 until his death in 2014. The sleeve addition replaces the black "WCF" patch on the left breast that was added after Ford's death.


title: Detroit Lions

text: On September 20, 2021, the Lions wore white pants with their road white uniforms against the Green Bay Packers. The white pants, which lacked striping, were previously worn during the "scarlet and black" era in the 1948 and 1949 seasons.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 1934, then team owner George A. Richards, who also was the owner of a major radio affiliate of the NBC Blue Network, WJR in Detroit, the forerunner to today's ABC, negotiated an agreement with NBC to carry his Thanksgiving games live across all of the network's stations. Since then, the tradition of the Lions playing on Thanksgiving has continued uninterrupted.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 2009, the Pride of the Lions was established. The Pride of the Lions is the ring of honor for the franchise's greatest players.


title: Detroit Lions

text: On November 9, 2008, the Lions honored the 75th Season All-Time Team during halftime against the Jacksonville Jaguars. The team was chosen via an online fan poll and selection committee. Bold indicates those elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.


title: Detroit Lions

text: On September 29, 2019, the Lions honored their All-Time Team in celebration of the NFL's centennial during halftime against the Kansas City Chiefs. The team was chosen via fan voting, contributions from the Detroit Lions Legends Community, team executives, and select members of the media. Bold indicates those elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions have had 30 head coaches throughout their franchise history. Their first head coach was Hal Griffen, who compiled a 5–6–3 (.464) overall record with the team of 1930. Wayne Fontes was the longest-tenured head coach in Lions history, serving from 1988 to 1996. The current head coach of the Lions is Dan Campbell, who was hired on January 20, 2021.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions have had several division rivals in their existence. Their oldest rivals are the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers, whom they have faced since 1930. The Minnesota Vikings have been in a division with Detroit ever since their inaugural season in 1961. Another notable longtime division opponent was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (25 seasons from 1977 to 2001).


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions also have a preseason rivalry with the Cleveland Browns, dubbed the Great Lakes Classic. The two teams have been playing for The Barge Trophy since 2002. The Lions and Browns had a solid rivalry in the 1950s, when they met four times for the NFL championship (Detroit won three of the matchups); they have met much less frequently during the regular season since the 1970 AFL–NFL merger due to the Browns' move to the AFC.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions' flagship radio station is WXYT-FM. Dan Miller does play-by-play, Lomas Brown does color commentary, and T. J. Lang is the sideline reporter.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 2015, the team announced that they were moving from WXYT-FM to WJR for the 2016 NFL season, ending a 20-year relationship with CBS Radio. The decision to part with WXYT was reportedly instigated by a demand by the team for the station to fire on-air personality Mike Valenti, who has had a history of making critical comments about the Lions during his drivetime show, as a condition of any future renewal. A CBS Radio spokesperson stated that their refusal was meant to maintain the station's integrity.


title: Detroit Lions

text: In 2015, WJBK took over from WXYZ-TV as the flagship station for Lions preseason games. In 2022, the announcers were Brandon Gaudin with play-by-play, Devin Gardner with color commentary, and Dannie Rogers with sideline reports. Games are produced by Bally Sports Detroit.


title: Detroit Lions

text: Regular season games are broadcast regionally on Fox, except when the Lions play an AFC team in Detroit, in which case the game airs regionally on CBS; however, since 2014, with the institution of the NFL's "cross flex" broadcast rules, any Lions game slated to air on Fox can be moved to CBS. The Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit is always televised nationally. In 2011, the Lions became the last NFC team to play on NBC's "Sunday Night Football" since the network began airing Sunday night games in 2006.


title: Detroit Lions

text: The Lions' winless performance in 2008 and 2–14 season in 2009, coupled with the effects of the Great Recession in Michigan, led to several local broadcast blackouts, as local fans did not purchase enough tickets by the 72-hour blackout deadline. The first blackout in the then seven-year history of Ford Field was on October 26, 2008, against the Washington Redskins. The previous 50 regular season home games had been sellouts. The second home game of the 2009 season in which the Lions broke the losing streak, also against the Redskins, was blacked out locally, as well as the comeback victory over the Cleveland Browns. The Lions had only one blackout in 2010, yet another Redskins game, which the Lions won 37–25. However, in 2015, the NFL suspended its blackout policies, meaning that all Lions games will be shown on local TV, regardless of tickets sold.


