In the summer of 1976 I was at the comic rack in J&M News when I saw Kirk and Spock on a magazine cover one shelf over. The magazine shelves had stuff I really wasn't allowed to look at, but this was Star Trek, so I figured it had to be okay. That was Starlog #1. It went on sale in June with an August cover date, and I took it home.
Back then, liking science fiction got you called a nerd, at least at my school in Pennsylvania. Before Star Wars, nobody admitted to it. I was lucky in that my dad liked science fiction, so my parents never minded me watching shows or reading books about aliens. When they both had to work on a Friday night, my grandfather let me watch the short-lived Planet of the Apes TV show. The intro scared me more than anything but that's another post. I was ready for a magazine like this.
Starlog covered the big movies from Star Wars on, but it also covered B-movies, old films, and TV shows, both current and long gone. It interviewed the stars, and it also interviewed writers, directors, authors, and especially the special effects people. It never talked down to its readers. It was also full of photos of miniature spaceships and alien monsters, and I pored over everything.
One thing it did that I didn't fully appreciate until later: it told me about movies that were coming. Not just that they existed, but what they were about, what the effects work looked like, who was making them. I usually couldn't see a new film until it hit cable or home video, sometimes a year or two after it opened. Starlog meant I already knew the story behind it by then. I knew the names of the ships, the effects crew, the director's intentions. I got to care about a movie before I ever saw it.
It also sent me backward. Starlog is where I found George Pal's films, Irwin Allen's TV shows, the old Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, UFO, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the Ray Harryhausen movies. I read about them first and then went and found them. Authors worked the same way: Clarke, Asimov, Ellison, Matheson, Gerrold, Bradbury. Most of it was made before I was born. That never mattered.
I read it from the first issue until around 1984, when comics and role-playing games took over my budget. For those years it was my only link to the people around the country who loved the same things I did. When the print edition ended in April 2009, I hadn't read it in years, and it still hit hard. It was like a friend had died.
Starlog is coming back this fall, and I'm looking forward to reading it again. It was the biggest part of my formative years, and the run I grew up with holds up.
Recommended.
