Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
D.G. Valdron: Doctor Who Fandom
91 Plays1 year ago
Joe and Mark are joined this week by D.G. Valdron, a Canadian writer of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction.
The topic of this week's discussion is Doctor Who, in particular the expansive, creative and fascinating world of fan-produced films, plays and fiction that honor the Doctor.
D.G. talks about this fandom with great affection and knowledge, something that he's been a part of as a fan, but also as a writer. He's written about the first female Doctor – not Jodi Whittaker, but Barbara Benedetti, the first woman to play the Doctor, through a series of four, unlicensed half-hour adventures in the 80s – plus many of the other hundreds of loving fan takes on the BBC series.
Writ large, the discussion is a history of fandom; D.G. also explains why it's worthy of our time and attention.
A fascinating discussion for fans of Doctor Who in particular, but for those who stan fandom in general!
For more info, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
Recommended
Transcript
New Year Optimism and Time Travel Intro
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Hello, Joe. How are things? Not too bad. Dare I ask you how your day was today? It's okay. It's fine. I'm fine. Okay, good. I had a fine day. Excellent. Because this is the start to a new year. It is. So hopefully your year is starting off okay. It actually started off really well. Yeah. Yeah.
00:00:30
Speaker
Excellent. So today I have a time travel question seeing as we're now becoming a time travel podcast. It seems to come up every episode. If you travel through time to the past, who would you most like to meet? Oh boy.
Historical Figures and Inventors
00:00:47
Speaker
You know, the interesting thing is, uh, just a pompously drops and some names. I was reading Margaret Atwood's sub stack today.
00:00:54
Speaker
And she reminded me of someone who I would not want to meet, who was Robespierre. Yeah, I don't think he was a lot of fun. Yeah, I don't think so. So that immediately comes to mind as who I would not want to meet, but who I would want to meet. Gee.
00:01:13
Speaker
There's a number of Roman emperors that I would be interested in meeting. Yeah, Octavian would probably be the first, but then others as well. I would like to see, yeah, Marcus Aurelius. I would love to talk chat with that guy. Oh, absolutely. I read his book. I need to read his book. Oh, it's worth reading. Yeah, it stands up.
00:01:30
Speaker
though it's highly ironic. So what about yourself? Oh, I know. I knew you're gonna ask me that. I was like, shit, why did I ask this question? I have no answer to this question. Yeah, Marcus release is a good choice. It's got kind of an obvious one. But I would love if I could get past the language barrier Buddha, I'd love to talk to Buddha, because he was a real person, the time of Buddha. Yeah, absolutely. And what would you ask Buddha? I would ask him what he meant. Because I once wrote an essay about that in my undergrad. And it took me
00:01:58
Speaker
the better part of the whole term. I knew at the start of the term what the essay was and I still needed an extension and I'm still not sure I got the answer right. So I'd love to chat with him about what his philosophy was.
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, we got to get in our hands in a time machine. So we've given our guest plenty of time to ponder this question. He didn't seem panicked at all. That's the worrying part. I saw him look a little reflective, I think. DG Waldron, welcome to the podcast. Welcome. Well, nice to be here. So just to answer the question for me, I think I would like to meet the guy that invented the wheelbarrow. We don't know his name, but it was a useful invention that was probably revolutionary.
00:02:39
Speaker
uh in its time it changed the way people work that's changed the way people move things around uh maybe the guy that invented the horseshoe the person who invented the horse collar the woman who figured out how to cook cassava without you know dying of poisoning the history is full of
00:02:59
Speaker
people doing absolutely amazing things over and over. And most of them we don't remember, we don't even know about. They're all just part of this human tapestry. And mostly the people that we do remember, they're just freaking horrible.
00:03:13
Speaker
You know, like Robespierre. Yeah. Yeah. Robespierre. I mean, take Thomas
Thomas Jefferson's Contradictions
00:03:19
Speaker
Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was probably a nice enough guy. He was one of these country gentlemen philosophers, and he had a lot of interesting things to say about freedom and equality and human dignity and the formation of the American Constitution. And a lot of idealism and thought goes into that. He was also a slave owner who
00:03:43
Speaker
raped this teenage girl so many times he had like a handful of children with her and he bought and sold slaves. That's hard to reconcile. But then that's the best. Everybody is horrible, especially the famous ones. That's my answer.
Writing Craft and Genius
00:04:01
Speaker
Well, okay, so I'm gonna do a little fanboy thing here, which I've only done a couple of times. You were the author of The Mermaid's Tale, which we did an entire episode on. I think it was our second episode, actually. Yeah. And that is because I'm a great admirer of that book.
00:04:17
Speaker
I'm a great admirer of your writing. And of course, we shared an editor in that book as well, Dr. Robert Redday. He once said that if he was only remembered for nothing else, he wished that he could be remembered for your book, The Mermaid's Tale, for having edited that. Note he did not say my book, but I would agree because I think that your book is by far the better of the two. But not only that,
00:04:42
Speaker
I once wrote that you are incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence, and they believe that to be true. I feel like that's a challenge. I may have to take that one up. Yeah, sure. Well, that's very flattering. And I'd like to say that
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, I'm terrific. I'm amazing. I'm just... I'm a literary genius. Yeah, sure. There are a lot of very good writers out there and some of us get discovered and some of us don't.
