Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Science Fiction Discussion => Topic started by: Listener on July 13, 2012, 02:30:44 PM
-
I'm writing an article that's basically an open letter to kids born in the 2000s whose parents are sci-fi fans.
Other than Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, what are some other fandoms I can try to "explain" parts of to these kids? Anything SF, F, H, or slipstream is fair game; I'll narrow it down once I have a good list.
It doesn't have to just be fandoms, either; it can be meta-things about SF -- I already wrote one chunk about practical effects vs CG.
-
I'm guessing that Firefly can be on this list, and Buffy/Angel. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Terminator movies, the Matrix (why didn't it work, when it's demonstrably better than many other franchises), Futurama, and the Jetsons. :)
Maybe a discussion of how over time our conception of what a future "big bad" would look like was influenced by the Cold War, the space race, our search for life on other planets, artificial intelligence, viruses, gene manipulation, transhumanism...
-
I'm a bit confused by the title of this thread. Are you talking about fandoms future kids won't understand because of cultural/technological changes that would make them unable to understand them? Or fandoms future kids will simply not be exposed to?
-
I'm a bit confused by the title of this thread. Are you talking about fandoms future kids won't understand because of cultural/technological changes that would make them unable to understand them? Or fandoms future kids will simply not be exposed to?
The former.
-
I'm interpreting it as things that have not aged as well, but still have loyal fans. However, the barrier to adding new fans is high. As such I have the following contributions:
Buck Rogers
Space toaster version of BSG
and even older you have Flash Gordon
pre-relaunch Doctor Who
I concur on Buffy/Angel - maybe not now, but it's on the cusp of a decline as the pop-cultural references age.
I have to disagree with devoted on Firefly and Futurama - both of those have had most of their momentum in the last decade. There's still more shelf life there.
Another generalized thing that might have to be explained: filk songs. I think the love of filk in fandom was at its greatest with the aging hippies and has held on through the efforts of fandom veterans with a little buoyancy from novelty acts like Weird Al. However, I see filk as a contracting portion of fandom rather than expanding.
-
In that case, I'm not sure why Harry Potter is on the list - I mean, time will tell whether the series will retain its cultural significance (my guess is yes, and that the novels will becomes part of young readers' fantasy cannon just like The Hobbit and Narnia are now), but the series is almost entirely clear of any content that will be anachronistic in 20 years. The conceits of wizards not understanding technology and of Hogwarts, a school deliberately structured according to a mostly outdated model that is supposed to feel different from the school experiences of the readers mean that I doesn't really matter if a kid read a Harry Potter book when it first came out or in 2020, the effect will be mostly the same.
I agree with some of Devoted135's suggestions - especially, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Matrix really seem to already be moving out of relevance and will probably be rather opaque to tomorrow's children. The Transformers franchise (esp. the TV series) is probably in the same category.
Actually, I think the most obvious category of stories that will be really weird to the next generation is Cyberpunk - the worlds depicted in Cyberpunk will increasingly look either mundane and uninteresting to people growing up with the internet as a fact, or quaint and silly the way many of the 1950s depictions of the year 2000 are. But perhaps because this has been apparent for a while, Cyberpunk fandom is already rather minor as far as cultural relevance in the present day holds.
(edited to make my sentences a bit easier to follow)
-
I weep that my children will never know Voyagers! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyagers!)
-
I'm a movie junkie, and I've spent a lot of time lately comparing originals with recent remakes. Much like original Star Trek, there's a lot of movies whose appearance is too dated for the younger generation to take a look at, and whose subsequent remakes have been so utterly wretched as to erase any lingering curiosity.
I recently screened the original and then the remake of Rollerball for some friends. They were lukewarm on the original until we got halfway through the remake. By the end, they were downright outraged at how horribly the film had been remade, and reall rather liked the original.
Similar micro-fandoms are all over sci-fi... Soylent Green, Logan's Run, a Boy and his Dog are all films regarded as "classics"... and thus never watched.
-
Max Headroom, Videodrome, and anything having to do with network TV takes a bit of explaining for younger generations to understand. Any speculation around broadcast media and the ill effects of television and commercials has completely dated itself at this point.
-
V the original not the reboot. Why didn't the reboot work, other than stopping the series like mid season and waiting so long to restart it, changing the day it was broadcast etc. ABC is becoming the new fox for killing off TV shows.
orginal Battle Star Galactica
others i can think of are more cyclical they come and go and are mostly gaming franchises Dungeons&Dragons, Magic the Gathering, that sort of thing.
