

Why "Star Wars" Created a Fanatical Subculture and "American Pie" Didn't - sfard
http://sfard.posterous.com/why-star-wars-created-a-fanatical-subculture

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pseudonym
Reading the abruptly truncated article, it looks like he's going for the idea
that Star Trek evokes a mythological reaction that causes people to be
religiously obsessed with it.

Personally, I think he's overstating things. Everything has a fanatical
fanbase somewhere. I'm sure there's people who watch American Pie repeatedly,
marveling at this amazing piece of cinematography and wondering why other
people aren't doing the same.

However, combine that with the following:

1\. There is a certain mindset that seems to come out more in the geeks of the
world. The obsessive, driving force that makes us dedicate days and hours of
our time to a single project, instead of passively consuming, say, romantic
comedies. There are people who watch Star Trek and say "Mmm, Star Trek.", and
there are people who watch Star Trek, write out technical plans and compare
the sizes of all the ships in the series, and recreate scale models of them.
There are people who calculate how fast the ship is actually going, how hot a
phaser would have to be based on the length of time it takes to burn through
material X in episode 1, material Y in episode 2, and call out the writers
when it burns through material Z in episode 3 too slowly.

2\. In the 70s, there wasn't an internet. There was no real form of escapism
for the bullied geeks, no way for them to gather together from across the
country in forums based on shared interest. There was just the hope that
someday, the brains would win out over the bullying brawn, and Sci-Fi in
general, and Star Trek in particular, was the crowning jewel of that time.

3\. To that end, the sense of awe you had when you first saw the Enterprise
swoop out over the screen, the gasps when Kirk was about to get pummeled by
the Gorn, the cheering when he turned the fight the other way-- those feelings
are the reason Star Trek was popular back in the '70s. Too, possibly, The Next
Generation in the 80s/90s. But after that...well, the honeymoon was over. And
it's not really that surprising. As an adult, you can never completely
recapture the feeling of nostalgia you had when watching the series for the
first time. And instead of realizing that, fans lashed out at the followup
series- DS9, Voyager, Enterprise...is it any surprise the franchise had a
reboot? But it's too late. The future is literally more fantastic than they
could have guessed when Star Trek first came out, and kids are too used to
seeing personal communicators with more functionality than Star Trek's from
the age of five.

Anyways. The upshot of all of this is that Star Trek managed to hit a sweet
spot of mindset, escapism, and time period (pretty much the same as Star Wars
did), and that sweet spot is now taken up by other, more interactive media of
varying types. It was more a matter of luck than any real sense of the
"mythological", and the only reason anyone would think that would be because
of their attempt to recapture the nostalgia of their youth, the first time
they saw the series.

Edit: I realize that anecdote is not the plural of data, but for me
personally, I don't know a single person my age (22) that is a Star Trek geek.
The only people I know that collect Star Trek memorabilia, watch and debate
the shows, etc. are people who were teenagers when The Original Series came
out.

~~~
philwelch
Voyager and Enterprise got (and deserve) a lot of criticism, but DS9, at least
while it was airing, was very widely respected as possibly the best Star Trek
series ever produced. And that's because the writers realized that, at the
time, the premise of space travel to strange alien worlds was not fantastic
enough to hold viewer attention. Where TNG and especially TOS featured some
new, strange thing each week (be it a fantastically powerful noncorporeal
entity or a planet killer or a Dyson sphere), DS9 mostly took its world as a
given and built a compelling, continuous drama out of those elements. It's
quite similar to how the new Battlestar Galactica was constructed, and BSG
developed a small, passionate fanbase during its run. (Not coincidentally, BSG
had a number of DS9 writers on its staff.)

I also disagree that it's too late for a reboot. The reboot was the single
most successful Star Trek movie ever produced.

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lzimm
Assuming "romantic comedy" was just an arbitrary dichotomy to serve as
linkbait, I think you can find other genres that penetrate just as deeply as
sci-fi that might make the point more clear.

If you look at jane austin, I think you'll find her influence on the generic
female psyche is at least on par, but probably far stronger than the impact of
lucas on the generic geek psyche.

The difference is the geeks make it visible so that they can share in the
"mythology of exploration" together, whereas the femmes just make it implicit
as a more natural "understanding of how the world should be". (I acknowledge
i'm making some grand assumptions here, this is a sunday morning thought
experiment)

Now, obviously its far easier to believe that "you'll find a perfect man
who'll do everything for you" than it is to believe that "you'll run around in
spaceships blowing up deathstars", simply as a consequence of the latter being
a very explicit detachment from reality (and while the former is much more
implicit, at the same time, I might add, it may quite possibly be just as
detached and with its own set of moral consequences, but I digress). But I
think that's where the real difference is: science-fiction is an explicitly
unrealistic escape from the way things are, whereas most other genres are
intended to blend in with out existing perceptions of the world around us to
convince us of the realistic possibilities of an achievable fantasy.

Space in particular is coded very deeply in our cultural sense of the unknown
and journey, and its often frightening to make journeys alone. So we bring
companions: we build subcultures.

