Stevens Fanvids

Fanvids
Stevens, E. Charlotte
Published by Amsterdam University Press
Stevens, E. Charlotte.
Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use.
Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/76871.
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[128.32.10.230] Project MUSE (2024-06-24 10:58 GMT) University of California, Berkeley TRANSMEDIA
Fanvids
E. Charlotte Stevens
Television, Women,
and Home Media Re-Use
Fanvids
Transmedia: Participatory Culture
and Media Convergence
The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence
provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with
a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The
series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional
edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices
surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term ‘media
convergence’ relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution,
and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while
‘participatory culture’ refers to the changing relationship between media
producers and their audiences.
Interdisciplinary by its very definition, the series will provide a publishing
platform for international scholars doing new and critical research in relevant
fields. While the main focus will be on contemporary media culture, the
series is also open to research that focuses on the historical forebears of digital
convergence culture, including histories of fandom, cross- and transmedia
franchises, reception studies and audience ethnographies, and critical
approaches to the culture industry and commodity culture.
Series Editors
Dan Hassler-Forest, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom
Editorial Board
Mark Bould, University of West of England, United Kingdom
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, United States
Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California, United States
Julia Knight, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
Roberta Pearson, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
John Storey, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom
William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside, United States
Eckart Voigts, Braunschweig Institute of Technology, Germany
Fanvids
Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use
E. Charlotte Stevens
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Alexandra Mazurina, dribbble.com/sundrystudio
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6298 586 5

e-isbn 978 90 4853 710 5 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789462985865
nur 670
© E. Charlotte Stevens / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Brief Introduction to Media Fandom and a History of Vids 11
Structure and Aims 14
Fannish Genres and the Vid 17
Conclusion 22
1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and

the Vid 27
Scholarly Views of Vids and Vidding 28
Gender, ‘Quality’ Television, and Digital Technology 32
Televisual Flow, Segmentation, and Technologies of Control 35
2 Approach: How to Study a Vid 49

Corpus Selection 52
Canon Formation in a Marginal Practice 54
How to Study a Vid 56
Conclusion 60
3 Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video and

Experimental Tradition 65
Music Video 66
Found Footage, Collage, and the Experimental Tradition 69
Vids in Gallery Spaces: Cut Up and MashUp 74
Distributing, Exhibiting, and Curating Vids 78
Titanium and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman – Same
Source, Different Conclusion 86
Conclusion 92
4 Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular

Historiography 97
Collection and Archive 101
Creating a Path Through Star Trek 105
Looking Archival 108
Vids from the Archive 112
The Archival Aesthetic of Vids 120
Conclusion 130
5 Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids 137
Multifandom Vids 138
Genre Pleasures 143
Erotic and Bodily Spectacle 152
Pleasures of Transmedia Consumption 160
Fascinating People 166
Conclusion 172
6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy 179

Overview of Battlestar Galactica 183
God Is A DJ (2006) 189
Popular Music and Television 195
Cuz I Can (2007) 203
I’m Not Dead (2009) 209
Conclusion 213
Conclusion 219
Vids as Vids and the Afterlife of Television 219
Thinking About Music 224
Future Work 226
Final Thoughts 229
References 233
Fanvids Cited 256
Other Audio-Visual Works Cited 262
Songs Cited 268
Index 271
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Birmingham City University and to the rich and supportive
community at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
for the time and space to turn my thesis into a monograph. At a time when
early-career academics work in increasingly precarious circumstances,
you’ve given me stability, fellowship, and many chances to grow. Thank
you to my BCU colleagues Nick Gebhardt and especially Nick Webber for
reading paragraphs and chapter drafts and helping me figure out what I
meant to say.
Thank you to Dan Hassler-Forest and Matt Hills, editors of this book series,
for guidance and support. My thanks as well to Maryse Elliott and everyone
at Amsterdam University Press for your patience, and to Alexandra Mazurina
for creating a fantastic cover illustration.
Thank you to the Department of Film and Television Studies at the Univer-
sity of Warwick, where this project had its start. I am indebted to my PhD
supervisor Helen Wheatley and to the friends and colleagues that I found
there. Thank you as well to my MA supervisor Jennifer Brayton, then of
Ryerson University in Toronto, for lending me your fandom studies books
and showing me that this path was possible.
Thank you most of all to everyone I’ve met through VividCon and VidUKon
for making such compelling vids and for welcoming a non-vidder vidfan like
me. I offer you endless kudos. Thank you in particular to M. for starting me
off with a copy of your vid collection and to T. for showing me my first vids.
A final thank you goes to my parents, Wendy and Jack, for your support and
encouragement over the years. Dad, I’m sorry you’re not still here to read
this. Mum, this book is for you.
Introduction
Abstract
How can we take vids seriously as works in their own right? The introduc-
tion chapter of Fanvids covers a brief history of media fandom, which I
understand as the productive home media audiences who adopt domestic
technology as tools for remix and recombination to create interventions
into their own media landscape. This chapter contains an overview of
the structure and aims of the monograph. This chapter also describes the
different genres and categorizations of vids, each of which illuminate a
different facet of a vid’s argument or the kinds of transformation enacted
in the vid.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding genres
What is a vid? Also known as a fanvid, it has its origins in videotape-related