00:05:19
Speaker
You know, probably the best writer in the world or the best physicist in the world lived their entire life shoveling camel dung and never got near like a math equation or the right bit of parchment. It really is a craft of life. And so you do what you can, you take what you can and you make whatever mark you can where an opportunity presents itself.
00:05:41
Speaker
So is
DG Waldron's Bibliography
00:05:42
Speaker
this the point where I go into a little bit of a bio? Yes, please do. I'm the author of a book called The Mermaid's Tale. I'm also the author of an alternate history called Axis of Andes about World War II happening in South America, author of The Bear Cavalry, which is a really strange mock documentary thing. I've got a whole pile of short stories.
00:06:06
Speaker
that are in a number of collections called Giant Monsters, Sing Sad Songs, or Brunt Slutty, Elf and Zombies, just to name a couple, or Dawn of Cthulhu. And I've also written Lex Unauthorized about a Canadian television series that was probably one of the most interesting science fiction series that came out in the last 20 years.
00:06:27
Speaker
I remember that. I've written something called a trilogy, Pirates History of Doctor Who, which was intended to be one book, but I just couldn't stop myself, so it turned out to be three. That is actually the subject of our discussion today.
00:06:45
Speaker
A Pirate's History, Another Pirate's History, and The Last Pirate's History. And they're all darn good books and really interesting. And honestly, they cure cancer in rats. And they're a perfect gift
Doctor Who Fan Creativity
00:06:57
Speaker
for any Christmas. Well, lots and lots of warning then for next year. Mark, are you a Doctor Who fan? Not really. I mean, I have watched Doctor Who. I was trying to think about that before the podcast. Tom Baker was my original Doctor Who.
00:07:15
Speaker
I watched him when it lived in England the first time. And then I kind of got re-engaged when Christopher Ecclestone was the Doctor Who and I watched, oh, David Tennant for sure. I think I saw most of his. And then I really liked Matt Smith. I liked his version of Doctor Who too, but then for some reason I just, I faded out again.
00:07:37
Speaker
So, yeah, I've been in and out with Dr. Who, but I'm not like a super fan. I haven't watched all of them. I don't really know all the lore. Yeah. Yeah. I never get into the original Doctor Who, because I was more of a Star Trek fan and was unimpressed by what I saw, although I did get into Baker a little bit briefly. But then my daughters were big Doctor Who fans of the news series, so I watched most of those up to a certain point and enjoyed much of those. But the Doctor Who that you're talking about, DG, is
00:08:06
Speaker
It's alternate Doctor Who, isn't it? Yeah, it's a Doctor Who that shows up in the corners. And really what the books are about, it started off way back in I think the 1980s. I was a Doctor Who fan back then, or at least enough of a fan to actually go to fan club meetings. Now the thing was, way back then, I was living out in Manitoba, Canada,
00:08:30
Speaker
You could watch Doctor Who on Prairie Public Television on Saturday nights. You could watch a few episodes and that would be it. But by that time, Doctor Who had about 20 years of videotapes around. And if you were hooked up with a fan club, then you had access to some of these videotapes. You could watch extra. You could watch other stuff. You could hear about some behind the scenes stuff. So I got involved in the fan club. And one night a young woman came in.
00:08:55
Speaker
with something that just blew me away, something I'd never seen before. It was Doctor Who, where the doctor was a woman, played by Barbara Benedetti. And there were four episodes. And I mean, this is the 80s. The show probably was in its rocky phase. They'd switched over to video when it really was looking good, the budget had been cut, the production values, there were all kinds of conflicts. So the show was kind of like on a slump.
00:09:23
Speaker
And I was watching an episode of Doctor Who that was well acted, well shot that had a vivid natural landscape or settings and a good story and was shot in 16 millimeter film. So.
00:09:40
Speaker
It was actually to a better standard than the television show at that time. So it was not the BBC. It was privately, independently done. It was a fan film produced by Ryan K. Johnston out in Seattle, and he made a series of them. Now, what had happened with Ryan was that there was some sort of filmmaking contest. He was a big Doctor Who fan, so he decided to make a Doctor Who film.
00:10:03
Speaker
And he knew a local actress named Barbara Benedetti, who was appearing in a stage play called Desperate Housewives. And that was going on for about six or seven years. And he was able to talk her and her friend, Randy Rochelle, into appearing.
00:10:20
Speaker
And so I thought, wow, this is amazing. It was a moment of revelation, you know, because I was a small town boy. And what I knew of culture, what I knew of media was the stuff that came from Hollywood, the stuff that was being dumped on us, the stuff that we were supposed to buy.
