Some utterly pointless comments about wikipedia and TV sci-fi in the 1980’s.
I like wikipedia. I tell my students to go ahead and use it as a place to gather information. Always evolving, and with 400,000 articles in the English edition alone, Wikipedia is a user-editable universal encyclopedia, that recalls H.G. Wells’s vision of a World Brain. But it does have its limitations.
But sometimes these limitations are the best part. Errors in the Wikipedia are supposed to be corrected by an evolutionary process — an asymptotic progress towards Truth, in which errors, imperfections, and biases are gradually erased in a great collaboration moving towards towards the Way Things Are.
But this plan is fallible. Incompetence and human entropy pollute the system and are not removable. And sometimes this entropy enters the system in a concerted effort by a group of people to to maintain the truth of something more than a little less than true.
Why such a diligent and concerted defense of falsehood? It’s a joke. But maybe all encyclopedias should contain a few such deliberate falsehoods. Some obvious, some less so. Note the Wikipedia article on “Fanon.” No, not him; rather:
Fanon is a fact or ongoing situation in fan fiction stories related to a television program, book, movie, or video game that has been used so much by fan writers that it has been more or less established as having happened in the fictional world, but it has not actually been established as having happened on the show, book or movie itself. Fanon is a portmanteau word of fan and canon.
The examples of such “Fanon” are, I guess, interesting. For example:
Star Trek: Mr. Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet. This has been suggested by non-canon novels and comic books, but has never been established in any television series or movies. To the contrary, Star Trek: Enterprise has established that the first Vulcan in Starfleet is Commander T’Pol. . . .
James Bond:
There are only nine 00 agents (001-009). In fact, Ian Fleming mentions a 0010 in his novel, Moonraker and a later book by Raymond Benson mentions a 0012. On a related note, some fanon states that M is in fact the original 001, the first 00-agent; nothing in Fleming supports this. . . .
The coolest bit of Fanon on Wikipedia, surely, is the following:
Knight Rider:
KITT, the car on Knight Rider, is actually built around a Cylon brain that crash-landed on earth at the end of Galactica 1980.
Now, “Galactica 1980″ was an obscure made for tv movie that was a sequel to the TV and film verisions of “Battlestar Galactica” of the 70’s. The Galactica premise is that a huge battleship is lost in space searching for a long-ago lost Earth, in a hostile universe populated especially by the evil Cylon Empire. Galactica 1980 extends the Galactica story past the end of the original series (canceled in 1979), allowing the beleaguered Galactica to at last find Earth, its long-lost home, and presumed place of refuge.
It turns out, however, that the Galactica has somehow ended up returning to the Earth of *1980.* Which is to say that it returns to a technologically primitive earth that cannot offer the Galactica even the slightest protection against the Cylon empire which has been hunting the starship. In fact, the Galactica will only bring destruction and enslavement to its own planet of origin.
So the Galactica now speeds away from Earth, hoping to lure the pursing Cylons away from the imperiled homeworld. They leave behind only a few people and fragments on the earth–charged with igniting a technological revolution on earth of secret origin, that will bring the planet a sliver of hope against the Cylons, should the Earth be fortunate enough to escape in a long period of obscurity the hostile predations of Galactica’s foes.
Only in light of this does _Knight Rider_ make sense — its post-apocalyptic wasteland opening; the secretive Knight Corporation; KITT’s unconcealable edge of menace, underneath his friendly reprogramming; Michael Knight himself, at the center of a show that was a weekly “Shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.”
After reading the “Fanon” entry that describes Kitt as reconditioned Cylon, I did a Google search for these terms, and found nothing. I checked the Kinght Rider and Battlestar Galactica fan sites for evidence of such a story–nothing there, either. It appears that this story which appears in the “Fanon” section of wikipedia is one which doesn’t in fact exist–except as a story of a story.
November 20th, 2004 at 12:07 pm
I feel obligated to flex my geekdom a little. Galactica 1980 was not a tv movie, it was an unsuccesful series picking up after the original series ended. In fact, one of the main characters was a grown up version of Boxey, the little boy in the original series with the robot dog (Muffet II, actually a “daggit,” not a dog).
In addition, the reason the Galactica “somehow” ended up in 1980 was because that was the time the show took place in. The interesting thing about it was that it was set in the present, not the future. The idea was that there was a lost tribe of humans who disappeared and founded a new planet called Earth, which the Galacticians were looking for. Since the Cylons’ goal was the elimination of humanity, finding a veritable wellspring of humanity was an important key.
