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Introduction

In 2002 a fellow named Glenn Yeffeth contacted me about writing an essay for a book he was editing, to be called Seven Seasons of Buffy, about the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That turned out to be the first in a series of similar anthologies about various pop culture phenomena, called the Smart Pop series, and I got invited to write for most of them. I didn’t always have anything to say about a given subject, so I turned down several of those invitations, but I wrote a total of fifteen essays for the series before I finally got somewhat burned out and stopped; fourteen of them were published, while the fifteenth, about Wonder Woman, was intended for an anthology that got canceled.

Writing them was fun. I always tried to find something to say about the work in question that I had never seen anyone say before. In some cases, given the huge amount of fannish writing that already existed, that was a real challenge. I may not have always succeeded.

I usually tried to be funny, or at least amusing, as well—not always, but usually.

I thought some of those essays were pretty good. I kind of regretted that most of my regular readers didn’t see most of them—I mean, someone who doesn’t care about “Grey’s Anatomy” wasn’t about to buy an entire book about the show just because I had an essay in it. Eventually, it occurred to me that there was an obvious solution: Collect them all into a single volume.

While I was assembling it, I realized there wasn’t any good reason not to include other old pop culture essays and articles I’d written, or for that matter new ones. Some of those old pieces had appeared in obscure, low-circulation venues, where almost no one saw them, so here was a chance to give them a larger audience. So I dug through all the articles and columns I’d written since 1984, and found a few I thought were worth reprinting.

(1984 was my cut-off because my seventy or so published articles and columns from before that were written on a typewriter—I got my first computer in August, 1984—and therefore weren’t available in a handy form.)

I limited this collection to pieces about popular culture, so all the articles about writing and publishing and collecting were excluded; I may put them in another book someday, but not this one. Plain old reviews of books or movies also got cut, as did articles that were just history, without any original angle. (I was somewhat startled by how many straight histories I’d written, mostly about comic books.)

I’ve updated several of these essays, as many were written before the work in question concluded, or contained material that hasn’t aged well—the Lone Ranger essay, for example, originally included a critique of the 1981 movie starring Klinton Spilsbury, and really, who cares about that anymore? Some stuff is still a bit dated, even after editing, but I’ll just have to live with that.

These aren’t academic papers or scholarly studies; they’re just for entertainment. You won’t find footnotes or bibliographies or annotations, just me throwing ideas around. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

—Lawrence Watt-Evans

Takoma Park, 2012