I found a little book of star trek trivia at my favorite used book store and the book was published in the 80s and I’m flipping through it and it’s like “dedicated Fans taping episodes of star trek ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy the series” which is such a weird sort of technology whiplash like we went from VHS tapes being THE way to consume media on demand and I’m over here in 2018 watching this show on my smartphone on Netflix and?? When the show came out VHS wasn’t even a wildly avaliable thing??? Sometimes little things give me hope, like a tiny book reminding me how much humanity has accomplished in 50 years.
Oh my goodness, there was no such thing as media on demand when TOS aired! We could not have imagined such a thing.Â
Around 1970-71 a group of original fans in the LA area did what we could to make a record of what happened in each episode, because it could easily be a year or more before our local station might run any given episode again. Whenever a rerun was shown, we worked as a team, taking Polaroid photos of the TV screen at each scene change and writing a quick description of what happens in the scene. These we glued onto poster boards, one for each episode, building up the collection over a couple of years (the rate at which we were able to see the episodes in reruns). The poster boards hung in a couple of our garages and were available for any fan to view with an appointment.Â
We would have been so jealous of fans now, had we known the day would come when we could see episodes any time we wanted. I still find it somewhat miraculous!
Tag: fandom history
Know what ticks me off the most about the “we’re canon” and “but that’s not canon” and “your ship is not canon” nonsense? It buys into the whole proprietary ownership of storytelling that Disney exemplifies: tales as commodities controlled and dispensed by suits with their own self-serving agendas.
If you tried to tell the bards or poets or ballad-writers of centuries past that there’s such a thing as “canon” and it’s superior, they would have laughed in your face. Try telling even the famous storytellers like Shakespeare or Homer or Sappho or Ibn Tufail.
The recent preoccupation with “canon v. fanon” in the culture battles makes the Textual Poachers author’s quote more relevant than ever:
“Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
– Henry Jenkins, 1997I did my undergrad comp thesis on Pavel Chekov’s potential realization and fufillment in Star Trek fanfiction; Textual Poachers is a great resource. 🙂
And yeah, the moral of the story: people need to chill the fuck out about canon and ships (did you write The Thing? If not, stop.), read up on reader response theory, and enjoy the fan-works they enjoy and don’t participate in the ones they don’t. In the end, it’s your experience and others, and as much as people think fandoms are communal, they’re comprised of individuals with different perspectives and desires experiencing a work through their own worldviews.
I laugh because the term “canon” to mean true and authoritative is appropriated from religion, and that’s a very recent phenomenon pushed by the commercial imperative; “canon” as it pertains to fictional works means “collection” – e.g. the American literary canon, the canon of classical Hollywood cinema; “The girl’s bookshelf was filled with the canon of children’s literature…”
How ironic that people are using “canon” – i.e. scriptural authority, the doctrinal truth, the Truth so true it is the decisive Word of God – for something which is literally fiction.
If there’s “canon” in fiction then most of the TV writers in Hollywood are heretics.
Okay, some fandom history, why show writers and authors say “for legal reasons” the can’t read fan fic.
Back in ancient times in the 1970s there was a show called Star Trek the Animated Series. Â It was on the air as fandom culture around Star Trek was really taking route and there were many fanzines (things on actual paper that people bought) being published and the first conventions to attend.
David Gerrold was a writer for Star Trek the Animated Series who had also written one of the most famous episodes of the original series The Trouble with Tribbles.  While he was around the production office for STtAS he was introduced to a couple of fans who proceeded to tell him all about their ideas for an episode–essentially a sequel to his famous episode–which it so happens he had already written a script for.  When that episode aired he received a letter from one of those fans lawyers demanding “credit”.  It so happened that he could prove that the episode existed before the meeting but the involvement of lawyers and a threat to sue became widely known.
Marion Zimmer Bradly was, before recent horrifying revelations decades after her death, a titan of fantasy writing.  She also welcome fan fiction and published it in anthologies and in a magazine she published.  One day she opened a story sent to her and the plot of the story was essentially the plot of a a novel she had nearly finished writing.  More than a years worth of her work was now unpublishable because it was provable that she had read this story with this similar plot and she couldn’t prove the work on the novel existed before she saw the story.  She stopped publishing anthologies and fan fiction and in particular the MZB story is the one a lot of professional writers know as representative of the dangers of fan fiction.
So when a writer says they can’t read fan fiction for legal reasons it’s that their own lawyers are protecting them from outside lawsuits.
And this is why knowing your fandom history matters.
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