Fifty Years

4th-doctor-faceMy favorite television show is older than I am. I’m a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately — when I started watching Doctor Who, it had already been on the air for a dozen years. A baker’s dozen, in fact — appropriate, since when I first saw the show, in the bicentennial year of 1976, Tom Baker was portraying the Fourth Doctor. I was living in upstate New York, and this was before the widespread import of the show into America, via Public Television stations, which would occur across the country in 1978-79. No, one of the local UHF stations would show 2 episodes back-to-back on Sunday mornings, part of the Time-Life television syndication package — complete with awful voice-overs from Howard DeSilva over the beginning of each episode, explaining the strange goings-on to my fellow benighted colonials.

The first thing that I remember was the title sequence, like nothing I’d seen before. Strange streaming patterns of energy, the staring, unsmiling face of a man, and an ornate title logo that looked like stained glass, all accompanied by this eerie music: haunting, howling, urgent. It scared me more than a little bit — but not the kind of fright that made me turn away. (In later years, in fact, this reaction would be shared by my oldest daughter, who, as a toddler, would shout out “SCARY MUSIC!” whenever she heard the theme.)

The first episode that I clearly remember watching was “The Pyramids of Mars” — still my favorite Doctor Who story of all time, a mix of H.G. Wells and Hammer-horror Egyptology. I was, quite simply, hooked.

The show has been a constant in my life ever since. One of the first short stories I ever wrote featured a Krynoid (from “The Seeds of Doom”). My first TV-star crush was Elisabeth Sladen, who portrayed the Doctor’s companion, Sarah Jane Smith. When my parents told me, at age 14, that we’d be moving to Kansas, I was in my room, watching Episode 3 of “The Pyramids of Mars” on a beat-up old black-and-white set with rabbit ears. I met my best friend during a high school chemistry class, when he noticed that I was reading a copy of Doctor Who Magazine. Watching Doctor Who and playing the RPG published by FASA filled weekends and summers through high school and into college. The night my first child was born, “The Pirate Planet” was playing on a hospital TV.

During the period of from 1989 to 2005, even when there was no new Who to watch (aside from the 1996 Fox-produced TV pilot), there was still more Who to be had — novels featuring the most recent Doctors (Sylvester McCoy’s 7th, before the TV movie, Paul McGann’s 8th afterward) kept the adventure going. Novels featuring earlier Doctors filled in gaps in the past. At the turn of the century, when I was living in New York City, new dramatic performances featuring past Doctors, produced by Big Finish as audio plays, accompanied me on endless subway rides.

Then the show came back… and impossibly, became a global hit. Doctor Who was on TV again — everywhere. The show had a big budget, and the same wonderful writing that has always been its core. Christopher Eccleston’s war-wounded lonely 9th Doctor gave way (too soon — I still want more) to David Tennant’s hipster genius geek 10th Doctor, who began to rival the 4th as my favorite. The 10th became the 11th with Matt Smith, in a top-to-bottom tonal reinvention of the show that played upon the theme of classic fairy tales — wondrous, but with a darkness lurking at the edges.

I then had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing for Doctor Who, when my colleagues at Cubicle 7 Entertainment offered me the chance to produce material for the Adventures in Time and Space role-playing game. (As an aside, I would still love to write for a Big Finish audio, or a Doctor Who novel, so, y’know, if you’re reading this and can make that happen, drop me a line…).

For a nerd of my generation, who used to have to explain why we loved Doctor Who, who were often, dare I say it, embarrassed by our devotion to a show originally intended for children, the newfound popularity of Doctor Who is still something shocking. It still gives me pause to see Doctor Who merchandise in mainstream shops, to see non-outcast kids who love the show, who embrace the ethos of a clever individualist hero, saving the universe with moral authority and without irony. The show has gotten flashier — more streamlined, faster-paced, bigger — but the core of it has not, mercifully, changed. As Craig Ferguson famously said, it remains a show about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Happy 50th, Doctor Who… and thank you.

A Bit of Whovian Time-Travel…

doctorwho50

10 years ago today, the BBC announced that Doctor Who was coming back. (I checked my blog entries — I was taking a week off, but I did mention it in my first post back, with a link to the story.) A year and a half later, “Rose” premiered.

