So I'm not going to put too fine a point on it, but this past year has not been an amazing one for me either. But I'm also not going to make a big deal about it-We all have our own suite of hardships to deal with in our lives, and all we can do is continue to carry on to the best of our abilities.
To the future then. Obviously, the post on “All Good Things...” (and some other stuff) goes out Monday, thus officially taking the blog out of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as the joint coverage of it and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is, to put it mildly, a major turning point. Apart from closing off a sustained block of writing for this project that dates back to 2014, this is also the place where I exit Star Trek permanently. Though my affection for the series never goes away and no matter how much my thinking and identity will remain bound up in it, from here on out Star Trek remains firmly and irretrievably a part of my past. There will be a rather lengthy epilogue of sorts once we hit TNN again in 2000, and then Enterprise the following year, both of which bring Star Trek back into my immediate life temporarily. And I suppose I'll have to say something about Star Trek (2009) and its subsequent film series as people have been clamouring to hear my take on it since 2009. But even so, Star Trek is never and will never be again what it was for me when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air. This is the point in which I follow Kei and Yuri's lead from last March and exit the narrative for good. My personal story is effectively over.
I've talked about this a few other places, but I thought I'd lay out the biographical reasons for this in one concise essay somewhere. After all, not all of you could be or should be expected to follow me through my scattered podcast appearances and my even more sporadic social media presences. Basically, the two reasons I fell out of Star Trek in 1994-5 can be attributed to two things: Satellite TV and Star Trek Voyager. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had been syndicated: For readers outside the United States, in this country we have a handful of national networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), and each of those networks has their own set of exclusive programming. But, because the United States is so large, we also have regional affiliate stations-Local TV channels that are associated with the national networks, but have news programming targeted to regional communities. Whenever these affiliates are not airing the news or national programming, they have free blocks of airtime they can fill with “syndicated” programming: Shows that aren't tied to a network and can be bought straight from a studio distributor and aired whenever the local affiliates have time to fill (these usually tend to be reruns of ancient, creaking sitcoms from the 1960s). Star Trek: The Next Generation used to be pretty much the only TV show that was produced exclusively for syndication, but things got dicey when Deep Space Nine premiered, leading to those exasperating cases of the shows competing with each other. And things only got worse for the syndication market from there, but that's not my actual point here.
Star Trek Voyager, and later Enterprise, would be different, because they *were* tied to a network, namely UPN, Paramount's short-lived attempt to create its own network to compete with ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. So, if you didn't get UPN, you couldn't watch them. Now, in 1995 my family got satellite TV to replace our aging analog antenna setup, and at that time the satellite provider we chose did not offer local affiliate channels as part of the package: Instead, you got satellite-exclusive generic versions of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and public broadcaster PBS that aired the national shows, but *nothing* from syndication (or any local interest programming, which was PBS' specialty). So I couldn't watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine anymore even if I wanted to (and I did want to)...But neither could I watch Star Trek Voyager because our satellite package *also* didn't include UPN until 2001 (just in time for Enterprise, so, you know, put the pieces together). So I didn't watch any Star Trek, save for the odd VHS rental or snippet caught at somebody else's house, between 1995 and 2001.
I knew Star Trek: The Next Generation was over and I missed it, and I tried to keep up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by getting its quarterly official magazine from Starlog whenever it was in stock at my local market (which was *very* infrequently) and I'll introduce that on this blog in the near future. But I'll be honest. I made no effort to follow Star Trek Voyager. I can't say it was lingering resentment for the behind-the-scenes consequences of its creation (and you'd better believe I'm going to get into that more: There's way more to it than I've even touched on so far) because I didn't know about that back then (though in hindsight I probably could have guessed), but quite simply because the show didn't interest me at all. There was nothing about it that grabbed me whatsoever. I did try though, I really did: Every time I was over at a relatives' or a friend's house and I happened upon it I tried to give the show another chance, but every time I tried I couldn't last more than a couple of minutes. That attitude hasn't really ever gone away, to be perfectly honest with you. I think this is what separates me from most Star Trek fans: I do not get excited for a New Star Trek Thing simply because it is a New Star Trek Thing. I have no loyalty to the Star Trek name or universe per se, what I like are things that remind me of my happy memories from the late-80s and early-90s and works that reflect the best ideals I saw in them.
Obviously, all this is going to have an impact on a project I've pegged form the beginning as a personal journey. Vaka Rangi isn't just going to end because Star Trek Voyager is coming (in spite of what it did to its franchise), but it is going to change in a number of major and significant ways. The posts themselves are going to radically alter their structure and tone, though this won't be apparent for some time. What is going to be more readily apparent is that this blog's posting schedule is changing, effective immediately. “The Collaborator” will be the final essay to go out on a thrice-weekly schedule. From now on, at least for the foreseeable future, Vaka Rangi will post once a week (barring special bonus posts, like this one), probably on Mondays, unless I get really behind on something.
There are a number of reasons I decided to do this: It's not so much *because* of Voyager as much as I figured this generational shift would be a convenient time to implement the change. The bigger reason is that it was getting to the point where I was getting extremely burned out and stressed keeping the thrice-weekly schedule, and I think too many essays suffered because of it. Oftentimes I'd find myself up until 5, 6, 7 or even 10 in the morning with no sleep trying desperately to meet a self-imposed deadline and word count requirement. And no sooner had I finished the last 1000-2000 (sometimes 3 or 4000) word analytical essay, I had to immediately start work on the next one. That left me with next to no time or energy to devote to anything else, and I've had to table a lot of potential projects because I simply could not give them the attention they required. There reached a point where I simply could not handle it anymore: I needed to cut back somewhere for my own sake. I need more time and energy to spend other places, not just on other projects, but just in my own life (I do have one, believe it or not).
The end result of this is going to not only be better for me, I think it'll be better for the blog too. The first beneficiary is going to be Monday's “All Good Things...” post: I'm fairly proud of how it's turning out, and I know for a fact I could not have written it on the old schedule. I needed a full week to work on an essay of this complexity. And once the later structural changes take effect, I think the combination of them and the new schedule is going to actually speed up the pace at which Vaka Rangi gets through material, and honestly, that's a necessity. If I'd kept doing one episode per post three times a week, this project would never end, ever. There's frankly too much material to get that meticulous, at least as far as I'm concerned. And there's some really fun content coming: I was serious when I said Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine created a shared universe for themselves that takes on a life of its own (in spite of whatever nonsense the TV franchise ends up pulling), because that's the way I've always seen it. I'm going to go all the way to 1996 exploring the ramifications of this to the furthest limit I can. In its death state, Star Trek gets a second life in Summer, 1994: Some of my very dearest pop culture memories are coming, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting them.
And yes, there will be an Ultimate Episode Guide Master Post somewhere in there.
Incidentally, one of those other projects I mentioned above is the actual published, paper-bound version of the Vaka Rangi book series. It's the 50th Anniversary of the Original Series this year, and I really want a revised version of Volume 1, covering it, the Animated Series and Raumpatrouille Orion, out in a format people can buy and read in time for this September's festivities. Cutting back on the new material will also give me more time to do the necessary edits, revisions and expansions to the old material so I can start actually releasing proper books and finally call myself an actual published author! The second book in particular is going to require a *ton* of time because I'm adding an entirely new section. I'm not shopping for imprint labels and I don't think I'll need a layout copyeditor given the wonderful document processor I use, but I am probably going to need a cover artist. So if you're a visual artist or designer and you're interested, or know someone who you think might be, please say so in the comments.
The voyage continues, as it always does. Thanks as always to those of you who still support me and the work this blog tries to do after all this time. I like to think it's accomplished something.
Hey Dirty Pair fans! All three of you! Guess what?
I just found out something really exciting: It turns out Nozomi Entertainment, one of the rights-holders to the English language version of the Classic Anime Series, has been putting up complete, *subtitled*versions of Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, Original Dirty Pair and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy on its official YouTube channel all summer! You may recall that these were among the releases Manga Entertainment chose not to include in subtitled form among its own uploads of the Classic Anime Series, so it's a really big deal to finally get these versions in free, legal streaming form.
The TV show never received an English dub because it was localized on the cheap and only very recently, so this doesn't apply to the Manga Entertainment releases of those episodes, but this is, to my knowledge at least, the first time folks who prefer to stream their visual media over the Internet have had to watch these later Classic Series Dirty Pair anime productions with the original Japanese language track and English subtitles. I've updated the video embeds on all my posts about those episodes and movies to these new uploads, and I do very much hope you'll consider taking this opportunity to give them a second look. I mean my work is surely rubbish and will make me cringe with embarrassment over a year later, but Dirty Pair itself still holds up!
