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Post by Batflunkie on Jul 29, 2016 8:49:05 GMT -5
Mine started from a very early age. I might have brought this up before, but I was raised by a mother and father who were very endeared towards the Star Trek franchise (One of my most treasured possessions
is a later edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia) and while I do love that series a lot for it's philosphy and societial harmony, it didn't make me "yearn" to be starbound. That didn't come until much later when on a complete whim I decided to read Quasar and Englehart's run on Silver Surfer while the Neil Degrasse Tyson Cosmos reboot was airing. The show opened my mind to infinite possibilities that I had never considered or dared to consider prior. Imagine staring at only a small portion painting and then being able to suddenly see it in it's entirety. It was like everything suddenly made sense to me
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Post by tingramretro on Jul 31, 2016 8:11:49 GMT -5
Doctor Who. My earliest childhood memory, of anything at all, is of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, running through a dark forest. I'd have been three years old, and the Doctor has remained with me ever since.
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Post by Batflunkie on Jul 31, 2016 10:14:56 GMT -5
Even for something as garish and terribly low-budget as the early Doctor Who, there's still something inherently magical about that show. Hartnel is probably my favorite as I'm strangely endeared to crotchety old men
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Post by tingramretro on Jul 31, 2016 10:53:17 GMT -5
Even for something as garish and terribly low-budget as the early Doctor Who, there's still something inherently magical about that show. Hartnel is probably my favorite as I'm strangely endeared to crotchety old men That's because good science fiction isn't about having a big budget, it's about having a big imagination. For my money, the single best episode of Who, as science fiction, is part one of The Mind Robber from 1969 , written in a hurry after something else fell through, and with no real budget so that it basically used one already existing set, some white drapes, some black drapes, and a couple of robots left over from an old BBC2 show. It is utterly unearthly and hugely compelling. A fantastic piece of television.  |
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Post by Batflunkie on Jul 31, 2016 12:04:35 GMT -5
I also really like the type of film camera they use. I've seen it used in a lot of older soap operas and dramas (even a handful of Twilight Zone episodes) but I'm not rightly sure what it's called. Almost kind of adds a mockumentary element to it
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Post by hondobrode on Jul 31, 2016 13:48:30 GMT -5
Thinking back, the first sci-fi that I remember was Planet of the Apes. Space 1999 was after that but WAY over my childhood cognition. What really got my attention was the Star Trek re-runs, and soon thereafter, Star Wars, and Micronauts, Shogun Warriors, ROM, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. Comics-wise, Green Lantern, Flash, the Legion, the Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Atom.
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Post by tingramretro on Jul 31, 2016 15:09:06 GMT -5
Thinking back, the first sci-fi that I remember was Planet of the Apes. Space 1999 was after that but WAY over my childhood cognition. A series which sadly never got a proper conclusion. Until now... ![]()  ![]() Much like the similarly unresolved Logan's Run...  |
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Post by String on Jul 31, 2016 20:39:12 GMT -5
Star Trek TOS and Doctor Who were and remain huge influences for me in this regard, perhaps more so than Star Wars.
Battlestar Galactica was another of my favorites along with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. For the record, I hate Lost in Space. It was boring and repetitive.
In junior high, my science class watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos which was truly epic in scope, thought and possibilities. Although I don't recall ever watching the TV show, I was a subscriber to the kids' science magazine, 3-2-1 Contact. But the dangers of space exploration were made real when we watched coverage of the Challenger disaster in class too.
My mother was an avid member of various mail-order book clubs and she suggested I try some of Isaac Asimov's work. She got me the Foundation Trilogy, probably my first exposure to sci-fi novels, a trilogy (and his later follow-ups) that I still dearly love.
On the comic front, probably Superman was my first exposure, an alien visitor to our planet. One of my earliest memories of Star Trek beyond the TV show is Star Trek #11357, a Dynobrite comic that reprints two stories from Gold Key's ST title. I'm not even sure how I acquired it but I re-read it multiple times. I was really happy when I got to see and meet William Shatner at a WizardWorld con last year and got his autograph on that book.
