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Monday Trivia
Jun. 14th, 2010 08:28 amIt occurs to me I haven't said anything re: World Cup yet. I'm not a football fan, but other people's fannishness is often endearing, especially if it's all over the world. Also, a few years ago I my surprise I found myself utterly charmed by a film in which football plays a crucial role, Das Wunder von Bern ("The Miracle of Bern"), which with its strong acting and excellent storytelling was utterly approachable for a football lay person such as myself. (For a review of why you should watch this film on dvd if you missed it in the cinema, see this post.) Since the film's background is the 1954 World Cup, a rewatching would be very timely indeed.
Meanwhile, yesterday in the train I browsed through the Summer2010 SFX, and found myself rolling my eyes and sniggering at the article about Blake's 7 a lot. Why? ( Spoilers for B7 aren't stupid and aren't going. )
The same issue of SFX has an interview with Ron Moore about what he's fannish about, and demonstrates again why despite certain aspects of BSG which infuriated me, I can't stay angry with the man. I mean, other than enduring affection for most of his TNG and DS9 episodes and the part of BSG I really love. You'll recall that for years the media, ESPECIALLY SFX, have been billing BSG as "the anti-Trek" and kept harping on Star Trek by comparison (conveniently ignoring much of ST, I might add), but RDM never played that game or renounced his Trekkish past, on the contrary. When it was 40th anniversary time, he wrote a glowing article for the New York Times, and now in the current Q & A about inspirations, he replies thusly: "(As a child) I sort of graduated from Lost in Space to Star Trek and Star Trek was very, very different. It took the genre seriously, it was what seemed like a real universe, everything fitted together and made sense, and it tackled interesting moral dilemmas every weekk. On top of that it had these fascinating characters at its core, so it was really unlike anything else I saw in television. I grew up fantasizing being on the Starship Enterprise, and then one day I got to walk on the Starship Enterprise, write the stories and sit in the captain's chair and do all sort of things that were childhood fantasies."
(Sidenote: has anyone ever done a study of the "fan-in-charge" phenomenon, because by now there are plenty of compare/contrast possibilities, between old Trekkers like RDM crucially shaping the later Trek shows like TNG and DS9, old Whovians like RTD and the Moff in charge of Doctor Who, and, for good measure, old X-Men fans like Joss Whedon writing Astonishing X-Men?)
He's equally fannish about space per se: "I got into science fiction because I was interested in the American space programme. I watched the Moon landings when I was very young and I was fascinated by space ships and space (...) For a long time as a child I wanted to be an astronaut. My fondest wish was to become a pilot and join the space programme. I was fascinated with all the trappings of NASA in the early '70s, watching the moon landings and the Moon rover, and the news coverage and the magazine articles. I remember writing letters to NASA and drawing pictures of spaceships and sending it to them, and they would send back full colour pictures of spacecraft and shots of the Moon. It was an amazing thing."
See, imagining young Ron drawing pictures of the moon and slightly older Ron, after joining the TNG writing team, using the first opportunity he gets to sit in the captain's chair reminds me of how much the current crop of showrunners are themselves the product of fandoms and "one of us" in both the good and the bad sense. No one is prone to get argumentative about fandom and into "I am right and you are wrong" mode more than another fan. And then there is the tendency to drawn-out WIPs where the plot isn't really mapped out... Still. Nobody said that when there geeks are in charge, this would result in fannish paradise.
Meanwhile, yesterday in the train I browsed through the Summer2010 SFX, and found myself rolling my eyes and sniggering at the article about Blake's 7 a lot. Why? ( Spoilers for B7 aren't stupid and aren't going. )
The same issue of SFX has an interview with Ron Moore about what he's fannish about, and demonstrates again why despite certain aspects of BSG which infuriated me, I can't stay angry with the man. I mean, other than enduring affection for most of his TNG and DS9 episodes and the part of BSG I really love. You'll recall that for years the media, ESPECIALLY SFX, have been billing BSG as "the anti-Trek" and kept harping on Star Trek by comparison (conveniently ignoring much of ST, I might add), but RDM never played that game or renounced his Trekkish past, on the contrary. When it was 40th anniversary time, he wrote a glowing article for the New York Times, and now in the current Q & A about inspirations, he replies thusly: "(As a child) I sort of graduated from Lost in Space to Star Trek and Star Trek was very, very different. It took the genre seriously, it was what seemed like a real universe, everything fitted together and made sense, and it tackled interesting moral dilemmas every weekk. On top of that it had these fascinating characters at its core, so it was really unlike anything else I saw in television. I grew up fantasizing being on the Starship Enterprise, and then one day I got to walk on the Starship Enterprise, write the stories and sit in the captain's chair and do all sort of things that were childhood fantasies."
(Sidenote: has anyone ever done a study of the "fan-in-charge" phenomenon, because by now there are plenty of compare/contrast possibilities, between old Trekkers like RDM crucially shaping the later Trek shows like TNG and DS9, old Whovians like RTD and the Moff in charge of Doctor Who, and, for good measure, old X-Men fans like Joss Whedon writing Astonishing X-Men?)
He's equally fannish about space per se: "I got into science fiction because I was interested in the American space programme. I watched the Moon landings when I was very young and I was fascinated by space ships and space (...) For a long time as a child I wanted to be an astronaut. My fondest wish was to become a pilot and join the space programme. I was fascinated with all the trappings of NASA in the early '70s, watching the moon landings and the Moon rover, and the news coverage and the magazine articles. I remember writing letters to NASA and drawing pictures of spaceships and sending it to them, and they would send back full colour pictures of spacecraft and shots of the Moon. It was an amazing thing."
See, imagining young Ron drawing pictures of the moon and slightly older Ron, after joining the TNG writing team, using the first opportunity he gets to sit in the captain's chair reminds me of how much the current crop of showrunners are themselves the product of fandoms and "one of us" in both the good and the bad sense. No one is prone to get argumentative about fandom and into "I am right and you are wrong" mode more than another fan. And then there is the tendency to drawn-out WIPs where the plot isn't really mapped out... Still. Nobody said that when there geeks are in charge, this would result in fannish paradise.