title: Detroit Lions

text: Games were also often blacked out at the Lions' previous home, the 80,000-seat Pontiac Silverdome, despite winning seasons and the success and popularity of star players such as Barry Sanders.


title: Detroit Lions

text: On June 13, 2016, the Lions announced their decision to add official cheerleaders to the organization. The team also announced that Rebecca Girard-Smoker, formerly the director of the Detroit Pistons dance team, would be the coach of the cheerleading squad. It marked the first time in over 40 years the team had an official cheerleading squad. The cheerleading squad is a part of the entertainment during football games, and active at community events.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Hades is a roguelike video game developed and published by Supergiant Games. It was released for Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch in September 2020, which followed an early access release in December 2018. It was later released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in August 2021.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Players control Zagreus, the son of Hades, as he attempts to escape from the Underworld to reach Mount Olympus, at times aided by gifts bestowed on him from the other Olympians. Each run challenges the player through a random series of rooms populated with enemies and rewards. The game has a hack and slash combat system; the player uses a combination of their main weapon attack, a special attack, a dash ability, and a magic ability to defeat them while avoiding damage to progress as far as possible. While Zagreus will often die, the player can use gained treasure to improve certain attributes or unlock new weapons and abilities to improve chances of escaping on subsequent runs.


title: Hades (video game)

text: "Hades" was developed following Supergiant's "Pyre", a game in which they wanted to explore procedural narrative storytelling, but due to the nature of the main gameplay, found that players did not play through "Pyre" multiple times to explore this. The roguelike structure of "Hades" gave them the opportunity to tell these branching stories to the player over the course of multiple runs.


title: Hades (video game)

text: A commercial and critical success, "Hades" received universal acclaim for its gameplay, art direction, music, narrative and characters and sold over one million copies. It is considered to be one of the best video games of 2020, and was named game of the year from several award ceremonies and media publications. A sequel, "Hades II", was announced in 2022.


title: Hades (video game)

text: The player takes the role of Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, who is trying to escape the realm to get away from his unloving father, Hades, and reach his mother Persephone in the mortal world. His quest is supported by the other Olympians, who grant him gifts to help fight the beings that protect the exit from the Underworld. He is also helped on his quest by notorious residents of the Underworld, such as Sisyphus, Eurydice, or Patroclus. The game world is divided between four main dungeons, each representing one of the regions of the Underworld, namely Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx, with each new region being unlocked upon clearing the previous locale.


title: Hades (video game)

text: The game is presented in an isometric view with the player in control of Zagreus. The player starts a run-through of the game by trying to fight their way through a number of rooms; the rooms are drawn from a pool of pre-determined layouts, but their order and the enemies that appear are randomly determined. The game has a hack and slash combat system. The player has a primary attack and a secondary "special" attack depending on their pre-determined weapon of choice (out of 6), a magic "cast" that can be used from long range, a dash providing momentary intangibility and mobility which can deal damage when combined with an attack or boon, and a summon attack that can call tremendous power from one of the Gods. Throughout a run, the Olympians will provide Boons, each of which provides a choice of three persistent boosts and effects for that run that the player can select from. The Boons are themed based on the Olympian; for example, Zeus's boons provide lightning damage effects and Poseidon's provide push-back wave effects.


title: Hades (video game)

text: The player will move through rooms to gradually climb up the Underworld; after clearing a room, the player will be given the room's rewards, allowing them to grow stronger or recover lost health points as Zagreus moves closer and closer to his ultimate goal, however should Zagreus' health points drop to zero while he has no "death defiance" tokens left he is defeated and taken by the river Styx back to the House of Hades, which effectively acts as the game's overworld between attempts. "Hades" features a combination of roguelike and dungeon-crawler elements, where obols and certain types of upgrades are lost upon death and must be collected anew each time, while other types of currency can be used at the House to purchase permanent upgrades that affect all future attempts. After clearing a certain number of rooms in a region, the player will have to fight the bosses of the region to advance to the next, namely, one of the three Furies in Tartarus, the skeletonized Lernaean Hydra in Asphodel, Theseus and Asterius in Elysium, and Hades himself at the very gates of the Underworld.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Between runs, Zagreus can explore the House of Hades before setting on a new escape attempt. Here, the player can use items recovered from run-throughs to impact the meta-game. The player can unlock and upgrade abilities for Zagreus, order construction of new Underworld features that may appear in future run-throughs, or obtain or upgrade new weapons. They can also have Zagreus interact with the various characters of the Underworld and improve his standing with them, which provide narrative elements to the game and may also provide quests with additional rewards. The player also has the option to romance some NPCs as the plot progresses.


