Starlog Returns

Starlog magazine is returning with a new print edition—props to them. It’s $20 via their site.

For a good part of the 1980s, Starlog was my Internet—when it came to upcoming genre movies and coverage of the big ones hitting theaters, it was the flagship. It was the first and biggest movie magazine, and the only one I regularly saw alongside comic books in the drugstore.

Before Starlog, I didn’t even know there was such a concept as people making a movie—it was like the movies made themselves. I got my first look at the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation in their pages (complete with “Cheryl” McFadden). A few years before that, I discovered soundtracks through their mail order ad in the back pages, sending away for the vinyl LP of The Star Wars Trilogy on Varèse Sarabande—my first soundtrack purchase.

In the early 1980s, Starlog also had editorial coverage that made it seem like more than just stenography for publicists. But that fell away in the late 1980s, and by 1990 it seemed more like a kiddie magazine. They’d cover whatever genre crap came out as if it was the second coming, and the lead times often made the coverage vague or outdated. (I discovered the problem of lead times myself with Film Score Monthly in the 1990s.)

I almost totally forgot—FSM would not exist if not for Starlog! The earliest newsletter that became FSM emerged out of a letter to an editor of mine they published in 1990, in the “P.S.” no less. So I basically owe my entire career, such as it is, to Starlog.

But around that time I got way more interested in Cinefantastique, which I found at the bookstore (Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven), particularly their annual Star Trek: The Next Generation coverage by Mark Altman. CFQ would talk openly about how so much new stuff was just crap (a problematic editorial stance, to be honest), while Starlog looked like it was “on the take.”

In a few years time, the Internet would blow all of them away. Who needs news from three months ago when you can read the daily dish online?

It’s very brave to publish a new print magazine now, because you’re turning what used to be just a delivery mechanism for information into an attempt at a collectible. I’m not sure it will work. But I wish them luck!