00:10:38
Speaker
And this was one of a number of remarkable things that just kind of blew my mind, the fact that people could create something. It wasn't the only instance. I watched a film called Decline of the American Empire with Denis Sarkand way back then. And that was a revelation, the fact that Canadians could actually make interesting movies.
00:10:59
Speaker
or The Adventures of Faustus Bidgood, which is pretty obscure today, but if you watch This Hour Has 22 Minutes, or KODCO, or all of the films that came out of Salter Street, I mean, that was the beginning of all of that. And so, you know, over and over again, I'm being exposed to the idea that, wow, people can create, and people can create these interesting, brilliant things. People can do these riffs. We are not.
00:11:29
Speaker
just subject to corporate culture. And in fact, with the Wrath of Eucor starring Barbara Benedetti as the first woman to play the doctor, 40 years before Jodie Whitaker, literally, he had something amazing and something wonderful. And it wasn't, it was certainly, I think, a feminist triumph, but it was a triumph of people being creative of doing something.
00:11:56
Speaker
And that's how I eventually got into the area of sort of this sort of marginal doctor who the stage plays, the animations, the fan films, this whole area of
00:12:13
Speaker
Cultural production, where somebody takes the actual licensed thing, takes the thing that's official and does something with it. Does something quite often that's really interesting and can be challenging, can be worthwhile, can present as much enjoyment and interest as something that they spend 50 or 100 million dollars on. And then, you know, a bunch of kids or a bunch of young adults are doing something
00:12:41
Speaker
that's almost equivalent to that with the budget that they found under seat cushions at home. And for me, just one more thing. And maybe this should be my tagline later on. But one of the things that so impresses me about this is not just that it's good. Some of it is good. The best of it is amazing. A lot of it is just terrible.
00:13:03
Speaker
Seriously, seriously, love and dedication and enthusiasm and hard work are often no substitute for skill and talent. That's just life. But the thing with all of this is they're not doing it for money. The people are making these fan films and the stage plays and all that. They're doing it for love because they really love something.
00:13:25
Speaker
And I think that's just about the best reason there is to do anything. So there you go.
Fan Films vs Professional Movies
00:13:32
Speaker
My first reaction is that the portion of this that is really good or entertaining or brilliant, what a shame that most of us don't get to partake of it. Or can we?
00:13:46
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's kind of interesting because almost no creativity happens in a vacuum. There's an audience someplace. And one of the things I explore in the books is how technology changed. I mean, you start getting fan films when you have Super 8. This goes all the way back to the 1960s. In 1960, if you've seen, you know, the Spielberg, Abraham's movie, Super 8. The Fablemans.
00:14:11
Speaker
The Fablemans, yes. You could buy like your home film camera and you could actually take home movies. And people took movies of their birthday parties and clips of their vacation and stuff like this, family gatherings and get-togethers. But for kids who loved toys, who loved to be creative, for adults who saw an opportunity, that became a source of creativity. And of course, there's a limitation to it.
00:14:38
Speaker
You only get one copy. You can only show it on an expensive projector. There's all this baggage to go through. But suddenly you started to see fan films starting up. People were creating their own versions of Star Trek and Star Wars. Well, Star Wars would come along later or Doctor Who or Tarzan or whatever. They're cowboy movies.
00:14:57
Speaker
And because it was fun to be creative, and they'd have these very limited venues, there was a guy who did something called Paragon's Paragon, and it was in the 1970s, and it's a Star Trek movie. It's a feature-length Star Trek movie made by some guy named John Constantino, who was like a carpet layer in Brooklyn or Boston or someplace, and he rebuilt
00:15:26
Speaker
the entire sets of the enterprise out of cardboard. He sewed all the questions. He did the whole thing. You can find clips of that on YouTube. And it looks interesting because, you know, you've got that kind of 70s facial hair all over the place. You've got some stock in the ocean. You've got a bunch of interesting things.
00:15:46
Speaker
I think I suspect it would be death to watch the whole thing. I think it would be painful. It's actually really fun to watch the clips. Anyway, from there, we started to get VHS in home movies and then the camcorders came out and suddenly it got to be a lot easier.
00:16:05
Speaker
Around the time that I got into fandom for Doctor Who, the society was literally built around trading and exchanging videotapes. There was like a kind of VHS network that was flowing around. And that's where people were actually recording episodes of The Real Show, distributing them all over. They were trading back and forth. And that was a gateway to discover a lot of British science fiction. So that was when we saw Blake Seven. That was when we saw Blackadder. We saw the Tripods.
Colonized Culture and Fan Works
00:16:35
Speaker
whole bunch of cultural products that were just flowing through these fan networks. And so that was where fan films came in. People started to make their own and they would enter the networks. And as time goes on, you have the internet, you have people uploading things and now
00:16:51
Speaker
You have YouTube, Vimeo. There's a lot of amazing stuff just in terms of amateur production all over YouTube. You can make a feature film with your camera now. Exactly. It has been done professionally. So yeah, the tools are much better for sure. Yeah, computerized editing, computerized sound mixes.
00:17:13
Speaker
Like there were 14 year old boys or 13, 12 year old girls who had the green screen in their bedroom and they're doing their own special offense.