title: Hades (video game)

text: As the game progress, the players can manually customize and increase the difficulty of the gameplay by using the Pact of Punishment, which allow the player to add extra challenges or modify some aspects of the game. For example, the Pact can increase the attack power, health or the number of enemies on the run; it can even drastically change part of the gameplay by changing the boss fights, like allowing Theseus to use a machine-gun-mounted chariot or adding an extra phase in Hades' boss fight. By continuously increasing the difficulty, the player can continue to receive rare rewards after the runs, unlock some special decorative items back at the House, and progress certain NPC subplots.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Alternatively, the player can activate a setting called God Mode. This setting makes the player character stronger after every failed run through the Underworld. This means players having difficulty with the game can progress more easily and experience the full story of the game.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Zagreus, the son of Hades, seeks to escape his father's realm in the Underworld. He is aided by his adoptive mother Nyx; the Gods of Olympus to whom he has reached out, and many other inhabitants of the Underworld. Hades claims that no escape is possible, and hinders Zagreus by unleashing the Underworld's monsters on him. As soon as Zagreus is slain, he is revived at the House of Hades at the bottom of the Underworld, which he leaves to begin another escape attempt.


title: Hades (video game)

text: It is eventually revealed that Zagreus wishes to escape the Underworld to find Persephone, his birth mother whom he never knew, having always been told he was the child of Nyx. Hades refuses to even allow her name to be spoken in his House and it is said that unimaginable punishment should befall anyone who disobeys his order. Nyx decides to help Zagreus find the truth about his real mother by putting him in contact with his relatives on Olympus. After reaching the exit to the Underworld and defeating Hades, Zagreus finds Persephone at a cottage in Greece. After a tearful reunion, Zagreus discovers that since he is bound to the Underworld like his father, he will quickly die after reaching the surface. Despite this, he promises to keep escaping the Underworld to spend time with Persephone and learn the truth of her absence.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Over the course of these visits, it is revealed that Hades was "given" Persephone by Zeus as a reward for ruling over the Underworld, with the other Olympians believing that she simply disappeared. The two had a loving marriage, until Zagreus was stillborn due to the Fates having decreed that Hades would never have an heir. Persephone ran away in grief, but refused to return to her birthplace on Olympus, which she disliked due to the constant bickering of the Olympians. Zagreus was eventually brought back to life by Nyx after she made a deal with the Fates. Persephone refuses to return to the Underworld because she fears retribution towards Hades if the Olympians discover the truth about her disappearance. Zagreus eventually convinces her to return by reminding her of the bonds of family, and they are ferried to the House of Hades by Charon. Persephone resumes her duties as Queen of the Underworld and Hades, now with a renewed respect for his son, allows Zagreus to continue his escape attempts under the guise of finding security vulnerabilities in the Underworld.


title: Hades (video game)

text: In an epilogue, Persephone tells Zagreus of her idea of reconciling with the Olympians by inviting them all to a feast in the House. At the feast, they claim that Hades and Persephone eloped and had Zagreus, while saying that due to her having eaten Underworld pomegranate seeds, she can only leave the Underworld a few months out of the year. The Olympians readily accept this explanation, though it is implied they know the truth and simply wish to move on. With everyone reconciled, Zagreus' duties to escape his home continue.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Following the release of their previous game, "Pyre", Supergiant Games was interested in developing a game that would help to open up their development process to players, so that they would end up making the best game they possibly could from player feedback. They recognized that this would not only help with the gameplay approach but also with narrative elements, and thus opted to use the early access approach in developing "Hades" once they had established the foundation of the game. As Supergiant was still a small team of about 20 employees, they knew they could only support early access across one platform, with the intent to then port to other platforms near the completion of the game. Supergiant had spoken to Epic Games and learned of their intent to launch their own Epic Games Store, and felt the experimental platform was an appropriate match with "Hades". Supergiant's decision was made in part due to Epic's focus on content creators, as Supergiant had developed "Hades" in mind to be a game favorable to streamers, which would be benefited through the Epic Games Store. Supergiant anticipated that "Hades" would take about three years to complete, comparable to the development time of their previous titles.