~~~
hugh3
I'm not really convinced that Jane Austen inspires the same level of fandom
that Star Wars does.

There is, of course, one genre that inspires the same sort of crazed-geek
fandom as science fiction, and that's "fantasy". Both genres, of course, are
based in worlds very different from our own, though not too different (there
are always humans or human-analogues, at least in popular examples of the
genre). What's more, what these worlds have in common is that they allow
people whom the reader considers analogous to themselves to become
ridiculously powerful and important in a way that they just don't in the real
world. An entire universe is provided for readers to escape into, and this
becomes particularly addictive for those who aren't finding much success in
the real world.

Now I guess Jane Austen is interesting in that it _wasn't_ originally set in a
world all that different from Jane Austen's own, but with the passage of time
the world of Regency England has become almost as foreign as Middle Earth. I
can see how someone tired of a world where wooing is conducted by misspelled
text message might prefer to escape into a world where every girl seems to
wind up with a handsome millionaire without trying too hard.

Maybe in two hundred years, American Pie will be escapist fantasy as well.
"Man, I wish I lived back in the days where you could have sex (or eat a pie)
without having to get a license from the government..."

~~~
RK
Jane Austen's uber-fans are called _Janeites_ , complete with conventions and
"re-enactments".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janeite>

From the Wikipedia entry:

 _Lynch has described committed Janeites as members of a cult..._

~~~
julius_geezer
Rudyard Kipling wrote an entertaining story, "The Janeites." The characters in
the story, for what it's worth, are not girls but rather officers and men of
British battery at the front in 1917 or so.

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philwelch
American Pie ostensibly takes place in the real world. That's no use to a
geeky personality--if a geek wants to get into the real world, he does
programming or learns about science or gets into trainspotting or something.
But a _fictional_ world means you get to speculate about physics and
categorize all the different alien races and starship types you see and so
forth, and build vast databases and just lose yourself in what is ostensibly
an entire world. This is the type of person who watches Star Trek: Deep Space
Nine and makes a mental note of each time they see an Akira-class starship,
and then complains when Enterprise comes out because they anachronistically
made the Enterprise look like an Akira-class starship. American Pie doesn't
have anywhere near this kind of depth of subject--it's just a bunch of dumb
teenagers in the real world. (Which is exactly the kind of setting geeks are
escaping _from_ in the first place!)

