Bloody, Spicy, Books has a new post The Shadow & Me, which points to the way in which even terrible movies can be formative experiences for kids who (at the time) knew no better. The 1990s screen world of Batman, Dick Tracy (ugh), The Rocketeer (Disney lavish version, ok-ish), and early Indiana Jones series all proved a formative environment for Bloody, Spicy, and led to print and to the ‘better Batman‘ of The Shadow, and Doc Savage. Of course, a lad who gets into print is perhaps a rarity, and I imagine that many other kids of the period may also have been influenced by the related pulpy games of the time (the classic videogame Crimson Skies springs to mind) and went haring off into a lifelong focus on videogames and RPGs.
But that was the 1990s, still largely a ‘take it when you can get it’ media world, even with VHS tapes and later DVDs. Even DVDs were expensive until the ‘3 for £10’ discounting of the early/mid 2000s allowed the creation of fledgling personal collections. The mass Internet only really arrived in 1995/6 and a lukewarm broadband and casual movie-downloading a decade later (for most people). 25 years later we are of course in a different world of abundance, with increasingly few rarities — usually obscurities that sit at the fringes.
As such it’s interesting to muse on how the ‘all you can eat, all tastes catered for’ superfast buffet of media has been affecting kids over the last decade, when ‘new’ is no longer a reliable synonym for ‘better than what came before’.
How do savvy kids now hack a way through the astro-turfing which serves to market the ‘latest thing’, and instead find routes to the best of the past? I guess careful roadmaps for pulp culture would be especially valuable here. Guides that highlight which would be the best item to introduce a character, author or sub-genre (‘sub-tropical lost world, with scientists’ etc), and if an audiobook has been produced for such. Perhaps we need a Big Bumper Guide to Powering into Powerful Pulp, aimed at 13 year olds rather than collectors or connoisseurs. A guide which discriminating lays out all the options and best starting points. Done in a visually attractive 8″ x 10″ manner, across 300 pages. So far as I’m aware, such a book does not yet exist. Though there are of course many worthy pulp history websites.
If you’re thinking of making such a guide book then the new non-PC guide to general children’s literature Before Austen Comes Aesop: The Children’s Great Books and How to Experience Them might be useful to look at, to see how such things can be structured and approached. There are also text-only survey books such as Don Hutchison’s The Great Pulp Heroes.
Legacies in wills might even help here. The affluent collector might set aside $20,000 to have a superb introductory for-teens guide produced, dedicated to a certain author or character which they have loved all their life. Better than a park bench or a 20-year plaque on a home for stray cats, I’d suggest.
A lot of those back-roads destinations in pulp culture can then be a bit bumpy to actually reach, especially with all the mis-selling on Amazon and the confusion generated by cynical reboots (the later dire Rocketeer cash-in comics spring to mind). As such it would probably also help to encourage a kid to break from the idle ‘just ask my clueless mates’ approach (Twitter, Reddit, insert this month’s teen social media fad) and instead cultivate good search-skills. In that case, simply being told that one can place good filters on one’s keywords and title searches (e.g. browser addons like Google Hit Hider by Domain, and about useful meta-engines like eTools), would be probably be a good start. (Sadly Google Hit Hider does not yet work with eTools, but hopefully it will soon).