title: Hades (video game)

text: In terms of the game's narrative and approach, the Supergiant team had discussed what type of game they wanted to make next, and settled on a concept that would be easy to pick up and play, which could be played in very short periods, and had opportunities for expanding on after release, driving them towards a roguelike game, which have generally best utilized the early access approach. The roguelike approach also fit well with their past gameplay design goals, where they aimed to continue to add in new tricks or tools for the player that would make them reconsider how they have been playing the game to that point. "Pyre" had been an attempt to create a branching open-ended narrative, but once the game was released, Supergiant recognized that most players would only play through the game once and thus lose out on the branching narrative perspective. With "Hades" established as a roguelike, the team felt the branching narrative approach would be much more appropriate since the genre calls for players to repeatedly play through the game.


title: Hades (video game)

text: For the setting, Supergiant considered revisiting the worlds from their previous games but felt a wholly new setting would be better. Supergiant's creative director Greg Kasavin came onto the idea of Greek mythology, a topic he had been interested in since his youth. Originally, it was planned to name the game "Minos", with the hero Theseus as the player-character seeking an exit from the ever-shifting mazes of Minos. The mazes readily supported the roguelike facets but Supergiant found it difficult to incorporate the branching narrative factors. They also found that Theseus was too generic of a character to fit their narrative.


title: Hades (video game)

text: During a work break, Kasavin researched more into Greek myths and found that Hades was underrepresented in these stories, as the Olympians feared him. This discovery led Kasavin towards having the game centered on Zagreus attempting to escape from Hades and the Underworld as a more interesting narrative approach. Kasavin compared the gods as "a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in", and that by having Zagreus repeatedly try and fail to escape from Hades, it would provide both the type of slapstick comedy that he felt captured the relationships in this "family", as well as the player experience typically associated with roguelikes where one moment the player may feel invincible only to be quickly defeated and brought back to the start the next moment. The change from Theseus to Zagreus had minimal impact on the game content they had developed to that point, and helped in establishing the gameplay connection to the narrative; Theseus remained in the game but his role became that of a boss character, transforming him to a boastful villain along with a tag-team partner of Asterius the minotaur. The Greek God narrative also informs the benefits that the player obtains as they progress through the game, representing the different powers of the gods, and various gameplay elements such as Trials of the Gods, emphasizing the fickle relationship the gods had with each other. These bits of dialog are advanced with each run through the game, thus making each attempt to escape meaningful compared to traditional roguelikes, which Supergiant felt would help draw more players into the game.


title: Hades (video game)

text: In contrast to "Bastion" and "Transistor", which were more linear games and thus had more control over how the player progressed, "Hades" presented the challenge of writing dialog for the multitude of routes the player could progress in the game. Kasavin and his writers drafted out about ten hours' worth of dialog between Zagreus and the non-player characters based on a large number of potential chained events that could happen to the player. For example, while in a run, the player may encounter Eurydice, and on return to the main hub after failing the run, meet Eurydice's husband Orpheus, who, because of that prior meeting, asks the player to deliver a message to Eurydice the next time they encounter her. These dialog events also tied into improvements at the hub once the player saw through the chain of events.


title: Hades (video game)

text: Supergiant remained committed to honoring the Greek mythology throughout the game. The game's art, primarily by in-house artist Jen Zee, show all of the Olympians as attractive with tasteful homage to the "heroic nudity" of ancient Greek art, according to Kasavin. The game also explores the diverse sexuality that was implied by the Greek myths; Zagreus is bisexual and in certain routes polyamorous, while one side narrative explores the gay relationship between Achilles and Patroclus.


title: Hades (video game)

text: During the development process of "Hades", Supergiant decided to rewrite their custom game engine to provide better game performance and better cross platform support. Their original engine, which was written in C# and used the Microsoft XNA framework, had been used by the studio for all of their games since "Bastion". While making "Hades", due the technical limitations and difficulties of hardware porting and other performance aspects, Supergiant decided to rewrite their engine using C++ based on the framework The Forge to benefit from the increased performance that native code provides.


