1986
I was standing in a small line, waiting to get up to a dealer’s table at Gen Con. I don’t remember which one. There were two guys in front of me talking about a space battle. Maybe it was from Star Frontiers. The way they talked about it, it was like they were there. It was as real and present as if they were talking about some football game they’d actually played in.
The memories were that real and crisp.
And they weren’t talking about die rolls or anything in a rules-based system—they were talking about a desperate battle where they were swash-buckling ship invaders while trying to shoot enemies who were attacking from outside.
The point is, it was a shared experience and it existed only in their imaginations, and later it probably was as real as if it had happened. I believe that to this day. What you remember from an experience is as important, and probably as real, as the experience itself.
And, while we’re at it, let’s not forget childhood imprinting.
Now, return to that scene in Sunbow with Frank and Steve. There we were, dead center of the eighties. Frank and Steve had come from a medium that had gone on pretty much the same way since it started sometime around World War II, when some guy figured out that you could fold and staple newsprint a different way and have a whole new medium.
Frank didn’t know it, but he was busy transforming a stagnant medium as well as a stagnant character. Batman hadn’t had an upgrade since the Adam West show in the sixties. That having been said, it would be almost impossible to overstate the importance of that show and the strange surreal shockwave it sent out. I was just a kid—young enough not to get the humor, but old enough to know that there was humor in it that I didn’t get. I tried to take it seriously, until that broke, but if you go back to the night when Frank Gorshin appeared as the Riddler and Jill St. John was meeting a horrible fate and Commissioner Gordon was calling Batman—it was a moment that would torque the television world around.
The world didn’t know what hit it. Some people thought it was the “camp,” some people thought it was psychedelia, but whatever it was, it served as a kind of precursor to what would happen later with Star Wars on an epic sale, in that everything became a reaction to it. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which began as a reaction to James Bond, became camp for a couple sorry seasons. Everybody was going camp. Movies like Yellow Submarine and Peter Max drawings would go mainstream. A guy named Stanley Ralph Ross, who was a writer on both Batman and The Monkees (and the first person I met when I arrived in Hollywood), would later be a voice actor and writer for us at Sunbow on G.I. Joe and Inhumanoids. And make no mistake, the DNA for what we did in the eighties is found in sixties TV.
Remember the Jack Kirby joke? About how the golden age of comics is twelve? Never underestimate the power of childhood imprinting. It is very hard to get past the thrills and intrigues and fascinations of childhood in your adult work. It pays to have an engaged, vibrant childhood. It doesn’t have to be a chaotic one with endless influences. Frank came from a small town in Vermont. Steve grew up in St. Louis, though everything about him screamed New York. But all of us reached back to things that impacted us when we were kids. Remember Frank and The 300 Spartans. Same thing with me and Davy Crockett dying at the Alamo. Same with the puzzle of “Why are adults laughing at Batman?” Steve Gerber and I never strayed far in our conversations from The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan, and that could have only existed in a world of James Bond and Batman and the Beatles. It’s no accident that “All You Need is Love” plays in the final episode.
And, of course, I was twelve the summer it came out.
Still, it’s a great show no matter when you watch it.
And the following section is another “Belly of the Beast” journey into all of the imprinting that was almost invisible to me, save for one obvious thing that would subconsciously serve me to this day. The belly of the imprinting beast had a high point in summer or fall of 1986 (neither Paul Davids nor I can remember the date), when we visited The Ackermansion.
Paul Davids set it up at some Transformers recording session, and we took a field trip to this shrine of geekdom back in the days when “geek” was a bad word. I don’t remember whether I was looking forward to it or if it was something I wanted to do, but I’m quite sure I had mixed emotions. Nevertheless, I knew it was important. If James Bond, Batman, The Green Hornet, and The Prisoner were my influences, these were the influences of the people who had created all of those things. It was like entering a necropolis of dreams from before my time.
Neither Forrest J. Ackerman nor geekdom were completely new to me, but this trip was a revelation. I’d first heard of Forrest J. Ackerman years earlier, when my father was researching a second volume of The Collected Works of Buck Rogers. Apparently Ray Bradbury, whom Dad had gotten to know when he wrote the introduction for the first edition of The Collected Works of Buck Rogers, had recommended that he contact “Forry,” because Forry knew everything. As I was doing nothing with my life in my lost years out of college, I was helping Dad sift through the stuff for his book and came upon an envelope with two things in it. One was a copy of Amazing Forrys magazine, and the other was a letter saying that Forry did not give out information for free and that he was charging a hundred dollars an hour (or something, I don’t remember the number) for consultation.