practices of media fandom and was known as a fan music video or songtape.
Today, vids are one variety of fan-made short videos made from the segmenta-
tion and re-editing of existing audio-visual sources with a popular song
as soundtrack. There is a developing consensus among scholars about the
definition of a vid. Francesca Coppa characterizes it as ‘a visual essay’ (2008:
1.1) designed ‘to make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108) or, as Kristina
Busse and Karen Hellekson describe it, ‘to analyze a particular character’
(2006: 12). Anne Kustritz calls it ‘a form of remix video collage’ (2014: 225),
one that according to Tisha Turk ‘integrat[es] repurposed media images
with repurposed music’ (2011: 84). Turk goes on to note that ‘one of the most
interesting things about vidding is that it involves both interpreting com-
mercial texts and producing new texts for an audience of fellow fans’ (2015:
164, emphasis in original). A vid is typically (though not exclusively) made
of film and television but is not film or television itself, though it intersects
with histories of media circulation and spectatorship practices. Accordingly,
this book’s chapters are organized around themes of collecting and archiving
media, of the visual pleasures of film and television as presented through the
Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Am-
sterdam University Press 2020
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_intro
10 Fanvids
vid, and of the adaptation and transformation of narrative within the vid.
Vids are a textual expression of fannish interpretation, and their production
has been enabled by the development of home media technologies from the
VCR through to the personal computer.
I have written Fanvids: Television, Media, and Home Media Re-Use at a time
when an awareness of transmedia storytelling is a constant background to
discussions of popular culture. The safe economic bet of a further instalment
of a franchise or an adaptation of a story successful in one medium to another
(not to mention direct remakes) has provided a swell of ‘sequels, prequels,
adaptations, transpositions, or modifications’ (Ryan and Thon 2014: 1) to
familiar storyworlds. For the fan communities that follow the novels, films,
video games, and television series that engender these storyworlds and
who do the work of engaging with characters and scenarios across their
different iterations (Scolari, Bertetti, and Feeman 2014), these provide a
bounty of potentially complex storyworlds. Indeed, the way media fandom
approaches its creative fanworks—with an ethos of repetition, variation,
and the pleasure of the iteration—is echoed by these official productions.
In this book, I do not analyse narrative strategies in which a unified
storyworld is presented across multiple platforms, nor do I examine technolo-
gies employed to invite sustained audience engagement (see Evans 2011;
Stein 2015; Kohnen 2018). Instead, I take vids as paratexts (Gray 2010) that
are part of an ‘interdependent, dynamic transmedia system’ (Stein 2015:
6), where the vid is a fan-led extension of the source material. I follow a
‘looser definition of transmedia’ that allows for ‘audiences as well as official
authors [to] co-construct transmedia narratives, storyworlds, and frames
for engagement’ (Stein and Busse 2012: 14). The critical and creative work
done by fans through their fanworks is part of the cross-platform narration
that extends storyworlds past the bounds of official production. As with
contemporary English-language Western popular culture more broadly, the
transmedia context is a constant undercurrent through this work.
In this book, I aim to take vids seriously as texts in their own right and
as texts that can withstand critical and aesthetic analysis. In doing so,
I am adopting and extending an argument put forth by Jason Jacobs in
relation to using textual analysis for the study of television: ‘that while
some programmes are designed as pleasant casual distraction […] many will
be able to withstand the kinds of critical pressure that we normally apply
to other artworks’ (2001: 431). This volume reconsiders the boundaries of
television and of television studies while exploring how to approach texts
like vids which are most often made of television but are not on television.
One boundary is that of medium specificity: the distinction between film
Introduc tion 11
and television as separate media is eliminated in vids, as both were treated

as different forms of video before media convergence in the 2010s made it
reasonable to consider (as does Newman 2014) all kinds of moving image
to be digital video.
Brief Introduction to Media Fandom and a History of Vids
The vid is a product of media fandom. As a subset of media audiences, fan

audiences are ‘distinguishable from the general audience in their emotional
connection to their specialized interest’ (Brayton 2006: 138) and the way
they self-identify as members of a subculture. Fan studies as an interdisci-
plinary field and the many current acceptable ways of ‘being a fan’ lead to
competing and nuanced definitions of how one distinguishes ‘fans’ from
‘audiences’ (Click and Scott 2018: 2). For my purposes here, I focus on media
fandom and on works produced within the ‘established and insular’ vidding
community (Russo 2016: 448) that grew out of the organization of mostly
female audiences of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968) and Star Trek
(NBC, 1966-1969) and whose interest in these series was expressed in part
through critical and creative responses. Media fandom continues to have
a strong interest in television, though often in connection to other media.
Therefore, this study examines vids made out of and in relation to television
on the whole; however, as will be demonstrated throughout, the re-use of
home media in the vid suggests a minimal difference between the home
use of film and television.
Fanworks represent a diverse array of engagement with films, television
series, and other media. These creative practices include critical and artistic
work across all media and occur both online and off. Alongside vid-making
(vidding), fans write fan fiction (fanfic, or fic), which is prose fiction of many
different lengths and styles (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Jamison 2013;
Hellekson and Busse 2014). Podfic is an audio performance of fic, sometimes
including elaborate audio design (De Kosnik 2016; Kustritz 2017). Fan art can
include the visual arts and handicrafts, such as knitting, quilting, jewellery
making, stained glass, and woodworking (Hills 2014; Persky 2015; Busse 2015;
Phillips and Freund 2016). Outside these specific creative practices, fans may
also attend, organize, and/or contribute programming for fan conventions
(Amesley 1989; Jenkins 1992; Stevens 2017a; Gilbert 2018), where it is common
to see cosplay, that is, attending in costume (Lamerichs 2011; Kirkpatrick
2015; Scott 2015). The most common fanworks are critical commentaries
on media texts through mailing lists (as paper zines and online), online
12 Fanvids
message boards, blogging communities, in conversation, and other social

