JulianPerez writes:Awww, c'mon! I always loved those spooky seventies shows like IN SEARCH OF... with Leonard Nimoy.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of those theatrically released schlockumentaries like "Chariots of the Gods," the kind of things poor old Orson Welles would narrate to pay off his bar tab.
I liked the Nimoy show, too, and I think they've been repackaged recently for the cable market, without the now laughably dated insert shots of mutton-chopped Nimoy in his plaid sportcoats and groovy turtlenecks. One segment that still sticks with me was about extra-sensory perception or something and they got on the subject of phantom pain, the phenomenon where amputees feel aches in limbs they no longer have. As an experiment, they cut a leaf in half and placed it under some sort of heat-sensitive spectrometer that showed not only the living half, but also the half that was missing! It was as if the plant, too, "thought" it was still whole and kept maintaining some sort of aura around the space that used to contain its missing half. Really weird, creepy stuff!
The original TREK fan magazine, pre-Next Generation, was one really great source of speculative essays.
That's the one I'm thinking of! They used to put out mass market paperback collections of the best articles. Some of it was quite well done, and ahead of its time, what with all the "pop essay" books on the market these days (one of which I just contributed to!).
There are a few fan-generated ideas that made it into official Trek lore, like Sulu's first name "Hikaru" (an alternate suggestion wasn't nearly as catchy...Walter!) and, if I'm not mistaken, Kirk's birthplace being Iowa.
Even erotic fanfiction has been around for a while. There's an apocryphal story that Shatner was shown a very early Kirk/Spock slash fiction story on the set of Star Trek's second season...and consequently went absolutely ape!
This foolishness even made it into a couple of early licensed Trek novels, the "Phoenix" books. I remember thinking it was pretty sick. But it is interesting to ponder that some women out there actually fantasize about two guys getting it on. I mean, we all know guys are into girl-on-girl action, but you don't hear much about the reverse.
Also it's interesting to note that by the time of the first movie this kind of stuff had gained such a foothold that Roddenberry was compelled to include a foreward from "Captain Kirk" in his novelization of the film, where Kirk basically said, "I don't know where these rumors get started, but trust me I much prefer girls to guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that..."
Anyway, if you're tracing the roots of erotic fan fiction, you can take it back another few decades at least, to the "Tijuana Bibles" that featured sexcapades between and among Clark Gable, Clara Bow, Popeye, Betty Boop, Superman and Wonder Woman, you name it.
One that was in the PJF mold was where they speculated Doc Savage might be a Vulcan. Doc Savage had strength that dwarfed even that of very strong men; his hearing was beyond human range (which is not entirely possible to attribute to exercises), he used a variation of the Vulcan Neck Pinch, he was very logical and never showed strong emotion ever, and never showed strong interest in women.
Ha! Nice way to turn it around so somehow Doc is derivative of Spock and not the other way around!
I also seem to remember an attempt to tie Spock to Sherlock Holmes. And someone, maybe Farmer, once speculated that Spock's mother, whose maiden name was Amanda Grayson, was a descendent of a certain Boy Wonder. Where does it all end???
There are moments (see THE CZAR OF FEAR, among others) where Doc did something very much like the Vulcan Mind Meld: he gets information by a criminal by gripping the crook's face (!) and then asking questions.
Ha! But where with Spock the interviewee goes blank and says, "My mind to yours...", when Doc does it he goes, "Ow, ow, ow, OWWWW!!"