If you were turned off checking out the OVA Series and movies because of the unavailability of a proper subtitled version through steaming services, I hope you'll go back and watch them now that there is one. And even if you were kind enough to follow along with my coverage of Original Dirty Pair and the film series, I hope you'll still think about giving them one more go-around now that you have the chance to see the original actors' performances. I'm not sure if this applies to the versions that are available on Hulu as well, so I've left that disclaimer on The Ultimate Dirty Pair Episode Guide Master Post, but I can now conclusively say for certain the YouTube versions are subtitled ones.
So what are you waiting for? The very best English language versions of some of the greatest sci-fi or anime ever made is now just out there waiting to be seen in all its glory! You can find a playlist of the OVA Series here and one for the movies here. And if you're for some reason still interested in hearing me go on about Dirty Pair after all that, you can always catch up with my more recent ruminations on the Lovely Angels at this humble side blog of mine. It's sadly been dormant for the past few months because of stupid life reasons (though I thankfully managed to update in time for the 30th Anniversary of the TV series on July 15), but I'm hoping to get back into it in the near future.
Now for the remaining 99% of my audience, I have something for you too.
The high definition restoration of Star Trek: The Next Generation is *finally* available to stream on Netflix! I'll freely admit I sound like a shill for this project, but I really, truly believe in it at a fundamental level. First a little background for those of you who might not know what this actually is, even though I harp on it all the goddamn time. So back in the day when they were making Star Trek: The Next Generation for TV, Paramount decided that because videocassette was obviously the technology of the future (and also because it was very cheap) the series would be *recorded* traditionally (meaning on 35mm film), but *composited* on tape. This means all of the editing and effects shots for the biggest new TV show of 1987 would be done on the utmost pinnacle of crappy 1980s consumer grade home video. This also meant there was a considerable visual downgrade from what the cameras were seeing in the studio to what audiences were seeing at broadcast, but it didn't matter back then because the average home TV set wouldn't have been able to pick up all that extra detail anyway.
The problem with this approach comes in the form of future proofing, or rather a glaring lack thereof. Because television sets got better, or at least good ones eventually became more affordable, this means that Star Trek: The Next Generation was curiously stuck in time: Even as technology moved on, it still looked like it was intended solely to be seen via broadcast TV in 1987, which, OK, it was, but that media climate is somewhat troublingly fleeting. This has the predictable, if unfortunate, side effect that if you happened to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation in any medium or climate other than broadcast TV in 1987, it happened to look like utter shit.
This became particularly a problem once home video started to become commonplace. Here's what normally happens with stuff shot on film: As I understand it, film has a limitless (or at least very deep) well of potential visual detail and information it can capture, something other media standards don't necessarily have, particularly the ones used for consumer grade home video (and certainly not VHS which is and always was, let's be clear, rather crap). Luckily, as home video technology gets better, it can convey more detail, and so all someone has to do to put out a new release of an old movie or TV show that was shot on film is to go back to the original print and make a new copy or transfer that takes advantage of the improved tech. And because this happens with goodly regularity, the process is fairly streamlined and effortless.
That didn't happen with Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in fact it *couldn't* happen.
Because there was only one print of the show ever made and because of the unusual way it was produced, instead of being able to turn back to a "definitive" film print, every single home video release of Star Trek: The Next Generation had to draw *exclusively* from that one composite job done on *VHS*. That is, the one that was consciously designed to be crap, but good enough for right now ("right now", of course, meaning broadcast TV in 1987). To make matters worse, those involved with producing said home video releases made the unfortunate decision to just outright *copy* the original VHS print: Anyone who's had the experience of trying to copy video tapes for a friend by daisy-chaining VCRs back in the day will have a keen understanding of what happens to a VHS signal after several generations of copying copies (also Roxette FTW).
Yeah, so now imagine that but with Captain Picard instead of Marie Fredriksson. That's what Star Trek: The Next Generation on home video used to look like, *including* the DVD releases from the early 2000s: All they did there was take the Nth Generation shitty VHS transfer and try their best to make it presentable through "digital remastering", which is marketing speak for doing some bullshit with sliders on a video editing computer programme to fuck with different colour balance levels. It's that DVD version that was used in syndication for the past ten years or so *and* on Netflix until, well, right now.
This means that if you were trying to enjoy the adventures of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D in any form other than as they aired on a huge-ass 1980s CRT TV or debatably on the very first LaserDisc release of the show from the early 1990s (LaserDisc having a comparatively higher visual and audio fidelity for standard
definition content than VHS provided you set your player and TV up
right), they would have in all likelihood looked like utter shit. But thankfully, they don't have to anymore!
In 2012, Paramount released a new high definition Blu-ray release of Star Trek: The Next Generation to tie into the show's 25th Anniversary. They called this a "high definition remaster", which is unbelievably misleading because this was manifestly not a "digital remaster" like I talked about above (and you can't even "remaster" something that isn't audio anyway: That's actually a physical impossibility and I wish people would stop abusing that word): This was nothing short of a brand new print of the entire series done completely from scratch: Because the show was still shot on film, all that filmic detail was still there, even though it was *composited* on VHS. All that was needed was to go back to the original film and make a new print using modern video production methods. The only issue was that given that compositing is where the effects shots were combined with the raw video footage of the actors, every single effects shot in all seven years and all 176 episodes had to be completely re-done.
It was an absolutely mammoth undertaking, but the end result is a Star Trek: The Next Generation that looks jaw-droppingly, breathtakingly beautiful. It also means that the Blu-ray releases are arguably the only place you can see the show as it was "originally envisioned" by its creators. In fact, because of all the VHS shenanigans I'm actually rather adamant that it's actively disingenuous to criticize the aesthetics and look-and-feel of Star Trek: The Next Generation unless you've seen this new print. Of course, given that, until now, this meant ponying up money for an admittedly pricey set of seven Blu-ray box sets, this is something understandably out of reach for those not swimming in disposable income or not insane to the point of being dangerously irresponsible.
But now you don't have to spend a dime more than your Netflix subscription fee, as its these new prints of those episodes that are now available to steam. The Netflix version has been compressed somewhat for Internet streaming when compared to the Blu-ray print so you'll be accepting a minor visual downgrade, but not enough for reasonable people to really give a damn, and the upside is that it looks like Netflix fans get to enjoy further tweaks, revisions and corrections to admitted mistakes that were spotted after the Blu-rays shipped. So now you *really* have no excuse not to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation the way it always should have been seen.
(And if Amazon Prime is more your thing, not to worry: Their version of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the new print too.)
One last treat for Netflix users: LeVar Burton's "other" show, Reading Rainbow, is also now available to stream. There are only a handful of select episodes to choose from right now (and "The Bionic Bunny Show", which visits the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is *not* one of the ones on offer, though it is on iTunes and I believe Amazon Prime), but I'm sure more will be coming soon. My personal pick of the ones available now is "Tar Beach", which is an episode I've always had very vivid and fond memories of. Reading Rainbow, and LeVar Burton's joint position on both it and Star Trek: The Next Generation, is pivotal to the reading I've been building throughout this section of the blog, so I heartily recommend it to any Vaka Rangi reader.
UPDATE 9/6/15: Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture/Dirty Pair: Project Eden is now up in full and subtitled too and I've updated the post for that movie as well. So that's a thing you can watch. I mean, only if you really want to.
My entire past year can be summarised in just one phrase.
Dirty Pair.
It was almost exactly a year ago today that I began my week-long miniseries on the history of professional wrestling to lead into my essay on The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair that would introduce Kei and Yuri and change the shape of this project forever. It was an intentionally cheeky move, I admit, and I took great pleasure in watching you all try and guess where on Earth I was going with that tangent. I enjoy making unpredictable moves like that and keeping my audience on their toes: Not only is it fun for me, but it keeps the project fresh and is a way of offering a subtle reminder that Vaka Rangi is meant to be far from another standard-issue history of Star Trek narrative.
But of course Dirty Pair was never an out-of-the blue, 90-degree turn for this project. Even though I've only been a fan of the series myself for the past three years or so, I've known about its existence, and its shared history with Star Trek, for decades. I've been dying to look at Dirty Pair from a Star Trek perspective, and vice verce, ever since I learned what huge geeky fans of the show Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were. The Long 1980s are an age where truths are conveyed through aesthetics, images and emotions, science fiction is a genre primarily about ideas and possibilities, anime is a medium particularly well suited to broadening the imagination through cinematography, and the fact that it was the two design illustrators who were the most profoundly affected brings it all back full circle.
