Tag Archive: nostalgia


…should be utterly excited about the following news. I say should because you really hate to chase someone off with good news despite themselves…

The following guests have been fully confirmed and lined up to appear together in a panel session with Q&A at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m.

On the panel will be: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Frank Conniff, Bill Corbett, Joel Hodgson, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Bridget Nelson, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein. Wow.

The moderator will be Patton Oswalt.

To explain to the rest of you; that is the ENTIRE group behind Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Including those who ‘washed their hands’ of the show and said they’d never look back.

This was a part of my weekend, every week when I was a kid.

A post for 1_wolfsong

Came across this video this morning while laid up on the couch.

It’s really not what you think. And you will want audio. It’s utterly safe for work.

Why do you like Doctor Who?

Bless you to the person who wrote this.

I was a kid in the 70’s and Early 80’s. Let’s just start there. Cartoons really had gone to complete sh*t by the time we hit 1984. I knew that Warner Brothers cartoons were ‘way old’ and that the 70’s hey day of Bullwinkle and Rocky and other such shows were being replaced by He-Man. And no matter how much we joke. He-Man really was a crap of a cartoon.

So let’s look at science fiction in the 70s and 80s. Star trek was history and all we had was the filmation Star Trek cartoons. A wonderful article posits:
Between groundbreaking classics that were light years ahead of their time (“Star Trek,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Prisoner”), envelope-pushers that were canceled far short of their creative peak (“Battlestar Galactica,” “V”), and overcooked turkeys that should never have been green-lit in the first place (“Galactica 1980,” “Automan,” “The Starlost”), Phillips and Garcia give each of the successes and the failures their balanced, fun and informative due.

And I remember all of these very clearly. I should point out… Prisoner came out when I was about 5… Way over my head. Similar with Galactica. It was ships. That’s the most I really remembered until I rewatched later. V was historical SF.

So there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.

And one weekend around the age of 10 or 11 I was watching TV. My friends and I liked “Benny Hill” and “Monty Python” because… well, the Brits were cool. Well, the shows weren’t on. What they did do was run 2 of 4 episodes of Doctor Who. “The Pyramids of Mars”. Fortunately the first 2.

A side note here. You know when you’ve been into a long running show… you catch episodes in syndication. You ever notice it’s like the same 5 stories out of 100 that you always see? For Doctor Who it was “Pyramid of Mars”

So here I was… 11 years old watching this cool guy in a big scarf. Mummies, pyramids, egyptian gods… I hadn’t gotten anything like this since The Shazam and Isis Power Hour or even Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. (The latter of which I loved and I will not take any more SHIT about it)

But this… this was magnificent. Even if the interiors were all shot like TV and the exteriors were all shot like a movie. (Yeah, the 11 year old figured this one out) There was story, there was character… It went somewhere… And after 90 minutes on PBS (back when the single episodes were 45 minutes but part of a story)…..GAH CLIFFHANGER. Backed into the corner… bad guys attacking cliffhanger!

I was going to be back… Then I started looking up where it would be airing. And then were cons. And helping pledge drives. And mom getting a friend to make me a scarf. And buttons. And collecting the novelizations, and fact books. And all the stuff. It was awesome.

But the one thing that is amazing is having a child. You see, you don’t buy stuff for the toddler. You buy stuff to feel your own childhood again. It’s why I bought my favourite books for ‘him’. “Are you my Mother” “Monster at the end of the Book”… I bought 70’s kid shows to share with him.

So then the amazing thing happened. The BBC after 15+ years said.. they were bringing Doctor Who back.

And yeah… I was terrified. This was not just 3 years of my life. This was 12 up to my late 20s. This was well over 10 years of learning a mythos, finding old episodes. I was terrified what they’d do to “MY DOCTOR WHO”

Imagine what would happen if Tim Burton announced that he was doing a Babylon-5 movie without JMS? Um…scary.

All I knew was that the guy that invented “Queer As Folk” was going to be reviving Doctor Who. Not that QAF was a bad show. I’ve seen a few and it’s deep. I saw a few before Doctor Who. So I was terrified.. but admittedly excited.

I was so excited that I grabbed the leaked to the net pilot and burned a DVD with extras and watched it 15 minutes before the show aired in Britain.

And I was THRILLED. The show lived up to the past. It stayed pure to the things I needed to feel. But was deeper. It’d grown up with me. It didn’t show the world thru the eyes of a 12 year old.

