legally murky until 1912, so despite the film's Library of Congress registration, unauthorized remakes and adaptations could be made with impunity.) Porter himself directed a 1905 parody of the film, The Little Train Robbery, with children robbing candy and dolls from a miniature railroad car. But despite its wide success and imitators, The Great Train Robbery did not lead to a significant increase in Western films; instead, the genre continued essentially as it had before, in a scattered mix of short actualities and longer stories. The Western genre would not proliferate in earnest until 1908; one of the leading contributors to this boom was G. M. Anderson, now billed as Broncho Billy Anderson. Porter continued to make films for more than a decade after, usually in a similar editing style to The Great Train Robbery, with few additional technical innovations. One historian commented that later efforts like The Count of Monte Cristo (1913) were "if anything a retrogression from The Great Train Robbery and had less innate cinema sense." However, some of Porter's post-Robbery works continued to be imaginative in content, including The Kleptomaniac, a notable 1905 social justice film. Legacy In the decades after The Great Train Robbery, various inaccurate legends developed, exaggerating its historical significance. By mid-century, mistaken claims that it was the "first Western" or even the "first story film" were common. Critiquing these inaccurate legends and citing the film's actual lack of impact on the Western genre, historian Scott Simmon comments that in fact the film's "main surprise in retrospect is how it led nowhere, either for its creator or the genre, beyond serving loosely as a narrative model for gun-wielding crime and horse-chase retribution." Claims about historical priority continued to be repeated by general-audience writers into the early twenty-first century. Later film critics, abandoning the exaggerated claims, have tended to explain the film's significance mostly in terms of its wide popularity and Porter's influential action-driven storytelling. William Everson and George Fenin dubbed it "the first dramatically creative American film", while Robert Sklar praised the film's capacity "to unite motion picture spectacle with myth and stories about America that were shared by people throughout the world." Historians have cited The Great Train Robbery as Porter's most important film, and noted it as a popular early film that collects numerous important Western tropes, such as "elements of fisticuffs, horseback pursuit and gunplay". Film historian Pamela Hutchinson highlights