(There's another, largely unrelated appeal to Star Trek and Star Wars: they
have genuine heroes. It's very hard to find a TV show or movie today that has
genuinely heroic people, it being considered "more realistic" to have flawed
heroes.)

~~~
hugh3
Right. American Pie is a movie, Star Wars is a universe. Just about every
movie or book with an obsessive fanbase is actually an entire universe.

The only obvious exception I can think of is Rocky Horror, and I don't claim
to understand that fandom at all (I've never actually seen the movie). I guess
it's still much more divorced from the real world than American Pie is.

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ilamont
I think Star Wars has been exceptional at pulling in young boys. The story
line and characters are part of it, but I think the light saber has had an
outsized impact on its popularity.

As an eight-year-old in 1977, I liked Star Wars but wasn't a true fanatic (I
liked reading sci-fi more, and when I was a teen became hooked on Blade
Runner).

However, my best friend who was just a year younger went crazy for 1977 Star
Wars. He saw the movie dozens of times and bought every piece of merchandising
he could convince his parents to buy.

When I introduced my own son to the original movie at age five, he was
similarly hooked. I noticed that the light saber concept seemed to be
especially attractive to him. I didn't indulge him on the merchandise, but did
spend $20 on Lego Star Wars for the Wii and have rented or borrowed the
remaining movies and Clone Wars discs, which he also likes. We also discovered
what seems like hundred of YouTube videos showing boys and teenagers acting
out lightsaber fight scenes:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4_qTO5Q1do&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4_qTO5Q1do&feature=related)

A few months ago I showed my son the 2009 Star Trek movie, which he liked but
not nearly as much as Star Wars. The sword scene on the Romulan drill bit did
not really register with him. I wonder if Kirk and Sulu had been carrying
light sabers if it would have been different?

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brandnewlow
Science Fiction appeals to the male brain's obsession with structure, order,
pattern recognition, and penchant for legalism. You can see a sci-fi movie and
then spend hours pondering how to fill in the rest of the blanks in the galaxy
that the movie introduced.

Romantic comedies, on the other hand, don't ping those same pleasure sensors.

I think this was one reason why Firefly, though definitely beloved by many,
remained a cult show and failed as a movie, it was half story and half
mythology, so neither the nerds nor the mainstream could ever totally embrace
it.

~~~
Groxx
And not the ass-backwards way Fox played it? It seems Fox kills shows for
kicks, sometimes.

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Tycho
I agree with the other posters who said science fiction creates a 'universe'
for the imagination to dwell upon, whereas other entertainments might just
create some _characters_ to remember. Also in creating a universe the author
can leave many details out, creating the opportunity for debate amongst the
fans. People still debate character motivations in normal entertainment etc.
but they don't involve the same interconnectednesss and logicality usually
(those things are apparent in Shakespeare though, which of course is endlessly
discussed).

Anyway what's eveyone's favourite universe? Mine's probably Frank Herbert's
Dune novels. I've been looking at them again recently and realised how much of
he writing, especially the epigraphs before each chapter, went over my head.
He's writing about the deepest trends in human history and behaviour. I
thought it was just a bunch of cool scifi ideas. I also love the _Marathon_
universe for its AI characterization though.

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rdtsc
The underlying answer is that SW, also Dune, LoTR, even Harry Potter, create
sophisticated alternate universes.

Those universes have self-consistent rules that are quite elaborate,
languages, but also, of course, touch and evoke common mythological motifs:

    
    
      * good vs evil
      * father vs son
      * sacrifice of self for the good of others
      * romantic love
      * coming of age
      * the journey of the hero
      * the faithful friend
      * revenge
      * supernatural adversaries
    

In other words it combines good, well established literary motifs with an
intricate, self-consistent universe. It lets geeks and nerds with their well
developed imagination completely escape the reality into this universe.

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heresyforme
I disagree with the idea that "the second and third functions are no longer
relevant".

"The second function is to explain the phenomenon like the seasons and
functioning of the cosmos. The third function is to ordain and maintain some
kind of sociological order."

The second function is constantly being refined as we discover more and
challenge existing ideas. The third function is the basis for any
civilization. One might be tempted to mark the end of Western Civilization in
the 20th century. Hence, the third function must, once again, function.

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Groxx
Two things:

Merchandising, and who says it didn't? I encounter _loads_ of cases where
American Pie is injected whether it makes sense or not. It's _way_ beyond cult
status from how often I see it around.

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stretchwithme
American Pie didn't take off like Star Wars because it didn't make the jump to
hyperspace even once.

And let's face it: pie crust is just not built to withstand those kinds of
shearing forces.

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devmonk
Why weren't there American Pie action figures?

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tzs
I haven't seen American Pie action figures, but it is interesting to note that
there are action figures for some decidedly non-SF/fantasy/horror movies.
There are Reservoir Dogs action figures, for instance, covering all the major
characters, and including sets for scenes like the ear scene (including
removable bloody ear).

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presidentender
Twilight, anyone?