The fact Dirty Pair turned out to be one of the single greatest and most personally meaningful bits of narrative fiction I've ever experienced in my life is really just icing on the cake.
Even though Dirty Pair was always going to be a part of Vaka Rangi in some form or another, I didn't originally mean for it become so pronounced that it would end up standing on equal footing with Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I first started, I figured I'd give Kei and Yuri a Sensor Scan post, maybe a few-One for each broad category of the Classic Series. Then when I started to actually watch it for research, I immediately realised the series was way, way too good to be relegated to the between-season errata: This was actually leagues better than the stuff I was actually treating as my case study. At that point I knew it would have to be one of the major pillars of Vaka Rangi Volume 3-The book I spent almost the entirety of this past year writing. Even then though I wasn't planning to serialize it on the blog: The decision to cover Dirty Pair episode by episode and bit by bit was made at literally the last possible moment when the traffic hits were coming in on the Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair essay and after I discovered the whole series was on YouTube and Hulu freely and legally thanks to Manga Entertainment.
I should mention that this all came at an uncannily appropriate time for me. As exciting as the past year has been from a creative perspective, in my personal life it's been defined by incredibly intense upheaval, trauma and turmoil. It's been Dirty Pair, and the Singularity Archetype I read onto it, that's helped me through much of the turbulence of the past 10 or 11 months. Because we know that while the Singularity looks like the apocalypse from below, it always signifies a change that is positive and uplifting for the universe on the whole. And we know that Kei and Yuri always leave a situation better than they found it, no matter the incidental destruction they leave in their wake. That's only partially why Dirty Pair has become so important to me (a lot of it is also due to its aesthetic imagery, how I relate to Kei and the ideals I project onto her relationship with Yuri), but it's the part of my connection to the series that's seemed to speak the loudest to me of late.
And yet it also worries me. Others have likened Kei and Yuri to the Tarot cards of Death and The Tower, which are themes I didn't expand on a lot personally but did acknowledge. And it's almost scary how much I see those themes manifesting around me: I sometimes fear that as long as I stay a devotee of the Lovely Angels, I'll keep invoking those destructive themes into my own life. But I can't stay away, precisely because of how much Dirty Pair has come to signify for me. So here we are a year onward, and Dirty Pair has inspired its own spin-off blog, looking at themes of emotion, energy, memory and forgotten futures. Right now, it's just a glorified mood room and place to host specific writing experiments of mine, but in the very near future it's going to serve as the home for a Dirty Pair themed project I've been planning on the side for over a year. I hope with it I can weave benevolent, constructive vibes and summer thoughts.
If you remember my anniversary post from last year (or go back through the archives to find it), you might recall I posted a rough outline for the various planned Vaka Rangi volumes, and that book three was supposed to have *three* pillars. One was obviously Star Trek: The Next Generation (or rather the first three seasons of it) and the second was soon to be revealed as Dirty Pair. But the third was actually going to be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: I initially had plans to do serialized coverage of the entire manga series chapter by chapter, and that plan was in place as late as my not-review of the movie that following June. Back then I said it was my favourite movie of all time, and I think I still stand by that...But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a work I constantly have a hard time conceptualizing and articulating my relationship with, as is probably evidenced by the fact it's the one time I just flat out gave up and confessed it was impossible for me to write about.
It's one of those things I sort of forget precisely how important it is to me until I see it again, and then I feel awful for forgetting it. Even though I brought in a frankly ridiculous amount of metafictional, metaphysical, mystical and spiritualist themes into my reading of Dirty Pair, what Kei and Yuri represent for me has always been clear as day. As oversignified as Dirty Pair as a series is, I always find writing about it to be basically effortless-The work is already done for me because Kei and Yuri have so explicitly spelled exactly who they are and what they're about at every single level. All you have to do is pay attention and look for it. Nausicaä though is very different: I can't explain everything I see in it unless I just sit down and relate my entire life story, everything I've ever done (and why) and everything that's ever been important to me. I mean I do that to some extent on Vaka Rangi as is, but properly writing about Nausicaä would require getting even more autobiographical than I already tend to get here.
So that's part of the reason I scrapped the plan to do serialized coverage of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The rest of it is because it would have just made an already busy book even more overstuffed and because as much as I like it and as important as it may be to me (and as similarly influential on Star Trek: The Next Generation as it was), there's really not a whole lot in the way of the kind of utopianism Vaka Rangi is primarily interested in to be found there: That is, the motif of the voyaging starship. There is very much a case that could be stretched that Nausicaä is a traveller and people grow from their experiences with meeting her, but it's a slightly different setup than exists in the kinds of Star Trek I like, or even Dirty Pair for that matter (though the spiritual metaphors are similar). I wound up being able to say most of what I wanted to say about Nausicaä's link to Star Trek: The Next Generation in the essay on “Samaritan Snare”, and the rest I'm hoping to hit in “Tapestry”.
I of course have to talk about Star Trek: The Next Generation. The fact that we're finally in it means Vaka Rangi is right in the midst of what is without question the single most important historical period it's ever going to look at. For me, Star Trek is what existed between September of 1987 and May of 1994, and my personal story with the franchise does not meaningfully extend beyond those dates. I of course did the Original Series, the Animated Series and Star Trek Phase II and I'm obviously going to get to Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise, the latter of which will probably be when I get the most brazenly experimental I'm ever going to with this project, but they're ultimately background material for the true heart and soul of Vaka Rangi, which is where we're at right now. And yet this is also the very reason I can't talk a lot about Star Trek: The Next Generation here: Unlike Dirty Pair and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, this is something whose material artefacts I'm still actively thinking about and working through in the moment. The story of Star Trek: The Next Generation as it pertains to Vaka Rangi is far from over, in fact, in many ways it's only now beginning.
Strangely, even though I've been looking forward to this portion of the project since before I began it, it's also proven to be one of the most challenging sections I've done yet. There have been moments, most notably early in the first season, where I was uncertain about just how I should approach writing about Star Trek: The Next Generation, because its something that's really most meaningful to me in terms of aesthetics, memory and personal experience. I can do a rote pro-and-con analysis of each episode in my sleep, but that doesn't seem right to me and I feel it misses a lot of the fundamental truths about my history with the show I hope to convey. This was also not helped at all by my rediscovery of just how much of a slog I've always felt years 2-4 were.
Then there's the first season, which has always been the most ethereal and intangible for me; a set of ideals, images and vivid half-remembrances that exist well above and beyond anything the physical show ever did. In many ways that makes up the truest Star Trek: The Next Generation for me, and as tough to get a grasp on as it is I think I may have touched on it once or twice. Most notably, my essays on “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Battle” spring immediately to mind as being ones I'm to date still the most proud of and that best encapsulate my thoughts and feelings about what Star Trek: The Next Generation has meant to me. Maybe “Yesterday's Enterprise” as well, which there was absolutely no way I could cover in any fashion resembling straightforwardly prosaic.
But now with Volume 4, we're well and truly reached the pinnacle of Star Trek's impact on me. Years 5-7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where I basically think the show was pretty much firing on all cylinders regularly and consistently for three years straight, with its definitive cast and crew and most iconic set of stories. The tail end of season 4, which sets that up. What I consider to be *my* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the purest demonstration of its purpose and potential: Its first two seasons (excluding “The Jem'Hadar”, which is thematically part of the third season, and a different show, even if it's not chronologically). The comic adaptations of both shows. The 25th Anniversary celebrations, the video games and the Playmates toy lines. Volume 4 is definitely going to be the most packed and Star Trek-heavy of the books, so some of you will appreciate that I'm sure. I'm really excited for this phase of the project, but also a bit intimidated: As has always been the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation I worry my words and their scope won't be enough to properly convey and do justice to my positionality.
(And really, as I intend to argue, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as originally conceived should really be read as the same show, or at the very least compliments or sisters.)