My favorite show was coming back — a show which I’d been watching since the mid-70s, and which formed a huge formative part of my childhood and adolescence. I was thrilled, and despite ups and downs in my opinion of the quality of various episodes, I’ve long since decided that having Doctor Who on the air and occasionally disappointing me is far, far better than not having it at all.

So thanks to Russell Davies, Stephen Moffat, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith and everyone involved, for the past decade.

Here’s looking forward to the 50th Anniversary special, the Christmas Special, and Peter Capaldi’s 12th Doctor!

(…and my deepest thank you to Cubicle 7 Entertainment for letting me write for the RPG, thereby fulfilling a childhood dream to write for Doctor Who!)
 
 

When Nazis Get Rapey

Back from GenCon — and had a relatively good time. It’s always nice to meet the folks who enjoy your work, and GenCon also serves as a time to socialize with colleagues and friends whom we only see a couple of times a year if we’re lucky. On the professional front, several things came together which have me very excited, and I am finally now an Ennie-Award-winning game designer, having a 1/12th share of the one given to DOCTOR WHO: ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE (11th Doctor Edition) for “Best Family Game.”

But this post isn’t about the good stuff. It’s about the very bad.

Belle and Blade (no, I’m not going to link to their site. I won’t give them the traffic.) is a fairly notorious vendor at GenCon. Officially, they focus on “military interest DVDs” — the booth is filled with copies of The Longest Day, Midway, Saving Private Ryan, The Four Feathers, Zulu, that kind of thing. Of course, if you look a bit closer, you’ll also find such gems as Ilsa, She-Devil of the SS, Red Nights of the Gestapo and Stalag Bitch. The Nazi fetishism continues on the inside of the booth, where you can find Triumph of the Will and T-Shirts emblazoned with each of the SS Division insignias, “Afrika Korps World Tour”, and other such gems. They’ve been an embarrassment to the industry for the years they’ve been exhibiting, but, depressingly, it seems a not-insigifiant part of the gamer audience actually gets into that kind of shit.

So I was not surprised when Valerie Laproye of French games publisher 7ieme Cercle was upset on Thursday night, telling me of the Nazi crap she’d seen in the dealer’s hall.

Then she mentioned the panties.

Wait, what?

I was used to the Nazi-fetish bullshit carried by Belle & Blade, so I was surprised when Valerie listed women’s underwear in the litany of the booth’s product — She said they were carrying black underwear, hung at child-height on the outside of the booth, emblazoned with slogans like “I COULD USE A LITTLE SEXUAL HARASSMENT.” She was quite upset by this — and I was as well. I had thought that admiration of the Nazis was as low as this exhibitor could go. I was wrong.

The next morning, I swung by their booth (1622) before the hall opened, and snapped a couple of pictures:

sexualharassment

In this shot, you can see the “sexual harassment” panties, above a pair that reads “you must be at least this long to ride” (with a picture of a ruler), and another that says “this is why I get my way.” The next shot I took, though, is where things got even worse:

getmedrunk

There, in the center, you see a pair emblazoned with the slogan “Get me drunk …and we’ll see.”

Let that one sink in a bit.

I headed over to security, where I showed the pictures to a friend I have on the staff, who was as pissed off as I was. He promised to escalate it further up the chain.

After that, I heard nothing more — things got very busy for me, and I was unable to head back to the other side of the hall to check up on things. On Twitter, more people started expressing shock and outrage. I mentioned it to several colleagues at the show as well. I know that many of these people filed complaints of their own with GenCon.

On Sunday, I heard several reports from friends that the panties were gone — but I’ve also heard via people on Twitter that they’d been only moved inside the booth, to share shelf space with the Nazi fetish bullshit. So far, there has been no official statement of any kind made by GenCon regarding this issue.

GenCon has vendors guidelines, and a clear policy governing harassment, and women’s panties emblazoned with encouragements of harassment and date-rape would seem to be clear violations of these policies. The silence, especially given that complaints began as early as Friday morning, is concerning.

The message that these products, and any action taken (or untaken) regarding them, sends about our industry is a fairly loud one. I will be keeping my ear to the ground for any news regarding this issue, and will pass along anything I discover. I would request that anyone with any further information please add it to the comments below — and also please send your concerns along to GenCon, letting them know how you feel about this vendor and their products.