Why was there a stigma against fantasy and sci fi shows in the 2000s?

[AstroCadet82]

It seemed like before 2014 fantasy shows and "Battlestar Galactica" were looked at as shows only "People who lived in basements watched" but once "Game of Thrones" started becoming big the stigma seemed to be erased virtually overnight.

 

 

Why was there a stigma against fantasy and sci fi shows in the first place?

 

It also seemed like society was more socially conformist during the 2000s.

Edited June 18 by AstroCadet82

[Jason]

Sci-fi has long been associated with geek/nerd culture, which was looked down upon for a long time. Gaming was too. It was only around the late 2000's that being a geek/nerd started to become, for a lack of a better word, fashionable. 

 

Gaming played a big role in changing that, the 360/PS3 era of gaming exploded into the mainstream and with the rise of things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc more people started engaging in traditionally "nerdy" things, even stuff as simple as memes and sh*t. Nowadays it's all a perfectly accepted part of modern culture.

[Timsalabimbo]

They weren't shows, but I would classify things like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter movies as fantasy. Both of those were very popular and came out long before 2014.

[LeeC22]

As someone who grew up during the 60's and 70's in the UK, this certainly wasn't the case back then.

 

Dr Who - 1963

Lost in Space - 1965

Star Trek - 1966

Space 1999 - 1975

The Tomorrow People - 1973

UFO - 1970

Battlestar Galactica - 1978

Sapphire and Steel - 1979

Buck Rogers - 1979

 

Thunderbirds, Stingray, Supercar, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 etc... television was full of sci-fi shows. All of which formed part of my everday TV watching, along with things like The Adventure Game later on.

 

And this is all on top of the Saturday CInema matinees where characters like Flash Gordon first appeared. None of this was considered geek or nerd culture back then. Sci-fi movies were commonplace and a widely accepted part of TV and film culture. Hard though it might be to believe, Alien was created in 1979... forty-three years ago with Star Wars arriving two years prior to that.

 

If you didn't experience that age as part of growing up, then maybe it's easy to misinterpret today's popularity (and subjective over-use of sci-fi) as meaning it was previously unpopular or stigmatised but it wasn't. If there is one thing the internet is very good at, it is misrepresenting things from before the people who work on it even existed. The word geek existed over a hundred years ago, the word nerd some seventy years ago but if you read the internet, you would think they were new terms invented by modern society, specifically aimed at modern cultural references concerning sci-fi and computers/gaming.

 

I obviously can't speak for how all this was represented in other countries, but in my youth, sci-fi was as common on screen in the UK as any other kind of TV. And sci-fi toys just as popular as any other... most male kids had a robot of one kind or another, and frequently it was called Robbie.

 

It's also worth remembering that we are just 3 years short of home gaming first kicking off (in the UK at least)... I was 11 at the time. 2025 will be its 50th anniversary and again, if you walked round department stores back at the start of the 1980's, computers and consoles took over huge areas in the electrical departments because they were so popular.

 

Edit: It seems my old age is getting some dates wrong, it seems the Magnavox Odyssey was released in the UK in 1973, so the 50th anniversary is actually this year based on the 1972 release date of that console.

Edited June 21 by LeeC22

[Craigsters]

[Lonely-Martin]

Teen comedies and slasher flicks, lol.

 

Honestly though, many teen comedies just loved to exagerate stereotypes grouping together, some horror movies too, particularly slasher flicks. They all have those tropes and as the likes of Animal House and American Pie or Carrie and Prom Night etc all got more popular as these genres grew, nerds were the sci-fi/fantasy/gamer geeks and the jocks were all sporty and cool (among other stereotyped groups of people of course).

 

Combine those influences with a pre-internet era where people just didn't/couldn't branch out beyond their peer groups as much to share their love of fantasy and sci-fi to see things like how a Game of Thrones level of internet chatter blows up bringing it even further into popular culture and attract an even wider audience through word of mouth.

 

But @LeeC22 is on the money. People have long loved these genres, in the mainstream too. Doctor Who, Star Trek, and so on. These shows weren't just enjoyed by nerdy kids but whole families at the time to the point it was water cooler talk all over the place.

[Mister Pink]

On 6/20/2022 at 11:45 AM, Jason said:

Gaming played a big role in changing that, the 360/PS3 era of gaming exploded into the mainstream and with the rise of things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc more people started engaging in traditionally "nerdy" things, even stuff as simple as memes and sh*t. Nowadays it's all a perfectly accepted part of modern culture.

 

I would say this is basically my origin story, lol. I had no interest in fanstasy or Sci-Fi. However, videogames made me fall in love with Sci-Fi. Sure, I liked Terminator, Robocop etc as a child I never really fell in love until I was introduced to he world of Mass Effect and it sparked a lot of wonder and inspiration. Then films like Moon (2009) came about that were kind artistic very digestible for me. 

