Examples of Dead Fandoms, Part One
You know, there was a time that Star Wars was close to being a dead fandom. Seriously.
Between 1986 to 1991, Star Wars was so dead, the Kenner toy line, once a license to print money, was canceled. The Marvel Star Wars comic was canceled, too, due to low sales and lack of interest, which didn’t justify the pricy license. As a point of reference, remember that Power Man & Iron Fist continued for several months after Star Wars was canceled…which means that at one point, Power Man & Iron Fist was profitable, and Star Wars comics were not! There were interesting attempts to extend the Star Wars toy line (read that link, incidentally – imagine the toys creating Episode VII), but for all intents and purposes, except for VHS sales, Star Wars was “over.”
If something goes a long time without any decent material to recharge your enthusiasm, the fandom starts to vanish. Fandom is like fire: it needs raw material to keep burning. Star Wars was unlikely to ever totally go away. However, not everything is a huge phenomenon like Star Wars: there are some fandoms that were once very huge and visible and have, for the most part, vanished.
Usually, I bristle at getting an “Um, actually…” annoying correction internet-guy response (since “um, actually” responses usually just zero in on one or two details and miss the big picture), but in this case, I don’t actually want to be right. I want to hear these fandoms are kept alive by one person in their hearts.
Swamp Thing
Sure, people know about the character as one of those weird DC Vertigo people (though he’s been vastly overshadowed even there by Sandman and others), but there was a time, close to a decade, that Swamp Thing was a legitimate merchandising phenomenon, with action figures, an animated series, a live action television series, and multiple movies that existed independently of any kind of superhero boom. All of that has basically vanished, and Swamp Thing is no more or less obscure than any of comics’ other “chiller” characters, like Vampirella.
The reason for Swamp Thing’s initial wave of popularity in the 1980s is hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there, but let me try: a big part of the pop culture of the 1980s was actually fifties nostalgia. Kind of like how much of the pop culture of today is eighties nostalgia (hello, Stranger Things, anyone?). Swamp Thing was retro, a schlocky sort of monster movie, with a creature, a girl, and evil mad scientists. It met a hunger in its time that doesn’t exist now.
Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy is not “on his way.”
The reason for the decline of this particular fandom is obvious: newspaper comics were once widespread popular entertainment, but because they didn’t really change with the times and were prevented from changing by newspapers’ concern with appealing for the broadest possible family audience (if you appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to nobody), they became less and less relevant…a trend that accelerated to lightspeed when newspapers began to die out with the internet. You could swap out once-popular properties like Prince Valiant or Little Orphan Annie for Dick Tracy, but Dick Tracy is a great example because it was undoubtedly, unquestionably, a really big deal for a very long time.
Dick Tracy, for decades, was one of those immediately identifiable and endlessly merchandized pop culture figures, on the level of Charlie Brown, the Muppets, or Superman. He had an animated series in the 1960s, two live action shows, serials, and even a movie with Warren Beatty that was one of the major pop culture events of 1990. There are some characters people have heard of, but nobody cares about. Dick Tracy was one of those people cared about, because his influence can be found in all kinds of works: Batman, for example, is very different without Dick Tracy’s gallery of grotesque foes. Spider-Man is just Dick Tracy with more wisecracking.
Though obviously Dick Tracy’s star would dim no matter what, just like every other newspaper strip character, I am sorry to say that he didn’t so much die as he was killed.This article here gives a good overview, but basically, it all boils down to the fact the film rights are contested, so attempts to make Dick Tracy comics and even a live action show were shot down.
The Tripods
The Tripods novels, about a boy hero who fights alien invaders who have ruled earth for hundreds of years, were once like cockroaches: they were everywhere, clogged up every single library used book sale, and everyone of a certain age read them…but I haven’t seen them around for a decade and a half. I usually have an explanation, or at least an educated guess, why certain fandoms vanished, but this is the first fandom I’ve encountered that I honestly can’t explain why it’s not around anymore, because it should be having its’ cultural moment. Right now, pop culture is dominated by Young Adult novels that are dystopias with kid heroes who stand up to tyrannical regimes. There’s a little bit of Tripods DNA in Hunger Games and others.
It’s surprising that no one is talking about a Tripods revival. It’s downright unbelievable that no one is talking about them at all.
Robert A. Heinlein
This one just kills me, because I love Heinlein. The Puppet Masters is my favorite science fiction novel of all time. Heinlein, with his wit, charm, and lively characters and dialogue, is still incredibly readable.
Heinlein was once the object of a rabid cult, and what’s more, his name was a personal brand that stood for a kind of story, sort of like what H.P. Lovecraft is today. Heinlein was one of two or maybe three science fiction writers that even normal people had heard of, what Dashiell Hammett is to detective fiction, what Danielle Steele is to romance novels, what Louis L’Amour was to westerns; Heinlein was science fiction. Only Asimov was even remotely comparable in terms of stature. It was not unusual to see entire shelves of Heinlein books in bookstores. And it wasn’t just that he was everywhere, it was that Heinlein was this rabid object of devotion, too: I had a friend who read Starship Troopers to the point of memorization. Almost two generations got into science fiction because of Heinlein.
A lot of people will argue that Heinlein’s eccentric politics, which he often worked into his novels and short stories, led to his decline in stature. I call this the “Fu Manchu explanation,” after the best example of a once-popular work who’s stature and visibility declined when the culture realized there was something ugly about it. With Heinlein, I really don’t think this is the case, because while I personally don’t share his views on many topics, all the same, Heinlein was more complex than people give him credit for being (people who say Starship Troopers is about fascism are like people who say Dune is about the middle east and oil - it’s a dead giveaway they didn’t really read it and just know about it).
Rather, my explanation for why RAH has declined is that essentially, there used to be a single point of entry, a single path, into science fiction fandom, via small publishers like Ace and Del Rey who just published Heinlein by the armful, or magazines like Analog that featured Heinlein. Now that so many ways exist to become a science fiction fan, the notion of a single scifi canon that had Heinlein at the center was obliterated. I’d compare it to the movie Akira: it used to be the only anime anyone ever saw, and for years, was almost everybody’s first anime. It defined what anime is in the heads of many (hardboiled, cyberpunkish, and ultra-violent). When Sailor Moon and other cartoons with a different audience in mind came out in the West, Akira became just another movie instead of the core point of entry.
Part Two of Dead Fandoms is coming soon. Can you think of any more dead or dying fandoms?
