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now here's where the timeline splits off
Oct. 20th, 2015 11:36 amLook at the date. October 20, 2015. I suppose I should wait until tomorrow to post this, but I'd rather be ahead of myself than behind. And ... I kind of want this post to remain forever behind the "future" as it were.
Everyone in fandom has a gateway story. To be fair to my mother, it's possible mine should be when she had me watching Star Trek TOS and the movies with the original crew in the early 1980s; or when she had me watching Twilight Zone at around the same time. (I never will forget the time she went grocery shopping and I stayed home to watch TZ; it was the hitchhiker in the backseat episode, and it was dark when she pulled up into the carport. I didn't hear her car and somehow, she knew it. Instead of rapping at the door or unlocking it and telling me to get out there and help her carry in bags of food, she quietly pressed her face to the screen window behind me, lowered her voice spookily, and intoned: "GETYOURASSOUTHEREANDHELPMECARRYSTUFFIN." I never recovered enough to watch that episode again without looking behind my shoulder - literally. R.I.P., you mad bitch.)
But I think a gateway fandom is one you come to yourself or find on your own, and mine was Back to the Future. I wasn't able to go see it in theaters in 1985 - hell, I didn't even care about it - but one night in 1986 Mom came home with the VHS that the local video store had just gotten in. She was going to watch it, but was either too tired or didn't have time that evening. "You'd better watch that," she told me, pointing at the case, meaning it had cost her $4.99 plus tax to rent it and it had to be back by noon the next day, so somebody had better get something out of it. So, after she went off to the bedroom at the other end of our small house, I put it in the VCR and hit play.
I don't think I can fully describe what it's like to become immersed in your first obsessive fandom, properly. It might be like really getting into a sports team for the first time, except I've never liked any sports team nearly like I've enjoyed my fandoms - so I'm just going by perceived lateral psychology, here. Do you remember the first time you watched the thing that it is you really, really like and fan over right now? It is a transportive experience. It's the difference between "that was a pretty good movie" and "it just ended, but I need to go get something to drink and come back and WATCH. IT. AGAIN." In fact, I got up early the next morning before school and did watch BTTF again.
The fact I no longer have the friends almost 30 years later in life that I had at that point is probably not because I spent the next week excitedly breaking down the movie for them at every opportunity - over lunch, between classes, waiting for the bus to come in the afternoon, on the phone. Probably. I had no concept of the word "fandom" or the fact I was one, in 1986. My little fandom gained one eventually, when I met another kid who loved the movie as much as I did - we would discuss it, talk about time travel and alternate universes, speculate on a sequel (which was no sure thing at that time, until it was announced in 1988, I believe), and argue about consequences of futzing with the spacetime continuum. We scouted for merchandise in teen and sci-fi magazines - I remember mailing a check to this company in Colorado in 1987 for a DeLorean keychain and pencils. I still use the keychain, and the pencil is almost ground down to nothing from use at work (though it will likely outlive October 21, 2015, by a few weeks) - as well as at any store we could, such as Spencer's, Sam Goody, Waldenbooks, and video stores. (Mom and I trolled one video store for weeks until the manager finally gave in and gave me a motorized VHS box popup from his counter, of Marty McFly. Another store owner sold me his VHS copy after he'd rented it for nearly a year, for $15 - he'd paid $100 for it originally.)
A pattern I've noticed among people who talk about finding a thing they really like for the rest of their lives, or a time in their life when they were influenced by a piece of media or a decision or an event that shaped them significantly, is that they were around 11, 12, 13 years old when it happens. I was 13 and had not found my "thing" quite yet, other than I sort of liked to make up stories. In BTTF I found a genre (sci-fi/fantasy, with a specification on time travel); a favorite actor (actually, I'm still pretty fond of all the actors in this movie, even recognizing players like Buck Flowers in other minor roles); a role model (following Michael J. Fox to his role as Alex Keaton, the overachieving business major on TV, inspired me to raise my grades, earn scholarships, finish university with a high GPA, and plow through the first dozen years of my career with stupid energy - believe it or not); and a desire to write stories that entertained much like Zemeckis and Gale had done for me.
And I think in BTTF, the general public found a relateable portal into sci-fi as well - movies like this and the Star Trek sequels, and TNG on TV a couple of years later helped revive and "normalize" the genre across a wider audience well before the internet came along and finished the job. As I look at Tumblr and other fannish platforms these days and I see the number of other, and much younger, people who are sort of bringing BTTF back as a fandom or have kept it going, rather than think "get off my damn lawn!" I think of how satisfied those who made it must feel that they're remembered and revered (and debated/critiqued ... if you're a fan of Cracked.com). Even poor Thomas F. Wilson, who's had to put up with questions about Biff and the cast so often that he's printed cards to hand out answering all common questions, must realize he was part of something really cool and feel some pride in it.
