The Here And Now

Today, with Leslie Fish's and Joesph Abbott's permission I was able to add this photo to  the Banned From Argo page on Fanlore, thereby closing the circle on a long standing bit of sci-fi fandom and filk history.

In the 1970s, if you missed the live airing of an episode of Star Trek, then you missed it. Maybe, sometime over the summer, the episode might be offered as a rerun at 2am. But without any VCRs or DVRs or DVD players, there was nothing to record an episode, let alone to view one. You watched what was presented to you, when it was presented to you, and how it was presented to you (no skipping commercials) on the TV or in the movie theatre.

Unless you were a die-hard Star Trek fan. Then you’d buy (for $14 in today’s dollars) a single audio cassette recording of your favorite TV show. And then, alone in your room, you’d close your eyes and imagine Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock…well, they *could* have been kissing. With your eyes closed, how would you know? Or not know?

And if you were really a die-hard fan, living in Australia where many US shows never aired, you might host a Star Trek (or Starsky & Hutch) audio cassette slumber party where you’d sit around the bonfire and listen to your favorite episodes under the stars.

some [Starsky & Hutch] fans in Australia, unable to attend Zebra Con, had their own little con. It was 14 people in a house, a book of clippings to browse, two episodes on video cassettes, and six sound tapes of various episodes. They remarked that like fans in the UK, they hadn’t seen season four yet and were being “driven white-haired” with frustration with the hints in the letterzine. Some fans slept in the caravan in the back yard, and they sat around singing into the night: “You Needed Me” (which they thought fit the episode “The Fix”) and “Sometimes When We Touch” (“whose chorus belongs in that scene in Wilderness”). Source: Fanlore.

Today, I looked at some K/S fan art: two guys sitting around having a drink and listening to some tunes, two guys simply catching a ride together (hey, you going my way?) and two guys having what looks like another gen wedding ala Wincest style.

Back in the olden days, fanzine publishers had to physically pick up their K/S fic and art and hand carry it to a local print shop. And then another. And then another. The tales of their journeys to find a print shop that would publish Captain Krik and Mr Spock in...intimate situations.....are epic, amusing and inspiring. All hail to our brave Foresmutters.

Here are a few of them

Publisher 1:
"Once I finished "T'hy'la" #1, I needed to get the zine in print and that would require finding a new printer. If I took "T'hy'la" to the printer I'd been using for my genzine, he'd have a heart attack....It was, I admit, a bit difficult to go in there for the first time. I was a bit...embarrassed. After all, I was asking them to print explicit art of naked men doing sexual things with each other...The people who owned the print shop were as cool as they could be....My printer really enjoyed printing my zines. By the time I'd done my 3rd or 4th issue, he told me the women in the bindery always looked forward to my zines. They'd post prints of the artwork on the bindery walls to keep them entertained while they worked."


Publisher 2:
"The manager, long inured to what she's been so faithfully producing for us, engaged me in a discussion about a Gayle F picture! The one where Kirk is straddling Spock in the grass, he is obviously being penetrated, Spock is raised up just a bit so he can twist Kirk's nipples, Kirk has Spock's cock in his hand, and our captain's head is thrown back in a fair imitation of ecstasy. I don't know if you can get more explicit that this picture.

"Oh, look at this," she said. That's really nice."

"Yes," I enthused." She's a terrific artist."

"No," the manager chided me. "I meant the quality. We caught most of the details."

Publisher 3:
"K/S Tale of Woe of the Month: So I was having [my K/S zine]  printed a few weeks ago, along with some additional artwork reprints that I needed. Specifically, a computer-generated piece of art (CGA) that had been done..... It's a fabulous work of art, one of my absolute favorites, and if I ever get a K/S room of my own, it will be up on my wall. Anyway, this work is reproduced by using a disk and not an original on a piece of paper. I was picking my order up when I casually asked the manager if there had been any problems with reproduction. She replied that she and her trusty assistant (both of them women in their 60s who aren't too computer literate) hadn't been able to get the disk to work properly, so they had enlisted the aid of "Jeremy." I blanched. "Jeremy?" I asked. He is young and enthusiastic and has never impressed me as a reasoned thinker. "Did he, uh, give you any trouble with the content?" (The picture in question shows Spock in a white shirt sitting on the floor against the side of a bed, between Kirk's knees, as Kirk sits, naked, behind him on the bed. Yeah, I did say it was a favorite....) "Oh, don't worry about it," the manager reassured me. "By now, almost everybody around here has seen your pictures. If they have a problem with what you're doing, they keep it to themselves." Oh. Great. So now I know why occasionally I get some strange looks.... Why the fellow who carries most of my boxes out to the car seems intent on talking about God all the time, and why the women up front seem so friendly.... "

Publisher 4
"The fanzine is a little late. Some of this is in the nature of fanzines, which always seem to take longer than planned to produce. A good chunk of the delay may be laid at the door of my original color printer. This man managed to leaf through [my sample zines] Mirrors of Mind and Flesh, The Price and The Prize, Greater California K/S, and T'Hy'La without noticing anything explicit enough to bother him. He seemed bemused but accepting of the project. Then, when I brought in my color art, he announced he couldn't print it. Upsetting in the waste of time, and the additional expense, but who wants a blind printer?^"

Direct link. "Instead of Spock beaming down to Vulcan, battling Kirk, overcoming his Pon Farr, etc, the Enterprise is unable to temporarily change course to Vulcan. After days of riveting impulses rattling his mind and body, Spock succumbs to his urges and asks of Kirk to act as a temporary manner of relief."

Today I am reading the draft script for the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action and learned:
*The original title was Mission Into Chaos (and someone has handwritten the new title "A Piece of the Action" on the front of the script)
*No Terran book "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties" had been left behind by a Starfleet ship to mold the planet's culture along Earth lines. They apparently developed Chicago Mob culture on their own.
*Kirk had to deal with the Romulans who were trying to do a legal takeover of the planet (and failing that the Romulans were going to forcibly take it over). Kirk uses the presence of Romulans to get around the Prime Directive
*There was no card game called "Fizzbin" (it has another, lamer sounding name)
*And no awesome tag line about how one day the Iotians may want a "piece of our action".

All in all, I can see why some of these are first drafts.

A fan recollects her first Star Trek Convention in 1976 (photos even include the hotel receipt and her mom's notes)

"That was the first time I was exposed to erotic Star Trek art too; I’ll never forget there was a nude pencil sketch of Spock, reclining on his right elbow, with his left arm modestly concealing his manhood. As I recall, the picture was titled “R&R”. Of course my Mom wasn’t too thrilled with it –’That’s dirty!’ — But one could not deny the female fans their fantasies. In the end I was just forever grateful to my Mom for letting me go to this convention, and putting up with all the Trek mania around her."

There are several blog entries posted under the tag so scroll down for more stories.

To illustrate the adage: "That which does not get copied becomes extinct" here is a page of an old Star Trek zine from 1969 that I am preserving. It is so fragile that I had to disassemble it  (gingerly) and I am scanning it page by page, by hand on a flatbed scanner. I will not be able to reassemble it because the paper is crumbling. What is left of the original will be sent to one of the fanzine archives. There are currently only two copies that I know of being preserved and one is a photocopy.



The zine.

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.

Temps approaching the 90s today. Time to break out the Frisbee. Kirk and Spock are already in their swim trunks. Let's head to the beach!

One of the few Star Trek Italian fanzines I've come across. If anyone knows Italian and can offer a better translation, go for it.