media (Cumberland 2000; Verba 2003; Bury 2017). Vids exist between these
creative and critical responses.
This book is concerned with vids in the tradition of works first shared
at media fandom conventions such as Escapade and Media West in the
United States in the 1980s. VividCon is a multi-day vid-specific convention
that met annually from 2002-2018; its European counterpart, VidUKon,
has been running since 2008. Other fan conventions include vids in their
programming. The first vids in this tradition were made on videotape and
were themselves inspired by a series of slide shows presented at American
Star Trek fan conventions in the 1970s. The first of these was Kandy Fong’s
What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan? (1975).1 This performance showed
slides—made from film left over from editing Star Trek episodes—in time
to a fan-recorded cassette soundtrack (Coppa 2008: 3.1-3.3). The videotape
works that followed were inspired by Fong’s work but lacked her privileged
access to offcuts. Instead, domestic VCRs were used to edit off-air recordings
with a similar creative and critical purpose.2 In this way, vids tell part of the
story of audiences’ re-use of media; this is explored further in the discussion
in Chapter 4 of audiences who maintain personal archives of media.
Media fans Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour made Starsky & Hutch
(ABC, 1975-1979) vids on videotape ‘as early as 1980’ (Coppa 2008: 4.1), but
identifying the first vid ever made is not possible—and truly, establishing
precedence is beside the point. As the form was shared at conventions—lur-
ing new potential vidders to try their hand after stumbling across a vidshow
in progress (Coppa 2011), for example—vidding turned the living room (or
other domestic space) into a site of media production for an overwhelmingly
female audience. Videotape compilations of vids were shared with other
fans at conventions and were traded through the mail, which required
personal contact with other fans. In order to learn about this form, interested
fans would attend workshops at conventions or join a videotape collective
(Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Coppa 2011). As early as 1992
(Coppa 2006: 53), online resources enabled a transformation of this body of
knowledge, as the internet broadened the accessibility of fandom. Vidding
was aided and enabled by related fan practices of tape-sharing and collecting,
1 Vids are short videos that are self-contained and released as individual works. Accordingly, I
format vid titles and use an in-text citation style that follows the convention for complete works
(italicized) rather than for segments of longer works (in quotation marks).
2 A complementary trajectory towards the vid occurred within Xena: Warrior Princess
(Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001) fandom, which ‘evolved without direct roots
to the traditional vidding community’ (laurashapiro 2007).
Introduc tion 13
and this circulation of media has been accelerated by digital file-sharing

and the increased power of personal computers and reach of broadband
internet (see De Kosnik 2016 for a discussion of fan spaces online). Today,
there are innumerable websites, communities, blogs, and discussion forums
that share information about the vidding process.
The critical consensus is that women are an unambiguous majority in
media fandom despite occasional fandoms attracting different genders
and identities, a position that has not changed since the first wave of fan
studies work. Constance Penley (1991) and Camille Bacon-Smith (1992)
write from the position that media fandom is a female subculture.3 Jenkins
describes his experience of fan spaces and practices as ‘largely female,
largely white, largely middle-class, though it welcomes into its ranks many
who would not fit this description’ (1992: 1). This presumption of whiteness
has persisted (Pande 2016; Pande 2018), and the implicit monolingual and
monocultural nature of the field may well be ‘a holdover from the earliest
days of English-language fan studies’ (Morimoto and Chin 2017: 177). This
project does not take great steps to challenge these presumptions, as it is
grounded in the analysis of fan re-workings of (mainly) Anglo-American
source material, circulated among fans who frequent spaces associated with
fan conventions in Britain and the United States, in dialogue with critical
literature developed in similar contexts. However, and while recognizing
that an individual’s experience of gender is complex, I understand vidding
as arising from a space that has historically been composed of ‘primarily
female fans’ (Busse 2009: 106), where vids are made ‘overwhelmingly by
women’ (Coppa 2009: 107). As a member of the community—though not
as a vidder myself—I write from a position of experiencing vidding as a
spectator and not a practitioner, in the same way that I might ask a television
studies or film studies class to discuss a piece of television or a film with
an awareness of production contexts without necessarily having empirical
knowledge of those industries.
In addition to gender, the pseudonymity of fan creators is an understood
part of the presentation of fanworks. Accordingly, I credit vidders using
the names under which they release their work. Indeed, the fluctuating
permissibility of format-shifting and legal re-uses of media for artistic and/
or critical purposes is a further reason to maintain the pseudonymous
vid credit. Sharon Marie Ross (2008) reports that her respondents were
3 I acknowledge that conflating biological sex and performative gender in a binary is reductive
and not uniformly accurate. However, for brevity’s sake, I use ‘woman’ and ‘female’ interchange-
ably and include trans* identities as an opposition to the cisgendered male positionality.
14 Fanvids
appreciative of online anonymity. This freedom to explore one’s private

interests without fear of discovery is signif icant, as outing oneself as a
fan is still potentially a source of shame (Larsen and Zubernis 2012), and
‘work and personal relationships’ can be ‘negatively affected by an outing’
(Busse and Hellekson 2012: 39; see also Lothian 2012). While the vidders
whose work I cite do often use ambiguously gendered pseudonyms, the
evidence provided by the above accounts of gender in media fandom leads
to the creditable assumption that vids are, on the whole, made by (and
for) women.
Structure and Aims
This study seeks to analyse how meaning is constructed in vids: as dialogues

