I'm marking my calendar for July 25th, 2008. That's the day the new X-Files movie comes out. Double w00t!
I got the complete X-Files series box set from my parents for Christmas. So I'm going to try to make David watch all the episodes with me before the new movie comes out. (Well, maybe in seasons 8-9 only the episodes with David Duchovny.)
The X-Files was the first show in which I really become a member of a "fandom." I remember watching the first episode in the fall of 1993 in the lounge of my college dorm room my freshman year. Everyone was immediately mesmerized. We'd never seen anything like it on TV. It may seem odd now in the era of geeks ruling the world (including pop culture), but there really hadn't been any television show for us Generation X-ers. It combined our distrust of the government and love for sci-fi in one package. It also was the first show whose fans made significant use the internet. Discussion boards, usenet groups, fan fiction archives, mailing lists, etc. sprang up all over the place for every aspect of X-Files fandom. The now widely-used term "shipper" also originated in X-Files fandom. "Shippers" were the fans who supported Mulder and Scully as a romantic couple. (Now the term is used generically for support of any couple in any fandom. For example, I'm a Buffy/Angel shipper or a Veronica/Logan shipper.) There were monumental flame wars between the shipper and anti-shipper contingencies in X-Files fandom. The academic study of television also got a boost with books such as this one and this one being written about the show from a Cultural Studies perspective. Searching for "X-Files" in Google Scholar elicits 5930 hits with new papers being written all the time. (Once I ditch political science and do something cool like popular culture studies, maybe I'll even write a paper about the X-Files.)
Needless to say, I am incredibly excited about the new movie. The las time we saw Mulder, Scully and Co. on any screen was May 19th, 2002. A new reincarnation is long overdue.
Here's a really shaky copy of the X-Files movie preview. It was taken WonderCon in San Francisco this past weekend on a panel about the new movie. Unfortunately, the preview hasn't been released yet so this it for now. Enjoy.
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