00:17:22
Speaker
Well, that's amazing. Wonderful, a little bit terrifying, but that's cool. What does this mean then for professional work? Is any of this a threat to that? If people can get access to quality for the love productions, why are we paying for other stuff? I think that's kind of a yes and no proposition because if you look at, say, Disney or Warner Brothers, Marvel, et cetera,
00:17:47
Speaker
They are making very big movies and they are spending gigantic amounts of money on it. I think Indiana Jones cost something like 200-300 million dollars and you were literally commissioning a medium-sized town's worth of technical staff.
00:18:04
Speaker
to do these things. If you watch the credits, it just goes on and on and on for miles. And they're using the high end, everything. And they've got like, you know, fight choreographers who trained in Hong Kong. And they've got like these professional crews of lighting technicians. And for a lot of your amateur independent filmmakers, or you know, the people are making fan films, well, okay, they're precocious, they're enthusiastic, they may be talented, but there's maybe a handful of them.
00:18:34
Speaker
And so, you know, you've got this guy who's making his own Star Wars film, his own Doctor Who film. No, he doesn't have a fight choreographer. He doesn't have like a whole bunch of lighting technicians. He doesn't have all of this stuff. You know, so the productions are more limited and he certainly does not have the marketing budget.
00:18:54
Speaker
They don't have the army of lawyers to do their errors and omissions. They don't have access to Hulu and Netflix and Prime and definitely not to the major theaters. Do they constitute the farm team for the professionals? Do they go on to become the professionals? I think some of them do. I mean, you know, you look at Spielberg, he started out doing Super 8 millimeters film, same thing for Lucas. If you look at, say, people like Joe Dante,
00:19:23
Speaker
They're all these guys that were making these little tiny, you know, eight millimeter monster movies. And we see this again today. There's I think the big success in Doctor Who fandom is this guy who did a set of titles.
00:19:38
Speaker
and he if they were good enough that uh that the bbc bought them and hired him so he he actually got a professional job out of that and you know you are seeing cases like that and quite often you're often seeing people who are kind of mixing and matching there was a guy who
00:19:58
Speaker
who was a big Ghostbusters fan. That's a much better outcome than being sued. Oh yeah, yeah. And he was going to film school and he basically made a feature length amateur Ghostbusters movie as his film school project.
00:20:13
Speaker
So. Wow. Was it any good? It was okay. It was okay. It had some new ideas. And well, I'll put it this way. It was good enough that Harold Remus before he died, saw it and sent them some complimentary letters. And he even made a reference to it in the Ghostbusters video game. That was essentially the third Ghostbusters film. So it's semi canonical.
00:20:40
Speaker
Okay. I got to jump in because when you're talking about making like the Star Wars stuff, just the image of Michael Cera in the garage from Arrested Development pretending he was fighting with a lightsaber just jumped into my head. It's like, yeah, there's a lower end quality of those kind of things. Yeah. But there was a Star Wars fan film called Hardware Wars.
00:21:05
Speaker
uh that used to remember that she affects technology with you know plumbing and it was a nice little parody uh if you're doing a parody it's generally legal a parody or satirical take yeah that's an exception in copyright law and a lot of fan films tended to go that way and it was a tribute to something they loved and the thing is with most fan films uh is you know there's no money in it you're not doing it for for any
00:21:29
Speaker
recompense, you're just creating it for your friends, putting it up there, sometimes spending an insane amount of money on it. Again, it comes down to you're doing something you love. And generally, unless you are trying to commercialize it, and there was one Star Trek group that did that, nobody's coming down, they just see it as free promotion. You know, if it's good, they might steal something from it or borrow something or hire somebody. But you know,
00:21:56
Speaker
They're okay with it. Well, yeah. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as they say. Yeah. And I think it's a positive thing because I think one of the things that comes up here is that so much of popular culture is literally colonized.
00:22:12
Speaker
If you go back, say 100 years ago, or 120 years ago, say between 1880 and 1920, a lot of popular culture was basically out there in the pulp domain. People were doing their cowboy stories, people were doing their, you know, pirate stories, they were doing literature or novels or stories or pulps, all kinds of stuff. And it was kind of like, not say public domain per se, but it was sort of Wild West where nobody really owned things.
00:22:41
Speaker
But now, I mean, if you're looking at science fiction, then really you're looking at Star Wars and Star Trek. And those two franchises own something like 80% of the field. And then there's a few lesser franchises, Star Trek, Alien, Farscape, etc., Stargate. And that's it. If you look at music, 120 years ago or 100 years ago,
00:23:06
Speaker
There were all kinds of musicians making all kinds of songs and now we are all listening to Britney Spears or whoever the latest Taylor Swift or Kanye West.
