Starlog Internet Archive Project: Starlog #2, November 1976: Spreading the Love

Three months after the first issue appeared to a grateful public, the second issue of Starlog showed up in the fall of 1976 and began building on the concept of the first issue. With double the number of full-color pages, the focus and love wasn't reserved for Star Trek; this time center stage was reserved for the Space: 1999 TV series -- though Star Trek was also well represented. There's also the first appearance of something the first issue lacked: outside advertising. There's not a lot of it -- a record ad and a book seller -- but it was a start. And we see the first sign of something that would be a Starlog (and Norman Jacobs/Kerry O'Quinn) hallmark: the merchandising of a popular property. So this issue, on page 8, we have an in-house ad for color prints of the Jack Thurston painting from the cover of the premiere issue, and t-shirts (only $3.99!).

Starlog #2
68 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $1.50

With the same staff as the first issue, the team produced a magazine that was a good preview of the content mix that would carry the title to untold heights of success in the science fiction publishing world in the next few years. Interviews with active SF luminaries, editorials and columns, articles on current SF TV shows, short news about various topics (first news about the Star Trek movie!), retrospectives of classic productions, and lots of good color and black-and-white photos. It's all there. Also added, on the contents page, is the magazine's slogan, which it would retain for many years: The magazine of the future.

Editor David Houston takes over the editorial writing duties this issue from the first issue's Kerry O'Quinn. An extended Log Entries (short news) section expands on the first issue's concept and blends reports on upcoming productions (first news on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters and on the upcoming blockbuster called Star Wars featuring a young Mark Hamill in the starring role of "Luke Starkiller"!) with short interviews (Space: 1999's Nick Tate) and other tidbits. Kez Howard contributes the first of what will become many (from different writers) profiles of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry; Jim Burns provides a newsflash about the new Star Trek movie; famous Trekkies such as David Gerrold, Rod Serling, and Arthur C. Clarke are quoted on the Trek phenomenon; the first appearance of the Communications letters page; Bill Irvin explores the Logan's Run movie; two pages are devoted to books news and a convention calendar; Managing Editor James M. Elron provides a preview of "The New Television Season" -- including the then-new Wonder Woman TV series; Tom Rogers contributes a retrospective of the classic George Pal movie The War of the Worlds; David Houston goes behind the scenes of the second season of Space: 1999, which is followed by an episode guide to the first season-and-a-half of the show; Gary Gerani explains the history of Flash Gordon, followed by an episode guide to the 1936 Flash serial; Gerani also writes an article called "Bringing the Comics to Life," which looks at how Hollywood adapts comic books; Frank Squires and David Houston pay tribute to the composers who provide the music for SF movies; there are some word games and quizzes; and finally there's the first appearance of the long-running "Visions" column, which this issue looks at how Mars is portrayed in SF and at fictional sources of inspiration for real space heroics.

"The [Star Trek] film's largest problem at this point is that Paramount still has not approved any of the screen plays or outlines that have been written. Both Robert Silverberg and Chris Knopf have written full screen plays; and Harlan Ellison, Dick Simmons, and Theodore Sturgeon have written outlines. All of them have been rejected by Paramount."

--Jim Burns, writer, "The Star Trek Movie"

Starlog Internet Archive: # 1

Starlog Internet Archive Project: Starlog #1, August 1976: It All Begins

In 1976, Norman Jacobs and Kerry O'Quinn -- owners of a small periodicals publishing firm in Manhattan (Daily TV Serials, Beatles Forever, Screen Greats) -- put together a one-shot magazine devoted to the long-dead science fiction TV series Star Trek. As O'Quinn explained in later issues, their distributor didn't think there was a big enough audience to make the one-shot a success, so Jacobs and O'Quinn went back to the drawing board and added non-Trek articles to make it a general (though still Trek-heavy) science fiction media magazine. There were no ads in this first issue; the pages were a mix of full-color coated (glossy) stock and mostly black-and-white uncoated pages. The August 1976 issue was an immediate success, and within a year the quarterly magazine doubled its annual frequency to eight issues. Issue #1, along with the other first nine or 10 issues, would eventually be reprinted for sale by Starlog as back issues; in the 1990s, around the time of the magazine's 20th anniversary, the company produced 10,000 numbered copies in a special reprint, all on heavy glossy stock.

Starlog #1
68 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $1.50

From the front cover Star Trek painting by Jack Thurston to the back cover photo from The Bionic Woman, the premiere issue of Starlog magazine truly reflects the era in which it was born. Trek, Space: 1999, Dino DeLaurentiis' King Kong remake, bionic people, etc.

