Over 300 action photographs
Sep. 14th, 2013 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arduinnaI'm sorting out a bookcase today, the one that has my media tie-ins. I've purged a lot of them over the years; fanfic gives me more of what I want. But I used to buy anything I could find for any show I loved, and I've hung on to a bunch, especially Star Trek books.
I used to buy a lot of Star Trek books. Some of these I'd forgotten I have; the only way to fit everything is to have doubled rows of books, and the titles in the back rows tend to fade. But today I'm looking at everything, and wow. Seriously, I'd forgotten.
Before VCRs, in most cases your only hope of knowing what happened in an episode was to actually watch it live as it aired, whether first run or rerun/syndication. But for some shows, you could buy books.
James Blish wrote adaptations of (almost) every episode; they weren't perfect, as they were written off scripts rather than final episode transcripts, and they were short stories rather than being particularly fleshed out, but. You could have the episodes in your hands!
I bought as many of the original paperbacks as I could find used, when I discovered these, but I couldn't get my hands on all of them. I was buying in the mid-80s, and there just wasn't much available; used bookstores weren't quite in vogue yet, and I could only get to one con a year with their fabulous dealers' rooms full of rows and rows and rows of used and new SFF. Then the Science Fiction Book Club offered four hardcover volume "Star Trek Readers", which collected all of Blish's adaptations, and I bought those, too. So now I have doubles of almost all of it, and still can't bring myself to purge any of them. *g* What if one day there are no more reruns or DVDs or blu-rays or downloads or anything!!
Blish wasn't the only one writing; a few years after him, Alan Dean Foster wrote adaptations of the animated series, which I also got my hands on, to my delight, as I'd never seen the animated show. Again, I don't have them all, but at least I had something.
And I bought behind-the-scenes books, and making-of books, and anything else I could. (Anyone else have "Chekov's Enterprise"?)
And then I discovered a couple copies of a treasure trove I'd had no idea existed: in the late '70s, Ballantine started publishing "fotonovels". I wound up with copies of Metamorphosis and Day of the Dove.
Metamorphosis front cover:
Back cover:
They used comic book layout, with multiple panels per page in various combinations to carry you through the story, using tricks like outlining specific people in a white panel border to show that they're in a different place (like talking over communicators), or that a conversation was cutting back and forth on screen, so the still picture would have both face-on shots together. Although someone appears to have decided that that looked silly, because by book #10, they were no longer doing that - so it's less cheesy looking, but also a bit less fun. *g* Some photos spread seamlessly across a two-page spread (which, wow, has to have been a BITCH to print -- there are no whitespace margins in these books, they're pure photos).
Comic book layout! The fotonovels had wiggle room to add things like thought bubbles, and quite happily used them to deepen the story:
This particular episode had a chatty disembodied alien called the Companion, so the fotonovel gave it a different kind of speech bubble so we'd know what was going on. The fotonovels also used comic-book-style narrative boxes to fill in some of the gaps in the photos:
Here's an inset of Kirk, outlined in panel-white-lines, to show that he and the Companion were actually talking face-to-glow.
And finally, something that cracked me up when I was paging through this: the jagged-electric-bolt line between Scotty and Kirk to show that they're talking ACROSS SPACE WOO! That line was consistent any time they were communicating across space. <3 The Enterprise is sticking into the screen outlined in panel lines from where it's sailing across from the other page:
I didn't want to break the spine on the book to get a sample of one of the two-page photos, but they're there.
The front of each book has a short cast list, including guest stars, and a two-page interview with one of the guest stars.
The back of the books have a helpful glossary to explain the terms in the book, from basic ST stuff like "communicators" and "phasers" to episode specifics like the disease one of the characters had, the planets involved in the ep, etc. Plus there's a quiz at the end, to see how much you were paying attention! (Answers on the very final page, so you didn't have to wait till the next book came out to see how you did.) And there would be a teaser photo from the next fotonovel, with a descriptive blurb. They packed a lot into these little books.
I'd completely forgotten about these, but man, now I remember how over the moon I was when I found them way back when. It was like being able to watch the episode any time I wanted!!
Even with VCRs available not long after, these were still fabulous for a long time, because a VCR was only useful if you had episodes to record - and the money to buy enough tapes to record more than a few episodes of anything. A single VHS cassette cost as much as ~10 fotonovels.
I kinda wish the trend of making these had started about five years earlier than it did, just to see how widespread it might have become before it got completely overshadowed by VCR tech.
(Seriously, these are so cool.) (How do I not have a TOS icon?)
I used to buy a lot of Star Trek books. Some of these I'd forgotten I have; the only way to fit everything is to have doubled rows of books, and the titles in the back rows tend to fade. But today I'm looking at everything, and wow. Seriously, I'd forgotten.
Before VCRs, in most cases your only hope of knowing what happened in an episode was to actually watch it live as it aired, whether first run or rerun/syndication. But for some shows, you could buy books.
James Blish wrote adaptations of (almost) every episode; they weren't perfect, as they were written off scripts rather than final episode transcripts, and they were short stories rather than being particularly fleshed out, but. You could have the episodes in your hands!
I bought as many of the original paperbacks as I could find used, when I discovered these, but I couldn't get my hands on all of them. I was buying in the mid-80s, and there just wasn't much available; used bookstores weren't quite in vogue yet, and I could only get to one con a year with their fabulous dealers' rooms full of rows and rows and rows of used and new SFF. Then the Science Fiction Book Club offered four hardcover volume "Star Trek Readers", which collected all of Blish's adaptations, and I bought those, too. So now I have doubles of almost all of it, and still can't bring myself to purge any of them. *g* What if one day there are no more reruns or DVDs or blu-rays or downloads or anything!!