This puzzled me. I’d never heard of somebody charging money for telling old stories. I’d just never seen it before.13 And I’d never seen a magazine that somebody had self-published to promote themselves. It kind of stunned me. I knew that there was once a magazine called Amazing Stories, but I had no idea who Forrest J. Ackerman was.
I commented on this to Ray Bradbury later on, to which he replied, “I think that’s my fault. I just felt that Forry was giving too much away for free and that he ought to get paid for his work. He just kind of got carried away.”
And it was true. I wasn’t used to nerds in the sense that they are socially awkward, and it was really just the way he phrased it that I found off-putting. That was my problem, not Forrest J. Ackerman’s problem. I just figured that anybody with an Ackermansion didn’t need money. I had a lot to learn about how the world really works.
So here I am, five years later, and what had looked weird to me in 1980 doesn’t look weird to me in 1985 while knee-deep in geek world, when I’m producing Transformers and G.I. Joe and TSR is owned by my family. TSR now owns Amazing Stories, and Steven Spielberg is making a TV show out of it. I am fully aware of money, and I’m fully aware of Forrest J. Ackerman’s position at the leading edge of what we would now call “fandom.” This guy was way out ahead of everybody, and the “garbage” in his Ackermansion was pure gold.
My recollection is that the Ackermansion, which was only sort of a mansion, was just rooms and rooms and rooms of old pulps, movie props, books, comics, and framed art that Forrest J. Ackerman had collected over a lifetime. My biggest impression was that one stray match or an LA wildfire could wipe it all out. I had fantasies about underground salt mines with climate control while I was there. I remember keeping an eye out for fire escapes. (It never burned down, by the way.) At a deeper level, the Ackermansion was a museum of stuff that was considered mostly crap and refuse when it was made. A Louvre of disposable pop culture.
Forry14 was aware of me, vaguely, for the shows I was doing, but there’s no reason they would mean much to him, because his mind was back in the Golden Age, and that’s a good place for his mind to be.
And, yeah, at that point, I’d had years of dealing with every form of nerd and geek imaginable and had probably become one myself without noticing it. The whole fact that I was looking at Star Trek props and Maria from Metropolis was not lost on me. And having grown up in a house full of antiques, I knew exactly how valuable this stuff would become.
Amazing what a few years can do.
I remember wondering what would happen to all of that stuff when he died. I remember thinking, and still think, that somebody should turn this into a real museum, because these old pulps and props and comics and posters really are the American treasures. This is our Louvre. Our Library of Alexandria. These comics, I’d argue, were what stimulated America’s first Wonder of the World—the space program—in exactly the same way that Dante triggered the Renaissance.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit overblown. But you take my point.
I, of course, did nothing about this instinct. I hear the stuff was all auctioned off after his death. It’s my hope that it is sitting in some climate-controlled silo under the desert somewhere, waiting for the day that a proper museum is built. But that is probably pure fantasy.
The point is that Forry Ackerman and Ray Bradbury and a few others were my link to that bold and exciting time before mass geekdom, when people actually thought about thrilling new futures and anything was not only possible but probable. It was a world of Esperanto and starry-eyed modernism when modernism made a lot of sense, a world where some of the most brilliant and visionary authors the world would ever produce released their work in much maligned pulp magazines. We’re talking Asimov, Heinlein, and on and on and on. Pure genius disguised as worthless pulp with gaudy covers (which were also some of the best and least recognized art America has ever produced).
I’m reminded of Charles Champlin’s column, which predicted that Annie Hall would beat out Star Wars for the Academy Award under the reasoning that “America hates what it does best.” Hopefully somebody will do a streaming series about the wonder of those old pre-geek times. Also, see Paul Davids’s The Sci-Fi Boys, shot when Ray Bradbury, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Ray Harryhausen were still with us. It will open a whole world for you.
I knew it just wasn’t in my range to become a superfan. I just don’t have the attention span. I wasn’t like my friend Gregg LaPore, who in high school would endlessly read sci-fi novels and listen to reel-to-reel audio recordings of Star Trek episodes while drinking lukewarm ice tea that came from a glass jar and smoking his pipe. A part of me thought it would be cool to be like that, but there are things that you are and things that you aren’t. That having been said, it was Gregg who got me started with writing. He was working on a novel, and so I decided I’d try my hand at it.