title: Hades (video game)

text: "Hades" was announced at The Game Awards 2018 on December 6, 2018, and confirmed as one of the first third-party titles to be offered on the newly-announced Epic Games Store. According to Geoff Keighley, the host and organizer of the Game Awards show, Supergiant's Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin approached him at the 2018 D.I.C.E. Summit in February about "Hades" and their intention to release it as an early access title on the same day of the Game Awards. "Hades" was a timed-exclusive on the Epic Games Store, later releasing for Steam on December 10, 2019. Supergiant officially released the game out of early access on September 17, 2020, coinciding with the release on the Nintendo Switch platform. Though cross-save between the Windows and Switch version had been planned at that point, Supergiant had to put this off until a patch that was released in December 2020, with crosssaving enabled through the Epic Games Store account platform.


title: Hades (video game)

text: A physical Nintendo Switch release of Hades was released on March 19, 2021. Ports for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S were released on August 13, 2021.


title: Hades (video game)

text: "Hades" received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator Metacritic. Critics praised "Hades" for its story, characters, gameplay and soundtrack. "IGN" praised the characters, writing that they each "[felt] like an authentic reinterpretation of a classic Greek myth...they're all a joy to behold." "The Guardian" liked art director Jen Zee's work on the game, particularly her portraits of the characters, calling them "wonderfully drawn" and "with appropriate godlike profiles." Jordan Devore of "Destructoid" enjoyed the story, feeling the dialogue made use of its non-linear nature "without coming across as artificial or "game-y"". "Game Informer"s Matt Miller felt that "the combat is fast-paced and challenging" and there was variety in the enemies Zagreus would face, although Miller thought that the combat could rely on button mashing at certain points. Suriel Vazquez, writing for "GameSpot" felt that the worldbuilding complimented "a robust postgame that... offers even more reasons to play an already entrancing mix of RPG and action combat".


title: Hades (video game)

text: During its nearly two-year long early access period, "Hades" sold 700,000 copies. Within three days of its official release, it sold an additional 300,000 copies for a sales total of over one million.


title: Hades (video game)

text: "Hades" won several awards and honors. At the 10th Annual New York Game Awards, it won in the Game of the Year, Best Music, Best Writing, and Best Acting categories. Several publications considered it one of the best video games of 2020, including "Polygon", "Giant Bomb", "IGN", "USGamer", "Destructoid", "Time", "The Washington Post", "Slant Magazine", and "Entertainment Weekly". It also won the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing, as well as Game of the Year at the 2021 British Academy Games Awards, the 24th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, Gayming Awards, 21st Game Developers Choice Awards and the inaugural Global Industry Game Awards. "Hades" also was the first game to be awarded a Hugo Award as part of a special video games category introduced for the 2021 Hugo Awards, as well as a Nebula Award for its writing.


title: Hades (video game)

text: A sequel, "Hades II", was announced at The Game Awards 2022. The protagonist of the sequel is Melinoë, the Princess of the Underworld and sister to Zagreus, who seeks to defeat Chronos, the Titan of Time, with the aid of the goddess of witchcraft Hecate and other Olympian gods and figures. The game will first be released on Windows in early access in 2023, similar to the first game's original release, with plans to port the game to consoles.


title: Lidar

text: Lidar (, also LIDAR, or LiDAR; sometimes LADAR) is a method for determining ranges (variable distance) by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. It can also be used to make digital 3-D representations of areas on the Earth's surface and ocean bottom of the intertidal and near coastal zone by varying the wavelength of light. It has terrestrial, airborne, and mobile applications.


title: Lidar

text: "Lidar" is an acronym of "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging". It is sometimes called 3-D laser scanning, a special combination of 3-D scanning and laser scanning.


title: Lidar

text: Lidar is commonly used to make high-resolution maps, with applications in surveying, geodesy, geomatics, archaeology, geography, geology, geomorphology, seismology, forestry, atmospheric physics, laser guidance, airborne laser swath mapping (ALSM), and laser altimetry. It is also used in control and navigation for some autonomous cars and for the helicopter Ingenuity on its record-setting flights over the terrain of Mars.


title: Lidar

text: Under the direction of Malcolm Stitch, the Hughes Aircraft Company introduced the first lidar-like system in 1961, shortly after the invention of the laser. Intended for satellite tracking, this system combined laser-focused imaging with the ability to calculate distances by measuring the time for a signal to return using appropriate sensors and data acquisition electronics. It was originally called "Colidar" an acronym for "coherent light detecting and ranging," derived from the term "radar", itself an acronym for "radio detection and ranging". All laser rangefinders, laser altimeters and lidar units are derived from the early colidar systems. The first practical terrestrial application of a colidar system was the "Colidar Mark II", a large rifle-like laser rangefinder produced in 1963 which had a range of 7 miles and an accuracy of 15 feet, to be used for military targeting. The first mention of lidar as a stand-alone word in 1963 suggests it originated as a portmanteau of "light" and "radar": "Eventually the laser may provide an extremely sensitive detector of particular wavelengths from distant objects. Meanwhile, it is being used to study the moon by 'lidar' (light radar) ..."