It kicks off with with a first-issue welcome editorial, short news (the David Bowie-starring The Man Who Fell to Earth, and other upcoming productions). Then the feature articles: Isobel Silden explores The Bionic Woman; editor David Houston writes about the changes in the second (and, as it turned out, final) season of Space: 1999; Gary Girani unveils two separate attempts to remake the classic King Kong (Girani's article would be publicly cited by Peter Jackson more than three decades later as an inspiration for his own big-budget Kong remake); publisher Kerry O'Quinn contributes a short preview of Squirm, a wormy horror film; Houston provides background for the cover features on Star Trek; then there's the full-color "Special Collectors Section" featuring lots of classic Trek photos from the original live-action series and the animated series; the great Isaac Asimov on the phenomenon of science fiction conventions; William Shatner is interviewed by Kirsten Russell (in the first of many, many Starlog interviews over the next several decades); costar Leonard Nimoy is interviewed by J.K. Lindquist; a complete episode guide to the original Trek; and it ends with some puzzles and word games.

"[Dino] DiLaurentiis stirred up a racial hornet's nest when he asked black males to try out for the role of Kong by jumping around in a bent-over position while wearing a monkey suit. De Laurentiis apparently hopes to supplement the robot's performance with the suits and black actors, provided he survives the lambasting from angered racial groups."

--Gary Girani, writer, "Battle of the Titans!"

Stay tuned for the rest of Starlog's nearly 400 issues, here on the Starlog Internet Archive Project.

Is ESPN Using Old 3-D Technology? Why Do You Need Glasses?

When I read the news that ESPN was going to launch the ESPN 3-D channel in June 2010, I noted with interest that viewers would still need to wear special glasses to view the screen video in three dimensions.

It reminded me of a note by one of the Starlog/Fangoria editors (sorry, I forget which wrote it) about another 3-D technology that would not require glasses for viewing. The note was in a report on the exit from the publishing company of co-founder Norman Jacobs. Jacobs was involved, we were told, in a venture aimed at bringing 3-D television to the world, and glasses would not be necessary.

It took very little digging to find more information on the company. It's called Magnetic 3D, and you can read a bit about the company and Jacobs' involvement here. Just earlier this week, the company announced that it would be debuting its new line of products at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, being held January 7-10 in Las Vegas.

If you go and see it, let me know if it works.

The Art of the Licensed Movie Magazine (as told by David McDonnell)

Editor David McDonnell's blog over at Starlog.com has an interesting story about the company's involvement (and mostly non-involvement) with publishing a licensed magazine for the Indiana Jones films and TV series. It's a tale of something that didn't come to be, but for people interested in the publishing business -- as I am -- or just movie-lovers who are interested in knowing how their favorite merchandise comes to appear in the store for them to purchase, it's a great article.

It also reminds me of my one and only visit to the Starlog offices, back in 1999. I was getting a tour of the offices from one of the mag's founders, and we got an earful from top editors and publishers about the politics of publishing a licensed magazine for one of the biggest blockbusters of that year. (I'll leave out that film company's name to avoid stepping on any toes; besides, that was a year of many blockbusters, so good luck guessing.) Starlog Group had tried to get rights to a licensed magazine for the film, but the price was so steep that it'd be nearly impossible to recoup the cost, much less make a profit. Another publisher did snap up the rights, but it paid so much that Starlog Group was slapping its forehead in dismay (if a company had a slappable forehead -- but you know what I mean) over what the other publisher would have to do to make it work.

Licensed magazines can be a money machine, if they're well-chosen. I also suspect they're a little bit like broadcasting the Olympics is for network TV. The winning network usually pays a ton for the rights and, or so I read once, doesn't recoup enough of its investment in advertising; instead, it gets a long-term payback by being able to promote its own shows throughout the two-week run of Olympics coverage, and that provides a boost to ratings (and thus broad-based advertising revenue) in future weeks and months. Similarly, movie magazines allow the publisher to devote a page or two to advertising its other titles and products. Take away the licensing biz from a publisher, and you take away more than one benefit it was receiving.

McDonnell explains how Starlog Group President/Publisher Norman Jacobs structured his licensing deals (again, a nice tidbit for magazine geeks like me to know; probably overkill for you). At one time (I believe in the 1980s), Starlog Group was the number-one publisher of licensed magazines. Over the years, the company did everything from Star Trek (TNG, DS9, Voyager) to Baywatch to Terminator 2 to The Untouchables and on and on and on, until that business dried up for them a decade or so ago. I would have loved to see what they could have and would have done with a magazine on the new Battlestar Galactica, but now I'm just compounding geekness upon geekness.

These days, the licensed movie magazine section of your local friendly Borders has been totally colonized by Britain's Titan Magazines, which did in fact publish a Galactica magazine, and still produces them for CSI: Miami, Torchwood, Star Wars, and others. I wonder what their licensing deal is like.

