Nerd Anthems: Galaxy Quest (1999)

The stereotypical nerd has enjoyed an interesting rise of popularity in recent(ish) years. It's had some interesting outings, which is definitely lovely. Traditional media usually associated with basement-dwelling hobbies has filtered through into the mainstream, starting with video games in the late 2000's to genre media, anime, collectible trading cards, pen and paper games. Of course there's always been the occasional nerd anthem in the form of movies, books or TV series. Many of the big hitters of the previous years have been of this sort. Game of Thrones was genre fiction, Rick and Morty is a love letter (kinda) to nerd culture and Stranger Things is an escaped D&D campaign. One of the earlier ones I just stumbled across: Galaxy Quest from 1999. Part of my seeking it out was seeing Alan Rickman in a role again, and it's a fun role as well. A fun role in a fun movie. It's the type of nerd anthem that I very much enjoyed for what it tried to do. It's basically an extended Star Trek reference, but works as a fine enough standalone story, making light of writing tropes along the way.

I should mention that I'm not very familiar with Star Trek at all. Not the old serials and not the newer movies either. It's not a project I feel ready to tackle, considering the high time commitment that comes with it. From what I understand, Star Trek is a sci-fi darling to the technical sort of fan, more interested in diplomacy and cultural exchange, somewhat in contrast to the space fantasy of Star Wars, what with all it's three exploding death stars. As such, I feel like the plot is more reminiscent of a micro Star Wars, though I suppose it makes the blunders more interesting. What I found striking about this entry into the genre however might be the metatextual stuff, though I'll work with the text a little, so I can do my due diligence. First however, a short look at some other notable entries to the nerd anthem genre.

The Big Bang Theory - The Roadmap

Yes, this one. I'm not here to praise it much, honestly, I'm mentioning it mainly because it's the first culture touch-stone I was aware of that centered around the traditional nerd and wasn't an anime. It having been a sitcom TV show living through the rise of streaming, was probably very fortunate for its popularity, and the subject matter seems to have made it a little slower to pop up on the serious media critics' radars. Good for it as well, because I think closer scrutiny might have killed it far earlier than it ended up running in the end, if it were anything but the thing it was. I'm not in any way under the illusion that it's a useful representation of anything other than casual misoginy, which is why I won't delve too deeply into its subject matter, but what it did do, was present a veneer of representation of a culture that would quickly co-opt one of the most profitable sectors of the established entertainment world.

The Big Bang Theory premiered in 2007, a year not otherwise notable to the media I want to talk about in this piece, and it blew up two years later with its third season in 2009. I don't remember much of those seasons, because I don't tend to think in seasons and it wasn't too formative a show to remember amidst the other stuff I watched when it showed up on my radar years later. This show did for me - somebody largely unaware of established American pop culture at the time - what a really bad university lecture does for the students: It provides a list of things that exist if you want to look them up. A sort of TV guide that happens to be wrong a lot of the time, but will give you basically what you're looking for. That proved somewhat interesting, in 2008.

Iron Man - Blockbusting

Iron Man released in 2008 as an attempt to test the waters for superhero movies. Sure, there had been successful ones of those before, but franchising had never seemed like something that was ever going to transcend the specific property they were adapting. This movie kicked off that one little obscure franchise whose name presently escapes me, and won't show up in the future, I'm sure, and it changed something small, but noticeable in the usual movie landscape. Movie releases in a year are usually chosen semi-carefully, keeping in mind other big releases, awards seasons, break times and holidays, and other things. In summer, where many people like to visit the theaters for entertainment, a certain kind of movie is convenient to release. That is the Blockbuster, specifically the Summer Blockbuster, a term, as many in the Anglo-sphere, derived from somewhat questionable military vocabulary. It's come to mean movies - usually loud and action focused - with high production value, earning back even higher numbers during their theatrical run. And with Iron Man, this new type of Blockbuster started to become a regularity, up to the point where their appearance in the year's lineup of big hitters is inevitable, as they put it. And they're fun movies. I enjoy them, especially at the time, and I occasionally take a look at the smaller projects, if they don't seem too tedious. Without wanting to imply causation in any way, the broader public became more interested in what had been deemed niche interests at the time, allowing for a wider option of shows to be made, with more funding, and in hope of that exact audience that wanted stories in other, maybe more unorthodox settings. Such as fantasy. Provided there were boobs in it.

Game of Thrones - All the Money in The World

I'm not the right person to speak on the show's content, so I'll only comment on this briefly. At the time of production, this show was notorious for it's high production cost, and also for its subsequent production value. It's probably also a direct reason why we got Rings of Power and the Hobbit movies, the third of which is so incredibly funny and poorly put together that I might forgive it for the rise of fantasy literature that made me stop reading contemporary fiction for the better part of a decade. The success of this particular gamble was probably not a gamble on the story specifically (at least not at the beginning), since it was a beloved series of books already that didn't stand on huge city-spanning battles alone. This meant that TV shows could be just as important as movies in terms of cultural milestones and high investments could pay off in this form. With the introduction of Netflix, this opened the doors for the last thing I want to touch upon before finally getting to Galaxy Quest proper.

