How Fandom Has Changed since the '90s

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I wanted to come on here and talk about something that's been on my mind since I watched a documentary on the Smallville: The Complete Sixth Season DVD set, that talked about the fans of Smallville and how they showed their fandom in the 2000s. And that's how fandom has changed since the '90s, and how it's stayed the same. I'm going to stick to movies and TV shows for this just because being a fan of certain TV shows and movies inevitably spins-off into the other branches of fandom, like reading comic books and playing video games. Let's get into it.

When I was a kid in the '90s being a fan of a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or a movie like Batman Forever or Clueless meant more than watching the show every week (or every day in the case of TNG and MMPR) on TV or going to see the movie in theaters. It meant watching the VHS releases, whether you owned them or rented them from whatever your video rental store of choice was, or you taped episodes off the TV. It meant reading the novels and comics, playing with the toys, listening to the soundtracks on either audiocassette or CD (or both), playing the video games, and collecting the trading cards. Oh and talking to friends and family members who were also fans of the show or movie.

If you were a teenage fan or an adult fan of these shows and movies, it also meant interacting with other fans on the internet message boards that started to pop up before the official websites for Star Trek and Star Wars became a thing. Same with going to fan conventions either locally or internationally, and writing fan letters to the casts themselves, or to fan magazines.

When I was a teenager in the early to mid 2000s, none of that changed. Except, instead of watching the show on VHS, you could watch your favourite show on DVD, as the latest DVD season set would come out between seasons of the show, ensuring you could refresh your memory before the next season started airing in the fall, or ensuring that you could still watch the show on the weeks where there wasn't a new episode airing on FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, The WB, or UPN. Or whatever channel you were watching the show on in whatever country you're from. 

By then you also had MSN Messenger and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), so you could talk to your friends about your favourite shows on one of those platforms. It also became easier to post your fan fiction online in the 2000s as well. Before the advent of the internet, fans would send their fan fiction to fanzines, which were fan owned magazines not authorized by the networks and studios making these shows.

Nowadays the only differences in the way we show our fandom, is the introduction of social media and video sharing sites such as YouTube. That and specific fan conventions outside of the authorized ones like Star Trek Las Vegas, Star Wars Celebration, and Power Morphicon no longer exist. Broader pop culture conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con, New York City Comic-Con, Fan Expo Canada, and Ottawa Comiccon (to name a few) have become the preferred conventions for fans to interact with one another. We also don't have MSN Messenger or AIM anymore, but Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and other social media sites all have messenger features that do pretty much everything that those Messenger sites did in the late '90s and early 2000s.

We don't even have most of our fandom magazines anymore either. Star Wars Insider and Doctor Who Magazine are pretty much the only ones left now. Aside from Star Trek Magazine and Star Trek Explorer the rest of them, like Disney Adventures, Wizard Magazine, Starlog, Cinemafantastique, Fantasmagoria, MAD Magazine, and Nintendo Power all ended in either the late 2000s or the early 2010s.

So I guess Fandom hasn't changed, we've just had new avenues in which we could share our fandom with other people, and new options for how to access our favourite shows from yesteryear, as well as our favourite shows from today. Using my first two examples, both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers have toys and comics being made for them. MMPR doesn't have novels anymore, but TNG does. They also both still have DVD releases for them coming out, though they are re-releases of their Complete Series DVD boxsets that first came out over a decade ago. TNG is also on Blu-ray.

I find it fascinating the different ways fans of a TV show or a movie or an entire multimedia franchise like Star Trek and Star Wars express their fandom. I'm especially fascinated by how fandom has developed over the decades. Just because a lot of it is the same, but some of it is different nowadays than it was 20 to 50 years ago. The internet has given us ways to share our fandom with other like-minded people. Which is pretty cool.

I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I just wanted to come on here and talk about fandom for a bit because that documentary on the Smallville sixth season DVD boxset got me thinking about fandom in the 2000s, particularly in that 2005-2006 period, where we had the internet, but social media, including YouTube, was still a year or two away from becoming a thing. 

I'll be back soon with more blog posts. Next week is the season finale of the fifth season of Only Murders in the Building, so I might come on here and talk about that for a bit. Mainly because I think it's the final season of the show, but I can't find anything on whether it actually is or not. It's certainly been feeling like a final season. Anyways, I might come on here and talk about that on Wednesday next week. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.