Took me a bit to be ready to comment on this. That's been happening more and more with so many culturally important individuals. Aaaaand there's a crisis at work so I'll finish later.
https://cnn.it/2OGRxlr

I remember sitting in our living room one Friday evening watching Wild, Wild West when there was a crash to my left.

Someone had thrown a rock at the window at the front of our house; it broke the window right where I was sitting. The glass was stopped by the heavy drapery we had.

RIP, James West.

(It was a group of kids driving around throwing rocks at all of the big windows in our neighborhood. Someone up the street from us got the license plate of the car, the kids were caught, and had to work the following Summer to pay off $3,000 of damage to those windows. Our window was $600 by itself: six feet tall, 14 feet wide, ¼-inch plate glass with a miter on one end to fit with another sheet of glass. It was five feet off the ground outside, and took five men five hours to install.)

Wild Wild West is arguably the most important influence on the Western Steampunk genre. In a market already saturated with Weaterns but in the James Bond era they blended the two genres of spy and westerns into something wholly original. By creating gadgets that could hypothetically fit the era they expanded our narrative of what steampunk tech could be. And the charismatic lead held it all together.