The Evolution of "Geek Culture" (part 1)

This post is one that’s going to make me feel old, but I think it bears putting into words.

My kids are growing up in a much more accepting and kinder world with regards to the types of hobbies we enjoy. It was very different when I was their age, and at the risk of sounding like a, “walked to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways,” type of post, I’m going to talk about it.

When I was young, there were very few acceptable outlets for “geek” or “nerd” culture. The

most mainstream of them were Star Wars, and to some extent, Star Trek, but seeing outward professions of fandom by others was a pretty seldom sight. Public proclamations of fandom (like wearing a shirt) was tantamount to wearing a “Kick Me” sign. Admitting you were a Nintendo or Marvel fan more or less made you out to be Urkel, the prototypical nerd. Personally, I was never given a swirly or shoved in a locker. But there was definitely ridicule when someone overheard me talking Zelda with a friend, saw my Marvel card collection that I brought to swap with other collectors, or saw me doodling Wolverine in class. Though I think it was known that I was into such things, I knew better than to bring it up unless I already knew the other party was a fan. Like, I kept a mental list that I could talk Star Wars with these 3 friends, Comic books with certain other friends, video games with a select few, etc. And when talking about those things at school, we kept the conversation kinda quiet so as to not draw attention our way.

The Sci-Fi, Superhero, and Fantasy genres seemed to be the domain of the nerd and

making those kinds of movies is really expensive because of the additional costuming, set, and special effects costs being so much higher than, say, a comedy like Fletch or Animal House. So when one did get made, it was usually terrible and only enjoyed by the most hardcore of fans.




Meanwhile, Sit-Com, Drama, and Sports television programs were on nearly all the time. But things that represented my interests and hobbies were only shown on Saturday mornings. I grew used to just accepting that most other shows would be about Hospitals, Cops, and Relationships that sometimes had pop culture references (video games didn’t make the cut as popular to be referenced in “pop” culture). Though what I liked wasn’t as mainstream, I used to love when even the smallest semblance of geek culture was seen on more traditional media. Like, I just about wet myself with glee while watching Family matters when Harriet mentioned Nintendo. Once.


Sometimes I would catch wind of something, like the 90’s Flash TV series, or Birds of Prey on the WB. Even if it wasn’t terribly great, I would still watch and support it hoping that it would get better because I was starved for things I really wanted. But these types of things were 1) usually cancelled after the first season, 2) were almost always relegated to really inconvenient time slots (and it seemed to change time slots weekly so it was hard to catch consistently), and 3) were often bumped for other programs that took precedence, like the Miss America Pageant. Back then, I really tried to embrace the philosophy that Kevin Smith (still) espouses - support everything that is even vaguely comic-book/sci-fi related so they will continue to make more of it.

There were, of course, comic books, computers/electronics, novels, Dungeon and Dragons, but very few movies outside of the Star Wars/Star Trek ones. The only (decent) ones I can think of are examples are the first Batman and Superman movies, Dune, Tron, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Occasionally there was a TV show, like Wonder Woman, Hulk, or Flash, and there were animated series. And there were places like Radio Shack, an arcade, or a comic book store that served as some of the few refuges for geeks but even these places were seen (to some extent) as seedy and frequented by less-than-desireables.

Video games caught a foothold and then almost lost it in the Video Game Crash of 1983, but thankfully were saved by Nintendo (for the most part). Slowly it gained in popularity, but was still seen as more of a nerd/geek/unpopular thing, and usually not something that girls did. However, there was always a prominent video game case/display in major stores like K-Mart, Wal-Mart, etc. that gave the hobby some visibility.


But something happened. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but sometime around 2003 to 2005, it became socially acceptable for some reason. Perhaps the kids who grew up with Nintendo were now of an age to spend large amounts of cash on consoles/accessories and it was enough that the business world finally took notice. Maybe it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films that made it ok to like these things, or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films winning all the Oscars. Perhaps it was the Star Wars prequels wrapping up that allowed the older generation of Star Wars fans to “transmit” the love of the films to their kids. It might even have something to do with online forums letting us all know that there were more fans than we initially thought because it was safer online than in public. I’m almost certain that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had something to do with it.

I don’t know.  