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Post by berkley on Aug 1, 2016 4:38:19 GMT -5
As RR said, it's so long ago now that I'm not really sure, but if I try to cast my memory back to those dark ages, emerging from the mists of time are the Apollo missions, Star Trek, and 60s Marvel comics. Not long after that - I have what feels like a better recollection of this because I was just that 1 or 2 yrs older - it was Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke books: Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, which we got in hardcover from the book club, then all those Bantam paperbacks; Clarke's novelisation of 2001, then Rendezvous with Rama, .
I do remember "It's about time, it's about space, it's about anything you can face", though I was very young at the time - I usd to wonder if Bowie had that in mind when he wrote the line "Look at those cavemen go" in Life on Mars
I also remember some of the early Star Trek books by James Blish and Twilight Zone books by Rod Serling - typing this I just realised or remembered that I read some of those TZ stories before I ever saw the show, which I don't remember seeing until my late teens when they started replaying them late at night, around midnight. I saw Rod Serling's supernatural anthology show The Night Gallery before I saw the earlier and much superior Twilght Zone (not to disparage NG which I still remember fondly).
After Bradbury and Clarke, the books were the focus for me. Niven's and Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye, Niven's Ringworld, he multi-volume Science Fiction Hall of Fame collection, Frank Hebert's Dune, all come to mind. Obviously by this time - the mid-70s - I was already a pretty hard-core SF guy.
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Post by brutalis on Aug 1, 2016 10:54:29 GMT -5
Even for something as garish and terribly low-budget as the early Doctor Who, there's still something inherently magical about that show. Hartnel is probably my favorite as I'm strangely endeared to crotchety old men That's because good science fiction isn't about having a big budget, it's about having a big imagination. For my money, the single best episode of Who, as science fiction, is part one of The Mind Robber from 1969 , written in a hurry after something else fell through, and with no real budget so that it basically used one already existing set, some white drapes, some black drapes, and a couple of robots left over from an old BBC2 show. It is utterly unearthly and hugely compelling. A fantastic piece of television. Doctor Who is one of those series which can generate so much discussion/arguments over it. You either love it or hate it. It is a truly amazing show in how it is a children's show (even to this day they still hold that concept dearly) that explores fears, terrors, monsters, history and science fiction. They say your 1st Doctor is your favorite and my 1st was Jon Pertwee the 3rd Doctor. But just as much as i love his version i adore the Tom Baker 4th Doctor tears. Of the newest incarnations, David Tennant was spectacular and i am loving the return of crankiness with Peter Capaldi but Matt Smith was fun as well. No matter the incarnation for the timey wimey travels of companions in the big blue box (its bigger on the inside than the outside, amazing) it is a series i enjoy watching, no matter how cheaply it used to be made. Which that is some of the charm of the series in it's 1950's mode of special effects made to budget. |
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Post by tingramretro on Aug 1, 2016 11:19:46 GMT -5
That's because good science fiction isn't about having a big budget, it's about having a big imagination. For my money, the single best episode of Who, as science fiction, is part one of The Mind Robber from 1969 , written in a hurry after something else fell through, and with no real budget so that it basically used one already existing set, some white drapes, some black drapes, and a couple of robots left over from an old BBC2 show. It is utterly unearthly and hugely compelling. A fantastic piece of television. Doctor Who is one of those series which can generate so much discussion/arguments over it. You either love it or hate it. It is a truly amazing show in how it is a children's show (even to this day they still hold that concept dearly) that explores fears, terrors, monsters, history and science fiction. They say your 1st Doctor is your favorite and my 1st was Jon Pertwee the 3rd Doctor. But just as much as i love his version i adore the Tom Baker 4th Doctor tears. Of the newest incarnations, David Tennant was spectacular and i am loving the return of crankiness with Peter Capaldi but Matt Smith was fun as well. No matter the incarnation for the timey wimey travels of companions in the big blue box (its bigger on the inside than the outside, amazing) it is a series i enjoy watching, no matter how cheaply it used to be made. Which that is some of the charm of the series in it's 1950's mode of special effects made to budget. Doctor Who is rather odd in that, while it was created to be a semi-educational series and is generally regarded as a childrens show, it was never actually made by the BBC's childrens department, and the majority of the audience have been adults since about 1970. A study published a few years ago claimed that children accounted for only about 15% of the regular audience, and also revealed that the age group least likely to watch it were teenagers. It seems that both children and adults love the show, but those in between have traditionally tended to consider it deeply uncool... |
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Post by Batflunkie on Aug 1, 2016 13:19:34 GMT -5
Doctor Who is rather odd in that, while it was created to be a semi-educational series and is generally regarded as a childrens show, it was never actually made by the BBC's childrens department, and the majority of the audience have been adults since about 1970. A study published a few years ago claimed that children accounted for only about 15% of the regular audience, and also revealed that the age group least likely to watch it were teenagers. It seems that both children and adults love the show, but those in between have traditionally tended to consider it deeply uncool... Star Wars/A New Hope was intially considered "little more than a b-grade children's fantasy film" by those who were working on it, but I'm sure it surprised everybody when it transcended such nonsensical barrier for entry |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Aug 2, 2016 8:52:44 GMT -5
I've been thinking and trying to remember how I was first introduced to sci-fi and it's hard because it's a genre that I've always been interested in for as long as I can remember. Thinking about it, my earliest exposure to sci-fi was probably in the mid-to-late '70s with Doctor Who (which scared the bejesus out of my as a little kid), Blake's 7 and re-runs of the original Star Trek TV series.