title: Lidar

text: Lidar's first applications were in meteorology, for which the National Center for Atmospheric Research used it to measure clouds and pollution. The general public became aware of the accuracy and usefulness of lidar systems in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission, when astronauts used a laser altimeter to map the surface of the moon.


title: Lidar

text: Although the English language no longer treats "radar" as an acronym, (i.e., uncapitalized), the word "lidar" was capitalized as "LIDAR" or "LiDAR" in some publications beginning in the 1980s. No consensus exists on capitalization. Various publications refer to lidar as "LIDAR", "LiDAR", "LIDaR", or "Lidar". The USGS uses both "LIDAR" and "lidar", sometimes in the same document; the "New York Times" predominantly uses "lidar" for staff-written articles, although contributing news feeds such as Reuters may use Lidar.


title: Lidar

text: Lidar uses ultraviolet, visible, or near infrared light to image objects. It can target a wide range of materials, including non-metallic objects, rocks, rain, chemical compounds, aerosols, clouds and even single molecules. A narrow laser beam can map physical features with very high resolutions; for example, an aircraft can map terrain at resolution or better.


title: Lidar

text: The essential concept of lidar was originated by EH Synge in 1930, who envisaged the use of powerful searchlights to probe the atmosphere. Indeed, lidar has since been used extensively for atmospheric research and meteorology. Lidar instruments fitted to aircraft and satellites carry out surveying and mapping – a recent example being the U.S. Geological Survey Experimental Advanced Airborne Research Lidar. NASA has identified lidar as a key technology for enabling autonomous precision safe landing of future robotic and crewed lunar-landing vehicles.


title: Lidar

text: Wavelengths vary to suit the target: from about 10 micrometers (infrared) to approximately 250 nm (UV). Typically, light is reflected via backscattering, as opposed to pure reflection one might find with a mirror. Different types of scattering are used for different lidar applications: most commonly Rayleigh scattering, Mie scattering, Raman scattering, and fluorescence. Suitable combinations of wavelengths can allow for remote mapping of atmospheric contents by identifying wavelength-dependent changes in the intensity of the returned signal.


title: Lidar

text: The name "photonic radar" is sometimes used to mean visible-spectrum range finding like lidar, although photonic radar more strictly refers to radio-frequency range finding using photonics components.


title: Lidar

text: where formula_2 is the speed of light, formula_3 is the distance between the detector and the object or surface being detected, and formula_4 is the time spent for the laser light to travel to the object or surface being detected, then travel back to the detector.


title: Lidar

text: The two kinds of lidar detection schemes are "incoherent" or direct energy detection (which principally measures amplitude changes of the reflected light) and coherent detection (best for measuring Doppler shifts, or changes in the phase of the reflected light). Coherent systems generally use optical heterodyne detection. This is more sensitive than direct detection and allows them to operate at much lower power, but requires more complex transceivers.


title: Lidar

text: Both types employ pulse models: either "micropulse or" "high energy". Micropulse systems utilize intermittent bursts of energy. They developed as a result of ever-increasing computer power, combined with advances in laser technology. They use considerably less energy in the laser, typically on the order of one microjoule, and are often "eye-safe", meaning they can be used without safety precautions. High-power systems are common in atmospheric research, where they are widely used for measuring atmospheric parameters: the height, layering and densities of clouds, cloud particle properties (extinction coefficient, backscatter coefficient, depolarization), temperature, pressure, wind, humidity, and trace gas concentration (ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.).


title: Lidar

text: 600–1000 nm lasers are most common for non-scientific applications. The maximum power of the laser is limited, or an automatic shut-off system which turns the laser off at specific altitudes is used in order to make it eye-safe for the people on the ground.


title: Lidar

text: One common alternative, 1550 nm lasers, are eye-safe at relatively high power levels since this wavelength is not strongly absorbed by the eye, but the detector technology is less advanced and so on these wavelengths are generally used at longer ranges with lower accuracies. They are also used for military applications because 1550 nm is not visible in night vision goggles, unlike the shorter 1000 nm infrared laser.