between the clips as edited and the use of the chosen song, and between
the expectations for narrative and/or character development as constructed
by the source material and the argument put forth by the vid itself. Vids
remake narratives for a deeply attentive fan audience that is watching with
an extensive knowledge of the source text or with sufficient familiarity
of the vid form’s codes and conventions. My examples are mainly vids
of live-action narrative fiction because this reflects the majority of vids
in media fandom as I understand it and covers technological changes in
television from VCRs and the rise of the home video to digital viewership.
This definition leaves out AMVs (anime music videos; see Roberts 2012),
machinima (Lowood and Nitsche 2011), and other recent digital remix video
forms (e.g. supercuts, faux trailers), which are related practices but are not
part of this particular tradition. Indeed, by gathering together a selection
of vids for this book, I am effectively arguing that the rich history of fans’
media re-use means that vidding can stand on its own.
The organizing question for this study asks what a vid is and, by extension,
what vids are to television and film. The vid form’s dense textuality, its use of
evolving media technologies, and its correspondence with non-institutional
archives suggest congruence with the extra-textual life of television: if
television is re-edited outside of television’s flow or combined with excerpts
from film, does it stop being television? How does television exist outside of
television? Ultimately, vids are not television; however, their form, content,
and context are derived from television and therefore deserve to be part of a
more comprehensive contemporary history of home viewing and recording.
Exploring the boundaries of television does not automatically indicate an
interdisciplinary project, as the hybridity and expansion of television studies
Introduc tion 15
(cf. Brunsdon 1998) follow the movement of television audiences’ use of the
medium and its products.
This book is structured into six chapters: the first two discuss the context
and approach for this research, and this is followed by four chapters with
case studies that each take a complementary view of vids and vidding. The
first chapter, ‘Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the
Vid’, explores what a television scholar can learn from the story of vids and
vidding. This chapter considers the vid form and vidding practice in relation
to the academic histories of television and television audiences. It covers
the history of productive (female) home media audiences who have adopted
domestic technology as tools for remixing and recombining to create radical
interventions into their own media landscape. Indeed, vidding is possible
technologically because televisual flow can be interrupted, excerpted, and
returned to. The second chapter, ‘Approach: How to Study a Vid’, discusses
my approach to textual analysis and what can be learned from studying
vids as texts unto themselves. This chapter also explores canon formation in
television/media studies and how this can apply to studying a marginal form.
The third chapter, ‘Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video
and Experimental Tradition’, works through specific academic framings
of similar forms such as found footage films in the experimental tradition
and music video; it also discusses how vids have been incorporated into
recent gallery exhibitions.
The remaining three case study chapters each focus on a different
aspect of how the vid form relates to television, exploring how attention
to vids—as a method of sharing paths through media texts—can nuance
an understanding of the possible ways to relate to television and other
media. The first of these, Chapter 4, ‘Textures of Fascination: Archives,
Vids, and Vernacular Historiography’, asks what the analysis of vids can
reveal about histories, memories, and practices of watching television. This
chapter compares contrasting theoretical understandings of collections
and archives to contextualize the archival work done by vidders. Videotape
vids bear traces of their archival origins, as the selective use of clips and the
wear evident on the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s favourite moments,
telling a historical story about practices of re-viewing, interpretation, and
memorialization of texts. Given the gendered reality of vid production, these
women’s histories of viewing and practices of spectatorship are immanent
in the vid text as textural/aesthetic qualities. In this chapter, I argue that
the home media collection has created conditions for media fans’ creative
expression and critical analysis. These archival traces are visible on the
vids themselves, which chronicle, for example, the unofficial distribution
16 Fanvids
networks of videotape and the practice of returning to favourite scenes that

cause wear on the tape itself. These personal historiographies are presented
in the content and texture of a vid. I focus on vids from the 1980s and 1990s
that were made on videotape and conclude with a discussion of the archival
look of certain Star Trek vids in relation to bootleg textures: the aesthetic
traces of analogue and digital video.
Chapter 5, ‘Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids’,
asks how we can account for vids that combine multiple source texts
into one work. This chapter focuses specif ically on multifandom vids,
a genre of vidding that draws together video clips from several sources
and that demonstrate ways of watching broadly across media texts. It
expands on the premise of the previous chapter to discuss the vid form as
detailing a mode of spectatorship that works across a genre (e.g. science
fiction) or other set of related texts (e.g. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in a
transmedia romance across f ilms, animated and live-action television
series, and comic book pages). In this, vids are the record of more than
the interpretation of a single text: they construct ‘paths’ through genres,
transmedia narratives, or even actors’ careers and therefore raise issues of
stardom and performance. Alongside critical work on found footage films,
this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship
with audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures
offered by various genres.
Finally, the sixth chapter, ‘Adapting Kara Thrace: Dualbunny’s Battlestar
Galactica Trilogy’, asks what it means for a series or film to be adapted to a
vid. Vids draw out and remake texts and can potentially address faults in the
source text, correct them through pointed exclusions, and even supersede the
source text in its fulfilment of promises of progressive representation. This
final case study chapter is an analysis of three Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi
Channel, 2003-2009) vids, designed to examine both the vid’s relationship
with adaptation and genre and the central role that songs play in making
meaning in vids. While vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure
meaning within the work, they are not abstract illustrations of songs. Instead,
the clichés and idioms of the chosen song’s instrumentation are vital in
completing the vid’s reinterpretation of its source text. In this case, the
music, voice, and star image of the recording artist Pink are instrumental in
appraising the character development of Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace in this vid
trilogy. These three vids were made at different points while the series was
still in production, and each work reflects the development of the character
and memorializes the potential for, and perhaps desire for, a particular kind
of feminist representation.
Introduc tion 17
Fannish Genres and the Vid
Throughout this book, I use the terminology of fandom instead of adopting