And oh yes speaking of books, I hope that by this time next year you will be able to have your very own physical copies of Vaka Rangi, just in time for Star Trek's 50th Anniversary. It's obviously the first volume that's the most important to get out as that's the one that deals with the Original Series and Animated Series, but I plan to get all the books out as soon as they're ready and not worry too much about setting exact schedules. Volume 2 will take the longest to revise as that book turned out unsatisfyingly short for me and I'm adding in an entire new section (as I'm not interested in keeping a ton of secrets where this is concerned anymore, I'll just flat out tell you all it's going to be on Super Dimension Fortress Macross). Each volume is also going to come replete with a slew of new, revised and extra content to hopefully make it worth your while to double-dip. This also means I'm going to be looking for designers and visual artists who might be interested in doing some cover art sometime in the next 12-18 months, so if you are one or know one who might be a good fit, please keep that in mind.
But lastly I want to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who's supported this project and who tunes in three times a week to see what I've come up with. I will never stop being stunned and amazed that people are actually interested in my extremely personal history with a long-forgotten old TV show and want to read what I have to say about it. Engaging with you all has been the most rewarding experience I've ever had as a writer, and I remember that each and every day.
Jack points out in the description and I second, that this is a bit of a disjointed one
and mostly consists of him encouraging me to randomly leap from topic to
topic in between audio and connection problems. I believe this
installment looks more in-depth at my history with Star Trek,
particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
my interest in aesthetics as a nonverbal language and philosophy and my
concept of fanfiction as the way culture reappropriates its oral myths
and histories that have been stolen from it by capitalism. Included in
this is my gender studies influenced reading of slash fiction and my
redemption and historical contextualization of the Mary Sue concept in
regards to the 1970s female-driven Star Trek fandom. Dirty Pair of course remains a
significant topic of conversation, primarily because I can never, ever
shut up about Dirty Pair.
A few notes…
The
concept of the Singularity Archetype and the Glorified Body I use
extensively throughout my recent Vaka Rangi work is pretty fundamental to how I read Dirty Pair, and is derived from the
rhetoric of Jonathan Zap (in particular these two essays).
As I discovered it rather late in the writing of volume three, it’s
something I definitely need to flesh out and make a bit more central and
clear in the revised edition. Zap has a tendency to be a bit too
teleogical and reductive for my personal tastes, but I find his basic
arguments and intellectual framework compelling.
Ostensibly, Jack wanted to interview me about this blog, but me being me the conversation inevitably spun off in a number of different directions. Fair warning, this is over two hours, most of which consists of me never, ever shutting up. And this is just part 1. In all seriousness though, we had a delightful conversation I was
honoured and privileged to be a part of.
Some of the things we talked about were, naturally, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dirty Pair and how I fell into all three and came to be writing about them for the Internet. We also talked about my interest in Polynesian wayfinding, my training in cultural anthropology, philosophy and science and technology studies and my conception of reading derived from me reading someone else reading Jacques Lacan. There were also brief mentions of non-Dirty Pair anime and manga and how Japanese media was introduced to Western audiences, such as Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Urusei Yatsura, my other loves Nausicaä of the Valleyof the Wind and Project A-ko and my uneasy ambivalence about Sailor Moon.
A few housekeeping notes: This being a completely unscripted and
largely directionless conversation, I caught myself after the fact in a
few factual slip-ups. I’m not sure how much of this made it into the
show, but I figured I should cover my bases either way:
I believe at one point I called “Masks” from the seventh season of The Next Generation
“Brannon Braga at his finest”. That’s a bit misleading-The episode was,
of course, written by Joe Menosky, though Braga was, I believe, a
producer and staff writer at the time.
When I’m talking about Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, I’m refering to the Takarazuka Revue.
Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers was written by David Turnbull. You should all still read it, though.
You can listen to the show here. Thanks
again to Jack for the opportunity and to Kevin and James for hosting
us! I hope all the listeners get as much a kick out of hearing this as I
did recording it!
Back in June, I was a guest on the Pex Lives! podcast with my good friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph's Paradox). The subject at hand was tacitly the Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann, but we very quickly spiraled tangentially off into a great conversation that had perishingly little to do with Doctor Who. The details largely escape me now, but I seem to recall at least touching on topics as disparate as Sliders, Homicide: Life on the Street, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Melora", Super Sentai, capitalism and domesticity, capitalism and Pop Christianity, the difference between high fantasy and science fiction, the aesthetic of non-modern naturalistic generativity in sci-fi, Dirty Pair, Gothic cathedrals, fascism vs. anarchy, the origins of mainline fandom histories, radical politics and detournement in fanfiction and criticism, pop culture as western oral mythology, and Toho's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES.
Sadly, the recording and editing process was marred by a myriad of technical problemsthat can really only be described as "we fucked up big time", so the episode hasn't actually been able to see the light of day until now. But it's been entirely reconstructed and pieced back together thanks to the valiant efforts of the Pex Lives! boys, so I can finally share it with you all today! You can download or stream the podcast here or here, and you too can marvel as I stammer incoherently while people far more articulate and cogent than I say very clever and thoughtful things!
Big thanks again to Kevin and James for the opportunity, and a happy, albeit terribly belated, anniversary!
Was what LeVar Burton once said in an interview with the now-defunct Star Trek Magazine when the DVD box sets for Star Trek: The Next Generation started being released. Even cast members, when prompted in fan environments, will tow mainline fandom's party line and cringe on cue at the prospect of the series' supposedly irredeemable first season. And while I grant there are issues to be found in this year's crop of episodes, there are issues to be found in *all* of Star Trek: The Next Generation's seven seasons and I'm still resolute in my belief the first year is unfairly singled out for blame. No, it's not what we've come to expect from Star Trek: The Next Generation and yes, it's a bit awkward in places, but Jonathan Frakes is correct to point out this was a year where the show took risks it wouldn't take later on. And, love her or hate her, this is your only opportunity to see Tasha Yar as a crewmember.
So these are my picks for the absolute best of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Year One. Not every episode is a masterpiece, but each one is far better than its reputation would have you believe and well worth a look during any journey through the show's mythos.
Addendum: If this is your first visit to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I have to begrudgingly throw in “Datalore” as well. It's not good, but the events it sets in motion come back to play an important part in later story arcs. But even without it, I look at this list and still see a pretty formidable success-failure ratio. I'm recommending roughly the same amount of episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 as I would from the entirety of the Dirty Pair TV series-While this season doesn't have anywhere near the same number of unmitigated masterpieces as that one did, that's pretty high praise coming from me.
Speaking of...
Since we're compiling enumerated episode lists anyway and since I never officially did one for this show, here are my picks for the very best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, for the five DP fans who actually follow this site. While as of this writing I'm still going with Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia as my absolute favourite Dirty Pair story overall, the firsttwo novels are a must-read if you can find them and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is probably worth a look at least once, they're not included here (nor is any Classic DP material I've yet to cover) as I'm strictly focusing on the 1985 anime TV series today. With that in mind, I highly recommend...
Like any good student of synchromysticism, I'm well aware of the importance of dates, in particular anniversaries. Especially when they're mine.
It was, in a sense, inevitable that I would one day have to do a lengthy project about Star Trek. No large-scale media franchise, or indeed possibly no work of fiction, has consistently meant as much to me or been as much of a source of inspiration (and frustration) over the course of my life as Star Trek. I would have had to address my personal history and issues with Star Trek in some fashion at some point, and that was before my Internet writer colleagues pushed me to work them out through a large-scale serialized blog project.
So, first and foremost, Vaka Rangi has always been more about me than it has been about Star Trek. You may have noticed. Sorry about that. But, as someone trained to notice, analyse and compare positionalities, and also simply knowing it would be pointless to do *yet another* “Let's watch every episode of Star Trek in order and write about it” thing, I also figured my perspective might allow me to say some things that might not get said in mainline cult sci-fi discourse. But this also means this is a particularly personal project for me, as it's my reaction to Star Trek that informs not just the kind of critical perspective I offer, but that kind of person I am. I never wanted this to be a straightforward critical history, even a subversive one, and the project was never going to let me make it into one.
Growing up cut off from the kind of pop culture discourse that seems to have morphed into Nerd Culture, I guess I assumed the things I saw in Star Trek were what everyone liked about Star Trek, but it very quickly became evident that I was wrong, and any evidence I found to the contrary seems to have been deliberate misrepresentations in marketing buzzspeak. As a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to structure this project to get this across, and I eventually settled on the idea of comparing Star Trek's idealism (at least the way I saw it) to the philosophy of the ancient Polynesian navigators for various reasons. Obviously, as a cultural anthropologist I've read about and studied them a lot, as Polynesia is one of anthropology's favourite classic case studies and Hawai'i in particular has a very deep and spiritual connection to the night sky. But it's also a region I feel connected to myself in a very deep and personal way I can't exactly articulate (there are a few places around the world that are like this for me, but Polynesia was the first one I consciously noticed my connection to). More specifically, I genuinely do see and try to find a kinship in the way the navigators conceived of growing, learning, travelling and the concept of a global community and what I think Star Trek really ought to stand for. This project is for them as much as it is for me and you, if not actually more so.