But the thing that will now always cement the show with me is two fold. One a fact.. one a spoiler.

We watched episodes with our infant. The first season ended before he was born. We watched on DVD. I remember the day we put on an episode and our child got excited to hear the theme. Many friends have seen Aiden to the “Doctor Who” dance. He loves the theme. I honestly think the show is just noise to him. But the theme. Music that is updated but unchanged from my childhood, connects to my son. And this thought alone really makes me begin to sort of get misty. Because it’s a kind of bond. It makes me foolishly happy.

The second comes from a short Holiday special that American’s are not likely to see until the new season releases on DVD in about 8 months. The show acknowledged in the special and does so in all the extras… that the people working on the show now are there because they loved the show as kids. The current star who plays Doctor Who got into the acting profession because he loved this show and wanted to be the Doctor one day.

It’s a show of wonder and dreams. It’s a show of magic and science.

It’s a show that makes you want to tell your high school friends that your car is your Tardis and the trunk is really bigger on the inside than the outside.

I love the show… I hope this explains why.

It’s not just entertainment. It’s a fundamental building block of who I am as a person.

So… last weekend (Et al Croce: Seems like such a long time ago…) we went to NorWesCon.

On the one hand, internally I was giddy like a little kid. shimmeringjemmy gave me several hours free time on my own at the con. This was exciting in theory.

Unfortunately, my con experience wasn’t like the ones I had as a 15 year old. NWC seems to be far more based in the social clumping. Seeing friends you don’t get to see except at NWC. Hanging with friends at sessions. Going with friends to gatherings.

I’m still new to the area so my social experience consists of
    seeing about 10 people in the weekend that I kinda know…
    Admiring their outfit if they are wearing it…
    Asking how they are enjoying the con…
    waving as they head off to (sdkfuwef)

This is an odd feeling.

When I went to Dragon*Con in Atlanta about 4-5 years ago; I actually knew nobody there. There was the friend from online who invited me to crash on the floor of her shared hotel room. There was the ‘daughter of a psychiatrist’ (a common bond) that I’d bonded with in IM that I’d met thru LJ. That was it.

However, at D*C I met a tonne of people. People knew of me from the net which really kinda freaked me out. And the scary part was; I got invited on the spot to be on several panels. The funny thing is I actually met s00j at this con and chatted briefly with her… but never really filed it away beyond, “Really hot and talented drummer from the circle”

So back to NorWesCon. It’s a larger con, but a large area con. It’s obvious that this is ‘da sh*#’ when it comes to Seattle area SciFi. I don’t want to hazard a guess on the size. Now… it’s not a WorldCon/Dragon*con… But the good news is… it’s not a ComicCon either. Comic Con is a trade show…not a con.

So… Art show.. nice. I’m saddened by how much the scifi fan is economically not in a place to buy art. Yes.. I’m biased. Went to a couple of sessions. I found myself pining to be on panels because sometimes the crowd would pull the panel waaay of topic. And like many cons. I leave with about 5-15 panel ideas.

One panel was about good and bad characters. It was observed that the most interesting good characters tend to behave at times like a**holes. The further observation is that everyone at one time has been an a**hole. So the question was posed to the room, “Has anyone in this room never actually been an a**hole”. So I lifted Aiden above my head and raised his hand. Okay… so maybe I got to be an a**hole myself.. but it’s worth it for the sake of a good joke.

At one point we got on an elevator with two women dressed in the style of Eliza in My Fair Lady. Swooping huge hats with flowers. I mean huuuuuge hats. I got on the elevator and joked, “Dear diary. Wife brutally killed today on an elevator. Really can’t go into the details…they are just too… hard to explain.” Good laughter on the elevator. Then someone added, “I’m really sorry I sent flowers to the funeral, he looked devastated.”

There was also a poker tournament. There were ongoing satellites to win a seat at the final main tournament. I inadvertently won a seat. It was a massively short stacked tournament. (200 in chips, initial blinds 10/20).. but the fun was going to the final table with 1 1/2 blinds… Quinting up, then tripling up and finishing third. No.. I’m not going to explain what that all means here.

But I never really felt connected to anyone at the con. Maybe over time. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’ve out grown the 16 year old who wants to take over a panel with hir fanish experiences and then demonstrate the worst british accent ever (Standard Fan Type X13)

A good con. I just want to know if I’m outgrowing cons or just not close enough to this one yet.