This is all reflected in the voice-over from the opening credits to the show, something like, “There are those who believe that life here began out there. Far amonst the stars, something something the ancestors of the Egyptians or the Toltecs or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man, who even now struggle to survive something something a lonely quest for a shining plant known as Earth.”
November 20th, 2004 at 1:20 pm
Washburn,
Have I told you lately that I love what you’re doing with this space? This is almost as good as actually hanging out with you. Where else could I find a discussion of the wikipedia as “an asymptotic progress towards Truth” with an exploration of the possibilities of KITT as a Cylon, a new bit of Fanon to me (admittedly though my geek quotient isn’t that high). I do concur with Dave L. about the nature of Galactica 1980. A big fan of the series, I had high hopes for it when it first premiered. Hopes that TV executives ruthlessly crushed, leading me to think that maybe the Cylons had got here first…
November 20th, 2004 at 2:32 pm
Hmm. Ok then, let’s get geeky. Two points:
1) _Galactica 1980_ was picked up as a series only *after* its pilot — a 3-part mini-series/tv movie/etc. was well received. And it’s this pilot that tells the story of the Galactica’s arrival at earth and subsequent departure.
2) I think BSG was alway pretty vague about its timeline, etc. Yes as you note, the opening voice over says that “even now” there are “brothers of men” fighting to survive out in the stars. But the voice describing the “lonely quest” for earth comes from Galactica’s *closing* credits, and is spoken by a different voice (L. Greene’s). So one voice speculates generally that humans may now be struggling elsewhere in the universe, and the other talks about the Galactica’s particular story.
So I’m not sure that the show every clearly established that that it was supposed to be happening right *now*. I think its timeframe was more ambiguous, like Star Wars, “A long time ago…” Further, it should be noted that the events of BSG1980 are supposed to happen about 30 years after the events of the original BSG, so technically speaking, the “even now” of the original can’t possibly have meant 1978/9 exactly.
I think that the 1980 date of return for the Galactica was supposed to be a surprise not only for the crew of the starship (who expected a far more advanced civilization), but also for the tv audience, who I don’t think were really supposed to have assumed that the events of the original were exactly contemporaneous with their own lives.
In any case, I’ve never actually seen BSG1980, and even the original is mostly a dim memory for me (I was maybe 7 or 8 when it was cancelled) So I could just possibly be wrong on some of this (or then again, maybe it was the original producers of the show who were mistaken :) )
And FamousP–thanks. But this blog also is a waste of time. Not sure how much longer I’ll do it. Or maybe more short entries? It’s funner (and quicker!) to run-through these theories hanging around humans in their real flesh-and-blood forms, maybe with a bit of alcohol mixed in with that blood.
Anyway, did y’all know they plan to bring BSG back?
[edit: I should note also that I do agree w/you Dave, that BSG doesn’t use time-travel, etc. to return in earth c. 1980. I didn’t really mean to suggest that they used time travel to return to earth (though not having seen the show I guess I wasn’t entirely sure that some such thing wasn’t involved)–I meant more that the Paramount producers were surely glad that the year of return happened to be 1980, and that the location of return happened to be Southern California–things that happned to work out quite well, from the standpoint of television production costs… Also in my post, I do call the Earth the Galactica’s “planet of origin,” which is wrong, it must be admitted.]
November 22nd, 2004 at 8:55 am
on to the main topic, that article by the Encyclopedia Britannica guy really steams me. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, but I think he completely misses the point. No, Wikipedia isn’t a perfect compendium of knowledge — nor does it claim to be. It is an experiment. To fault it because after only a year or so it hasn’t yet become 100% accurate and complete is ridiculous. In addition, I definitely detect an undertone of smugness, that you’d be a fool to trust this compendium of knowledge that hasn’t been sanctioned by the official bearers of knowledge themselves. The author points out a problem with delight, showing the poor quality of this rogue knowledge.
If, instead of writing a self-serving and shrill article, he had simply sent Wikipedia the correction, he would have improved it. Instead, he sits on the sidelines and laughs at this noble failure. And why SHOULD he help, anyway? What’s in it for him? For anyone?
Like I said, I’m probably reading too much into it, but the article was a bit too “hooray for the free-market and for ‘official’ knowledge! Fie on those who oppose them!” for me.
November 23rd, 2004 at 12:05 am
Yeah, I agree. I mean, of course, I love the Britannica too, but really, he is just being nasty. He is like be big nasty old cat who simply cannot appreciate the loveliness of the new cute kitten. But I think Wikipedia will eventually charm most such curmudgeonly fellows. I swear that when you hit that random key you can hear it purr…