Con Descending
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Con Descending |
| Creator: | M.J. Fisher |
| Date(s): | February 1976 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Con Descending is a 1976 Star Trek: TOS essay by M.J. Fisher.
It was printed in Spectrum #23.
Some Topics Discussed
- complaints about Paramount and other PTB (which the author includes Lincoln Enterprises) making too much money off of Star Trek fans
- procons and their influence: their ability to "1) stars, many of them 2) ST films, many of them as well 3) publicity 4) fans, unrealized thousands of them, ergo, fans' money"
- the outside world and the media is getting wise to the money to be made off of fans
- there are so many big pro cons now that they are often taking place the same weekends
From the Essay
The shape of things to come in the world of ST convention is due to change quite a bit in the next few years. I dare say that our entire attitude toward them shall change and spread farther through fandom.
Certainly cons have come a long way since the beginning of ST Con history in '72. A few different styles of cons have been set, and they have probably been the single most important way that the fans have forced their attention on the mundane public.
One of the recent additions to the styles of cons are the procons which are organized on a large scale with many professionals involved with the purpose of making a profit. These have, of course, met with initial disapproval as many new twists on an old idea has discovered in the past. This isn't to say that the idea for procon is bad either. The motivations behind them are among the basest of all human motivations and certainly raising yourself on the social ladder and lining your pockets with foliage is a well-known impetus and not a complex idea to understand. Other people too make money from ST fans...primarily Paramount, and Ballantine and Bantam, even Lincoln Enterprises. The way business is set up in this country actually encourages people to go out and rake the other guy over the coals if it'll buy you two homes and a few garages of luxury cars. You can even make a monopoly provided the government doesn't know it's a monopoly or if you disguise it well enough.
The procons might have been headed in this direction. In just the last year we have seen the first few cons of this type...you might call them preemptive efforts. These cons are able to get 1) stars, many of them 2) ST films, many of them as well 3) publicity 4) fans, unrealized thousands of them, ergo, fans' money.
The people addicted to cons still try to defend these conventions because they come under the category of "convention" by gross definition, but their sheer existence is changing the convention scene in fandom, and thus all of fandom is changed....
[This year], StarCon 76 and Star Trek Houston both fall on the same date; so do Equicon/Filmcon and The Boston Con, so do The August Party and Tol-Con, so do MidAmeriCon and the Bicentennial 10... These are just the Trekcons. It used to be in fandom that cons were planned for the fans, as a method of letting the fans see the stars and hear them speak, as a chance for fans to get together for discussion and philosophizing as fans will do and a chance to introduce the new fans to fandom.
This still goes on, undoubtedly, but the cons aren't organized around these goals in every instance now. Any fan that goes to a ST con is bound to be able to find evidences of fandom everywhere but there is less and less in the con and more and more of fandom at large cons is embodied in the established fans walking on the ballroom floor or the faneds and amateur publishers behind dealer's tables. It takes more effort to plan a con schedule for the fans when so much time is spent engaging in advertising blitzes.
The procon people have help too. There are hundreds, even thousands of more dealers now who have discovered the gold mine they have in selling pure garbage to fans and making a profit cut of it. Together they can out-advertise any local, amateur con held by any group. They can afford more stars and even schedule their cons directly across from the others since the procons are formula cons. Run off the checklist of what you need, who you need to hire, contact the stars' agents, reserve the place and date and you've outdone a group in the same area that has planned for a year and a half. Albeit, this is oversimplified but possible and leaves any amateur group at a loss. Moreover, the procons can take their cons on the road like the circus and just drop stakes in any virgin territory they may take a liking to, hold their con, take their $$ and leave. Certainly the fans can't cope with this.
This all leads one to suspect that if we are willing to accept procons then it means the end of all large cons run by fans. They have too great an edge. Cons would degenerate into the floating procons at one side of the spectrum and the local faaan cons that receive only intimate publicity between fans on the extreme opposite end. The procons have not done spectacularly though. Since many of them are unfamiliar with Trekcons in general the scheduling and programming has been, at best, only fair. The Chicago con last year was not well ordered and if not for the fact that they had an experienced gofer squad it might well have been a major disaster. A few con committees have cried that to make a better con they need more money. At $20 a throw, the Chicago con, by most reports, was not superlative, only expensive.
If the procons aren't dealt a heavy blow before long they may well take a permanent place in fandom, so long as it exists. The basics for disarming the procons is available to us though. Already we have seen that the mid-70's is going to be a time of increasing consumer advocates. An angry press awaits to attack any monster that threatens to swallow an unsuspecting buyer. In many cases large cons can be looked upon as a rip offs provided you are furnished with the right suspicions and the necessary amount of information to dissect their real worth. So far the press has seen ST cops as everything from absurdly banal to wildly phenomenal, but rarely as a machine for soaking money from fans. A recent article on the Pittsburgh convention described it as "Something Edith Bunker would organize." Later in the same article Al Schuster was quoted for saying that he sells 12 buttons for $1.00 each and expects to sell 1,000 during any con...along with a bevy of other products. The mention of this fact by the reporter surely proves that the press is getting wind of some of the atmosphere of the cons. In essence the people associated with the large cons are digging their own graves with their mouths. If the news media does get a hold of this aspect of conventions and they concentrate on it, as they so often do when there's a skeleton in an otherwise pristine closet, then anti-con sentiment might actively begin to grow. This wouldn't affect just the procons but almost any large con, so again fandom would be left with a preponderance of small cons. When this will happen, or whether this will happen depends on the press finding out about cons and how the established fans in fandom will continue to look toward the procons.