title: Lidar

text: Airborne topographic mapping lidars generally use 1064 nm diode-pumped YAG lasers, while bathymetric (underwater depth research) systems generally use 532 nm frequency-doubled diode pumped YAG lasers because 532 nm penetrates water with much less attenuation than 1064 nm. Laser settings include the laser repetition rate (which controls the data collection speed). Pulse length is generally an attribute of the laser cavity length, the number of passes required through the gain material (YAG, YLF, etc.), and Q-switch (pulsing) speed. Better target resolution is achieved with shorter pulses, provided the lidar receiver detectors and electronics have sufficient bandwidth.


title: Lidar

text: A phased array can illuminate any direction by using a microscopic array of individual antennas. Controlling the timing (phase) of each antenna steers a cohesive signal in a specific direction.


title: Lidar

text: Phased arrays have been used in radar since the 1940s. The same technique can be used with light. On the order of a million optical antennas are used to see a radiation pattern of a certain size in a certain direction. The system is controlled by timing the precise flash. A single chip (or a few) replace a US$75,000 electromechanical system, drastically reducing costs.


title: Lidar

text: The control system can change the shape of the lens to enable zoom in/zoom out functions. Specific sub-zones can be targeted at sub-second intervals.


title: Lidar

text: Electromechanical lidar lasts for between 1,000 and 2,000 hours. By contrast, solid-state lidar can run for 100,000 hours.


title: Lidar

text: Microelectromechanical mirrors (MEMS) are not entirely solid-state. However, their tiny form factor provides many of the same cost benefits. A single laser is directed to a single mirror that can be reoriented to view any part of the target field. The mirror spins at a rapid rate. However, MEMS systems generally operate in a single plane (left to right). To add a second dimension generally requires a second mirror that moves up and down. Alternatively, another laser can hit the same mirror from another angle. MEMS systems can be disrupted by shock/vibration and may require repeated calibration. The goal is to create a small microchip to enhance innovation and further technological advances.


title: Lidar

text: Image development speed is affected by the speed at which they are scanned. Options to scan the azimuth and elevation include dual oscillating plane mirrors, a combination with a polygon mirror, and a dual axis scanner. Optic choices affect the angular resolution and range that can be detected. A hole mirror or a beam splitter are options to collect a return signal.


title: Lidar

text: Two main photodetector technologies are used in lidar: solid state photodetectors, such as silicon avalanche photodiodes, or photomultipliers. The sensitivity of the receiver is another parameter that has to be balanced in a lidar design.


title: Lidar

text: Lidar sensors mounted on mobile platforms such as airplanes or satellites require instrumentation to determine the absolute position and orientation of the sensor. Such devices generally include a Global Positioning System receiver and an inertial measurement unit (IMU).


title: Lidar

text: Lidar uses active sensors that supply their own illumination source. The energy source hits objects and the reflected energy is detected and measured by sensors. Distance to the object is determined by recording the time between transmitted and backscattered pulses and by using the speed of light to calculate the distance traveled. Flash LIDAR allows for 3-D imaging because of the camera's ability to emit a larger flash and sense the spatial relationships and dimensions of area of interest with the returned energy. This allows for more accurate imaging because the captured frames do not need to be stitched together, and the system is not sensitive to platform motion. This results in less distortion.


title: Lidar

text: 3-D imaging can be achieved using both scanning and non-scanning systems. "3-D gated viewing laser radar" is a non-scanning laser ranging system that applies a pulsed laser and a fast gated camera. Research has begun for virtual beam steering using Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology.


title: Lidar

text: Imaging lidar can also be performed using arrays of high speed detectors and modulation sensitive detector arrays typically built on single chips using complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) and hybrid CMOS/Charge-coupled device (CCD) fabrication techniques. In these devices each pixel performs some local processing such as demodulation or gating at high speed, downconverting the signals to video rate so that the array can be read like a camera. Using this technique many thousands of pixels / channels may be acquired simultaneously. High resolution 3-D lidar cameras use homodyne detection with an electronic CCD or CMOS shutter.<ref name="Medina A, Gayá F, and Pozo F 800–805 http://www.opticsinfobase.org/josaa/abstract.cfm?URI=josaa-23-4-800"></ref>