categorization associated with found footage film, remix video, or other
proximate forms. Just as film and television broadly conform to genres,
each with their own tendencies and characteristics, so too can vids be
grouped into recognizable genres. In any discussion of films or television
programmes, it is generally accepted that the critic or scholar will have a wide
viewing experience and general knowledge of similar texts in order to inform
analysis. However, as I am aware that the vid form still is marginal and
can often be mistaken for similar forms, I offer the following explanations
developed during the course of my research and long personal involvement
with fandom. Vids can be difficult to interpret for those who may know
the source material but not fandom norms, but the captioning effect and
structuring created by vids’ soundtracks make vids generally accessible to
non-fannish viewers. It is common in vids to address character psychology,
proposing a voice for characters’ inner thoughts and feelings. As Jonathan
Gray argues, this probing of ‘a character’s psyche leads to many of the form’s
better offerings’ (2010: 157). Indeed, fanworks have long been a place to
expand upon characterization in a context where the episodic structure
of television runs counter to character development.
As with fanfiction, vids may be classed as gen, het, and slash, indicating
whether the work includes romantic pairings. Gen typically refers to a
general work, one that does not focus on sexual relationships. Het involves
a heterosexual pairing of characters in a relationship either present in the
original material or created in the work. Slash works create a narrative
space that elaborates a ‘perceived homoerotic subtext’ (Busse and Hellekson
2006: 10) in the primary work. The term refers to the typographical mark
separating the characters being ‘slashed’ (i.e. ‘Kirk/Spock’ is the pairing of
Kirk and Spock), which indicates that a fanwork will ‘concern a same-sex
relationship between the two men’ (Penley 1991: 137). In pre-internet zine
fandom, ‘K&S’ would indicate that the work contains the two characters
but is gen, not slash. 4 Scholarly attention to media fandom has sought to
explain the appeal of slash, with explanations ranging from an idealization
4 The intermediary stage of this terminology can be seen in 1980s fanzines; for example,
contributions to S&H Letterzine #36 (October 1982), refer to ‘“/” f iction’. In digital fandom, a
forward slash (/) is an essential part of a URL, and as such can disrupt hashtags on sites such
as Tumblr and Instagram. This has led to single-word portmanteau ‘ship names’ derived from
the characters’ names: ‘drarry’ replaces ‘Draco/Harry’ or ‘Harry/Draco’ or ‘H/D’.
18 Fanvids
of romance without gender hierarchies (Penley 1991; Busse and Hellekson

2006) to ‘a way of doubling the number of objects of erotic consideration’
on offer (Kaveney 2010: 245). As Julie Levin Russo (2018) points out, slash
on its own tends to indicate a male/male relationship, with the all-female
variant requiring a separate term: femslash, or femmeslash. Slash fandom
is arguably where vidding began.
There are countless slash vids, and I will use talitha78’s vid Fever (2010) as
an illustrative example. It pairs an Adam Lambert song about explicit sexual
attraction with the many clips from Guy Ritchie’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes
film in which Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) share
the frame, exchanging a variety of fond and exasperated glances. The song
amplifies (or constructs, depending on one’s perspective) a desiring subtext
underlying each glance, with the repeated lyric ‘Would you be mine?’ giving
voice to an unspoken mutual attraction. These do not necessarily need to
be limited to a duo: Parachute (thingswithwings, 2014) is a Leverage (TNT,
2008-2012) vid articulating the bond between three central characters,
and in addition to appropriately romantic lyrics, the song’s polyphony
in the final repetitions of the chorus underscores its argument about the
multiple directions of affection in this triad. Such ship vids (once styled
’ship, short for ‘relationship’) can act as explicit declarations of romantic
desire or friendship beyond the relationships that are demonstrated in the
text. Some vids can be friendshippy and imply a close but not necessarily
sexual bond between characters. Kryptonite (Seah and Margie, 2002), for
example, is an Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) vid about the
show’s two main characters highlighting their friendship, mutual respect,
and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their partner. It uses the song
‘Kryptonite’ by 3 Doors Down as its soundtrack. The close bond between
the characters could be read as platonic or romantic, though not explicitly
desiring or erotic as with Fever.
Vid genres are also defined by the nature of the transformation enacted
within the work rather than by their ship. These include (but are not limited
to) character study, constructed reality, multifandom, meta, and recruiter vids.
These genres have fluid boundaries, can be hybridized, and may be known by
different names in different fandom communities. I use terminology drawn
from my experiences attending and participating in vidding conventions in
the US and the UK,5 with reference to convention programme books and to
the fan-written wiki site fanlore.org. While this is not an exhaustive list of
vid genres, it indicates the form’s possible variations and uses.
5 Including contributing programming to VidUKon (see Stevens 2017a).

