It may be hard for some of you to understand, but in the late 1960's/early 1970's, science-fiction on television was a rare and wonderful thing.  There were no cable stations.  There were no VCRs, DVDs, pay-per-views, no satellite, no first-run syndicated programs.  In short, if you wanted to watch science-fiction, you watched it when it was on, and it rarely was.

     There were things for kids, like Lost In Space after school, Johnny Sokko and Ultraman.  There were reruns of the original Star Trek, The Outer Limits, or The Twilight Zone.   And sometimes, on Saturday afternoons or late on a Sunday night, UHF Channel 30 would show Tarantula, or Rocketship XM.  But you had to seek these things out, make a point to see them, and actually sit and watch them, start-to-finish, because once they were gone they were gone and you might never see them again.

     Of course, in 1982 we got our first VCR, a Sharp, just as the cost for these units were coming into the range of the average consumer.  We paid $529 for that unit, if I recall correctly, at an electronics show down at the old St. Louis Arena--I had no idea what the thing actually was at that point, and taping from the television was kind of an alien concept.  Keep in mind that we had never even had a color television until about 1980 (on a visit to my grandmother's house I was shocked to find out that on Star Trek, Scotty's shirt was RED!)!

     Suddenly it was possible to record all these programs that had slipped away in childhood.  Of course, tapes cost $5.00 each, which means that we taped everything in 6-hour speed (EP, they called it then), but the first thing I ever taped was the Star Trek episode The Devil in The Dark.  I still have that recording, though it shows some decay from age, and the commercials on that tape are now showing antique electronics at laughable prices.

     Well, over the next fifteen years or so, things slowly changed.  More and more things were released to video.  Prices dropped.  The collection that had started with only two blank tapes in 1982 has grown to maybe 1200 tapes or more.  You can find almost anything on video, now, or even DVD.  Cable stations run science-fiction constantly, though a dismal crop it usually is.  Science-fiction, and it's bastard stepchild fantasy, are now big business and the mundane world has taken over.  It's all very much mainstream and it's mostly bad and boring.

     There are still things I miss about those days--the sense of discovery, the only access to these strange and wonderful things being catching it on TV, or seeing pictures and descriptions in the pages of books about these odd old presentations.  I'm still video obsessed--DVD is fine, though it will probably not have the odd, eclectic catalog that VHS has for years yet.  I have spent countless hours pawing through bins and bins and bins of PVTs (Previously Viewed Tapes) finding cast-offs from video stores, copies of Mario Bava's Planet of Blood (aka Planet of the Vampires), episodes of Space Patrol, or almost-unknown films like Who?, hidden beneath a hideous video-release title as 'Roboman.'

     There is horrible garbage out there, too, cynical movies produced for direct-to-video, which feature graphic gore, violence, and sexual content--usually these are not worth a look unless you're a hyper-pubescent teen who needs some trashy thrills.  But the good stuff is out there, I'm convinced, lurking in some unknown box in the back of some old video store, just waiting to be found.

     Until then, I've put together a catalog of the kind of thing I miss--the old stuff, the forgotten stuff, the few well-known classics that really deserve it, the new releases that bring a fresh glow back to tarnished memories.  A big part of the reason behind starting this website is to keep these things alive and getting out into new hands.

-Mr. Wonderful