"Badlands"/"Better Days," Old Fanvids and Nick

[brightknightie]

The fkficfest/fkficfest prompts went out very late last night, and, just a little sleep deprived, all day I've been alternately giddily hopeful and heartburningly worried about the matches. If anyone received prompts that she would really rather not write, I hope that she reaches out. We're just so diverse in FK! The only taste that we all share is for this extraordinary show and its phenomenal fandom. Mystery, history and horror; adventure, romance and metaphor; dark, bright and red all over ;-) ... you'd hardly know that we were watching the same series!

In that spirit, I wanted to share a happy mistake that my MP3 player made recently, and what FK reflections it brought. For some reason, the gadget piled all of my many assorted "Greatest Hits" albums into one giant playlist, alphabetical by song title. I would never have put Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel and Bing Crosby together on my own, but it's actually the most delightful playlist ever! I'm loving it. By coincidence, however, alphabetical chance spins Springsteen's "Badlands" (1978) and "Better Days" (1992) right together, nothing between, and I keep hearing them as one song in two chapters: an anthem for first-season Nick and all of first-season FK. (Or perhaps it's first season and then the original hiatus that I think I hear?)

Part of my reaction comes straight from a "Badlands" FK fanvid that I'm very, very lucky to have on a VHS tape that I really need to dub to digital somehow before it goes the way of all celluloid. I'm sorry to say that I don't know who made the lovely vid. Dubbed and redubbed and passed around, if it ever had a title screen, it had lost it by the time it reached me. But I love it, and I imagine you would, too. While its raw materials and editing standards are of course VHS vintage and might not pass muster today, it indelibly makes its case for a Nick determined to live now, to live forward, to know and count the true terrible cost but to never stop pushing. Clips of him on the beach over Elizabeth's ashes. Clips waking sweating blood. Clips with Janette. Love, hope and faith... someday. Clips of him with Natalie, with Schanke, with Joan. I haven't actually watched the vid in a few years (the VCR is in the closet), but it unforgettably showed me Nick through that song and that song through Nick. For me, that's the sound of first season. (No offense to Mr. Mollin.) That's the sound, even more than Mr. Mollin's, that reminds me how much I love this story and everything it promised.

My one and only fanvid collection is a compilation of vids kindly shared with me by various people, long ago, in quite another fandom era.

I unfortunately don't know who made these. I can't give these vidders the credit and praise that they so richly deserve. All I can do is list the songs they chose, link to the lyrics, identify what I personally thought each was about (insofar as I wrote it on a paper folded up with the tape)... and invite you to think about them, too? What connections each vidder may have been trying to make, what each song may show of FK, and FK of each song?

1. "You Take My Self-Control" by Infernal (Nick)


2. "Even a Memory (When I Look at You)" from The Scarlet Pimpernel (Janette to Nick)


3. "If There Hadn't Been You" by Billy Dean (Nick to Schanke and Natalie)


4. "Badlands" by Bruce Springsteen (Nick)


5. "Only the Good Die Young" by Billy Joel (Dark Nick)


6. "I'll be on My Way" by [I don't know; not any of the lyrics that come up when I Google this!] (Nick to Natalie / Nat's Nick)


7. "You Love the Thunder" by Jackson Browne (Nick to Janette / IB)


8. "Terminus Est (The Shadow of the Torturer)" by Julia Ecklar (Nick about Lacroix)


9. "She's Like the Wind" by Patrick Swayze (Nick about Natalie)


10. "Hero" by [I don't know; not any of the lyrics that come up when I Google this!] (Schanke about Nick)


11. "Devil with the Green Eyes" by Matthew Sweet (Dark Nick)


12. "You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side" by Morrissey (Schanke to Nick)


13. "Hot Summer Night" by Meatloaf (Dark Nick and Natalie)


14. "She's Like the Wind" by Patrick Swayze (Nick about Natalie) (different version than the one above!)


15. "Living on the Edge of the Night" by Iggy Pop (general)

After "Badlands," my personal favorites of this set are Janette's "Even a Memory (When I Look at You)" and the Nick-to-Janette "You Love the Thunder," both of which gave amazing new insights into Janette's position with Nick in the present day, and Nick's sometimes clear understanding and sometimes apparent obliviousness. Of those two songs and vids, while "Even a Memory" gave me something immediately back in '97 when I first saw it, "You Love the Thunder" offers me more today.

I also really love the Nick-to-Schanke&Natalie "If There Hadn't Been You."

What do you think? Do any of these song/character combinations speak to you?

Comments

[sholio]

I hope you get a chance to dub this to digital someday! I'd love to see a lot of these. One of the problems of getting into a fandom long after it's moved on from its heyday - so much of the old stuff is lost! (I have run across an "Only the Good Die Young" vid with Nick, but it might be a different one ...)

[brightknightie]

I've actually purchased a device that is supposed to let me hook my VCR up to my PC hard-drive and convert the content, so the next time that I have a day off with nothing other to do than drag out the VHS player... :-) I have these vids and the second-season blooper reel, of course, plus an interview with Susan Garrett about the second FK pro novel.

The question is, though, after I've digitized the vids for my own enjoyment, how do I share them on? I have no way of asking the original creators what they'd prefer. Presumably, they'd all be as okay (or not okay!) with my dubbing DVD discs and mailing them around as they were with VHS tape trees from which I ultimately got the vids in the first place. That should be fine. But the next step, putting it on the Web... I can't? Some of the creators might not want that done, might be embarrassed or angry or hurt.

(I can't even credit them, for goodness sake! Although that may be for the best, as we used real names then, not knowing that someone was about to invent Google or that data was immortal.)

[sholio]

Ooh! I hope your device works as advertised! I definitely agree about the deeply awkward ethics of sharing those files online, however, and I agree - I don't think I'd personally be comfortable doing it, especially since, yeah, there's no way to credit people, and the only credit you would be able to give in any case are real names! But at the same time, it's terribly sad to think of all the work the creators put into them, and no one ever being able to see them.

(Although, yeah, I can't see why private DVD exchange would not be entirely okay - and personally I would absolutely LOVE to have a DVD if you ever do digitize them - I'd be happy to reciprocate in some other way, if I can!)

It's kind of an ongoing problem with vids, really, because even the online ones disappear all the time. I'm glad I've saved so many of them to my hard drive over the years, because nearly all of the ones from the early fandoms I got into are now gone, and even some of the more recent ones have vanished. When I got into Highlander, it was an utter exercise in frustration trying to find vids, although I *was* pleasantly surprised to discover several vidders who had been in the fandom since the show had aired on TV and went to the trouble of digitizing or remastering their vids and putting them online! But most of my favorite vidders from my days in Stargate Atlantis fandom - about 2006-2008 - have now disappeared, and their vids along with them. And that's not even that long ago!

[brightknightie]

If I get the FK vids successfully digitized, I will happily burn DVDs to the limits of my resources, and you will certainly receive one in the mail. :-) As long as I'm well-employed, I'd send them off for just the promise of actually watching them; if something terrible happened, I'd request materials and shipping costs in the good old tape-tree way.

I also have a few Quantum Leap vids (same issues). I never saw any HL vids: pity! First and second season HL vids would be very sweet to me, I imagine. Like fanfic written before a certain point in canon, vids constructed before a certain point have an element of ... possibility ... that later canon closes, and HL was always ... closing its doors behind it. :-)