Tracking very old fandoms

[fmanalyst]

I've got very old fandoms on my mind due to the recent popularity of the BBC series Sherlock and Merlin. I've seen a number of people say that they had never read the Doyle stories until after they saw the TV series, which was very striking to me (since I had first read them in the 70s as a middle school student). I'm having the same curiosity

Comments

[rm]

I almost said T.H. White, because that was my first literary exposure, but my parents took me to see the musical when I was five, and it's stayed with me in vivid detail for over thirty years. It has its oddly powerful moments.

[fmanalyst]

It was hard for me to remember, between Camelot, Sword in the Stone and T. H. White, but I seem to remember reading Once and Future King from the library first. Camelot I saw on television at some point. Sword in the Stone came out the year I was born, so I wouldn't have seen it in the theater. I'm pretty sure I saw it after I read the story though.

[corneredangel]

I'd give money to say that pretty much every country with a national cinema had a sequence of Sherlock Holmes films - and the Soviet Union certainly did.

[fmanalyst]

I just remembered that Miyazaki had an anime version as well.

[nebroadwe]

These fandoms have penetrated too far into western culture to make it easy to come up with my first exposure -- for both, I need a category like "had always heard about it" (my dad quoting "Elementary!" or Bugs Bunny putting on a deerstalker for Holmes fandom, long before I read the stories ... which I think just preceded me seeing any of the Basil Rathbone films or The Great Mouse Detective; and I'm pretty sure I knew about King Arthur before I read Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising stuff, but I couldn't tell you how I knew -- I read White's Sword in the Stone after Cooper, I think). Is there something to be said here about the way popular fandoms spawn cultural memes that circulate independently of the storytelling? The "Elementary, my dear Watson"s and "Beam me up, Scotty"s and "Play it again, Sam"s that are many people's first/only encounter with a fandom (and I choose my quotations deliberately, here ...)

[fmanalyst]

You mean the way they're inaccurate memes rather than true quotations? The meme that stands in for the original as though it were the original.

[pgranzeau]

I can't remember any specific introduction to Sherlock Holmes, or to the King Arthur legends, they were both just things I kept seeing references to in my other reading.

I am sure that the first Holmes as Holmes I saw must have been Basil Rathbone. I have since read several of the Conan Doyle stories, The Seven Percent Solution, and I have seen the recent BBC Sherlock.

Similarly in King Arthur--I read widely as a child, including a set of books my mother had called "Journeys Through Bookland". Arthur may have been in that set someplace. If not that, then I read several versions of the Arthur legend, to the point that when Guy Gavriel Kay brought Arthur into "The Fionavar Tapestry", I threw the book across the room.

[fmanalyst]

I'm finding myself wanting to go back and read Fionavar from an Arthurian point of view, but I know what you mean about them as part of the existing culture.

[pgranzeau]

I think it was Judith Tarr who said something to the effect that in reading "The Fionavar Tapestry", she kept saying "Aha! I know what you've been reading recently!"

[fmanalyst]

Yeah, and there was a period in the 70s/80s when there were a number of fantasy authors heading for the Arthurian well.

[rift_bound]

Sherlock Holmes: Besides seeing Bugs Bunny do his Sherlock routine, I first saw The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone as a child (maybe 10 or 11) and loved the story so, as was usual with me, I went to the local library and found the book and promptly fell in love with Conan Doyle and all things Sherlock. Read through all the canon stories before seeing any of the other films.

Merlin: I think Malory was the first real experience I had of the whole Merlin/Arthur universe. A friend kept going on and on about the book so I read it too just to see what all the fuss was about. I remember getting bits and pieces of Arthur as a possible historical figure through some of the English histories I was reading, but hadn't gone much further until my friend urged me to read Malory's book. Camelot was lovely, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail was hilarious! I did being doing more reading after seeing that film.