What I heard is that whoever was responsible for making the magnificent 7 liked the idea of the seven samurai but didn't think it would have mainstream appeal in America, so they made it cowboys instead.

I haven't seen any of these movies or the anime, but my lecturer went on about it during a lecture at uni for a while (he had a tendency to ramble off...he started off using the magnificent 7 film as an example of something, but when he found no-one had seen it he went on to describe the history [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif[/img])