Blasto from el pasto: Cinefantastique ST:TNG Specials
Tonight’s uncovered treasure: binders full of Cinefantastique Magazine’s annual Star Trek double issues. CFQ, as it was abbreviated, was a nifty magazine whose editors seemed to espouse an ethos of “we like this stuff, and we say so, but when we see a great big overbaked turkey, we’ll call a spade a spade”. Rob Heyman and I used to eat these issues up, especially when Mark A. Altman took over stewardship after the late 1989 issue. I’m not sure it can be overstated how influential these CFQ issues were on theLogBook.com’s own editorial “outlook.” Back around 1994-95, when theLogBook went through its brief incarnation as a print ‘zine, I’m unafraid to admit that we borrowed CFQ’s 4-star episode rating system and more than a little of Altman’s writing style. (At least for a while – I’m also unafraid to say that this was a “phase” for both of us.) It was the gospel according to Altman, and It Was Good.
Why bother with these when I was waxing rhapsodic just yesterday about Starlog’s official TNG magazines? Altman had a very fair but firm critical approach, and his behind-the-scenes pieces were wonderful warts-and-all profiles. Despite the descriptions of conflicts of personalities, egos, creative agendas and styles, they made both of us want to write for television all the more. Unlike the Starlog magazines, which were vetted by Paramount, CFQ would seek the opinions of pissed-off former TNG writers like Tracy Torme and Herb Wright, who often had perfectly legit axes to grind. Neither of us really exactly wound up going in that direction, but we have both served our time in the trenches of journalism – so Altman may have wound up being more of an influence on our lives than Michael Piller or Ronald D. Moore, though we didn’t realize it at the time.
As wasn’t uncommon for that point in my life (early 90s), I carefully removed the staples from each issue, gently separated the pages, and put each Trek-related page in a page protector in the binders. So these aren’t exactly “intact.” But if anyone’s interested in taking the binders off my hands, give me a shout. The 1989 issue has already been claimed by a friend of mine, but the rest of them (1990-94/95) are up for grabs.… Read more
Today’s blast from the (housecleaning) past – the Starlog Group’s old official Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine magazines. There was a time, before Paramount (disastrously) took the print periodicals in-house, when Starlog held the exclusive license to do these mags, and they were nifty. At the time, Dave McDonnell was editing both the TNG mag and Starlog itself, so there was some crossover material if you read both, but man, if the magazine wasn’t a treasure trove of the studio’s official still photography file, there was no such thing. And now looking back through the old issues, I’m marveling at some of the interviews – they managed to talk to writers who never opened up for interviews again, and they did profile pieces on extras and hand doubles, all really inspirational stuff about how these guys had left the midwest and ditched everything to come to Hollywood, and wound up working full-time as background extras in uniform on TNG. It was all really neat stuff, especially for something very carefully targeted at the young adult audience. It was the only publication I ever read that interviewed Keith Birdsong, who was a local artist whose Trek novel cover artwork was all the rage in the early ’90s. They’d talk to the book authors, comic writers and artists, and whoever they could get a hold of – it was truly a magazine aimed at Trek-as-a-lifestyle. A few years ago, long after I’d given up being enough of a Trek fan to pick up one or two magazines at a time, I picked up Paramount’s official Trek magazine, and while I can comprehend that the franchise had grown (or, perhaps, not grown) to the point where one-publication-per-series was no longer feasible, it just didn’t have the cool factor that the old Starlog mags had. It was all about how this story tied into this non-sequitur reference from an original series episode, etc. etc., and what great Officially Paramount Approved Merchandise was coming out. In other words, it was all about how far up its own ass the Trek franchise was by that point. I don’t know if a Starlog-produced magazine would’ve been any different, but my instinct is that the Starlog mags always seemed to be a little more in touch with what the fans were thinking. Of course, the Starlog mags were also largely pre-internet. Maybe the official Paramount mag was right on the money for earlier this decade.