 

I would say TV went through a big revolutionary change with The Sopranos in the 00's. It was pretty much the first time we had more big budget, long-form TV that was reletively cinematic and had symbolism, metaphor and hidden meanings of like any good cinema. The Sopranos is treated like the godfather of the new golden age of cinematic TV. That followed by The Wire... before those shows, Sci-Fi or fantasy TV always looked a little tacky,outdated and low-budget, because they essentially were. In a sense The Sopranos had to pave the way for shows like Game of Thrones. HBO built up so much good will from The Sopranos (voted by the writers guild of America to be the best written show) to The Wire (which spawned books analyizing it's themes of social justice - so much so Harvard gave courses examining the themes). So these aren't small shows. After that, many of the producers/writers/directers went of to make Boardwalk Empire (2010) which is a period crime drama. So now, HBO are experimenting with big budget cinema TV productions and it's not contemporary like The Sopranos and The Wire but a period-set show.  However, we now see actors like Steve Buscemi move from the big screen to TV. Before TV was always ?"2nd rate" compared to movies. 

 

These were the top-rated big shows of the time, with Breaking Bad in there to compete. That's nearly 10 years of superb crime TV drama from The Sopranos to the last episode of Breaking Bad. What hadn't been really done yet was big-budget fanstasy in the new direction TV was headed over the preceding 10 years. Actually, there was The Tudors (2007) which was quite popular (another period drama). So it was kind audience-tested and HBO could see there was interest on both sides of the Atalantic for a potential fantasy With HBO's clout and talent that could take the fanstasy/period genre much farther than The Tudors ever could go. Cue; Game of Thrones. 

 

And while videogame media like Mass Effect and Skyrim is catapulting sci-fi and fantasy into the maninstream, the TV shows were reflecting that. I've no doubt that when Skyrim released in 2010 that someone in HBO was pining for a TV series set in a fantasy setting. Videogames started to outdo film and TV entertainment. All of sudden games weren't for kids or basement dwellers but for adults. And they bought Skyrim. It's kind of no surprise GoT arrived a year later. 

 

As others pointed out there were massively popular sci-fi shows from the UK such as Red Dwarf which was comedy sci-fi but it still had the very low-budget TV look. You had shows that focussed on nerds such  as Spaced. But for sci-fi and fantasy to get the HBO treatment, The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, IMO had to be made first. They're all in the crime genre which was just arguably an easier pitch than fantasy and Sci-Fi. Now you have Westworld, GoT, Raised By Wolves and more. 

 

Well, that's some of my hypothesis and personal experieces of it anyway. 

 

 

Edited June 23 by Mister Pink

[Graven]

I remember watching Galactica 1980 when it was aired, we used to have Humans vs Cylons battles with neighborhood kids based on the show, in the vein of Indians vs Cowboys.

After that came V. Still my favorite Sci-Fi show, fell in love with Lizard Queen Diana, June Chadwick is also a favorite, Robert Englund had funny awkward role.

Stargate and Farscape were okay. I haven't watched much any later Sci-Fi shows but this stigma you mention I can't recognize.

 

[Jason]

The stigma came about in the 90's and 2000's, not the 60s-80s. Fantasy had it's moments but sci-fi especially was niche during those times. The only sci-fi shows left were fairly niche, long standing staples like Doctor Who were cancelled, the TV and games industry were specifically avoiding the sci-fi genre because it had resulted in so many flops and when sci-fi flops it's a megaflop cause it's more expensive to do (special effects, costumes, sets, etc) than most genres/settings, if not all of them. I remember reading game dev accounts when they've talked about trying to get sci-fi projects greenlight around that time and it just wasn't possible.

 

And again, nerd culture was... not necessarily looked down upon, but it was made fun of a lot. It wasn't cool to be a nerd/geek around that time, so more geeky/nerdy forms of media of which sci-fi has long been associated with dropped out of the mainstream.

 

Nowadays geek/nerd culture is part of the mainstream and general pop culture, nerdy stuff is popular. We have a few things to thank for that, but what it's resulting in, in combination with the streaming boom for TV and thus higher TV budgets, is a lot more TV sci-fi. We're also seeing a lot of sci-fi games coming out now as well, to the point that the recent Summer Games Fest became a bit of a joke because there was so, so much sci-fi stuff being shown/announced.

[Failed Again]

On 6/21/2022 at 2:14 AM, Craigsters said:

 

Wait, this wasn't real! 

Shazbot

Edited July 4 by Failed Again

[Big Molio]

When you learn that Henry Cavill paints Games Workshop Citadel Miniatures in his spare time, then you know that geek culture really is mainstream.

 

 

Edited July 6 by Big Molio