Introduc tion 19
Character study vids are focused on examining a single character’s motiva-

tion and development with a minimal degree of transformation of the source
narrative. In Thousand Eyes (thuvia ptarth, 2018), the 54 episodes of Nirvana
in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong Film & TV Production/Daylight Entertainment,
2015) are condensed to explore the emotional journey of the protagonist
Lin Shu (Hu Ge, 胡歌), also known as Mei Changsu, as he enacts a complex
political scheme. The plot of Nirvana in Fire is not transformed, and essential
character elements are drawn out for a viewer familiar with the series as a
whole. Character study vids are particularly effective in promoting secondary
characters to a leading role within the bounds of the vid. For example,
The Adventure (greensilver, 2012) uses clips of the Harry Potter film series
(2001-2011) that feature supporting character Neville Longbottom (Matthew
Lewis). Narrative economy limits the amount of diegetic introspection a
supporting character can have, but character study vids are a way to devote
a concentration of screen time to the feelings, experiences, and motivations
of characters beyond the main few. For the duration of the vid, Neville is
the hero: as his small acts of courage through the film series are collected
and displayed, the vidder argues that Neville has been just as vital as Harry
(Daniel Radcliffe) himself in defeating Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). What
is more, the extended production cycle of the Harry Potter series—eight
films released over a ten-year span—means the vid captures Lewis-as-
Neville growing up on screen. When used to treat secondary characters,
character study vids have a pleasurable tinge of righteous justification, as
underdogs are given a heroic space or villains are granted the illicit allure
of an anti-hero.
Constructed reality vids use clips to construct a new narrative, sometimes
including clips beyond the single source to build a cohesive story. As with
all vids, constructed reality vids rely on editing and song choice to create
these alternate storylines. For example, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of
Money) (Killa and Carol S., c. 2001), cuts together clips from Highlander:
The Series (Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998) with the Pet Shop Boys song
‘Opportunities’ to make it appear as if the subjects have decided on a ‘life
of crime’ (as described in the vid’s opening credits). The original source
contains all the elements which could then be recombined into a new
narrative with radically different meanings. While a slash vid may appear
to be constructing a reality for its subjects, slash vids amplify subtext, using
clips as evidence of desire or affection and not to construct a new narrative.
The fandom being vidded does not necessarily need to have a visual
source. Fans of comedy/horror podcast series Welcome to Night Vale (Com-
monplace Books, 2012-present) have used the principles of constructed reality
20 Fanvids
to create vids of this audio-only source. One particularly well-executed and