-
Max Headroom, Videodrome, and anything having to do with network TV takes a bit of explaining for younger generations to understand. Any speculation around broadcast media and the ill effects of television and commercials has completely dated itself at this point.
And yet, it was all true.
-
TV Shows that were popular when I was a kid but that haven't aged well:
1. Lost in Space
2. The Wild, Wild West
3. UFO
4. Space 1999
5. Land of the Giants
6. The Invaders
7. The Prisoner
These shows all still have fans, but those fandoms run heavily towards people like myself who remember them from childhood. I teach secondary school and my students typically have never heard of any of them.
-
THE PRISONER is still miles beyond most current television (no need for those soap opera paddings) - just did a rewatch about 3 years ago and still got tons more out of it with every viewing - I wouldn't use what the ADD addled internet generations have heard of as a yardstick for anything - they haven't heard of CASABLANCA either, short of some "10 best list" that they consumed merely to name drop...
THE WILD WILD WEST predicted steampunk.
Poor LAND OF THE GIANTS and LOST IN SPACE - the crews of the Spindrift and Jupiter 2 - never to return...
-
Yeah, I agree with Shawn - there's a big difference between "today's kids aren't aware of it" and "today's kids wouldn't get it if they saw it". Prisoner may be dated in some superficial ways (fashions, technology) but story and theme-wise, it's still as relevant today as it ever was. I'm pretty sure that if you could get intelligent teens to watch it, they'd appreciate it as much as previous generations. Lost in Space already felt irrelevant to me when I first saw it in my teens, twenty years ago or so.
-
I'm in the minority here, clearly, but I've never been a fan of The Prisoner. Even as a kid, I found the whole thing to be mostly an opportunity for Patrick McGoohan to wallow in pretention.
As for my "ADD addled internet generation" students, they are neither more nor less intelligent and discerning than that first group I taught in 1985 or those who came after them. Before you scorn them for not obsessing over your favorite old TV shows, remember that these younger people are the ones who have made steampunk a thing (and I wouldn't credit TWWW with giving birth to it, that honor goes to Jules Verne). They have their own TV shows, movies, and such that they follow.
Before we get into "But all the new stuff sucks! Look at the drek like Twilight that is popular!" consider this: My generation obsessed over the original Dark Shadows TV show. Ask anybody in their 50's or so and you'll hear a lot of stories about running straight home from school so as not to miss a minute of an episode. But if you go to Netflix today and watch it, Dark Shadows was crap. Slow moving, badly acted, poorly produced crap. It is, in fact, nearly unwatchable. All the shows I mentioned earlier have a golden glow around them for people who watched them new...I think it has more to do with being young that that the shows were actually that good.
-
I'm in the minority here, clearly, but I've never been a fan of The Prisoner. Even as a kid, I found the whole thing to be mostly an opportunity for Patrick McGoohan to wallow in pretention.
That's a matter of taste. I first saw it in my early teens (when more than 20 years had already passed since it was produced), and it captured my imagination like little else did on television. It's not perfect by any means, but this wasn't a thread about what is good or what is bad, it's a thread about what fiction or shows are stuck in their era and which have staying power. I don't think everyone will like The Prisoner, but I don't think the fact that it's 45 years old is the issue.
As for my "ADD addled internet generation" students, they are neither more nor less intelligent and discerning than that first group I taught in 1985 or those who came after them. Before you scorn them for not obsessing over your favorite old TV shows, remember that these younger people are the ones who have made steampunk a thing (and I wouldn't credit TWWW with giving birth to it, that honor goes to Jules Verne). They have their own TV shows, movies, and such that they follow.
Before we get into "But all the new stuff sucks! Look at the drek like Twilight that is popular!" consider this: My generation obsessed over the original Dark Shadows TV show. Ask anybody in their 50's or so and you'll hear a lot of stories about running straight home from school so as not to miss a minute of an episode. But if you go to Netflix today and watch it, Dark Shadows was crap. Slow moving, badly acted, poorly produced crap. It is, in fact, nearly unwatchable. All the shows I mentioned earlier have a golden glow around them for people who watched them new...I think it has more to do with being young that that the shows were actually that good.
Yeah, I think that was an unfortunate piece of agism/snobbishness from Shawn. I'm probably younger than the students you taught in 1985, and I don't think that the students I teach these days (most of whom are exactly half my age) are any less discerning than I was.
