Thoughts on childhood fandoms

[teddog]

I've been rumbling about this for a while (mostly to poor Kate), but I figured that I should get my thoughts down. Could be an interesting discussion topic.

OKAY. So, there's a lot of Transformers fans being bitchy about the upcoming film and how it's not faithful to the source material. This brings up an interesting topic:

There are still Transformer fans that uphold the original cartoon as the main canon?

I have some all-over-the-place fandoms. Many of them are quite old; I've loved Red Green since back when it was airing on CHCH, so that would be back in 1991. However, aside from some remote clinging to Sonic (and it is remote and far inbetween), I don't have any strong ties to dated kids cartoons. I did go to college with some people who swore that their childhood cartoons were great pieces of media and deserved a place in history.

Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to enjoy old kid's cartoons. I personally own sets of Animaniacs, the Saturday morning version of Sonic the Hedgehog and Wacky Races, along with one-off discs of Teddy Ruxpin and the Raccoons. These were all childhood fandoms. As for their spot in media...

For that, I'll give a direct example that's going to really embarrass me. When I was a preteen, for some reason I could NEVER fully understand, I really liked Bots Master. There. I said it. The humans in that series really annoyed me, but I'm a sucker for goofy robots and the plot took a page from Saturday morning Sonic, so I was all over that at the time. Anyway, I've been rewatching the show on YouTube and pondering how I sat through this crap as a kid. The music is bad (the opening theme... there is nothing that can describe that horror...), the animation is often painful and many of the characters annoyed me.

I believe I finally got my answer in what I think was episode 20. Maybe it was 19. There's this really goofy scene with interaction between a minor character who was the main protagonist in this episode, the main villain of the series and one of the villain's sidekicks. It's a short little scene, but manages to give the main villain some very out of left field but complex character development and tosses a major boost to the protagonist in taking what's been a stupid running joke up to that point in the series and turning it into into a form of self defense.

It's a surprisingly solid piece of writing for a stupid series. It makes me wonder if there's some more scenes like that through the show. That would explain why I watched the darn thing - I have a weakness for plot-tasty storytelling like that.

Yet, I can't imagine myself fangirlling a show like that in a way more than a happy childhood memory. So, the mindset of Transformers fans and their kind, the ones that burst into tears when something from their childhood is "updated", is forever lost on me.

So, does anyone else have any goofy fandoms as a kid that they'll admit to? And why did you like them?

Comments

[krwalker.livejournal.com]

I'll admit to TMNT. And I'll admit that to this day, I still *love* the old crappiness of the original so much more than the new one.

What else? Um... Captain Planet. Liberal indoctrination there. X-Men, of course.

But, really, a lot of it wasn't cartoons. I was big into Knight Rider, MacGyver, Quantum Leap. There was a block that was on USA every day and we watched it like crazy. Heck, I'm still in to some of these.

Oooh, just going down the list makes me cringe and laugh. But, I'm still crazy about some of them, and I do get a bit offended when they try to re-invent the wheel. I mean, look at Knight Rider 2000... Ugh.

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

I'm still at a loss as to what audience Captain Planet was geared to. I'm a left winger from a Liberal family (although those terms mean different things in Canadian poltics) and we found it heavy handed.

"But, I'm still crazy about some of them, and I do get a bit offended when they try to re-invent the wheel. I mean, look at Knight Rider 2000... Ugh."

We're not talking mildly offended, but more like... oh... on the edge of a mental breakdown. Think "fanbrat". And Knight Rider 2000 was very gross and the rumoured movie looks like it's going to be trainwreck. I'm not at a convention panel, in tears as I explain my thoughts to the creators, though.

[vonandmoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I worship John Byrne's Alpha Flight and I've hated everything that's followed his 28 issues run (so that's, what, three volumes of stuff now?). However, I've long learned that there's really no point to have much of an attachment to this kind of thing, regardless of whether it's corporate owned or not. It's not yours and that means your stake isn't as valuable as either those who create the work or the corporation that owns it.

Marvel and DC have destroyed much of what I've loved about comics in the 90s. The later Transformer cartoons changed everything that I liked from the first two seasons and the movie. Wrestling is entirely different from the 80s Kayfabe stuff - or the Southern tag team style I loved. Joss Whedon irritated the crap out of me with the later seasons of Buffy and Angel (let's not communicate, folks!). The Star Trek franchise pulled away from Gene Roddenberry's vision after his death. And Lucas messed up Star Wars. And on. And on.

I don't kvetch much about it because it's not mine. My only choice is to read (or watch) or not.

That, by the by, is the main reason I never got into writing fan fic. I can totally get that it might be very personally rewarding (and a great way to develop one's craft) but the characters aren't mine. And I just can't write characters that I have that little control over.

Hope this makes sense!

Von

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

Oh, it makes sense.

My point was that a lot of these fanatics don't see the line between what's owned and what is what sometimes known as "fanon". Thus, you have batshit. Case in point, the Harry Potter fans that freaked out when Harry didn't hook up with Hermione (http://wiki.fandomwank.com/index.php/Harmonian).

I think it's perfectly fine to have an opinion on media and just because someone is a creator doesn't give them an excuse for bad storytelling. That said, there's a big difference in fans that can just shrug off something doesn't sit well with them and those who throw massive hissyfits. We aren't talking small disagreements but vortexes of stupid (http://wiki.fandomwank.com/index.php/Category:Fandoms).

There's much broken logic that runs around in the depths of fandom...

Fanfic is funny. There's some series I totally CANNOT write about for the exact reasons you've mentioned. Others, I have no problem. It's very much a personal thing.