The result is a reading, and really, a comprehensive reconceptualization, of Star Trek very much informed by the invisible, heretical, voiceless side of fandom, indigenous spirituality and comparative mythology, philosophies that are in many ways mine as well. This also means people like Gene Roddenberry and Nicholas Meyer are a constant analytical headache for me and I worry every single day about making a mistake and lapsing into cultural appropriation.
2013 seemed like the year that, if I was ever going to do something like this, would be the year to finally do it, with mainstream interest in Star Trek looming for the first time in years with the release of Star Trek Into Darkness. Not being entirely blinkered, I recognised an opportunity when I saw it and timed the launch of Vaka Rangi to coincide with the film's release. Of course the movie itself wound up bombing (or bombing as much as any hyper-blockbuster of that stature is allowed to these days), but this blog is still around a year later and still apparently manages to draw an audience, which I guess is a good thing. I remember being overwhelmed at the start of this project thinking “Oh My God: If I actually *am* still around a year from now, how far will I actually have managed to get?”. As it turns out, as I wrap up the final essay for Volume 2 as I write this, I'm about as far as I thought I was going to be, if not a little farther.
So, exactly one year after I set off on this journey, I wanted to take the time to reflect on what this project is and what it means to me and to thank everyone who decided to join me along the way. I'm especially grateful to the people who have gone out of their way to tell me how important this project has been to them: I never stop being moved to hear something I've written has resonated with somebody else, especially when I'm writing something as overtly personal and reflexive as Vaka Rangi has turned out to be.
You might also be interested in hearing a bit about where this project goes next. It's no secret that we're on the cusp of beginning the Star Trek: The Next Generation era and, all I can say to that is if you've been upset by how personal I've gotten so far...It's about to get a lot more personal, so, be forewarned. While I don't actively dislike the Original Series (except the parts that are misogynistic and reactionary, natch), it's not a show or a set of characters I have any particular affinity for, which I know is yet another thing that makes me a bit of an oddball in Trekker circles and why parts of the past year have felt more clinical than introspective. This next period, however, is something I actively and unapologetically love, or rather, I love the setting, characters, ideas and the memories and images it's left me with, and I'm really hoping to be able to convey this in the posts going forward. This also means that while I'm not going to stop being critical, I am going to loosely shift from the perspective of the offense to that of the defense, at least for a while. I mean yes, “Code of Honor” is every bit as bad as you think it is.
Aside from seeing a *lot* more of me cropping up in the blog, I'm also going to be changing the structure around a bit. Flatly, we're entering a period of Star Trek history that's incredibly long and incredibly monolithic: With three series of seven, 30-episode seasons *each*, plus one with four, there's an incredible glut of material to get through the likes of which I've never had to deal with before, and it also happens to coincide, at least partially, with an era of Star Trek history I know almost instinctively. This means there will be several occasions where, instead of doing one post per episode, I'll take three or four stories centred around what I find to be a unifying theme and look at them all together. I won't do this all the time, but I think it will help clarify the points I'm trying to make and further emphasize my positionality, the way I was exposed to these works and how I read them. And also, you know, believe it or not, I don't actually want to be doing this for the rest of my life.
Also, since I mentioned volumes earlier, I thought it might be fun to actually post a (highly truncated) version of my outline here. It's sort of an open secret that the ultimate goal for this project is a multivolume book set, and I've been planning and structuring this project with that in mind from the beginning. I'm not going to tell you *everything* I'm going to cover, of course, that would spoil the surprise, and I've got a *lot* of surprises planned. But, this should help anyone who might be trying to mentally work out the different categories and divisions I split Star Trek into and the different underlining themes and motifs I see in each era (and indeed, what the eras I see actually *are*):
Volume 1: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Animated Series and Raumpatrouille Orion (contains the posts from Foundation to “The Counter-Clock Incident”, plus bonus exclusive coverage of the entirety of Raumpatrouille Orion, among others).
Volume 2: Star Trek Phase II, The Lost Years and Star Trek in Pictures (contains the posts from Star Trek: Year Four, Issue Number 1 to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, plus bonus exclusive coverage of Star Trek Continues, among others). Also includes the movies Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Volume 3: To Be Announced, To Be Announced and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Seasons 1-3. Also includes the movies Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Covers the period roughly from Spring 1980 to Summer 1990.
Volume 4: To Be Announced, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Seasons 4-7 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Seasons 1 and 2). Also includes the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Covers the period roughly from Summer 1990 to Summer 1994.
Volume 5: Star Trek Voyager and the Dominion War (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Seasons 3-7). Also includes the movies Star Trek Generations, Star Trek First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection. Covers the period roughly from Winter 1994 to Summer 2001.
Volume 6: Enterprise and other material to be determined, though likely including the movies Star Trek Nemesis, Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness.
So Monday we finally start Star Trek: The Animated Series and the next phase of the franchise. This means today is sort of our last opportunity to talk about the Original Series as the incumbent form of Star Trek (although even then it's not quite cut-and-dry as I make it seem, which we'll talk more about tomorrow) and, given that, I thought I'd use this space to very briefly sum up my thoughts and recommendations concerning the 1964-1969 series.
Under my post on “The Apple”, frequent commenter and blog friend Flex quoted a Futurama episode where Fry, when talking about the Original Star Trek says something along the lines of how the show had “79 episodes...and maybe 20 good ones”. Back then, Flex mused as to whether we'd even be able to meet that tally on Vaka Rangi.
I took that as a challenge.
More recently, under the “Turnabout Intruder” post, 5tephe wondered if I could put up my revised list of recommended episodes: I mentioned coming up with such a thing for my Trek neophyte sister when talking about “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and made an offhand remark on how I'd've chosen different episodes after doing this project. 5tephe quite reasonably thought this might be a good resource for other people who are trying to get into this historically significant but notoriously sticky and problematic series.
So this is for Flex, 5tephe, my sister and I suppose anyone else who might get some use of it. It's a list of twenty episodes of the original Star Trek that I feel showcase the series at its strongest and that most clearly reflect its best virtues. I tried to pick six from each season, although that still doesn't divide evenly so I gave more weight to some eras than others, but not unjustly I feel. There were a few other episodes I thought were solid, if not particularly outstanding and I could have included them as well, but I really wanted to hit an even 20 here to keep with the theme I'd chosen for myself.
This is the second part of my reading of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the context of Star Trek and the larger pop culture landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. You may wish to check out part one (covering the period of the show when it was actually known as Mysteries Five) first if you haven't done so already, or even if you have just for a bit of a refresher. This part goes into more detail about the actual show and what I think the main characters represent. And, like the previous part, it's a revised, remixed, expanded and otherwise tweaked version of a piece I wrote a year ago on one of my other blogs.
I'm not going to pull what Gene Roddenberry did with “Assignment: Earth” and pretend this isn't a backdoor pilot for another project I'd really like to write someday. This is manifestly why it's an overstuffed two-parter: I'm trying to condense my entire reading and thesis into one blog post when covering Scooby-Doo could well be a project of comparable size and scope to Vaka Rangi. However, the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is still one of the biggest cultural signifiers of 1969, so I've really no choice but to put this here. My apologies in advance. That being said, if you're at all interested in hearing me talk more about Scooby-Doo (as if for some reason this ridiculous spiel wasn't enough for you) or just want to discuss it further, please do let me know in the comments or anywhere else you're able to get ahold of me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
If there's another pop culture franchise that's meant as much to me and about which I have as many complex, conflicting emotions as Star Trek, I'm not at all ashamed to admit it has to be Scooby-Doo.
You find yourself on a dirt path. It's an avenue lined with leafless trees on either side. The Moon is full, and the moonlight shining through the trees gives the gnarled landscape a transfixing, grotesque otherworldly beauty. In the distance there's an old Victorian estate. Through the evening dusk, you can just make out that it seems completely abandoned, all save for one window that remains eerily lit. There's a crack of thunder, and a flock of bats comes flying at you. There's an almost legibly thick haze in the air, blurring the boundaries between night and day, between our world and the others. How far across the expanse does the dream extend? How long have you been here? Difficult to say. All you know is that you need to get to your next gig and your dog's hungry in the backseat.