But overall, let me stress again that the question of what was good in its time and the question of what has lasting interest are different questions. Babylon 5 - a show I obsessed about as a teen - was groundbreaking as far as what it did for long-form television storytelling in the 90s. It is also somewhat painful to watch now, 20 years later, when it no longer has the shine of novelty attached to it. That doesn't make 18-year-old me a fool for loving it, anymore than it makes a current 18 year old a fool if they find it dated.
-
But overall, let me stress again that the question of what was good in its time and the question of what has lasting interest are different questions.
I honestly need a clarification here; ideally one that uses examples. I'm at a loss to come up with a show that has lasting interest but that wasn't good whether only in its time or not. I'm going with the idea that by "interest" we are talking about continuing to attract new fans, not just hanging on to some of the old ones.
-
I miss the sci-fi & horror TV rush that went through in the 80s tv...there was so much with Creepshow, Tales From the Crypt, Friday the 13th (the TV show), Bradbury Theater, Twilight Zone, Wonder Works, Amazing Stories, Misfits of Science, The Highwaymen, ST:TNG, X-Files... There were only 4 friggin' networks back then and somehow we managed to have 5x the worthwhile content.
Then in the 90s there was a mini rush with Sliders and Earth2 and Dinosaurs. Okay, probably don't count Dinosaurs, but the dawning of Fox in 1988 both brought a lot of shows unlike anything you had seen anywhere else AND forced the networks to go looking for content to compete. It was such a magical time.
-
Yeah, those were good days. Along with Earth2, Space Above and Beyond was another show I thought was great that was canned before it's time (really, it seems like it was a precursor to the recent BSG). Ditto Harsh Realm.
-
...consider this: My generation obsessed over the original Dark Shadows TV show. Ask anybody in their 50's or so and you'll hear a lot of stories about running straight home from school so as not to miss a minute of an episode. But if you go to Netflix today and watch it, Dark Shadows was crap. Slow moving, badly acted, poorly produced crap. It is, in fact, nearly unwatchable. All the shows I mentioned earlier have a golden glow around them for people who watched them new...I think it has more to do with being young that that the shows were actually that good.
I think some of that also has to do with the nature of watching shows live versus being able to watch whole series at a time on Netflix or DVR or whatever. And it works both ways. A lot of the 80s action shows -- A-Team, Night Rider, MacGyver -- were great when you saw them once and then could forget them and remember just the nostalgic glow afterward. If you try to watch them back-to-back or repeatedly, you have to REALLY be invested for them to be interesting, or even tolerable. On the flipside you have shows like Lost where the week-to-week folks were miserable with having to wait and got more miserable when they discussed the loose ends as they piled up and by the 4th season they were exhausted and disinterested. Personally, I watched all of the episodes in rapid succession as the final episodes were airing and found it intriguing and interesting from start to finish.
Of course, you now also have to consider the growing trend of multi-month breaks between seasons or half seasons with shows like (the original worst offender) The Sopranos, BSG, Walking Dead, Dexter, or Breaking Bad where they're dropping significant chunks of audience every time they take a break, and the idiot execs in charge blame it on the lifecycle spinning out when it's the lag between that's chasing people away.
Timing may not be everything, but it sure accounts for a lot.
-
You are exactly right about the timing. I gave up on The Sopranos a couple seasons before it was done exactly because the long hiatuses (hiati? hiates?) caused me to just lose interest. I still haven't seen those episodes. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are interesting to me because I was able to watch several back seasons in 2 episode-per-night bites. Going months at a time between seasons might well have caused me to give up on them just as I did Tony and his mooks.
(OT aside: I don't read TWD comics, so I'm not interested in how awesome any given character is in them. The last episode I saw of TWD introduced Michonne. She is just so very much a comic book character in that intro compared to the other characters that, right now, she seems egregious enough to make me quit on the show.)
-
I'm in the minority here, clearly, but I've never been a fan of The Prisoner. Even as a kid, I found the whole thing to be mostly an opportunity for Patrick McGoohan to wallow in pretention.
As for my "ADD addled internet generation" students, they are neither more nor less intelligent and discerning than that first group I taught in 1985 or those who came after them. Before you scorn them for not obsessing over your favorite old TV shows, remember that these younger people are the ones who have made steampunk a thing (and I wouldn't credit TWWW with giving birth to it, that honor goes to Jules Verne). They have their own TV shows, movies, and such that they follow.