Edit: After reading some comments on Reddit, I have decided that Lord of the Rings probably accounted for like 45% of the shift, and the other things just mentioned are spread across the other 55%. 

The two comments in particular are this: 

from /u/TechniChara:

I've said this before - on paper, [the LotR Trilogy] should have failed spectacularly.

• Low budgets (less than $100MM per film) with huge special effects expectations and cinematic translation of a sprawling world
• Directed and written by an unknown indie director, his wife and friend
• Directed in a country with little more than an indie film industry
• Adapting a work that was deemed unfilmable even by modern standards
• Using an unknown special effects workshop
• Featuring a 100% CGI character as a main character meant to blend in with live action and interact with other characters - history before LotR showed this was very risky and likely to fail.
• All three films filmed at once - this is the biggest shocker. This had never been done before, closest was two films at once and one film would always end up worse off at best. Three films is logistically insane.
• Some of the main actors were relatively unknown, so there was little star power to draw people in
• At the time, geek was not cool. High fantasy with weird names and deep lore would put a neon sign on your person screaming "kick me!" The genre itself was known for some mild successes and plenty failures. At best they might expect to break even.

It should have gone wrong. But someone really fucking liked Tolkien and rained a hurricane of good luck upon that production because everything good that could have happened to make it even better than originally envisioned, did, and it forever transformed our culture to embrace and love geek.

And this comment from /u/Deggit:

There's a lot of missing context here for people who grew up with film series like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or the MCU. The idea of making a trilogy of nearly 3-hours-each fantasy films, and financing and shooting the entire trilogy before the first film was even theatrically released, was considered absolutely looney tunes in 1998.

Fuck, it's audacious now.

But in the late 90s it was especially bad for genre films. The epic flop Cutthroat Island was one example of what scared Hollywood away from fantasy adventure for a while. The 90s were a heyday for straightforward action films and in the latter half of the decade, for slick adult scifi. But fantasy and comic books were considered dork material. The only high grossing comic book movies were about Batman or Superman. Also, if you were an industry exec in the late 90s, your idea of chaching was sequels, not film series per se. You would make a movie and if it was successful the sequel gets greenlit. The idea of purchasing an entire IP just to make a structured cinematic universe out of it was... out of this world in 1998.

There were eight trilogies that really changed the landscape of Hollywood between 1998 and 2008. They completely altered the possibility-space of what a successful, genre movie could look like.

1. First, the original X-Men trilogy... though it's probably not considered a notable series of films anymore, at the time it blew the doors off superhero filmmaking. Instead of the "god IPs" of Superman & Batman, the X-Men films made bank with "less bankable" characters (there were earlier films that tried this, like Spawn, that were just a bit too soon before their time). There woulda never been Iron Man (and certainly not Deadpool), without X2 back in 2003.

2. Then LOTR happened and showed you could get huge mainstream box office and even sweep the Oscars with a fantasy movie, leading to a glut of me-too movies for the next decade (most notably, the Chronicles of Narnia movies). The first movie is very much a "Part One" and proved that a film that was necessarily, unashamedly incomplete could still be a success. There would be no "cinematic universes" without LOTR and Harry Potter, which I'll talk about for #8.

3. At the same time you had the Star Wars Prequels and...

4. ....the Matrix trilogy, both of which were highly commercially successful despite fanwars, and both trilogies pointed the way to a new "hybrid" Hollywood that combined live action and completely virtualized environments, which is what most top grossing movies are doing today (the New York City in Avengers 2012 doesn't look as wild as Avatar's Pandora, but they are both 100% fake). Together with LOTR all three film trilogies also combined CGI with miniatures, mattes and other "conservative" special effects techniques.