00:23:17
Speaker
Speak for yourself, I'm going to say. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if I agree with that actually. I think at this point in history, because of the streamers, I think people are listening to a wider variety of, like maybe you're right in the sense that what's popular is just a limited number of things, but I would argue that people are listening to all kinds of things. I heard
Community in Creativity
00:23:36
Speaker
this loud noise coming from one of my undergrads, not last term, but a couple of terms ago and I'm like,
00:23:43
Speaker
I'm like, you shouldn't have thought loud at your buds. And then she took them and I said, what? And it was a symphony. She's listening to classical music. I'm like, that's okay. I'm not going to say anything. Just keep listening. Yeah. We have so much of our culture, which is literally colonized, which is sort of locked down as intellectual properties that are now sort of difficult to break into or difficult to wield.
00:24:07
Speaker
And we've got these new technologies where now people are able to listen to more and more diverse things. People are able to open things up, try and find or search things out. Colonized culture, maybe not the best phrase for it, but things like Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, all of the big franchises. They occupy their territory. They occupy psychic landscape.
00:24:30
Speaker
If you want to make an alien movie about aliens, probably there's no market for it because everybody goes to, you know, the real alien or the real Star Trek.
00:24:41
Speaker
And so for a lot of people who are creating, it's kind of interesting to create on this sort of shadow realm, this sort of border land where you're trespassing on this territory, you're not making any money out of it, but you were able to work with the tools. And I think that's a positive thing. And I think that opens the door to further creativity. Have you ever been tempted to create that sort of thing yourself?
00:25:04
Speaker
Oh, fan fiction? Okay, I've written things that I think would qualify as fan fiction. I do these sort of peculiar television, film, alternate history excursions. I'm not going to write a Doctor Who novel or a Star Trek novel unless somebody is paying me. You know, I've messed around in Edgar Rice Burrough's, you know, Martian world. If you find something that's really engaging, you do tend to want to play with it.
00:25:34
Speaker
As to making a fan film, I look at some of this stuff, and it is so amazing. And I realize that these things are being made by people in their 20s and 30s, and I think, Jesus.
00:25:44
Speaker
I wasted my life when I could have been doing stuff like this. But you know what? I think of the mermaid's tale. I've already said it's blisteringly good, but it bears repeating. It's kind of playing on the Lord of the Rings turf with orcs and trolls and dwarves, but you make it completely
00:26:05
Speaker
your own. So in a way, you are kind of playing with existing materials, but you're taking that clay and you're creating something startlingly original out of it. Yeah, well, I think the mermaid's seal also bears
00:26:18
Speaker
some debts to say the works of Dashiell Hammett, the Heard Boy Detective, Phil Noire. I was very, very influenced by Phil Noire when I was writing it. And I was actually trying to invert Phil Noire. So in Phil Noire, you have say the honest man who descends into darkness.
00:26:38
Speaker
on his mission. And in The Mermaid's Tale, what you have is a sort of reverse film noir of a monster who is climbing up into the light on her mission. So yes, there's that. Like the thing with creativity, right? Everybody thinks that creativity is like this light bulb that comes out of nowhere, that it's sweet generis, that it has no origins, no precedent. But really, 99% of creativity
00:27:02
Speaker
is just picking up what's in the landscape and adopting it and trying to synthesize it with other stuff. Most creativity is just taking something and combining it with something else and then seeing what develops out of that.
00:27:20
Speaker
And I think that's sort of, that comes back to the colonization of intellectual property, which I think tends to interfere with that process because if you can't take something and start playing with it and maybe start looking at how to synthesize it, how to combine it with something else, where you can go with it, that's an obstacle.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so, I mean, for myself, for The Mermaid's Tale, for the books and short stories I've written, I don't pretend to be super original. What I do think I have is I'll take ideas that are out there and I will combine them and do something new or interesting with them. I'll give you an example. In a book I did called Dawn of Cthulhu, you've all heard of Lovecraft and the Lovecraft, you know, Cthulhu cult and stuff.
00:28:06
Speaker
And so I kind of took a look at that and I thought, hey, what if it was a real religion? I mean, maybe that Cthulhu was about as real or unreal as any other God like Allah or Jehovah or whoever, but it was a real religion with a history and origins and you could work your way backwards and trace the evolution to here and here and how find out or work out how the gods came about and what was really going on. And so, you know, it was a really nice piece to do.
00:28:35
Speaker
But that's fundamentally creativity. None of us are super geniuses. We all build stuff out of other stuff. All our civilization, everything we've ever done.
00:28:46
Speaker
Even everything that we've talked about is all, it's not, I'm not going to say derivative, that's too strong a word, but Star Wars comes from Joseph Campbell and the idea of knights and like, it's got a very medieval thing, whereas Star Trek comes from the idea of the Western and the tract and going west and like, these things are all tropes that, so I think you've defined creativity, which is just taking the tropes
00:29:13
Speaker
and mashing them together and finding new forms. And that's kind of cool. Well, who was it that said standing on the shoulders of giants? Yeah, you know, I think that was creativity, who invented mavity.
00:29:28
Speaker
Interesting fellow, often a jerk, but I think he was right on that front. He was an alchemist. What he was trying to do is make gold out of lead, but he got distracted by this. He was a failure. Yeah. He also would engage in these long correspondences with other leading scientific men of his age. And once it got to a certain point, he would burn all the correspondents in literature and just say, look at what I came out with.
