The Scarcity Mentality in 1970s SF Fandom

I was listening to the “70s Trek” podcast the other day when one of the hosts made an interesting comment.

The podcast is a celebration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1970s which, according to their tagline, was “The decade that built a franchise.” In episode 118, host Bob Turner and Kelly Casto talk about the decade itself. In their discussion of consumer technology, Turner mentions the personal tape recorder. He described the very one my parents purchased from Radio Shack: a black plastic device, about five inches by seven inches, mono, with all the requisite buttons.

Turner went on to describe how he was record the *audio* of Star Trek episodes off the TV…because he never knew if one of his favorite TV shows would simply go away and not be aired. He would at least record the audio because that was the only option available to him. He followed up that mentality with the advent of VHS recorders and the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, actually recording all the shows.

But his comment about the audio really struck me. Back in the 1970s, we lovers of SF had few options. We had Trek on TV (on Houston’s UHF channel 39 for me), Star Wars by 1977, and Buck Rogers by 1979. Comics and books were out only other options. With the pool of things to digest so small, naturally we scooped up all we could, in any manner we could.

It is one of the reasons I think we geeks in 1977 onward can still name you things like the trash compactor number from Star Wars*. Since we didn’t have a lot, we engorged ourselves in what we had. If you missed the Star Trek episode on Saturday afternoon, you had to wait an entire week for the next one. And given a 79-episode catalog and assuming the station manager ran all the episode in order and then repeated the run, you’d have to wait quite a while before you even had the chance to see that missed episode.

Naturally Turner’s option to record the audio became one of the only ways we could experience Trek at our leisure. I’m surprised I never tried it.

Is it cool to have all the content at our disposal, able to consume it any time and almost any way we want? Sure. It’s basically what the characters in Trek had. But having grown up with a scarcity mentality regarding beloved content, there is still a special fondness for those times when we didn’t have much, but we loved that stuff dearly.


*Okay, so you’ve had time to think about that number, right? I had “The Story of Star Wars” album with all the dialogue and sound effects. I played it constantly. Thus I can still remember: 3263827