Is the any historical analogy to Star Wars/Star Trek geeky obsession

Factual Questions
21

The ancient Greeks [or in Bushspeak, “Grecians” :D] could be quite the sports fanatics when it came to their Olympics. Ditto for the Roman fans keeping stats on their favorite gladiators… Dunno if they ever developed collectible trading cards, though.

Early-mid 19th C. AD, Mitteleuropa: Liszt-o-mania! Hordes of untethered, licentious, dissolute young women follow Hungarian composer/pianist Franz Liszt on his frequent European concert tours… some of the obsessed fans were known to bare their bosoms in public to the musical genius, in apparent attempts to seduce him…

Over the past 200 years plus: chess mania periodically erupts throughout the Western world! The affected Russians, Germans, Americans, Latin Americans, etc. devoted their lives to the endless pursuit of perfection and world domination in this board game. Grandmasters and fans alike memorize the entire tournament runs of the greatest players, move by move… Many of its greatest practicioners were known for their, uh, psychological peccadillos, spiked by extra doses of paranoia during the Cold War… Put it this way – long before the development of cyber- and tech-subcultures, there were skinny, intellectual, myopic, undersocialized, sexually frustrated & inexperienced, introverted, hygiene-challenged mouthbreathers obsessed with their gaming. The more things change,…

…and rumor has it that in Asia, millions waste away their days playing Go, Mah-johng, and Hana [sp.?]. Sometimes these games are played in notorious opium dens, sometimes they are the focus of intense gambling activity; altogether a detriment to orderly society! Dunno if those games ever developed a star system or trivia-memorization subculture, though.

Two words: car collectors. You got yer vintage-oriented restorers, myriad hot-rod specialist collectors ('68 Mustang, anyone?), drag-racers, lowriders, even model car collectors…

Also, the art world, the cineastes, book collectors, antiques collectors, historic preservationists, high-couture fashionistas, foodies, space junkies, football fans, train & model train hobbyists, ornithopterists ;), etc. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world out there!

And speaking of dope, what about this online message board subculture that refers to themselves as “Dopers,” eh? Some major time-wastage there… :wink:

22

Virgil’s Aeneid might qualify. There is a form of divination called bibliomancy. You ask your question, then open a book at random and the “answer” is the first passage that catches your eye. The Aeneid and the Bible are the only books I know of that have been regularly used for this purpose (but there are probably others).

23

http://www.synicon.com.au/sw/ls/sabres.htm comes damn close!

24

Speaking of Arthur Conan Doyle, didn’t he get swept up in the (Trekkie-like) fairy mania that swept England after WWI? Folks went to all sorts of elaborate lengths to prove that fairies were real.

And there was also a spiritualist mania after WWI- seances, ouija boards, etc. Many respected folks (including Doyle again, and Harry Houdini) became obsessed with the idea of contacting “the other side.”

25

Not if the captain of the Enterprise knew the limitations of a Star Destroyer, it couldn’t! All the Enterprise would have to do would be to back up at Warp 2 and lob photon torpedoes at the Star Destroyer until it blew up. Since the Star Destroyer’s weapons all travel at light speed or slower, and since a Star Destroyer can’t fight while moving faster-than-light, it wouldn’t be able to touch the Enterprise.

26

… with the clear difference that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a “true believer” in spiritualism, while Harry Houdini quickly became convinced that most (if not all) mediums were charlatans. Houdini had the advantage of knowing lots of stage-magician tricks, and could recognize when a medium was using them.

27

Fascinating post. It actually made me think and taught me a few things!

The biggest difference between then and now is television. In the 50s, not everyone had a TV. By the 60s, most people had Black and White sets but TV was broadcast and affected by the weather (but it was FREE!!!). By the 70s, everyone had a TV and most were color and the quality was improving so people could identify more with Star Trek plus, we had set foot on the moon and 2001 came out and we were all dreaming of becoming space travelers, until politics, greed and stupidity all but shut the space program down.

We never got the moon bases and low gravity hotels I dreamed of there being on the moon by now, with reasonably affordable transport to and from them.