Imitation Is the Best Flattery: A Tale of Starlog, Famous Monsters, Playboy, & Esquire

Learn from your elders. That's not a bad idea, and it's an idea I heard long ago from a magazine and newspaper editor to whom I may or may not be closely related.

What it means in practice in the publishing arena is to not be afraid to see what works in other publications and adapt those ideas to your publication.

This did not become clear to me until I visited a little bookstore in San Francisco called Kayo Books, which focuses on (and sort of fetishizes) the 1950s and '60s. I saw some inexpensive copies of '50s-era Playboy magazines, and I bought some.

It was fascinating to see the early years of a magazine that became a behemoth of the periodicals industry (and several other industries). Reading the editorials and subscription ads and the text that referenced its readership made it very clear that the magazine had pretensions -- pretentions it had not yet met; but issue after issue, it improved and got closer to that manufactured self-image.

In short, Playboy was aping Esquire in many ways, even while it was clearly going beyond and above it in terms of quality and success. Playboy has a long history of award-winning and stunning cover treatments, but it was only when I saw those early issues of Playboy and then -- wow -- saw contemporary issues of Esquire that I realized that Playboy's (and, by that, I assume I mean Hugh Hefner, the former Esquire employee who started his magazine after being denied a raise; but it might also include his art staff) view of its audience and itself owed an immense debt to Esquire.

It's not just the cover designs that were clearly done with an eye to the market leader. Those '50s issues of Playboy were almost painfully earnest in their attempt to reach the ivy league young professional, the educated "gentleman" (oh, if only either magazine tried to reach educated gentlement today, the world would be a better place) seeking to learn what it takes to be independent and successful in the post-war world. That was Esquire's market.

I saw something similar when I spent more time looking into Famous Monsters, the Jim Warren-published movie monster magazine that paved the way for such competitors as Fantastic Films, Starlog, Fangoria, and others. Like Playboy, Starlog was known for years as a creative and confident powerhouse in its publishing market. In its first half-dozen years, in addition to its monthly magazine and its many spinoffs, it published poster magazines, best-of collections, LP albums of movie music, high-quality paperback books, photo collections, foreign editions, a children's book by Boris Vallejo, calendars, t-shirts, licensed movie magazines, and more, and would soon launch live conventions. It was a great time to be a science-fiction geek.

But Famous Monsters had done a number of those things first (such as best-of "yearbook" collections, licensed movie mags, and conventions), and that realization has only fairly recently come to me. After all, I was too young to appreciate Famous Monsters; I found it to be juvenile and low-quality; as a 'tweener in the late '70s, early '80s, I much preferred the Starlog approach that inspired me to play with ideas and controversies, and that also gave me lots of color pages and professional-quality features.

But Starlog-partisan that I am, I have to admit now that the magazine would have been radically different had FM not existed. That's not to take anything away from all of the people who worked hard on Starlog -- or, for that matter, on Famous Monsters or Playboy or Esquire. It's just a recognition of when a great title is more an evolution than a revolution.

What interested me about it is that both Playboy and Starlog came to dominate the markets created by the magazines from which they were drawing ideas. And noticing their creative debt to other magazines is both disconcerting and a little endearing.

Playboy borrowed a lot of ideas from Esquire; Starlog borrowed a lot from Famous Monsters. It's not just a matter of taking from what came before. Starlog wasn't stealing very many ideas from Cinefantastique, another pre-existing competitor. Playboy certainly was avoiding the men's adventure mags that also flourished before it came to dominate the market.

And that is the point, and I think the lesson for magazine creators today: Starlog and Playboy borrowed from the leading publications in their fields, not just any publications in their fields, because both Hugh Hefner and Starlog's Norman Jacobs and Kerry O'Quinn had expectations of great success and of leading their respective fields. So why not learn from, and imitate, the best?

The Redesigned Starlog Logo

So, let's return to talking about magazines on this blog. Let's start with an oldie but goodie: Starlog magazine, a 30-something monthly that chronicles science fiction and fantasy films, television, and books, has redesigned its iconic logo for its newest issue, December 2008.

You see the old logo from the October 2008 issue at top left. The new logo is at bottom left. It's a radical change, and I'll admit I'm a conservative when it comes to magazine design, but the new logo has the advantage of being bold, stretching across the entire cover (rather than crammed in the middle), and by being set off in a separate box, should be better able to stand out against various-colored backgrounds.

This change follows the purchase of Starlog and its sister magazine, Fangoria, by The Brooklyn Company (headed by Tom DeFeo), after the bankruptcy of previous owner The Creative Group (which, to make things even more complicated, bought the two brands several years ago from founder Norman Jacobs).

More on this soon, after I've seen an actual copy of the magazine and can critique the entire issue.