00:30:00
Speaker
You know? He was really a genius for his time, and he did accomplish genuine things, but he did not do it alone like he pretended.
00:30:10
Speaker
Well, I have a question though, and I don't mean this in a mean way because I really do believe in, Kurt Vonnegut has a quote about how everyone should be creative and whatever they want to. And the reason for that because that's what makes your soul grow when you're growing your soul. It makes us human. It makes us human. So I'm prefacing what I'm going to say with that because
00:30:34
Speaker
I agree that all of this fandom is great and it's very creative. But wouldn't you rather, like you're talking about the colonization of those mega media and that's what those fandoms are really. They're living within the colony of like what they've seen on the big screen or they've read in a book. That's the world they're playing with. And I'm wondering, wouldn't it be better if we just made up our own things?
00:31:00
Speaker
and did what we do as writers, just mash stuff together and wouldn't that be better? Sure, I hear that all the time. And especially from lawyers who go, yeah, this is property that's owned. Why don't you just go and create something brand new, goddamn it. But here's the thing, right? See, creativity doesn't exist in the vacuum. Often it is or attempt or effort to communicate with somebody to talk to somebody. So when we create, we're often thinking,
00:31:29
Speaker
in terms of an audience somebody's going to see this somebody's going to look at this there's there's a rock i saw a picture of a rock on facebook and there's an inscription written in Greek on it and it's about a 200 pound rock and the inscription says i pericles and rockless lifted this stone above my head with one hand
00:31:53
Speaker
Okay, he wanted somebody to know. We want somebody to see this stuff. We want somebody to respond to it.
00:32:01
Speaker
So if you are in a fandom or a community, you're probably going to try and make something that this community is watching. So if you make your brand new space opera epic inspired by Star Wars that has no real connection to it, your friends aren't going to be interested. Maybe the four or five people closest to you might sit there and watch it. But if you make, say,
00:32:26
Speaker
a really interesting, you know, Doctor Who fan film or a Doctor Who parody, or your own little version of Star Wars, then it kind of catches on. Go back to that kid who is, who Michael Sarah parodied, who's waving his lightsaber around in the garage. If it was just some random kid who was, you know, practicing fencing because he wanted to do his like, you know,
00:32:50
Speaker
Say three musketeers riff or he was inspired by I say some he wanted to do a Western That wouldn't have gone viral. Nobody would have cared. Nobody would have thought about it But because he was trying to reach out and work with a cultural touchstone that goes viral so, you know fan films are made for an audience of fans and I
00:33:13
Speaker
And so, you know, you trespass on this colonized commodity, this commercial commodity, because that's where the people are. That's where you personally are engaged. It's also where the community that you belong to is engaged. Nobody wants to go off into the woods and create a masterpiece that no one will see.
00:33:35
Speaker
They want to, you know, create their masterpiece in town. Michelangelo,
Original Works vs Fan Fiction
00:33:43
Speaker
when he works on the Sistine Chapel, is not doing it in a cave somewhere where he probably could have had better working conditions. No, he's doing it where all these people are going to be coming by to see it. So there is that. And yeah, I think
00:34:01
Speaker
It opens up the door for people to work with these tools and go on and do much more independent, much more, you know, uncontained or unowned stuff. But if you're just fooling around with something you love, do your Star Trek, do your Star Wars, do your Doctor Who, do your, you know, version of Alien or Super Heroes.
00:34:20
Speaker
So would you say it's the community aspect of it that's just as important as the creative aspect of the activity? Yeah. Because it's within the community where this matters. Yes. Well, you know, I think community is always an important part of creativity. Like, you know, we are social beings. Do we exist in complete isolation?
00:34:44
Speaker
I think there's something sad about that. The death row prisoner who writes his poetry on a wall that nobody will see. There is something for Lauren in Lost.
00:34:54
Speaker
Or is it a triumph of the human spirit? Because it could be that even though he knows no one's going to see it, he still wants to express himself in some way, and he still manages to express it. I mean, just because you don't have an audience doesn't mean it doesn't have value. I completely agree. I think there is that.
00:35:16
Speaker
but let's not pretend that the idea that somebody is going to read your poem at some point is a motivating factor. Well, I agree with that. I mean, I'm sure he hopes it's going to be read, but probably recognizes it's not going to be read, yet still writes it. Why? Well, there's other people in the death row who are going to be occupying that cell after you're gone. So there's the audience. There's a built-in audience.
00:35:45
Speaker
You know, reaching out for a community after you're gone. We don't have to talk to people right now when we are creating. But I think there is that impulse that we're talking to somebody at some point in the future, even if we never meet them. I think that when I write The Mermaid's Tale, people who I have no idea of, people who I've never met, may read it. And I kind of like that. I kind of like Inflicting the Mystery on Complete Strangers.
