Dear Diary....
Dec. 25th, 2013 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morgandawnToday is the Doctor Who Christmas Special. And yesterday, the Atlantic magazine wrote the following article about Doctor Who fanzines (on a side note, Fanlore was briefly mentioned in the fanzine cover credits)
"How Fanzines Helped Put Doctor Who Fans in Charge of Doctor Who
"When the BBC announced Scottish actor Peter Capaldi would play the 12th Doctor in its beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who, superfans quickly dug up a crucial fact about the actor: He’s a superfan, too. Capaldi, who takes over Doctor duties from Matt Smith in a Christmas Day special, has an enthusiasm for the show that dates back to the 1970s, when he authored stories for Doctor Who fanzines—small-circulation publications made and distributed by fans. See, for example, this 1976 article about the show’s title sequences.
“Watching the abstracted light forms & patterns which appear in the opening sequence of Dr. Who has become a familiar ritual for all of us,” 18-year-old Capaldi wrote. “The wonder of the opening is that it manages to capture in only a very few moments of screen time the atmosphere of Dr. Who.”
Capaldi isn’t the only amateur Who geek to go professional. Because of the program’s unusual history—it ran from 1963 to 1989 and then returned in 2005—many of its original fans are now its writers and producers. Showrunner Steven Moffat told The Guardian this year that he was "the original angry Doctor Who fan,” and his earliest Internet postings about possible story ideas are still online today (and those ideas occasionally find their way into the show). Writers like Paul Cornell and Matt Jones graduated from zines to official Doctor Who novelizations and, eventually, episodes of the reboot itself."
Read more.
"How Fanzines Helped Put Doctor Who Fans in Charge of Doctor Who
"When the BBC announced Scottish actor Peter Capaldi would play the 12th Doctor in its beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who, superfans quickly dug up a crucial fact about the actor: He’s a superfan, too. Capaldi, who takes over Doctor duties from Matt Smith in a Christmas Day special, has an enthusiasm for the show that dates back to the 1970s, when he authored stories for Doctor Who fanzines—small-circulation publications made and distributed by fans. See, for example, this 1976 article about the show’s title sequences.
“Watching the abstracted light forms & patterns which appear in the opening sequence of Dr. Who has become a familiar ritual for all of us,” 18-year-old Capaldi wrote. “The wonder of the opening is that it manages to capture in only a very few moments of screen time the atmosphere of Dr. Who.”
Capaldi isn’t the only amateur Who geek to go professional. Because of the program’s unusual history—it ran from 1963 to 1989 and then returned in 2005—many of its original fans are now its writers and producers. Showrunner Steven Moffat told The Guardian this year that he was "the original angry Doctor Who fan,” and his earliest Internet postings about possible story ideas are still online today (and those ideas occasionally find their way into the show). Writers like Paul Cornell and Matt Jones graduated from zines to official Doctor Who novelizations and, eventually, episodes of the reboot itself."
Read more.