When last we left Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, we dubbed it the reanimated shell of a dead show we didn't get to see forever haunted by the potential its predecessor hinted at. While in many ways this remains true, one of the most fascinating things about Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is not so much what it *lost* from Mysteries Five, but how much it actually managed to *retain*. Because Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is one of the most brilliantly subversive and inspirational television programmes ever made, hardly anybody recognises it as such, and it manages this all through imagery and symbolism alone.
Which is quite fitting for a show so consciously invested in reviving German Expressionism for 1960s children's television. Still the boldest and most intriguing decision Joe Ruby and Ken Spears made when given the dictum to create a modern, hip supernatural-themed mystery show for kids was to deliberately invoke the films of Weimar cinema. It would have been very easy, and indeed expected, to just do a tongue-in-cheek monster romp full of Lon Cheney, Jr. Werewolves, Boris Karloff Frankenstein monsters and Bela Lugosi Draculas, paying lip-service to the ubiquity of Universal Horror (it's telling that when Scooby-Doo does eventually do this, it does it with far more style, cleverness and layered meaning than really ought to be expected of it). This is just what people who pastiche horror films do: Pick one of the above and do a fun runaround full of family-friendly scares. This is also explicitly not what Joe Ruby and Ken Spears do, and that choice has tremendous ramifications.
If there's any remaining doubt in your minds that Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is nothing short of unfiltered Expressionism, think back for a moment to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: That film is defined by its use of distorted perspective, unnatural-looking light and colour and painted shadows to emphasize the unearthly, dreamlike setting. Furthermore Caligari, just like many Expressionist works, showcased a warped and contorted version of an otherwise relatively modern and urban environment, sometimes contrasted with a similarly ethereal pastoral setting. Many prints of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari I've seen give the film an eery blueish tint that I think really accentuates it. Well, The very first shot in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! opens on a deserted rural highway that looks painted onto the background (I mean, even more so than one would expect to see in a cartoon) surrounded by disquietingly bent leafless trees with the moonlight streaming through them.
Furthermore, the antagonist of the second episode, “A Clue for Scooby-Doo”, is disguised as a ghostly diver: A haunted, vacuous shell of an otherwise recognisable everyday object (in this case a diving suit) glowing an unsettling greenish-yellow. Likewise, the Phantom Shadow from “A Night of Fright is No Delight” and Ghost of Hyde from “Nowhere to Hyde” are bathed in an unearthly blue-green aura. This even extends to real people, like the occult sculptor in “Don't Fool with a Phantom”. But one of my very favourite moments comes from the opening of episode “The Backstage Rage”, where Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are walking through a suburb: The show makes that neighbourhood look as vast and unreal as anything in “serious” horror. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! takes an environment any of its viewers would be familiar with (not to mention its own creators too: The show is obviously set in Southern California) and transforms it into something that feels alien and inhospitable, a trick you might recognise as something only the most potent of horror movies can pull off. It's a style utterly unique to this show and that I've somewhat cheekily dubbed “California Gothic”.
The undiluted Expressionism of the show's art style is just the half of it, of course: In a juxtaposition worthy of Weimar Berlin itself, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! stars four cheerfully groovy youths and a goofy dog who travel around together with no immediately clear motivation beyond trying to have a good time and to enjoy being young, seemingly oblivious to the shambling disarray and general disorder that apparently surrounds them. Except they're not. In fact, the real genius at work here is how Ruby and Spears quietly made the cast of their show some of the most blatantly radical and progressive characters to ever appear on US television, and it's in truth their revolutionary interaction with the world around them that's the entire point of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. Perhaps we should finally meet them, then.
One thing should be made perfectly clear from the outset: The gang are not Hippies. They are in no way, shape or form designed to resemble Hippies, nor does anything about their appearance, mannerisms or general look invoke the Hippie subculture of the late-1960s United States at all. For a supposedly-timely shout-out to the youth this might at first seem puzzling, though I have a theory as to why this may be the case I'll outline later. The bottom line for the moment is that no-one in the core five is meant to represent Hippie culture: In fact, really the only thing in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! that remotely calls to mind the Hippies or psychedelic street performance is the Mystery Machine itself, with its flower-power paint job.
Actually, speaking of the Mystery Machine, let's talk about that first. We know from looking at production documents that Mysteries Five would have seen the gang as a five-piece musical band who had a knack for stumbling into mysteries on tour, hence their name. This also explains the Mystery Machine-It was obviously supposed to be the band's tour bus. Without the band motif though it now looks weird and out of place. Why are four random kids driving around in a van called the Mystery Machine? The gang are clearly not a group of private investigators in this show (all the evidence for that reading comes from subsequent series), they're just ordinary youths. So what's with the van? Well, even though its initial purpose was lost with Mysteries Five, it serves an important new role in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: It's the gang's home. While it's never explicitly stated in any of the shows that the gang are nomads (there are even a few episodes far in the future that try to give the gang actual houses, with mixed results in my view), it's pretty strongly implied, especially later on. This was probably the most important thing about this franchise to me as a kid: The idea of travelling around the world with three close friends, a dog and nothing more than what we could fit into our modified van is pretty much my definition of utopia. To this day my dream is to live in either a boat or a van, and I credit Scooby-Doo with being my primary inspiration.
But that's the van-What about the actual gang? If they're not Hippies, than who are they? Comics and animation veteran Mark Evanier is on record saying the gang was based on the main cast of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, with Fred as Dobie, Daphne as Thalia, Velma as Zelda and Shaggy as Maynard. This would of course fit with the information we have from Ruby's and Spears' earliest brainstorming sessions with Fred Silverman. However, and with all due respect to Mark Evanier, who knows more about Hollywood and the cartoon business than I could ever hope to and who actually wrote for the show and ran its comic adaptation for a time, if this was the intention than, the way I see it Ruby and Spears pretty decisively missed the boat: The gang no more resemble the teens-by-committee of Dobie Gillis than they do the Hippies. No, the gang are something far different and far more interesting than either of those.
Let's take them one at a time, starting with our new star. Scooby-Doo (and this is his name, not Scoobert of the House of Doo or whatever, at least right now), as we know, was from the beginning written as a large, silly, cowardly Great Dane. However, as easily spooked as he is, the core of his character is that he'll always summon up the courage to do the right thing and help save the day in the end. He was, as it happens, modeled off of Bob Hope's various comedy performances in the “Road To...” films in which he starred alongside Bing Crosby. So Bob Hope then: Not other cartoon dogs or a calculated metaphor for drug culture or whatever, Bob Hope. Not exactly radical youth movement material there, but let's remember he was supposed to be a comedy relief supporting character and what we see now is what happens whenever comedy relief supporting characters are suddenly thrust into the spotlight and given the responsibility of carrying the whole show. Not much good, in other words.
Actually, even though he's supposed to be based on Bob Hope, in practice, Scooby-Doo's narrative role seems to be more comparable to Lou Costello's in the Abbott and Costello movies: As of this writing I'd recently rewatched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and I was struck by how much Costello's character reminded me of Scooby-Doo. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the show would have handled its comedy a lot better and would have just been more effective overall if it had emphasized this more prominently. This is the biggest problem with Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and the thing that regularly gets in the way of people taking it as seriously as I think it deserves to be taken: The comedy all too often feels every bit as shoehorned in and as forced as it actually was. Although Scooby-Doo was always meant to be funny, he was obviously only originally supposed to be a minor background character and his shtick has a tendency to wear very thin. Furthermore, the show's panicky need to shove humour at us all the time to appease its moral watchdogs has more destructive effects on the other characters. But Scooby's charming enough and because much of his initial characterization carries through he works (for now at any rate), so let's move on.
Perhaps more interesting is Scooby-Doo's evergreen companion and now second half of a shared double act, Shaggy. Shaggy is the first character who shows off the extent of the damage the show's last-minute tonal shift did. More than any other character, Shaggy is the one who is the most Flanderized and stereotyped over the course of the franchise as every single showrunner tries to take one minor quirk (the fact he has a big appetite and has a tendency to be jumpy) and squeeze far, far more material out of it than is physically possible. Really, by the second season it was all over for Shaggy until Tom Ruegger came along in 1983 and gave him some much-needed reconstruction. But, If we look at Shaggy in the earliest episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! we might be surprised to find that his defining character trait is not, as we perhaps might expect, cowardice, but rather a world-weary and tired cynicism and a dry, jaded sense of humour. In fact, he's often the one who is tasked, to his exasperation, with coaxing the nerve-wracked Scooby into action.