00:36:17
Speaker
But this is the thing. I mean, otherwise, I could just walk up to people I know and talk to them about it. I wouldn't have to write a novel at all. I think you should keep writing the novels. I'm sorry I haven't read the book yet, but I will. Oh, that's okay. I've got tons of stuff you should go and read it all. You should buy it.
00:36:36
Speaker
I'll buy it at the very least. I think, actually, I've already bought it. I just haven't read it yet. Well, Mark has heard me rave about it often. And I probably should issue a reminder that it does have some challenging bits. Yeah, I'm OK with that. Yeah, not dissimilar to challenging bits at the beginning of even R. Donaldson's classic. The first trilogy. Yeah. I do admit that.
00:37:04
Speaker
Some of my writing is very dark and it deals with and touches some things that people can find uncomfortable and difficult and I've come to understand why because I've had those experiences so they're part of me and perhaps I need to keep addressing them or coping with them.
00:37:25
Speaker
or maybe it's just part of this world that I live in. But yeah, there's darkness. So, you know, buyer beware. It's a feature, not a bug. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, yeah. Life can be dark. But I wanted to ask in light of the fan fiction and your point that the people are doing it because it does give them access to that built in audience. What does it mean for writers like us and you who are creating our own original material,
00:37:53
Speaker
that is not connected to those works. Is there any point in us doing that? Would we be better off, you know, creating essentially fanfic? Well, all right. So if you get a contractor write a Star Wars novel,
00:38:08
Speaker
you're probably going to make big bucks upfront and your novel is going to probably sell 20 or 30,000 copies guaranteed. And my novel has probably sold less than a couple of thousand copies to date. I mean, that's just sort of the nature of the thing.
00:38:26
Speaker
But I didn't feel like writing a Star Wars novel in Lucasfilm wasn't ringing my doorbell to get me to do it. So there's that. I think for a lot of my writing, it's unconnected to a particular franchise. It's unconnected to an existing colonized intellectual property. I'm writing things that are important to me that I want to write about. And there's an entire class or genre of fan filmmakers. There's fan fiction writers.
00:38:54
Speaker
And I respect what they do. Some of it is completely inaccessible or abstract to me, especially when you get into things like slash fiction where suddenly Kurt and Spock are having relationships. Yeah, there's dynamics here that are apparently important and satisfying to people that I just don't relate to. But if it's working for them, fine. I think
00:39:21
Speaker
One of the things that you come across, not just with fan filmmakers is that they will, the ones who stick to it, the ones who develop some skill and talent, they will, many of them will break into the industry in some way. A lot of fan fiction writers have actually
00:39:38
Speaker
broken into mainstream in some way or other. It's not a clear direct path, but if you're being creative in one thing, you don't just stop. Probably the most famous example of a fan fiction that got big is Fifty Shades of Grey, which started off as a Twilight fanfic with Stephanie Myers. And somehow it managed to carry on on its own and develop a life of its own.
00:40:07
Speaker
Now, of course, you know, between twilight and 50 shades of gray, whoever did that filed off all the serial numbers very, very carefully.
00:40:19
Speaker
And it got publishable. And you have to kind of wonder, like, how many how many science fiction novels out there started off, you know, just carefully falling off the serial numbers of Star Trek? I mean, you know, you look at The Expanse or you look at Stargate or Farscape or even Lex.
00:40:40
Speaker
I think it represents a kind of cultural dialogue. You've got the space opera, Star Trek and Star Wars and Alien, these different visions of the future. And you can start with one of those visions of the future and file the serial numbers off, or you start a reaction to one of those and try and create something that is completely different. But you're informed by what's out there.
00:41:03
Speaker
And it's a part of the conversation, isn't it? Yes. Yes, completely. You know, Star Trek is a part of the discourse and then, you know, the next work comes along and is a response to that. And, uh, and it's all, yeah, a part of the cultural dialogue. Are either of you guys worried about the constant reboots? Yeah. Well, in terms of, for instance, I did a, a series of books called Lex unauthorized about the Lex television series. And Lex, when it came out, uh, was around the, around the turn of the millennium.
00:41:33
Speaker
And it was very much a reaction to Star Trek. Star Trek through the next generation, the S-9, Voyager, had created this vision of the future and this vision of what humanity was.
00:41:43
Speaker
And Lex becomes a reaction to that. And there were a bunch of shows that showed up around the same time that are all a reaction to Star Trek's utopian vision, Star Trek's aesthetic sensibility. So you've had Firefly, you know, you had Battlestar Galactica, the most famous one, obviously, you had Farscape, SG-1.
00:42:05
Speaker
was somewhat of a reaction to Star Trek. Even Babylon 5, in its own way, is a reaction to Star Trek. We are always in dialogue with this world that's around us and with dominant media presence. OK, we're wrapping up. I do want to tie this back to your books about Doctor Who pirate history. So in your books, can you tell us a little bit more about those books? And does it give us an indication of where we can find some of these alternate fan fiction works?