Stranger Things - Roll for Charisma

I've been very late to this one. Fashionably, some might call it. In all honesty, my Gen-Z just didn't have the 80's nostalgia to carry me there on recommendations alone. It - like Game of Thrones - was a commercial success, and it probably didn't too a lot for the industry apart from putting D&D back on the map for the general audience. The children being very much in the center of the story is probably why it works from an exploratory perspective. They get enough incentive to involve themselves, but have to actively organize a support structure around them, because nobody has established it beforehand. It also made encyclopedic knowledge of the Dungeon Master's Handbook a genuine asset to the characters and most importantly, it's made the children likeable (at least at the start). This last part, I notice, is oddly uncommon in media aimed at these people as an audience. In a lot of media, the knowledgeable characters tend to take supporting roles, lancers maybe, but rarely are they likeable in very different ways. There's a reason that the adorkable support behind the computer is a stereotype in writing. This is a departure I hope stays, because more than just more interesting writing, this feels like it genuinely values people with "niche" hobbies, and though Stranger Things does this well to a large extend, this is where I want to finally get to the main point of this whole ordeal.

Galaxy Quest

Galaxy Quest's relationship with fans is interesting to me. The film takes place during a fan convention for a Star Trek stand in show, and it makes a point to involve the fans. Yes, there's a few comments dropped here and there about the more uncomfortable sides, but it's played straight, and more importantly: Not exaggerated if it's not necessary. It really doesn't spend too much time with the fans at the beginning, and for most of the movie, it's a normal fish out of water story, having actors trying to actually do the things a Star Trek crew would have to do on screen. A substantial part of the climax however features the protagonist receiving directions on the ship from some super-fans who know the locations inside out. So far so good. In itself this isn't too remarkable, until you remember that these fans that Galaxy Quest involves in the story to such an extent, are not in fact Galaxy Quest fans. Obviously those didn't exist at the time of production. No, they are Star Trek fans, fans of a different property, which by all means should be neutral towards Galaxy Quest. I think that's a notable choice for a story ostensibly about people that aren't involved in these communities as members. It's made clear in several of the scenes that the main cast doesn't actually know a lot about the property they've starred in, and the details the characters do remember, they aren't in agreement about. Somebody saying "Episode 58" is usually answered by somebody asking about "Episode 38", and this way of communicating does decidedly not work out. The one character that shows aptitude with the tools he's given is only able to do so because he's good at emulating actions, remembering lines and repeat small motions, not because he is in any way familiar with the ins and outs of the lore. It helps that Tony Shalhoub delivers his techno-babble with a tone that suggests that he's repeating something he's just heard somebody else say. It's recalled knowledge, not learned knowledge. This character is interesting to me in particular, since he's characterized last out of all the core cast, away from all the others, even through an altercation in the beginning and he's framed a little bit like he's a background character until he actually gets to do stuff. He's even the last one to arrive on the Thermian spaceship. In a way, this echoes the role of the brains in the classic five man band. I think this was probably done deliberately. The core cast of heroes consists of six characters. The Captain/Leader, played by Tim Allen; a Spock parallel, taking the role of the Lancer (Alan Rickman); the Heart/Girl of the classic trope (Sigourney Weaver); the pilot that is responsible for most of the early (spaceship-)combat, i.e. the brawn (Tommy Webber); and the aforementioned brains in the form of a technical officer (Tony Shalhoub). And the sixth one, the guy that doesn't get a name until the end credits, formerly playing a crewmate that died to to raise the stakes of the episode. Now, if they wanted to just do a Five Man Band setup, they would have omitted that last one, even if the joke is funny. They probably wouldn't have needed to get Sam Rockwell for an extended joke. In a way, this feels like Tony Shalhoub is cast as the "nerd among actors", since he is the first one to fulfill the role he was written for in his show, first superficially by technobabble, then actually in the beaming scene. All of the core cast experiences this sort of progression, where they first fill their expected role through the things they say, before slowly growing into the actual actions expected from their characters (Tim Allen's then growing into a good leader acts as the heart of the story).

This ready inclusion of the fans of geek culture felt novel to me, because in many iterations, fans aren't generally looked kindly upon. In a way, passion for something fictional is still perceived as something dorky or uncool, so these characters are mostly played for laughs. That's fine now and then, but it strikes me as odd that often even media centered around these people, like the aforementioned Big Bang Theory, seems to have genuine contempt for them.

Things have probably gotten better for people that like space operas and fantasy novels, I can't tell, I wasn't there for the supposedly bad parts, and too antisocial to care about the stigma that was left when I got into stuff. There's a lot of genre media now, more than I can keep up with, along with all my other interests, and I'm sure there's ones that take the Galaxy Quest approach to its fans. It's a nice early example of many of our more contemporary trends in media, such as the ever-entertaining (?) homage or trope subversion, things it didn't really enter the public consciousness for. Not at the time, and certainly not now, where these elements have maybe reached the point of saturation. Maybe it will turn out to set a standard in the treatment of communities as well, several years from now.