5. Together with this was the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and...

6. the Nolan Batman films. The importance of these two is they heralded the dawn of "manchild cinema." In a revenge of the nerds, the pariahs of pop culture took it over; the kid who used to get shoved into lockers for playing with toy armies was now helming $150m movies, and those movies then became the top rated and most discussed movies of that year. It was an era of complete euphoria and vindication for the former dorks. (Peter Jackson was partially identified with this generation of directors as well). Premises that would have been considered abysmally dumb and puerile became real movies because you had a "dork whisperer" like Zack Snyder, Joss Whedon, or Sam Raimi in the director's chair making movies for his fellow dorks. Manchild cinema was arguably a 10-15 year generational fad that swept not just movies but TV (Big Bang Theory ran alongside its heyday) and our wider pop culture (celebrities playing Dungeons & Dragons was pretty unimaginable in 1995). Manchild cinema came to an end around 2017 or so, with the Star Wars Sequels and Justice League both being unfortunate casualties of the pop culture shift. Ironically the main reason for its demise was possibly that younger audiences are so used to any premise being a possible movie - the idea of, say, Kick Ass being an actual Hollywood movie doesn't amaze them - that they began to be a bit more cynical about these films than their "inject it into my veins, because I never had this as a kid" elders.

7. The seventh trilogy that was crucial in Hollywood's transformation, and honestly it's weird that I put it at #7 because it deserves a higher spot, was Pirates Of The Caribbean which presaged the entire Disney MCU. Pirates nailed down the tightrope-walking formula of all modern blockbuster films, where everything is postmodern and meta and the characters continually puncture the drama of their own situation, yet the movie is also full of genuinely indulgent genre thrills. There's no Tony Stark without Jack Sparrow. This film-making strategy is in the final analysis a cynically psychological management of the audience; you give them the stupid thrills they want, but also give them an 'out' from having to admit they're invested in a movie about men in spandex or women with magic swords. In other words: THEY FLY NOW? THEY FLY NOW (also, EARTH IS CLOSED TODAY, SQUIDWARD). Interestingly the age of Jack Sparrow movies may be coming to an end for two reasons. First the idea of "Marvel humor" has filtered into pop culture so much that people see that shit coming a mile away (and few screenwriters did it as well as the original Pirates screenplay). Secondly there's a trend in movies, filtering in from television, for a "New Sincerity". Mad Max: Fury Road was one example of a post-2010 film that made no apologies for its hideously genrebound setting and plot. And every movie the Rock makes, especially the Jumanji films, pretty much wears its heart on its sleeve with no false ironies.

8. Finally there was Harry Potter which was maybe the most important film series of all of them, even more important than LOTR, because it kind of revolutionized the relationship between studios and actors. The idea of hiring actors for an entire series turned films into quasi-TV and created a believable continuity that went beyond the casting-carousel James Bonds and Batmans of the past. Also, while many of the costs of producing a film remained fixed on a per-film basis, the franchise grew increasingly profitable, ending with two films that were absolute fucking cash cows and created a merchandising empire.

All I know is that now it’s remarkable when I go in public and don’t see someone wearing a Marvel t-shirt or see hordes of Captain Americas and Iron Mans (Iron Men?) while Trick-or-Treating. And it’s not like it’s that this kind of thing is finally just tolerated. It’s flat out thriving and even driving current pop culture. The MCU in 10 short years became the highest grossing movie franchise with 23 movies that are the cultural event that Star Wars was in 1977, only even more so. When I visit subreddits like /r/NBA and /r/CFB, which should be the stomping grounds of jocks and sports fans, there are Thanos jokes and WandaVision references peppered throughout the LeBron and College Football Playoff discussions. That still blows my mind.

When once there were a few small conventions for very specific things (Star Trek or San Diego ComiCon) that were often a punchline to jokes told on sit-coms, these are now huge industries, with conventions popping up all over the place. Cosplaying has been normalized and is even popular enough that some people make a living doing it. The Big Bang Theory was a whole show about physicists (and one engineer) that lasted 12 seasons but would have never made it past the initial pitch when I was young. Instead of the "nerd" being the outcast like Urkel was, they're the main stars. The video game industry rivals the film industry every year for most money grossed, and e-Sports and Twitch live streaming is a thing. Sports stars in the NFL solving Rubik's Cubes and talking about Black Panther isn't out of the ordinary. Dr. Who is no longer an obscure British show known by only a few Americans.

Basically, what I’m trying to convey is that if I could get into a time machine and go tell my 9-year-old self that the biggest movie ever was about Captain America and Iron Man (and like 50 friends in full costume) taking down Thanos, that there would be an actor who portrayed Wolverine perfectly, and that dressing up as characters or playing video games made you “cool,” he would call me a liar.







However, there is a Part 2 to this story . . .