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I can think of a few, actually, but a trait of every singleone is that they are almost always rediscovered thanks to some new technology,and that on rediscovery, the fandom acquires a totally new character, a newfocus, it didn’t have before. In other words, the new fandom rewrites history,simply because they’re all new people who weren’t there the first time.
The ultimate example of a fandom that came back were thepulp characters, who were revived thanks to the new invention of the paperback,and the rise of smaller publishers like Ace, Del Rey, and Lancer who werehungry for content and so their fannish editors looked back to the pulp era forreprint materials. If you know who Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian are, it’sbecause they were revived in the 1960s by new publishers.
Weird Tales was an especially intriguing example of what I’mtalking about, as, thanks to the reprint paperbacks, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P.Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard were rediscovered.
Here’s a trivia question: in the 20s and 30s, what was themost popular character or writer in Weird Tales? If you answered eitherLovecraft or Conan the Barbarian, you are deadwrong. The answer is the “occult detective,” Jules de Grandin, created bySeabury Quinn. It’s almost impossible to find a Weird Tales cover with theLovecraft or Conan the Barbarian stories everyone remembers, because Jules deGrandin got the cover almost every single time.
If you asked a fan in 1934 what Weird Tales was, they’d say “oh,that’s the mag that has Seabury Quinn, right?”
The paperback revival reduced characters to iconography. DocSavage for instance, always had a ripped t-shirt because that’s how Bama drewhim in the 1960s paperback reprint covers. The 1930s covers by Baumhofer andothers drew Doc a bit differently.
And also…well, here’s what Conan looked like to the firstand second generation of fans of his. The furry underwear and horned helmetcame from Frazetta, who at this point, is more responsible for our vision ofwhat Conan is and looked like than anybody who ever worked at Weird Tales.
Another interesting example of a fandom that came back fromthe dead is U.S. fandom for Doctor Who, which came back because of the newrevived series. In the UK, Doctor Who is something many people grew up with orwatched as kids. In the US, Doctor Who only aired on PBS, usually at unusualhours, and as they were reruns, they were wildly out of taste with what USfandom wanted (adult, serious scifi shows like Star Trek). Even in the 1970s,Who’s production value, to American eyes used to the $1 million per episodeaverage of Battlestar Galactica and others, looked very second rate.
The end result was that the first generation of Doctor Whofans in the US were extremely…shall we say…dedicated, much like fans of anime theyair at 2 in the morning. That fundamentally changed the character of the fandomin the US: there were no “normies” who discovered scifi because of Doctor Who. Theharder it is to be a fan, the more eccentric and unusual and dedicated thefandom ultimately becomes.
I despise and hate fandom rankings, with some fans “above” and others “below,” because contempt forothers based on their fiction of choice is undeserved, but all the same, in the80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Doctor Who fandom in the US was seen as…well, notquite furry-level, but something close. If fandoms were drugs, Star Trek andWars were marijuana, but something like Doctor Who, in the US, was krokodil given only to super-addicts.
And eventually, I think it’s safe to say that the Doctor Who fandom in the US either died or went into a coma in the 1990s, since there was nothing to keep our interest, so energy dissipated. That happens with something that has no nostalgia value, as people didn’t grow up with it here in the States. You don’t have nostalgia for something that aired when you were 23 and had to watch on PBS in your college scifi club.
When the revival show came around, something absolutelyextraordinary happened: Doctor Who became hip. It was a darling of fandom,mostly because it really was a well done show. And the fandom had lots ofpeople who weren’t super-hardcore, since it was something accessible and not onat 2am on PBS.
I still cannot believe this happened. To see what that lookslike to the old-heads, try to imagine some alternate universe where Disneyremakes Robin Hood, and it becomes a cultural phenomenon, and so everyonestarts identifying as a furry, and all kinds of 20-50 something ladies startcalling themselves furries.
darkheart-despairs https://ift.tt/OSirWDZ
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