So come at us, October 21, 2015. After tomorrow, none of it will be in the future any longer ... but still part of an inspiring, dynamic sci-fi history.
Everyone in fandom has a gateway story. To be fair to my mother, it's possible mine should be when she had me watching Star Trek TOS and the movies with the original crew in the early 1980s; or when she had me watching Twilight Zone at around the same time. (I never will forget the time she went grocery shopping and I stayed home to watch TZ; it was the hitchhiker in the backseat episode, and it was dark when she pulled up into the carport. I didn't hear her car and somehow, she knew it. Instead of rapping at the door or unlocking it and telling me to get out there and help her carry in bags of food, she quietly pressed her face to the screen window behind me, lowered her voice spookily, and intoned: "GETYOURASSOUTHEREANDHELPMECARRYSTUFFIN." I never recovered enough to watch that episode again without looking behind my shoulder - literally. R.I.P., you mad bitch.)
But I think a gateway fandom is one you come to yourself or find on your own, and mine was Back to the Future. I wasn't able to go see it in theaters in 1985 - hell, I didn't even care about it - but one night in 1986 Mom came home with the VHS that the local video store had just gotten in. She was going to watch it, but was either too tired or didn't have time that evening. "You'd better watch that," she told me, pointing at the case, meaning it had cost her $4.99 plus tax to rent it and it had to be back by noon the next day, so somebody had better get something out of it. So, after she went off to the bedroom at the other end of our small house, I put it in the VCR and hit play.
I don't think I can fully describe what it's like to become immersed in your first obsessive fandom, properly. It might be like really getting into a sports team for the first time, except I've never liked any sports team nearly like I've enjoyed my fandoms - so I'm just going by perceived lateral psychology, here. Do you remember the first time you watched the thing that it is you really, really like and fan over right now? It is a transportive experience. It's the difference between "that was a pretty good movie" and "it just ended, but I need to go get something to drink and come back and WATCH. IT. AGAIN." In fact, I got up early the next morning before school and did watch BTTF again.
The fact I no longer have the friends almost 30 years later in life that I had at that point is probably not because I spent the next week excitedly breaking down the movie for them at every opportunity - over lunch, between classes, waiting for the bus to come in the afternoon, on the phone. Probably. I had no concept of the word "fandom" or the fact I was one, in 1986. My little fandom gained one eventually, when I met another kid who loved the movie as much as I did - we would discuss it, talk about time travel and alternate universes, speculate on a sequel (which was no sure thing at that time, until it was announced in 1988, I believe), and argue about consequences of futzing with the spacetime continuum. We scouted for merchandise in teen and sci-fi magazines - I remember mailing a check to this company in Colorado in 1987 for a DeLorean keychain and pencils. I still use the keychain, and the pencil is almost ground down to nothing from use at work (though it will likely outlive October 21, 2015, by a few weeks) - as well as at any store we could, such as Spencer's, Sam Goody, Waldenbooks, and video stores. (Mom and I trolled one video store for weeks until the manager finally gave in and gave me a motorized VHS box popup from his counter, of Marty McFly. Another store owner sold me his VHS copy after he'd rented it for nearly a year, for $15 - he'd paid $100 for it originally.)
A pattern I've noticed among people who talk about finding a thing they really like for the rest of their lives, or a time in their life when they were influenced by a piece of media or a decision or an event that shaped them significantly, is that they were around 11, 12, 13 years old when it happens. I was 13 and had not found my "thing" quite yet, other than I sort of liked to make up stories. In BTTF I found a genre (sci-fi/fantasy, with a specification on time travel); a favorite actor (actually, I'm still pretty fond of all the actors in this movie, even recognizing players like Buck Flowers in other minor roles); a role model (following Michael J. Fox to his role as Alex Keaton, the overachieving business major on TV, inspired me to raise my grades, earn scholarships, finish university with a high GPA, and plow through the first dozen years of my career with stupid energy - believe it or not); and a desire to write stories that entertained much like Zemeckis and Gale had done for me.
And I think in BTTF, the general public found a relateable portal into sci-fi as well - movies like this and the Star Trek sequels, and TNG on TV a couple of years later helped revive and "normalize" the genre across a wider audience well before the internet came along and finished the job. As I look at Tumblr and other fannish platforms these days and I see the number of other, and much younger, people who are sort of bringing BTTF back as a fandom or have kept it going, rather than think "get off my damn lawn!" I think of how satisfied those who made it must feel that they're remembered and revered (and debated/critiqued ... if you're a fan of Cracked.com). Even poor Thomas F. Wilson, who's had to put up with questions about Biff and the cast so often that he's printed cards to hand out answering all common questions, must realize he was part of something really cool and feel some pride in it.
So come at us, October 21, 2015. After tomorrow, none of it will be in the future any longer ... but still part of an inspiring, dynamic sci-fi history.
