I can think of a few, actually, but a trait of every single
one is that they are almost always rediscovered thanks to some new technology,
and that on rediscovery, the fandom acquires a totally new character, a new
focus, 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 the
pulp 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 were
hungry for content and so their fannish editors looked back to the pulp era for
reprint materials. If you know who Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian are, it’s
because they were revived in the 1960s by new publishers.
Weird Tales was an especially intriguing example of what I’m
talking 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 the
most popular character or writer in Weird Tales? If you answered either
Lovecraft or Conan the Barbarian, you are dead
wrong. The answer is the “occult detective,” Jules de Grandin, created by
Seabury Quinn. It’s almost impossible to find a Weird Tales cover with the
Lovecraft or Conan the Barbarian stories everyone remembers, because Jules de
Grandin 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. Doc
Savage for instance, always had a ripped t-shirt because that’s how Bama drew
him in the 1960s paperback reprint covers. The 1930s covers by Baumhofer and
others drew Doc a bit differently.
And also…well, here’s what Conan looked like to the first
and second generation of fans of his. The furry underwear and horned helmet
came from Frazetta, who at this point, is more responsible for our vision of
what Conan is and looked like than anybody who ever worked at Weird Tales.
Another interesting example of a fandom that came back from
the dead is U.S. fandom for Doctor Who, which came back because of the new
revived series. In the UK, Doctor Who is something many people grew up with or
watched as kids. In the US, Doctor Who only aired on PBS, usually at unusual
hours, and as they were reruns, they were wildly out of taste with what US
fandom 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 episode
average of Battlestar Galactica and others, looked very second rate.
The end result was that the first generation of Doctor Who
fans in the US were extremely…shall we say…dedicated, much like fans of anime they
air at 2 in the morning. That fundamentally changed the character of the fandom
in the US: there were no “normies” who discovered scifi because of Doctor Who. The
harder it is to be a fan, the more eccentric and unusual and dedicated the
fandom ultimately becomes.
I despise and hate fandom rankings, with some fans “above” and others “below,” because contempt for
others based on their fiction of choice is undeserved, but all the same, in the
80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Doctor Who fandom in the US was seen as…well, not
quite furry-level, but something close. If fandoms were drugs, Star Trek and
Wars 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 absolutely
extraordinary 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 of
people who weren’t super-hardcore, since it was something accessible and not on
at 2am on PBS.
I still cannot believe this happened. To see what that looks
like to the old-heads, try to imagine some alternate universe where Disney
remakes Robin Hood, and it becomes a cultural phenomenon, and so everyone
starts identifying as a furry, and all kinds of 20-50 something ladies start
calling themselves furries.
My dad is an old school American fan of Doctor Who from the Tom Baker era.as kids He and his brother would set their alarms,keep the volume low and sneak Doctor Who while my grand parents were asleep
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