Fandom: We Have No Idea How Good We Have It

[morgandawn]

I am reading old issues of the Star Trek letterzine Interstat and it is the mid-1980s. A fan was complaining that even though the movie studios had lowered the prices of the most recent Star Trek movie on VHS tape to $30, the cost was too high. Before the price reduction, the cost for the first three movies was $79. Each.

In today's dollars, the reduced price would be around $63. The full price for those first three movies would be $172.  When was the last time you paid $172 for a  single movie on DVD?

The 1980s...when torrenting was still only a fannish dream, paying full price was a fannish reality, and fans with  two tape decks and macrovision decryption were Gods.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

it really was uphill in the snow.

Yeah, but when we had to walk up hill both ways...

[charlottechill]

There were a couple of advantages too. (Why yes, I did just get a surge of curmudgeonly ill will toward modernity; maybe it's because at more than one time, we had so many VCRs duping together that the family room looked like a Christmas tree was blinking in there.)

Access to content, on demand? GREAT. Balkanization of fandom, too much intrusion of producers into fannish content, Fifty Shades of Gray. Suuuuucks!

Okay, pollyanna is clearly reasserting herself; there is something beautiful about me feeling as anonymous as I feel, in some fandoms. For example, yesterday I went online looking for a clip from a BN ep. I didn't find it, but what I *did* find was like, EIGHT very cool songvids I'd never seen from the show, three of which featured "my" guy, and I had the thrilling, "Hey! It's all out there! I don't have to culture a fandom anymore to find some content in it!" (Not that I always did, but I've had more than my share of smaller, more oddball fandoms.)

Re: Yeah, but when we had to walk up hill both ways...

[morgandawn]

Re the intrusion into fandom: Harve and Pocketbooks were involved in Interstat (and vice versa) - many letters were (indirectly) aimed at them to get them to change something in the movies or the pro tie in novels or TNG (which aired for the last 3 years of Interstat ). Many of the fan writers who subscribed to Interstat were also the pro tie in novel writers and they argued back and forth about both their novels and zines. So it has been interesting to see some of the same Observer Effect patterns play out decades earlier.

Re: Yeah, but when we had to walk up hill both ways...

[charlottechill]

Oh, *totally*. (You may or not remember Sandy's and my "Banks Reports", and the fact that Sandy always reported what kinds of pants J.Banks was wearing in class that night, and whether he we wearing "it" right or not that day.) I was a worst offender, or would have been if I'd deigned to drive down and find people's production offices.

I feel you, and of course you're right. It just... well, you've heard the refrain a couple bazillion times, I suppose, but for some of us, it still "feels" different. And that same anonymity is a double-edged sword; there was a half-decade there where NO ONE asked, "Have you ever written anything?" Because they all *knew* my volume of fic. *g* So I'm not above admitting that my curmudgeonly attitude usually slips in from my narcissistic side. I'm currently in the decade where people ask, "So have you been in fandom long?" And that too--or my sometimes-annoyance at it--will also pass. :)