00:42:35
Speaker
fan films and yes it talks about the best and the most interesting fan films that are out there. Literally you know recreations of the show that you can sort of sit there and watch and go okay you could slip this into a DVD set with the classical series and you can enjoy it. There's DW 2012
00:42:58
Speaker
With Luke Newman, there is the Doctor Who Velocity series starring Sharon Moore. You have Barbara Benedetti's first woman doctor, still holds up 40 years later. You have Rupert Booth and his time-based crew who did 14 episodes, 14 half hour episodes, five stories. And it's like discovering a lost season just with a brand new doctor out of nowhere.
00:43:26
Speaker
and all very professional, all amazing, some of them imperfect.
00:43:31
Speaker
but they've always got something interesting. I did a chronicle of all of the Doctor Who stage plays, both formal and informal. This is the nice thing back in like the 90s. The show was off the air. If somebody went to the BBC and said, I'd like to do Doctor Who as a stage play, the BBC would say, oh yeah, sure, whatever, do it. And it would be official, semi-official. So you have the Empress of Otherwin, you have Planet of Fire, you have this guy, Nick Scoville, who did five consecutive Doctor Who stage plays
00:44:01
Speaker
And he did a fan film called Power of the Daleks, which was a recreation or reimagining. We look at the reconstructions, which is a whole different area where we look at the way that fans saved all the lost episodes in audio. So that's just kind of like an amazing story. We look at gay at gray market stuff.
00:44:25
Speaker
where people were realized, oh, well, Doctor Who was property of the BBC, but these aliens called, say, the Saunterans or the Great Intelligence or the Atai, they belonged to the writers. So they would go to the writers and they would make the deal. And suddenly you had like, you know, the Saunteran movie.
00:44:45
Speaker
which is sort of halfway in the Doctor Who universe. They never mentioned the Doctor, but it's there. And then people began to experiment with animation and fan animation literally drove the real professional animation from the BBC. There were lost serials and scripts that were never made by the BBC. Fans have made them.
00:45:07
Speaker
There's something called Masters of Luxor which was supposed to be the second Doctor Who serial and it was made in black and white in four episodes with a fan group. There's this thing called called devious and this is a fan film project that has been going on for about 35 years and they actually got Sean Pertwee one of the real doctors to star in a scene in it.
00:45:32
Speaker
And, you know, they're finally getting to the point where they're releasing it one episode a year, so there are four episodes up, and it's just amazing to see. See, I've got all of this wonderful stuff, and I write about it, I talk about where it comes from, I talk about the cultural impact, all of these different aspects of the show that's just right off the mainstream, audio adventures and where those came from.
00:45:56
Speaker
The wonderful thing is, between YouTube and Dailymotion and various sources, a lot of this stuff is more accessible now than it has ever been before. There is a kid, like I've said, named Luke Newman, started doing his own Doctor Who, and sometimes it was just Luke. He had to be both the hero and the monster. He built himself in his parents' shed, his own little TARDIS control room and console, and, you know, did the job.
00:46:24
Speaker
And he worked his way through. He's got something like 40 episodes. He has a body of work that is literally equivalent to a mainstream doctor. And while some of it is, you know, kind of twee and maybe cheap and silly, there are some episodes that he's done that
00:46:46
Speaker
are just solid. And you can sit there and go, yeah, yeah, this is enjoyable. And he's doing it with like some fraction of the budget of the BBC. I will take Luke Newman's Doctor Who 2012 over the Whitaker era, maybe even up there with the Capaldi era. It's just a nice piece of work. And so I want to celebrate, you know, these people who are doing these things and doing them amazingly
00:47:13
Speaker
out of a sense of love, and I would really encourage your listeners, if you're Doctor Who fans, to just go on YouTube, search out some of these people, search out some of these names. Buy my books if you wanna figure out who's doing what and where to find them. And if you're saying- And we will put links to your books up on our website. And if you're a Star Trek fan, then I would recommend to you something called Star Trek Continues.
00:47:40
Speaker
It's an insane thing. There was this actor named Vic Mignonia who spent $100,000 rebuilding the original sets from the original blueprints for the original Star Trek series, got a bunch of actors and crew together and literally did his own classical Star Trek series, including bringing back actors who were in the original show from the 1960s. It is the most amazing thing.
00:48:07
Speaker
You know, look up John Cosentino and Paragon's Paragon and just get this strange little 70s nostalgia. Look up Hardware Wars, for God's sakes. Or what was it? Pink Five, a really cool Star Wars series of fanfics that started off as just somebody having a bit of a lark and then ended up costing as much as a small house. And holy cow.
00:48:34
Speaker
Mark, any final thoughts or questions? No, I just say thanks to DG for bringing this to our attention. It's been a complete slice and you know, it's nice to be able to talk to other human beings on a Sunday night. So yay. Yeah, human interaction. Yay.
00:48:53
Speaker
It is a great pleasure to have you on the podcast, DG, so really appreciate your taking the time. Thank you very much, and it's been such a pleasure.
00:49:33
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Raynor and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney. Web design by Mark Raynor. Show notes and all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney.donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.