effective example is Bloody Shirt (unfinishedidea, 2014), which gathers clips
from eighteen film and television sources to construct a visual reality for
the podcast. Bloody Shirt does not create visuals to illustrate any particular
episode or narrative arc but instead creates an abstract and atmospheric
space that draws on the same narrative conventions and tropes that are
used in Night Vale itself. While the vid does use multiple sources, it is not a
multifandom vid because the clips are adopted as representations of Night
Vale, its residents, and the history of its community radio station rather than
being used as individual examples in a vid that compares and contrasts
multiple fandoms. Vidders have also composed vids based on novels by
Octavia Butler, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ben Aaronovich by way of the
same kind of creative analogy.
Multifandom vids, discussed at length in Chapter 5, use multiple television
series and/or films as their source material—that is, they draw from multiple
fandoms—to mount a comparison or demonstrate contrasts between the
various sources, enacting a kind of audio-visual genre study. For example,
Around the Bend (Danegen, 2010) collects clips and still images of women
operating cars, motorcycles, and aircraft to celebrate the representation of a
female presence in activities traditionally dominated by men. These include
not only selections from cult film and television sources but also historical/
archival footage, examples of world cinema, and commercial music videos.
As is typical for multifandom vids, there is no particular narrative. Instead, it
uses The Asteroids Galaxy Tour’s jubilant song ‘Around the Bend’ to construct
a diegetic space dominated by happy and confident women in charge of
these powerful machines. The organizing logic of the vid groups each mode
of transportation, which allows the viewer to evaluate and appreciate the
repetition and variation across the many examples included in the vid.
Meta vids make a comment about an issue or situation beyond the narra-
tive in the vid itself. These may often be multifandom vids, as they use clips
from multiple sources to compare and contrast issues of representation. For
example, Laura Shapiro’s unsettling Stay Awake (2010) matches congruent
storylines from series such as Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-
2003), Battlestar Galactica, and The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002) to highlight the
problematic representation of the pregnant female body in science fiction
television. Other meta vids take vidding itself as their subject, including
clips from other vids to comment on the form’s potential and successes,
such as Us (lim, 2007) and Destiny Calling (counteragent, 2008).
Finally, the recruiter vid is intended to convince a viewer to watch the
vid’s source text. These can adhere to any of the main genres (gen, het,
Introduc tion 21
or slash) and will highlight aesthetic or thematic elements that make the
series appear compelling. For example, Jayne L.’s Fireworks (2010) was made
to solicit new viewers for the television series Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000),
a lesser-known Canadian series about a fictional hockey team. Vids do
not have to be made as recruiter vids to be used as such, though there is
a distinction drawn in fandom between a vid made explicitly to grow a
fandom and vids addressing an existing audience. As a personal aside, my
first experience of watching vids (after years of following discussions about
vids on the alt.tv.x-files.creative newsgroup without seeing any myself) was
part of a friend’s efforts to introduce me to Farscape: we did not watch a full
episode but rather started with Farscape vids. These served as trailers or
teasers for the show but also shared their creators’ arguments about what
made the series compelling. (For the record, this approach was successful,
and I was duly recruited.) As Jonathan Gray argues, successful vids ‘have
something interesting, substantive, and/or revelatory to say about the show’
or other source material (2010: 159). Vid genres are significant in part because
they offer different frameworks against which to re-present their sources.
These genres are all linked through the role of music in vids, particularly
in constructing subjectivity in character study or relationship vids, but song
choice is relevant to all vid genres. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins argued that,
when watching vids, ‘viewers are often totally disinterested in the identity
of the original singer(s) but are prepared to see the musical performance as
an expression of the thoughts, feelings, desires, and fantasies of the fictional
character(s)’ (1992: 235). To argue that ‘nondiagetic [sic] performers play
little or no role within fan videos’ (Jenkins 1992: 235) is to suggest that a
song’s lyrics take precedence over its other aural connotations. While the
individual performer may be irrelevant to the vid’s immediate construction,
the song’s instrumentation and the performer’s voice are fundamental to
how vids are understood. Nondiegetic performers may have little or no role,
but their performances are vital.
In a vid, musical performance is used to express a character’s interiority,
and the accompaniment to those lyrics is just as influential and theoreti-
cally complex as screen music more generally. The study of the vid form
requires recognizing the importance of musical genre, instrumentation,
and performance in providing context for re-used clips beyond lyrical
signification. Just as one’s tone of voice can greatly alter meaning when
speaking, the genre of song and performance do much of the ‘heavy lifting’
in conveying and directing meaning in a vid. While other vid genres rely
on images to tell their story or present their analyses, multifandom vids
are more abstract and rely on the signification of the image as an image.
22 Fanvids
Whereas slash vids work well with love songs (as one would expect) and
character study vids tend to need lyrics that describe a person and/or their
motivations, multifandom vids can be very effective with dance music,
featuring short verses and long repeating choruses or nonsensical lyrics.
These provide a structure for the vid but put the burden of meaning-making
on the clips themselves and the performances in the song. Indeed, as it is
possible to make successful vids using instrumental songs, lyrics are not
always necessary.
Conclusion
This book engages with the vid as a form intimately related to television,
as a product of a kind of spectatorship, and as a way of interacting with
media that took full advantage of developments in home video technology.
Throughout, I draw on related literature within fan studies, television and
film studies, and screen studies more broadly to undertake a sustained
exploration of the ways in which vids carry with them traces of production
and interpretation.
The vid, as a complex technological cultural artifact, is worthy of as much
critical academic attention as other forms of fan activity such as fan fiction,
and yet vids have only relatively recently been the subject of scholarship.
The vid is a form of cultural production that represents a unique relation-
ship to technology and media: it is a product of a decades-long, organized,
parallel industry in which material and immaterial production is linked
to practitioners’ knowledge as both technically skilled digital and active
and critical audience members. The vid form strongly suggests an audience
that is competent in the deep reading and careful viewing of mainstream
and cult television and film and that keeps archives of media with which
they engage both critically and creatively.
Vids are made by women in media fandom and are their responses to
tendencies in mainstream media and cult texts that marginalize women’s
stories and experiences, reframing narratives that exclude them. This book
also highlights the importance of stardom and performance to television
audiences, and the pleasures and attractions of television and film that
are made visible and concentrated in vids argues for an audience whose
spectatorship is based on more than a concern about narratives unfolding.
Fundamentally, this study argues that the vid form demonstrates that
television’s active audiences are active media audiences, watching broadly
across various screen media. This takes into account the importance of
Introduc tion 23
the songs used in vids because instrumentation, vocal performance, and

lyrics all caption a vid’s moving images. The interplay between sound and
image in vids is where meaning is derived; the vid form is therefore about
more than simply viewing.
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24 Fanvids
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(New York and London: New York University Press, 2010)
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The Cult TV Book, ed. by Stacey Abbott (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 243-247
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1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies,
Fandom Studies, and the Vid
Abstract
What can television scholars and historians learn from vids and vidding?
This chapter considers the vid form and vidding practice in existing
scholarship. The bulk of academic engagement with vids and vidding is
in the loosely defined field of fan studies rather than in television studies.
However, vids are possible because of the changing form and shape of
television, from home videocassette recording through to digital video.
Audience control over watching television, theorized as ways of controlling
that flow, also provides the technological tools for making vids. The vid
form is textual proof of fans using the tools at their disposal to intervene,
respond, and create in a context wherein they have no official role.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding, television studies,

quality television
Vids are made about—and made out of—a vast range of source material.
One of the exciting parts of studying vids is seeing how vidders iterate the
form: for example, beyond television, vids are also used to comment on the
pleasures and frustrations of films and video games in order to draw the
web of paratexts and intertexts that inform contemporary (transmedia) fan
experience. However, vidding’s origins in television fandoms of the 1980s,
continually enabled by the affordances of domestic media technologies (e.g.
home video, both videotape and digitally), means that the vid form deserves
to be explored through television. Indeed, in the first years of the American
vidding convention VividCon, up to ninety percent of vids shown each
year were made from television sources. Though this proportion dropped
off to around half in the convention’s later years, vids remain a supremely
televisual form. Television studies offers a complex and hybrid set of ways
to think about television technology, texts, and audiences and therefore
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch01
28 Fanvids
those of the vid. Therefore, this chapter focuses on vidding’s relationship