BASTARDS!

28

I’ll buy that. How obsessive are we talking here? Holmesians can give Trekkies a run for their quatloos. (Granted, this link does not demonstrate that such fanaticism pre-dates “Star Trek.” But it’s seems pretty clear that Doyle’s fans were present from the beginnning.

Also, those afflicted with Shakespeare mania exhibit similar symptoms (see the copyright at the bottom: 1884).

29

(I can’t believe I forgot this one) Musos! Instrument collectors, recorded music collectors, individual artist completists (for example, collectors of Beatles stuff only), and the genre collectors/completists. Ever see the home of a serious jazz collector? I’m talking about the kind of place so stuffed with vinyl, if it caught fire, it would burn like a tire dump for three days…

Wine connousseurs [sp.?] can get extremely nerdy about the vintages and years (and soil conditions, weather patterns, corks, etc. ad nauseum).

And birdwatchers (and, unfortunately, egg collectors).

And I’d argue that these days, the fitness, bodybuilding, weight-training, and dieting obsessives can get very self-absorbed over their muscle groups, metabolic burn rates, nutritional supplements, workout regimens, etc. ad nauseum in extremis. While much of the details and growth of those scenes is relatively new (female bodybuilding, steroids, etc.), the core skeleton, as it were, of this dates back well over a century in Anglo-American culture. Jack LaLanne, Charles Atlas, and, in the late Victorian era, “muscular Christianity,” and sex-segregated educational institutions that self-consciously encouraged physical education and exertions to sublimate those nasty adolescent/young adult sexual urges… Boxing, running laps, and tossing the medicine ball to help allay the desire to jerk off or hire prostitutes. :rolleyes:

30

A friend who is 44 told me his whole group at Intel took the morning off to see Attack of the Clones.

31

Padeye:

I work in the IT department here (in the greater Washington DC metro area); two guys I work with took the equivalent of vacation time to go on the first day of the “clones” movie. I gave them a lot of grief about having to stand in line with all the "skinny, intellectual, myopic, undersocialized, sexually frustrated & inexperienced, introverted, hygiene-challenged mouthbreathers " who would doubtless be having their geekfest. Turns out that the audinece was full of men in their upper 30’s and 40’s with Blackberry remote e-mailers, cell phones, etc. Most were from Hughes Network Systems and the Marriott HQ’s IT staff.

Personally, I noted that it seemed a whole lot easier to access the Internet that afternoon.

32

I think from the amount of time and money those “StEx trainvestites” spend on the show. Some have seen it over 1,000 times, and we’re not talking going to the local movie house and spending $20 a pop to do it.

Someone mentioned music people. When people come into my 2 room apartment and see the sheer volume of my CD collection, their mouths just drop.

33

No one has mentioned the Tulip speculators yet? Prime example IMHO.

http://www.sfheart.com/tulip.html

  • Tamerlane
34

I spent a couple of hours trying to find the sources I have that describe the peculiar British phenomenon of “militias” in the latter half of the 1800s. Unfortunately, I failed.

If I remember rightly though, between the 1860s and early 1880s the militia movement was only loosely bound to the actual military of the U.K. It was largely dismissed by regular soldiers as a dress-up sport, and as best I can tell for at least twenty years these guys primarily put on ornate uniforms and paraded around to impress the girls.

By the 1880s these organizations successfully lobbied to be more closely tied to the armed forces (again, if I remember correctly). From that point forward they ceased to be as harmless as they were once considered. I think some of the unit names survived long enough to be incorporated into the Kitchener units of World War I.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t laugh too hard at our Jedi friends. Forty years from now their grandkids might be swinging their glow-bats for real!

35

Tamerlane wrote:

Tulip bulb speculators are not so much similar to Star Trek / Star Wars fans as they are similar to the dot-com stock market speculators of the late 1990s.

36

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the fanatical obsession with Tolkien that has come and gone a few times over the last half-century.

37

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the fanatical obsession with Tolkien that has come and gone a few times over the last half-century.