Before we get into "But all the new stuff sucks! Look at the drek like Twilight that is popular!" consider this: My generation obsessed over the original Dark Shadows TV show. Ask anybody in their 50's or so and you'll hear a lot of stories about running straight home from school so as not to miss a minute of an episode. But if you go to Netflix today and watch it, Dark Shadows was crap. Slow moving, badly acted, poorly produced crap. It is, in fact, nearly unwatchable. All the shows I mentioned earlier have a golden glow around them for people who watched them new...I think it has more to do with being young that that the shows were actually that good.
WWW - I said predicted, not invented. And, just for the record, I have no inherent like of steampunk. In fact, I pretty much avoid it at all costs.
ADD addled - you said (and I followed your lead here) - "heard of" not "liked" as a mark of quality - I did not mention "intelligent" or "discerning", just the fallacy of using "what they've heard of" as a mark of quality. The fact that they've never heard of FINNEGAN'S WAKE affects it's quality not one whit. No "obsessing", either - get your panties out of bunch, already. With the turnover of cram-data sieving into their (our) noggin gullets, "their own TV shows and movies" are likely already being disliked by the next generation micro-segment behind them. Somewhere, some 16 years old is SEETHING with disinterest at CABIN IN THE WOODS. And so it goes (it just gets faster!)
I think it has more to do with being young that that the shows were actually that good
this is, of course, one of the standard definitions of "nostalgia understood as sickness", as the Greeks had it. Anyone who likes things when they are young and grows old has to grapple with it - but it's not a binary argument of good/bad and learning to find out why and in what context things were liked from *even before you were born* is a first step (constantly to be reinforced by thinking and new exposure and more context) and goes a long way towards building the critical skills required to get a real grasp on various art forms as a whole. That's why they show "boring" old silent movies in film school and have students read *boring* old classics in lit classes - because 1/2 of the kids will be bored and walk away but it was never meant to be, and 1/4 will parrot "yes.. this... quality..." (and try to figure out how to use this new name drop to get themselves laid) but that last 1/4 will have the scales fall from their eyes and realize just how beautiful it is... all of it... even the stuff they don't like *personally* (but begin to see the larger context of critical context). Thus, the reason to watch old things.
As for DARK SHADOWS - well, the recent and quite lengthy critical roundtable (including people who weren't born before it went off the air and not just senile old fans) in one of the few genre magazine left out there that has consistent quality writing - VIDEO WATCHDOG #169 (http://www.videowatchdog.com/home/home.html) - might disagree (extremely interesting section in there about how Dan Curtis succeeded in folding in a version of Henry James TURN OF THE SCREW into a story arc during the run of the show). For me, just slightly too young to have known it as something that disappeared right before I would have paid attention (like ASTRO BOY) in retrospect it's an interesting example of how "Women's Gothic" and horror overlapped in the 1970s, the first real attempt at the romantic vampire anti-hero (which succeeded, and then moved to greater popularity under Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Anne Rice), and a wonderful artifact of the last vestiges of the grueling, New York City-acting community-based (nearly) live, (nearly) daily local television production - and it was loved by millions (despite those snickering NPR reports).
But it was a soap opera and, even with that consideration in place, YMMV (I'm no big fan of the soap opera template - even less nowadays that's it's snuck into all major television structure plotting from comic books and then through BUFFY/SUPERNATURAL et. al., to become the way almost all, if not all, genre shows are structured.
My recent re-re-re watch of THE PRISONER was a success, predicated as it was on the using the "No. 6 fails" lens this time. Fascinating how the wonderful acting and writing of the last few episodes transmutes into something quite different when this approach is taken.
Yeah, I think that was an unfortunate piece of agism/snobbishness from Shawn. I'm probably younger than the students you taught in 1985, and I don't think that the students I teach these days (most of whom are exactly half my age) are any less discerning than I was.
Please note above - but I'll cop to being a "snob" ... you'll become one too, in time... and "old" as well... just you wait and see....
-
But overall, let me stress again that the question of what was good in its time and the question of what has lasting interest are different questions.
I honestly need a clarification here; ideally one that uses examples. I'm at a loss to come up with a show that has lasting interest but that wasn't good whether only in its time or not. I'm going with the idea that by "interest" we are talking about continuing to attract new fans, not just hanging on to some of the old ones.
One could argue that Star Trek and Dr. Who are examples. There is still interest in new movies/tv shows some 40 years later, but I can hardly watch some of those early episodes now, due to how bad the special effects are, and better special effects existed when those came out. For example look at the effects in Forbidden Planet and compare to Star Trek. some of the early stories are not badly written, but...
-
get your panties out of bunch, already.
>:(
-
But overall, let me stress again that the question of what was good in its time and the question of what has lasting interest are different questions.
