Raeli watched part of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Gene Wilder, not Johnny Depp) courtesy of my Dad the other day, and has managed to get herself well and truly traumatised about the fate of Violet Beauregarde (SPOILER, she turns into a giant blueberry). Nightmares and all. As with the similarly traumatic puppet show incident we now refer to as The Tiddilik Disaster (frog drinks all the water in the world), she has been dealing with her fear by asking me to tell her the story that scared her, over and over again (only leaving out the scary parts).

It’s surprisingly sophisticated, the way she chooses to face her fears like that. I’ve seen her do this with movies, too, being worried or scared by something adult in them, but coming back the next day and asking to see it again. She was terrified by Spirited Away the first time (and I don’ t blame her) but now it’s one of her favourite movies.

So yes, many spare moments & chores over the last several days have been enlivened by me having to recite from memory the plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Good thing it wasn’t the Twits or something, at least I remember a lot of this one! At one point I explained to Raeli about how that episode of Futurama she’s seen approximately a gazillion times, when Fry and the others visit the Slurm Factory, is actually a pastiche of the Willy Wonka movie. I pointed out the similarity in the river scene, the Oompa-Loompas, and Wonka’s costume. She nodded in a vaguely patronising “yes I see this is interesting to you, Mummy” way, and I dropped the subject.

But I remember the first time she saw that episode of Futurama, I thought “Oh here we go, seeing the pastiche before the source material…” Because that pretty much sums up my childhood.

I was not in on the zeitgeist, growing up. Possibly because my mother’s influence steered me away from American pop culture, commercial tv stations, seeing movies in the cinema, and any form of early-adoption, apart from the VHS player. We were also a pro-second-hand books family. I’m not sure if it’s just the era I was born in, but it seems like I viewed, read and experienced almost everything in entirely the wrong order.

Before I saw Star Wars, for example, I:

saw a parody in pig-themed comic book Oink! depicting Luke Skyporker and Ham Solo
watched Caravan of Courage
watched Return of the Jedi
read the novelisation of Star Wars
watched Spaceballs

Seeing the parody before the original source became something of a tradition for me. I also saw Spaceballs with its classic alien-bursts-out-of-chest-and-starts-tapdancing scene long before Alien.

Doctor Who, which can definitely be considered my first fandom, was something experienced through endless repeats and recordings. For at least 10 years on Australian TV (possibly 20), the same Jon Pertwee and especially Tom Baker episodes were repeated in a seemingly endless loop, along with the Goodies, Roger Ramjet, Bananaman, Monkey Magic, etc. My honey and I, comparing notes, discovered that we had exactly the same childhood TV memories despite having 10 years separating our ages.

My obsessive brain was reading Doctor Who: the Programme Guide at a horribly early age, learning which episodes went where, and becoming an expert in characters and actors I had never actually seen. Target novelisations allowed me to fill in the gaps, and say with great confidence that my favourite story was The Highlanders, despite it having been destroyed (I think) before I was born.

Oh, and I read about two dozen Star Trek: Next Gen novels before I saw a single episode of the series. I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately, thanks to listening to Wil Wheaton’s awesome ‘Memories of the Futurecast’ podcast, and my recent Dragonlancy nostalgias. As a teenager, I found some Next Gen novels being sold for $5 each in a no-longer-there bookshop in Hobart called Greensleeves. I read it in a mad tear, and went back with some pocket money, thinking I could maybe afford 3-4 of them. To my utter delight, they were now marked down to $2 each.

I loved those books like a crazy person. My favourite was “Survivors,” which filled in the backstory (later contradicted in the TV show I think) about Tasha Yar, my favourite character (ha, that worked out well). I eventually got hold of some episodes thanks to our local video rental, but the tv shows never quite had the same level of interest for me as the books. It was just about a year before my obsession moved on to other things… but I managed to collect a LOT of books in that time.

When it comes to books, my favourites were often the series that could be read in any order, like Pratchett’s Discworld or Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga. The same can be said for a lot of historical series, I suppose. I read Jo’s Boys before Good Wives. Read Rainbow Valley & Rilla of Ingleside before Anne’s House of Dreams.

I’m an early adopter, these days. I watch my favourite shows the instant they come out, I order books in bulk from the US rather than wait to see if they even get a release in Australia, and I take part in Last Short Story, a project which means reading as much as possible of the short fiction published this year, instead of waiting for awards shortlists, recommended reading lists and Best-Of anthologies to filter out the best stuff for me.

So much of our pop culture these days is obsessed with avoiding spoilers, with wanting to experience every second of a show or film or book without a single hint about it beforehand, without knowing what the twists and turns are. I love that experience too, and I understand why people get so obsessive about it now that the internet makes it so much easier to be spoiled. I’ve been known to hide from my laptop so I can watch a soccer game on delay without finding out what the result was by random tweets.

But there’s something to be said for the kind of story that is good despite you knowing how it ends. Where the experience is learning how they got to a particular place, rather than wondering where they will end up. I am, as it happens, a sucker for prequels, between-the-stories stories, and the revelation of backstory that makes the front story so much more interesting. One thing I love about the TV show How I Met Your Mother is the way that they play with narrative, using flashbacks and unreliable narration to reveal secrets and new layers about the past, which always fit seamlessly into the present, while dropping hints about the future – all managing to form a cohesive whole. Despite its title, it is most definitely a story about the journey rather than the destination. (I know this especially because I watched season 3 first, then 1&2, then 4…)

We all know how Doctor Who is going to end, this Christmas. Except we don’t. Not really. The joy is in the details. It should be every bit as much of a surprising revelation as was the War Games when I first watched it, long after Spearhead from Space; or the death of Julius Caesar in Rome. Short of actually getting hold of transcripts first and reading all the dialogue beforehand (which, cough, I did for Buffy Season Three) we can’t be spoiled, not really. All we have so far is the shopping list, not the recipe.

Tags: doctor who, himym, pop culture, raeli, reading, star trek, star wars, watching