Vidding Oral History Project Interview with Kandy Fong
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vidding Oral History Project Interview with Kandy Fong ("Five Questions with Kandy Fong") |
| Interviewer: | Francesca Coppa |
| Interviewee: | Kandy Fong |
| Date(s): | filmed in Chicago, Illinois, at Vividcon, August 2008, posted in 2014 |
| Medium: | online, video |
| Fandom(s): | Star Trek: TOS, Vidding |
| External Links: | Interview with Kandy Fong, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Vidding Oral History Project Interview with Kandy Fong is a video interview and transcription of Kandy Fong, an early Star Trek vidder by Francesca Coppa for Transformative Works and Cultures.
It is part of Transformative Works and Cultures. "This is an excerpt of an extended video interview with Kandy Fong, a fan whose mid-1970s Star Trek slide shows are the earliest known examples of vidding, or fan music video.
This interview was conducted as part of The Vidding Oral History Project. A similar interview is Vidding Oral History Project Interview with The Clucking Belles.
Excerpts
What gave you the idea to make a slide show to Star Trek?
In 1973, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, with my then-husband. And I was going to school at ASU [Arizona State University]. And in the ASU paper there was a little notice that they were trying to form a Star Trek club. I ended up showing up there, and that was the United Federation of Phoenix. It's the oldest, longest-running Star Trek club in the world.
So the Star Trek club needed entertainment. And we decided that since John [Fong] had three cigar boxes filled with little pieces of film that had been edited from the TV show itself, because the TV show back then was all shot on film. And there were outtakes, there were extra takes, there were scenes that weren't used. So there was a lot of scenes that people hadn't seen before. And odd things like Spock sucking on a sucker, or laughing. So unusual scenes. And I said, "Well, why don't we do something with this?"
We took a bunch of the slides, mounted them as slides, and ended up using them to make a little show. And I wrote a little story about Ensign Fong aboard the Enterprise. And we sang the song, "What Do You Do with a Drunken Vulcan?" And we illustrated it with the slides, and that was a big hit.
What was the influence behind "Both Sides Now"?
Well, as I said, I was looking for entertainment for the Star Trek club. So I wanted something funny, entertaining, etc. And I was already writing by then, and we had a club fanzine. So the idea of writing a story and putting it with pictures just made good sense to me.
If you remember back, these dates of so-called professional music videos, you'd have a band standing up there playing their instruments, and that's pretty much the video. But the Beatles did a video called "Strawberry Fields Forever." And they're doing all kinds of very strange things like jumping out of trees, and they had this deconstructed piano that the wires just go up to the thing up there…And they're just doing all sorts of unusual images. And to my mind I'm thinking this, going, "Okay, we're disconnecting the actual playing of the instruments and singing the song with the images we're seeing. So I can take a song and use images from somewhere else to tell my story—oh, Star Trek, oh, of course Star Trek!" And that's where I got the idea.
Spock is such a dual character: half human, half Vulcan. Half trying to follow Starfleet, half trying to do the whole thing with his parents. The two sides of him. And then there's Chapel, and then there's T'Pring, and then there's Kirk. There is just so many different sides to him that "Both Sides Now"—he's trying to be both sides now. And it seemed to just fit him so very well.
What was the atmosphere of these performances?
So in these slide shows was always a live performance. The tape, the music tape was running, and then I had my little script, and I had a little mark where I was going to…where I was going to fast-forward, change slides on there.
Because Gene had known about these things, and was encouraging me and letting me have pieces of film etc. and slides, publicity slides, at one point I decided I wanted to send him…[copies of the performance]. So I went to a friend of a friend's house, who had two slide projectors that I could marry together and I could actually have the things—if I wanted either a hard cut or a soft fade from one to the other. And so I sat there and did a live performance—one shot, that's all I had—to go ahead and record these [to videotape].