What this means is that what Shaggy is, as can best be determined by the larger social climate in which Ruby and Spears could reasonably be expected to have been working, is a Beat. Crucially however, Shaggy is not a “beatnik”, that hegemonic parody designed to marginalize and belittle Beats who is exemplified by Maynard G. Krebbs; Shaggy is closer to the actual spirit and ethos of the Beat Generation than really anything seen on US television before, and arguably since. Shaggy's role in the show is to appeal to caution and try to prevent his friends from making any rash decisions. He's proven wrong as often as he's proven right of course, though this doesn't take away from what he seems to be doing. Furthermore, he freely goes along with whatever the rest of the gang comes up with and is just as useful and willing part of the team as anyone else.
This makes sense, as the Beats were arguably the oldest of the youth movements that came to define the 1960s counterculture landscape, and much of their guiding ethos is reflected in the way Shaggy behaves: “Beat” is literally a reference to a feeling of being “beaten down” by society. In fact, Shaggy isn't just a Beat, he sometimes feels like a specific stand-in for someone like Jack Kerouac: The older, more weathered person who can speak from a position of age and experience. Another thing that makes Shaggy such a strong character is that his disheveled appearance is just universal enough he can be co-opted and championed as an icon of any number of subcultures that have cropped up over the years in the wake of the Beat Generation. Just compare him with, for example, the likes of John Carmack or Thurston Moore.
However, the character with hands-down the most blatant broadness of appeal has to be Shaggy's one-time sister Velma. Unlike Shaggy, Velma doesn't seem to represent any specific youth movement or philosophy, instead going for generically and cheerfully bookish (though it is worth mentioning she wears a miniskirt, which ought to, in 1969, make her allegiances clear). Her looks, unorthodox for a woman on US television, paired with her unabashed nerdiness and cool competence has rightly made her a hero for generations of feminists and other academics, and that alone makes her an iconic character. In Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Velma is often cast as the third wheel to Shaggy's and Scooby-Doo's buddy comedy act, to her detriment. At the very least this isn't done in the manner of the trite and sexist disparaging (and arguably repressed Freudian) female straight man: More often than not she gets wound up in the shenanigans as often as her friends do and contributes her fair share to them as well (cheap nearsightedness gags are her specialty, naturally, as are gratuitous technobabble and comedic miscalculations). This is no mistake-Ruby, Spears and Silverman felt Shaggy, Scooby and Velma were the most inherently funny characters in the cast and took every opportunity to put the spotlight on them as often as possible.
The biggest myth surrounding Velma is that she's the only really productive member of the cast, finding all the clues, putting them together and solving the mystery. This does in fact become the case in later incarnations (largely because Hanna-Barbera stopped caring after the original show), but it's important to stress that in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! every character has a dedicated role to play: If Scooby is the comic relief and Shaggy is the voice of reason, Velma is the analyst. She makes observations and inferences and helps to formulate deductions. She's also the primary expositor, using her wealth of book smarts to help the gang in situations involving science and engineering. She's not, it should be stressed, chief investigator, at least not yet: She doesn't tend to find clues as much as she does put the pieces together once she has them. She's more James Bond's Q than The Avengers' Emma Peel, if you will. That role falls to someone else.
Then there's Daphne. The character everyone says is objectively useless; a piece of late-1960s eye candy with no sense of self preservation or spatial awareness who exists solely to hang off of Fred's arm, fret about her clothes and hair and get stupidly kidnapped every episode to drag the plot out a little longer. Or, as I like to say, a triumph of both feminism and youth utopianism and quite possibly the best idea Scooby-Doo ever had. First of all, Daphne's job is manifestly not to get kidnapped to give the gang something to rescue at the halfway mark of every episode: In the original series she doesn't get abducted any more frequently than Shaggy or Fred (her nickname “Danger-Prone Daphne” comes from the fact she's sometimes a bit clumsy, though please do note it's only Fred, and on rare occasions Velma, who refers to her by this name). What Daphne actually does is find the clues. All of them. She seems to be able to notice hidden subtleties the other characters overlook all the time and frequently asks the questions that cause the others to re-think a deduction or leads them to suddenly realise something they hadn't before.
Even aside from that, Daphne is very probably the least understood character in Scooby-Doo, and this is a real shame, because she is also possibly one of the greatest. Part of this might be due to the passage of time and countless reboots distancing us from the cultural context into which she was originally introduced, so parsing out exactly who and what Daphne is requires us, even more than in the case of her friends, to start from critical square one, ignore the 40+ years of cultural conditioning that weigh down the franchise and flex our media studies skills a bit. But the groovy miniskirt with the scandalously short hemline, fabulous riding scarf and flip hairstyle tell it all: Daphne is a Mod.
In a famous quote that's still the best descriptor of the movement I've yet seen, Peter Meaden, the manager of legendary Mod rockers The Who, described the lifestyle as “clean living under difficult circumstances”. The origins of the first Mods is the subject of a lot of academic disagreement, but the consensus seems to be that they were a group of working class dandies who emerged out of the 1950s Beat Generation and were inspired by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Modern jazz and soul music and a fascination with consumerist culture as a deliberate act of rebellion against British traditionalism and the old-fashioned, classist social structure that went along with it. Fashion and style were, in and of themselves, extremely important elements of the scene, though not in the stereotypical sense of an unscrupulous one percenter whittling vast fortunes away on trivialities. Because they were working class, the Mods were very conscientious about which products to purchase and show off and the way in which they would be displayed. The goal was to take symbols of consumerist culture and reappropriate them in unique, “Mod” ways as a kind of Pop Art (not Soda) statement.
(Also note that Daphne's original voice actor was the US-Icelandic Indira Stefianna Christopherson, i.e. the only person not immediately recognisable as Southern Californian. The birthplace of the Mod movement was the UK.)
So no, Daphne is not prissy heiress who can afford to live in luxury because of her amazingly wealthy family. She's a working class dandy performance artist. If you need further evidence, consider the fact her signature colour is purple: Traditionally, purple was seen as an exclusive symbol of the aristocracy because it's an extremely rare colour in nature and the dye could only be derived by harvesting thousands upon thousands of mollusks whose shells contained the necessary pigment. That changed in the Victorian age with the advent of artificial dyes which made purple a colour available to everybody. So, by wearing purple, Daphne is using her wardrobe to make a public statement about how she reappropriates symbols and tools of the ruling class for her own radical purposes and as a symbol of herself and her personal ideals, which is pure Mod. And really, this reading does seem to make more sense: After all, why would a stupidly wealthy young woman obsessed with status bomb around in a beat-up Volkswagen van with a grungy Beat, a bookish nerd, a dog and a guy obsessed with poking his nose into other people's business?
But this also means Daphne is the character most hurt by the transition from Mysteries Five to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: As the Mod, she is very clearly meant to have some kind of relationship with Shaggy, the Beat, because her subculture is an evolution of his. She's the more hopeful, optimistic yin to his cynical and jaded yang. However, because Daphne wasn't considered to be as funny as Shaggy and Velma, she was pushed offscreen at every opportunity so the clown troupe leads could be in the spotlight as much as possible and as a result she's barely in the show (this, by the way, not an implication that she's sleeping with Fred, is the reason the gang has an irrationally programmatic instinct to split up all the time). Just as with Shaggy, Daphne's role doesn't truly become clear until the two of them get the entire show to themselves in the mid-1980s under Tom Ruegger. However, even in the original series if you notice, whenever the gang is just making casual conversation, it's usually Shaggy and Daphne talking to each other.
Which brings me to Fred who is, I'll be honest, difficult to read. He's the character who poses the greatest challenge to my redemptive interpretation of the series, but let's see what I can do with him anyway. For one it would seem like Fred was meant to be the protagonist before he was usurped by Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, which makes sense if we take Mark Evanier's word and posit he was based on Dobie Gillis. It's just too easy to claim this when looking at his design: youth subculture? Well, I suppose we could say he looks vaguely Mod; He's certainly got the ascot for it and the colours are right, but I'm pretty sure we're meant to read that top as a white sweater over a polo shirt and those look suspiciously like blue jeans to me. Not quite a slick Italian suit, then. No, what Fred looks the most like is a generically clean all-American prep school jock or university Ivy Leaguer which, annoyingly, he'd most likely have to be if he was created as the protagonist of a series meant, at least in part, to appease fanatical moral guardians.
