Vidding Oral History Project Interview with The Clucking Belles
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Transformative Works and Cultures Interview with The Clucking Belles |
| Interviewer: | Francesca Coppa |
| Interviewee: | The Clucking Belles (Sandy Herrold and Rachael Sabotini |
| Date(s): | 2011 |
| Medium: | video, partial online transcript |
| Fandom(s): | vidding, fandom |
| External Links: | Interview with Sandy and Rache ("The Clucking Belles"), Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
In 2011, Francesca Coppa interviewed The Clucking Belles for an issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.
This interview was conducted as part of The Vidding Oral History Project. A similar interview is Vidding Oral History Project Interview with Kandy Fong.
Some Excerpts
Sandy Herrold: 1991 Koon-ut-Cali-Con II was happening in San Diego... and we decided to—what the hell, it's, I don't know, a thousand miles away, and we decided to go. Koon-ut-Cali-Con, I mean it's a Trek con; we were K/S fans. So we get down there, and almost the first thing we see -— is vids. And not K/S vids. Man from Uncle, which had been, like, you know, secret baby little loves of ours, and this curly-haired guy and this dark-haired guy who we eventually found out were...
Rachael Sabotini: We had no clue.
RS: And we were doing The Professionals at that point in time because there were only two fandoms, really: there was The Professionals and Blake's 7.
Francesca Coppa: Life was so simple then.
SH: Both Trek and Starsky and Hutch had kind of moved on, at least in our area, so yeah, it was B7 or Pros. And we chose Pros -—
FC: You could have vanilla or chocolate. [laughter]
RS: Yes. Because before Escapade, you would go to a con, you'd show your vid, but there was nothing afterwards. We were the ones that came up with the vidding comment forms. We were the ones that came up with wanting to do a Vid Review.
SH: And the Vid Review -— that's like 5 years of learning to talk about vids in ways that did not end friendships.
RS: And it was incredibly fraught. Because one of the things we were interested in was honesty about our reactions to things. And we had people from lots of different disciplines that were attending—we didn't have so much the MediaWest [vidders], 'cause that was all gen, but things that were important to one group were not necessarily important to another group, and we fought like crazy.
SH: And we also spent a lot of time coming up with vocabulary. I mean, some of the earlier problems probably would have been made easier if we'd been able to talk to each other more aptly. Some of our conversations we're still having at Vividcon started really in the very early '90s talking about vids —- I say '92 but it was probably '94 or '5 before we finally got the Vid Review going every year. And it gradually became a 2-hour vid review just like it is at Vividcon. And it moved, just like it does here, it was a different person each time, or a pair occasionally, with different philosophies, which I think was good, but certainly some people were easier or—less willing to get involved.