...And then came Star Wars. It's weird because I can remember that I was interested in SW before I had even seen the film. I know that people think of SW as being a film that came out in May 1977 because that was when it was released in the U.S., but over here in the UK, the movie didn't open until 27th December, 1977, and that was only the premiere. So, it was February 1978 before the original SW film was on nationwide release here in the UK.
By that time, the Kenner toys (initially distributed by Palitoy over here) had been in the shops for a good few months, while kid's magazine's like Look-In had done features on this new sci-fi film with its groundbreaking special effects in the latter half of 1977. As a result, I already had the Luke Skywalker action figure (the first SW thing I ever owned), along with one or two others, and loved playing with them. I can vividly remember my Dad saying to me one day in early 1978, "There's a Star Wars film on at the pictures, would you like to go?" Needless to say, I said "yes!" and thus began a lifelong love (obsession?) with Star Wars.
Seeing SW in 1978 also cemented my love of all things sci-fi. Of course, by the time I was 12 or 13 I had already decided that SW wasn't really sci-fi, but more like space fantasy, but nonetheless, from there I full embraced films like Battlestar Galactica, Battle Beyond the Stars, Flash Gordon, and Disney's The Black Hole, along with the BBC adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
By the time I was 11, my best friend and I had discovered that his step-father's book shelves were stuffed full of proper, hardcore sci-fi novels by the likes of Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Harry Harrison, which we began to read. In particular, I remember really enjoying Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books.
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Post by brutalis on Aug 2, 2016 9:03:20 GMT -5
Certainly it was television which led me into the realms of science fiction/fantasy. By the 5th grade thanks to our local library sending around book-mobile (a mobile home turned into a library on wheels stocked on both sides from floor to ceiling) where every 2 weeks it came around so we could sign out 4 books at a time i was reading Heinlin, Asimov and H. G. Wells. Once into Junior High i had an English teacher who was a science fiction lover and she would lend me books from her own collection exposing me to smaller name authors and different genre's of science fiction. One of those was the paperback of Colossus and it's sequel which had been made into a movie. Then from there it was Saturday viewings (often repeat viewings) of each new Planet of the Apes movies with my grandfather. I can't remember a time when i didn't have a science fiction book, or comic or television show or movie foremost in my mind while growing up. Personally, i think all that has helped me into adult keeping my thoughts and mind open for new experiences and for dreams and hopes of tomorrow which sadly humanity seems unwilling to embrace as much as i do.
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Post by Batflunkie on Aug 3, 2016 7:24:01 GMT -5
Seeing SW in 1978 also cemented my love of all things sci-fi. Of course, by the time I was 12 or 13 I had already decided that SW wasn't really sci-fi, but more like space fantasy, but nonetheless, from there I full embraced films like Battlestar Galactica, Battle Beyond the Stars, Flash Gordon, and Disney's The Black Hole, along with the BBC adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I tend to prefer most of my sci-fi cut with heavy fantasy elements, which is probably why I prefered A New Hope and The Force Awakens to the other Star Wars films. I kind of miss the "fantastical" element of sci-fi that was so present in pulps and serials of yesteryear, now it's just so inherently focused on pure fact and scientific schematics that it just gets so hard to seperate one from the other |
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