However, this reading runs into issues once we realise that Mysteries Five always seemed like it was intended as an ensemble show with no one main character, focusing instead on the dynamic interaction of the gang as a whole. There's certainly enough of that in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! that it seems like it renders this take on Fred's role too problematic to hold. So what does Fred do in the show as broadcast? Mostly he just makes decisions and issues orders when it comes time to inevitably split the gang up. He's usually credited as the one who designs the traps used to catch the villain, but Velma has just as much input and on many occasions its implied the entire gang works together on them. He exposits the plot, but not as much as Velma, he finds clues, but not as many as Daphne and he works with Scooby and comments on the situation, but not as well or as frequently as Shaggy. Really, he seems just like a balanced, well-rounded member of the team with no real specialty, symbolism or particular purpose. Puzzlingly, still just like a generic leader would be.
This may very well be the underlying point of Fred though, that he plays the role of leader even when it's not required. After all, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! absolutely needed to not arouse the ire of the media watchdogs again, so what better way to do that than have a token character designed to look as white bread as they come to contrast with the manic antics of our loveable clown troupe leads? Looking more carefully however, and it could be assured media watchdogs absolutely would not, it becomes clear Fred's leadership is redundant, but he doesn't really care because he's only playing the role halfheartedly. After all, he's hanging around with three overt symbols of 1960s subculture, so he must not mind them all that much. What Fred does then is, through his superficial displays of blandness, textually and metatextually allow his friends to be as wild, crazy and countercultural as they can get (it's telling when Fred eventually gets his one major character revision he is overtly assigned a subculture: Conspiracy theorists).
The way Fred seems to play with his narrative role segues nicely into the other major thing Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is known for: A formulaic style of storytelling and characterization that is not just a major aspect of the way it tells stories but fundamentally imbued into the very core of how the show works and what it does. Among the many things that could be said about this approach, included among these the minor fact Scooby-Doo seems to have introduced Glam-style characterization several years ahead of the curve, the really interesting thing from my perspective is what ramifications this holds for the show's basic themes and values. For one thing, Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy are not characters in the sense we now understand them. As I've argued, they're really representatives of specific youth movements and crucially, youth movements from the late-1950s to mid-1960s: Several years before the show's actual airdate. They're caricatured for television animation, of course, but it's very clear who these characters are meant to be. What we have is, far from the original brief of a show overtly about everyday teen issues against the backdrop of a detective story or, for that matter, a modern character-driven drama, a show about programmatic characters who represent ideals tossed into a nightmare-scape of German Expressionism.
Recall the fact this show was being worked on in 1968, the year that marked the final collapse of youth counterculture in the United States. And then think back on which youth movements in particular the individual members of the gang represent: Beat, Geek, Mod and, arguably, Glam. Two of these date from long before the rise of the Hippies and Yippies, let alone their collapse and public shunning, one is timeless and the other hasn't even really coalesced into a visible movement as of this point. Although part of this is most likely due to the creators' need to distance their hip, young modern sleuths from the antiwar activists who had just been jackbooted by the Chicago police force for the benefit of the moral guardians, there's another side to this. The gang not only embody youth movements, they overtly hearken back to a time when youth movements were more accepted. The wisdom behind this choice becomes apparent when factoring in the other great programmatic aspect of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: “And I would have gotten away with too, it if it wasn't for those Meddling Kids”.
People like Richard Dawkins tend to love pointing out how Scooby-Doo is essentially a show for arch-rationalists: The ghosts and monsters always turn out to be criminals in disguise, ergo the show is teaching us that the supernatural is all make-believe and mass hallucinations. I would humbly suggest Dawkins and his ilk are completely wrong in this assertion. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! I argue, not only has nothing to do with arch-rationalism or the supernatural, in point of fact the supernatural exists within the series to such an extent it's taken for granted. Later series canonize this by doing stories overtly about a physical supernatural world, but this is really a strong undercurrent that dates back to the show's origin. It's the favourite tool of the New Atheists themselves, Occam's Razor: How many paranormal-themed mysteries have the gang solved in their time? How many turn out to be a dude in a rubber mask in the midst of a land-grab job? How often are they surprised by this revelation?
The answer is always. Every single time the gang, and not just Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, treat the situation as incredibly grave and do nothing that would suggest they think something suspicious or earthly is going on until the clues start piling up. They remain convinced, or at least very open to the possibility of a paranormal explanation up 'till the very end, and are usually frightened to the point of despair as a result. If the gang were truly arch-rationalist skeptics why wouldn’t they go into every case with the presupposition that it's going to be a guy in disguise from the get-go? Are they really that thick? The answer, it turns out, is very clear and very simple: The gang are not arch-rationalists because pretending to be an otherworldly manifestation to hide your unethical tracks is an extremely effective criminal plan. The reason? The realm of the supernatural is very real and something to respect and fear.
Now, look at how the show treats adults in general: They're either criminals (and always criminals motivated by some kind of financial or otherwise personal gain), victims or, in the case of the police, hopelessly incompetent. In any world that subscribes to our model of logic, lawmakers and lawkeepers who are regularly and embarrassingly upstaged by a group of inexperienced young adults who can do their job better than them and effortlessly so would be sacked in a heartbeat, but, in the world of Scooby-Doo, these are the only kinds that exist. The gang are the only proactive characters in the entire show. Authority figures are not to be trusted because they're either evil and corrupt or weak and apathetic. The whole point of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! then, is that the world is full of manipulative, unscrupulous people who will callously play on people's fears to increase their lot in life at the expense of everyone else's. The only way to live justly and freely in it is to jump in with the spirit of the youth, live our life according to our terms damn what anyone else thinks of us, and expose the wrongdoers for what they are. Perhaps most importantly, we have to take up arms ourselves, because no-one will do it for us.
This then at last is when we can finally see the true genius behind juxtaposing the show's visual aesthetic and its narrative structure: The chaotic and surreal nightmare world of Weimar Germany related by the German Expressionists and that Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! so consciously invokes now reflects the traumatic disarray brought upon the United States in the late 1960s by the hegemonic revolution that left the utopian ideals of youth movements in tatters. Those same lost ideals embodied by our main characters, who at the same time express a nostalgic regret for an age long since past even as they seem to subconsciously create an alternate universe around them where the 1960s not only never died, but in fact won by bringing down the same forces that sought to crush them. And this is where it suddenly becomes clear why it's so important for Daphne, the chief clue-finder and question-asker, to be a Mod: Daphne's purpose is to facilitate and engender revolutionary change in the show's world, which makes her basically a microcosm for the entire series.
There's a peculiarly timeless, static and unchanging feel to Scooby-Doo, most notable in future iterations but still clear here to an extent: The gang never really shed their mid-60s fashions (dated even here, at the series' beginning) and continue to frequent Malt Shops well into the 1970s and 1980s, even when they're revealed as the official in-universe calendar dates. In postulating a dream-world alternate reality where the 1960s never needed to end, what Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is saying is that Daphne's starry-eyed Mod utopianism has won the culture war. Our groovy heroes always triumph; the forces of hegemony, bullying and calculating dehumanization always fail. Of course it's a crook in disguise all the time: After all, there will always be someone cleverly hidden just out of plain sight who will use power, fear and intimidation to harm others, and that person will always be stopped by the young and young-at-heart rising up to point out the injustice of it all. Daphne and her friends don't have to be made to change by a shifting cultural zeitgeist: Rather, the world changes around them, the only strong and reliable things within it. That dream-atmosphere surrounding all the great German Expressionist works is plainly on display here to remind us it is all, in fact a dream, but it's a dream worth striving for despite, no, because of its twisted and macabre beauty. The best dreams, we know, are always made of a beguiling mix of light and dark; that's what makes them so memorably haunting.
Like all great children's television, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! doesn't talk down to its audience and manages to effortlessly convey themes that “grown-up”, “adult” shows stumble over constantly. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears respected their viewers of course, but they also respected themselves and the culture their show was going out into: They tried to make the most intelligent and mature show they could, and, because it was a cartoon, they were able to use imagery and visual symbolic logic that would have been impossible on a live-action series. Don't you see what this means, Star Trek friends? This is a show about wayfinding. The gang are travellers making their way through the ruins of modernity, bound together by only their sense of social justice, their desire to help others and their loyalty to and love for each other. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is purely and utterly Vaka Rangi. It perfectly encapsulates all the themes I wanted to highlight on this blog, and that I frequently wish were clearer in Star Trek itself. In fact, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! may well be the most Vaka Rangi work I'm ever going to cover.
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