But for science fiction and fantasy, yeah, I’d read the big stuff: The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Starship Troopers, everything by Bradbury, and some obscure stuff that fell down the chimney, but there was nothing encyclopedic about me. Nothing voracious. It was high school, and I was busier badly playing bass guitar and making Super-8 films.
And this gets to something that’s strangely personal, but it’s relevant, and that’s that in Geek world—especially for Forrest J. Ackerman’s generation—I’m royalty via my grandfather and Buck Rogers. This is a very weird position to be in. It comes with this sense of illegitimacy. Whatever my grandfather did, I didn’t do it. I’ve met various people who are real royalty. It happens in Hollywood now and again. The guy in the strange suit at a dinner party is really a Count or something. And my reaction is eighty percent “So what?” and twenty percent “Hmmm, this is kind of interesting.” Royalty, which is dependent, by definition, on bloodline, brings with it a sense of illegitimacy.
And the other irony in all of this is that at exactly that moment, I was out there doing pretty much what my grandfather was doing, but more than fifty years later. You think about this and it goes ouroboros fast. So I didn’t think too much about it, but like everything that’s intrinsic to yourself, it’s something to factor in when the world starts treating you weirdly. You’re a lot of different things to different people. But what does royalty do, other than create a lot of awkward conversations?
It’s like a backstage pass. And like real backstage passes, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and you find yourself in exciting places and in places you which you don’t really belong. By the time I found myself in the Ackermansion, I was deep into what alternate reality games call a “rabbit hole,” in reference to Alice in Wonderland. You go into a rabbit hole and you’re in a whole new world. If you’re even reading this, you’re in a rabbit hole and may not know it. You’ve already met the White Rabbit and fallen into some hole or maybe multiple holes, at a minimum.
The first question is how important it is to you to be able to see the light from the outside world. It’s like the underground catacombs in Paris. People have elaborate maps, and there are markings all over the walls in cryptic languages. You’re in there, and you hope to hell your guide knows what to do. The concept of being lost in a necropolis is horrifying. You get too lost and it’s about running out of food and wandering endlessly and trying to remember the rule about always following the right-hand wall.
Or is it the left-hand wall?
Some people take up residence in rabbit holes. They’re some of the happiest and weirdest people I know.
Once I was in Fiji, and our cruise boat (a small scow—don’t think floating Iowa) had a side trip to explore some caves. We didn’t have scuba equipment. This was a network of caves right next to the shore. You swam under a low rock wall and moved from cave to cave. The guides had flashlights. The farther in we went, the less we could see the comforting blue light of the real ocean. Finally, by cavern three or four, we couldn’t see it at all. That’s when the thrill and paranoia started. What if the flashlight breaks? What if they play a trick on us? What if this is a black hole of lost tourists? In the rational light of day, that’s all kind of silly, but in a dark underwater cave in Fiji, these are very rational thoughts.
I remember seeing one of the guides slapping the water in a strange way and wondering what he was doing. Was he placating some real or mythical sea creature with bulbous eyes, sharp teeth, and tentacles that was looking up at our feet, treading the water?
The fan rabbit hole is something like that. How deep do you go in? How much do you care about the light outside? At what point are you cut off from the skiff that’s going to take you back to the real world?
And at the same time, the cave was cozy and comfortable. Maybe you could live there. Learn to catch shrimp or something.
That’s how I think of the fan rabbit hole. I look at some people that show up at the cons with extreme haircuts and piercings and face tattoos, and I wonder what they’re doing at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. I think the same about people I see at concerts and in clubs. What does this look like in daylight? The important thing is that they’re committed. They’ve created their own world, and they usually have friends that live in these worlds too. They’re all the way in the rabbit hole and probably don’t know or care about the way out. Maybe you never need to come out. A part of me fears their fate and a part of me envies them.
The Ackermansion was, almost literally, a rabbit hole—if rabbits built bookshelves, I mean. But it was a warren. We walked through room after room of movie props, comics, books, posters, and magazines. I remember being shocked to see all of the Secret Agent X original pulp print series collected on a top shelf with Operator #5 and The Spider. I wanted to ask to look at it but didn’t. I was afraid I’d crack or bend something.
Forry Ackerman’s place was rabbit hole grand junction. All of the subcultures seemed to meet in that one place. He was not only a collector, but also a creator and a scholar of popular culture—like some hoarder who then discovered that the newspapers really all did contain secret treasure maps and that the bottles he collected contained genies. It was pure gold.