An interesting frustration...

[tikatu]

I've been fiddling around with the Thunderbirds page at FanHistory, trying to set up a timeline of when various sites came and went. I figured it'd be difficult in the case of Thunderbirds World, seeing as the place has been defunct for two years and more. But I was hoping to find some info from The Wayback Machine to help out. I've been able to

Comments

[tikatu]

I'm not sure where to get info on the pre-internet history, except possibly some of the memoirs and auxiliary materials written early on. I have some of that material, but a lot of it is either expensive or hard to get. This was a primarily British phenomenon, which means the majority of hard-core fans are in Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. There's also a really large following in Japan as well, with books about them, but they're in Japanese, which I don't read.

I'll keep plugging away at it, and hope that those with more knowledge of the fandom from when the show came out will pipe up - if only to correct my mistakes.

[sidewinder]

It is an interesting puzzle, isn't it? I have a lot of the same issues when trying to document my own fandoms (especially The Police, for both FH and for PoliceWiki). Police fandom has 30 years of history, with fanclubs and zines and other off-line activity, as well as on-line activity that dates back to the early 90s. And it's not always easy to pull it all together. I squeed when I found an archive of all the posts for one Police mailing list going all the way back to its inception date in the early 90s, but...there are websites long gone that don't even come up in wayback. Early pieces of bandfic in the bandom that I can't provide accurate details of because it's long gone. LJ comms that were deleted and I didn't think to record the dates of its activity

[tikatu]

I understand the squee factor! I was doing some work in the Wayback yesterday and found what I think is the oldest fansite for Thunderbirds online. It's still available, and highly recommended, but hasn't been updated in a couple of years, and the forum is gone. I got the start date for the forum, which puts its creation months ahead of the oldest, still-being-updated site available. Always nice to find that kind of evidence.

[sidewinder]

Always nice to find that kind of evidence.

It is. Especially as people's recollections can often be colored by what they want to remember moreso than the facts.

(Though the downside? Going through that one old mailing list's archives I found my very first post there, back in my college days. Oh, and I was such a wanky young brat at the time too. Talk about blanking things out by selective memory...

Here via metafandom

[pandorasblog]

@ sidewinder: I'm really glad people are logging the Police fandom history. I think we're lucky that with the e-mail list etc. a lot of the way-back-when fans are still around, active and talkative.

@ tikatu: All I can suggest re: the international quality of your fandom is to see if people from the old days are online. LJ fandom seems to be mainly teens and twenties, but more and more lately I'm seeing people refer to stuff that happened in their fandoms thirty years ago. Could be worth your putting out a general call for people who remember the fandom pre-internet; maybe try some non-fandom comms like livejournal_uk and their equivalents in other countries? Or e-mail the webmasters of the more comprehensive sites for personal recollections?