Blish wasn't the only one writing; a few years after him, Alan Dean Foster wrote adaptations of the animated series, which I also got my hands on, to my delight, as I'd never seen the animated show. Again, I don't have them all, but at least I had something.
And I bought behind-the-scenes books, and making-of books, and anything else I could. (Anyone else have "Chekov's Enterprise"?)
And then I discovered a couple copies of a treasure trove I'd had no idea existed: in the late '70s, Ballantine started publishing "fotonovels". I wound up with copies of Metamorphosis and Day of the Dove.
Metamorphosis front cover:
Back cover:
They used comic book layout, with multiple panels per page in various combinations to carry you through the story, using tricks like outlining specific people in a white panel border to show that they're in a different place (like talking over communicators), or that a conversation was cutting back and forth on screen, so the still picture would have both face-on shots together. Although someone appears to have decided that that looked silly, because by book #10, they were no longer doing that - so it's less cheesy looking, but also a bit less fun. *g* Some photos spread seamlessly across a two-page spread (which, wow, has to have been a BITCH to print -- there are no whitespace margins in these books, they're pure photos).
Comic book layout! The fotonovels had wiggle room to add things like thought bubbles, and quite happily used them to deepen the story:
This particular episode had a chatty disembodied alien called the Companion, so the fotonovel gave it a different kind of speech bubble so we'd know what was going on. The fotonovels also used comic-book-style narrative boxes to fill in some of the gaps in the photos:
Here's an inset of Kirk, outlined in panel-white-lines, to show that he and the Companion were actually talking face-to-glow.
And finally, something that cracked me up when I was paging through this: the jagged-electric-bolt line between Scotty and Kirk to show that they're talking ACROSS SPACE WOO! That line was consistent any time they were communicating across space. <3 The Enterprise is sticking into the screen outlined in panel lines from where it's sailing across from the other page:
I didn't want to break the spine on the book to get a sample of one of the two-page photos, but they're there.
The front of each book has a short cast list, including guest stars, and a two-page interview with one of the guest stars.
The back of the books have a helpful glossary to explain the terms in the book, from basic ST stuff like "communicators" and "phasers" to episode specifics like the disease one of the characters had, the planets involved in the ep, etc. Plus there's a quiz at the end, to see how much you were paying attention! (Answers on the very final page, so you didn't have to wait till the next book came out to see how you did.) And there would be a teaser photo from the next fotonovel, with a descriptive blurb. They packed a lot into these little books.
I'd completely forgotten about these, but man, now I remember how over the moon I was when I found them way back when. It was like being able to watch the episode any time I wanted!!
Even with VCRs available not long after, these were still fabulous for a long time, because a VCR was only useful if you had episodes to record - and the money to buy enough tapes to record more than a few episodes of anything. A single VHS cassette cost as much as ~10 fotonovels.
I kinda wish the trend of making these had started about five years earlier than it did, just to see how widespread it might have become before it got completely overshadowed by VCR tech.
(Seriously, these are so cool.) (How do I not have a TOS icon?)
no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 02:03 am (UTC)And the "fotonovel" is AWESOME. :D I would have absolutely flipped to find something like that in the 80s. And yet again, it's super-dated now; the technology has moved WAY past it.
As much as I love living in the fannish time of plenty, in a way I kinda wish I'd been in fandom a little earlier, because I love being an age where I can remember and be nostalgic about things like browsing dusty cassettes in little local music stores, or the delight of stumbling upon a sequel to a favorite book in the library in an era when you couldn't just look that up on Wikipedia. I kinda wish I'd had those experiences for fandom as well -- zine subculture; cons back when cons were your only way of meeting and networking with other fans ... Of course, the reasons why I didn't do those things as a teenager would still be equally true even if I'd been born a decade earlier; I would still have been very isolated in a small town, with no clue that a) this sort of thing existed, or b) that I'd even enjoy it if I knew about it. (There were Star Trek conventions in the nearest big town to where I lived, but while I was sometimes aware of them, I was much too shy to go.)
no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 06:36 pm (UTC)The fotonovel is amazing! What a tremendously clever idea, really, to satisfy people who were craving a fix of their favorites.
I fell into that earlier network of fandom - well, I sought some of it out, reading SF magazines like Analog and catching glimpses of a whole SF world out there, and my library had a copy of the Star Trek Concordance that changed my life (it talked about conventions for Star Trek! Where people got together and just... talked about Star Trek!! zomg). But I was in the suburbs and all the interesting stuff was in the cities, and also cost money. But then the year I was 15, Worldcon came to my city, and the paper did a big writeup on it in the Sunday paper, which my parents saw and showed me. I was all "wow, that's so cool - someday I'm going to one of those!" and went upstairs to pine a bit, and a few minutes later my dad came up and said "How about I give you $50 and drive you in to that, would you like that?" \o/
If he hadn't, I don't know if I ever would have gotten involved in the con scene at all; I don't like going in to the city and probably never would have on my own without that push, and cons are expensive, even if you just stay local (which I always did, until I hit media fandom). And if I hadn't made it to cons, I never would have found zines, either. The little things you don't realize are going to affect your whole life, man.
(I went to some Star Trek cons and mostly didn't like them; by the 80s, they were being run by Creation, which,
ughis not the kind of con that appeals to me, generally).no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-17 06:51 pm (UTC)