I honestly need a clarification here; ideally one that uses examples. I'm at a loss to come up with a show that has lasting interest but that wasn't good whether only in its time or not. I'm going with the idea that by "interest" we are talking about continuing to attract new fans, not just hanging on to some of the old ones.
One could argue that Star Trek and Dr. Who are examples. There is still interest in new movies/tv shows some 40 years later, but I can hardly watch some of those early episodes now, due to how bad the special effects are, and better special effects existed when those came out. For example look at the effects in Forbidden Planet and compare to Star Trek. some of the early stories are not badly written, but...
I love how the Doctor Who reboot is grabbing many of the elements and aliens from the earlier series and breathing fresh life into them.
-
I have been informed that the term "panties in a bunch" may be perceived by some as sexist - such was not my intention and should certainly not be inferred as such by anyone - as I have no idea of the sex of the poster who the posting was in response to. Please replace with "get in a tizzy". I do not believe this term has any inherent problem as I have heard it applied to both sexes.
I have also been informed that the "ADD" modifier of "addled" would be considered insulting to those who have suffered from ADD, ADHD or other related problems. Unequivocally, this is so and I apologize to all those who have such problems or know people with such problems. There must be a better shorthand for the lack of concentration (and expectation of lack of concentration) currently at work in our culture and I should seek it out. Perhaps just the unmodified "addled" would suffice.
After thinking it over, I've decided that, in retrospect, a quick summation of my actual response to the initial posted question in this thread would be a glib but pithy "all of them" or a cynical but honest "Art & Letters of Civilization from anytime before 5 minutes ago". I just indexed and archived a number of STINGRAY fanzines (the Stephen J. Cannell show, not the Gerry Anderson one) from the 1980s for a University papers collection and NO ONE remembers that show...
-
But overall, let me stress again that the question of what was good in its time and the question of what has lasting interest are different questions. Babylon 5 - a show I obsessed about as a teen - was groundbreaking as far as what it did for long-form television storytelling in the 90s. It is also somewhat painful to watch now, 20 years later, when it no longer has the shine of novelty attached to it. That doesn't make 18-year-old me a fool for loving it, anymore than it makes a current 18 year old a fool if they find it dated.
I just watched B5 about four years ago. While the graphics were painful at times, and the storytelling occasionally dated, overall I loved it quite a lot. Same with Buffy, which I watched right after B5. Great stories are good no matter when you experience them.
-
Yeah, those were good days. Along with Earth2, Space Above and Beyond was another show I thought was great that was canned before it's time (really, it seems like it was a precursor to the recent BSG).
I agree, Dave. Space Above and Beyond was awesome in its day, killed before its prime. The Firefly of the 90's.
-
60s-early 90s anime, apart from shonen Dragonball- or Pokemon-type stuff, and shoujou stuff; especially adult-oriented stuff. Anime has degenerated into several broad categories still persisting: Kids shows and fight-manga adaptations; and girl's anime. These two haven't changed all that much. It's the rest that's gone right up its own ass. You've got maybe one or two series with really mature, complex storytelling per year, then the remainder is veiled pornography, often pedophilic. Like just enough distance that you can maintain a fiction that you aren't jacking to it. There's a gradient between that and girl's anime, of all things.
Anyhow, this transition probably started in the early 90s, and got really fucking creepy in the mid 2000s. Kids growing up now know what anime and manga are. They get it on some level. They may embrace the creepy shit, or reject it, and they may embrace the more literary stuff. But stuff like Robotech/Macross or old Gundam shows, or Galaxy Express and such might be hard to get. They don't fit into modern pigeonholes. They aren't quite as "deep" as Ghost in the Shell or Berserk or Planetes or Kaiji or whatever, and they clearly aren't strictly for kids, and they aren't pseudoporn. They might have some appeal, but the visuals are mostly pretty terrible by modern standards, so they might never sit through it to get to the core of what appealed to us old people.
-
just thought of this one after posting Ultraman to the picture association thread. There is the sad derivative that is power rangers but...
-
One could argue that Star Trek and Dr. Who are examples. There is still interest in new movies/tv shows some 40 years later, but I can hardly watch some of those early episodes now, due to how bad the special effects are, and better special effects existed when those came out. For example look at the effects in Forbidden Planet and compare to Star Trek. some of the early stories are not badly written, but...
Remember that Forbidden Planet was a movie, with a dramatically different budget and schedule than a TV series. I think it's a characteristic of the "analog world" that the gradient from "something slammed together on a schedule" and "true state of the art" is a lot greater than it is now.