with television through fandom studies’ approaches to television audiences,
and through television studies. The subsequent case study chapters adopt
a range of frames, in line with my overall purpose to explore the vid form
through a range of theoretical approaches.
In this chapter, I discuss the relatively understated place of the vid form
in current television scholarship and fan studies literature. I continue with
the critical writing on the control of, access to, and uses of television to
contextualize the perception of television form and content in order to then
explore the form and content of vids. A discussion of television’s inherent
segmentation is followed by an examination of the gendering of television
access and the recent masculinized valorization of so-called ‘quality’ narra-
tive fiction formats. I conclude with an overview of the devices and practices
that allowed television audiences to intercept, store, and manipulate these
segments and thereby make vids.
Scholarly Views of Vids and Vidding
To date, the bulk of academic engagement with vids and vidding is in the
loosely defined field of fan studies, not in television studies. In television
studies literature, the appearance of fans has been oblique—for example,
through hints of an ‘engaged viewer’ who then joins an ‘interpretive com-
munity’ and may produce ‘semi-professional videos’ (Meehan 2007: 167).
However, the recent ‘mainstreaming of both fan culture and fan studies’
(Click and Scott 2018: 1) means that the language of fan practices and fan
studies have become seemingly more acceptable in other fields’ scholarship,
and thus such euphemisms are no longer required.
I use ‘vids’ and ‘vidding’ throughout this book to emphasize the con-
tinuity of the current works and practices, which are grounded in earlier
videotape-based fanworks (Coppa 2006, 2008). While vidding has undergone
a technological shift from videotape to digital video, early descriptions
of the form, purpose, and reception of these fan-made music videos are
recognizable as antecedents of the more recent works. Early academic ac-
counts of fanworks refer to vids as ‘songtapes’ and ‘song videos’ (Penley 1991;
Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992), which follows their naming in the fanzines
from the 1980s that I have read in the course of my research. However,
the March 1993 issue of the vidding-focused zine Rainbow Noise refers to
‘song videos’ and ‘vids’ interchangeably. While it may be anachronistic to
use a blanket term to effectively rename material from the first decade of
Critical Contex ts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid 29
vidding, by today vids have been called ‘vids’ longer than they have been
called anything else.
In the canonical foundational writing on Western media fandom (Penley
1991; Bacon-Smith 1992; Fiske 1992; Jenkins 1992), vidding is generally under-
stood to be symptomatic of fandom’s particular approaches to television,
‘depending for its significance upon the careful welding of words and images
to comment on the series narrative’ (Jenkins 1992: 225). Of course, clips could
be chosen for erotic or iconic signification as well as narrative references;
see, for example, The Boy Can’t Help It (Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour,
c. 1980-1985), a Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) vid that starts with a clip
of Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) topless and finishes with no fewer than 10
repetitions of a clip showing Glaser wiggling his hips with his back to the
camera in a shot that emphasizes his denim-clad behind.6 Suggesting that
a piece like this is a careful comment on narrative elides the pleasurable,
silly, and erotic potential of vidding that has been part of the form since its
earliest days. Vids are a textual expression of spectatorship that is potentially
concerned as much with a fascination with bodies—though these may be
considered more accidentally than intentionally erotic (Wheatley 2016;
Collie 2017)—and genre tropes as with narrative.
For Jenkins, vidding is central for theorizing the aesthetic basis of
‘poached’ culture, where ‘borrowing and recombination’ are just as important
as ‘original creation and artistic innovation’ (1992: 224). I take issue with the
implication that in vids (and in fanworks more generally), something has
been ‘poached’ and has therefore been removed: vidding is about duplication,
multiplication, and proliferation (of clips and of meanings) and does not
take the original source out of circulation. Pre-empting Jenkins, Constance
Penley notes that vidshows she attended were ‘often the high point of a slash
convention, going on for an immensely raucous and pleasurable three or
four hours’ (1991: 145). Writing in the same period, Camille Bacon-Smith
is emphatic that vidding is fandom’s ‘own art form’ (1992: 175). Across this
early work on vidding there is a consensus, largely drawn from the fan
communities being observed and interviewed, of the variations possible
across the vid form and the ways in which vids functioned within ongoing
fan discourses and practices. But after this point, there appears to be a gap
in attention paid to vids in scholarship.
Scholarship on fans and fandom after 1992 largely focused on fandom’s
written outputs—fanfic and commentary—as Eve Ng (2008) points out
6 The Bonnie Raitt song used as the vid’s soundtrack is quite clear about the appeal of the
titular ‘boy’, e.g. ‘he’s got himself a figure that’s just made to squeeze’.
30 Fanvids
in her essay on femslash vids about characters in All My Children (ABC,

1970-2011). Vids are mentioned in a list of other fanworks, with minimal (if
any) context or description (see Busse and Hellekson 2006; Derecho 2006;
Karpovich 2006; Richards 2010; Robinson 2010; Kaveney 2010; De Kosnik
2013, 2016; Booth 2017). Academic attention on vids has increased since 2008,
sparked in part by misinterpretations of vids that were circulated beyond
media fandom without context (Coppa 2008; Russo 2009). Francesca Coppa, a
key figure in this second wave of writing on vids, offers that a vid is ‘a visual
essay’ (2008: 1.1) designed ‘to make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108).
Along with Jonathan Gray (2010) and others, I accept this critical/creative
purpose in vidding as a basic tenet. The analytical and critical work of the
vid is demonstrated through the meanings made in juxtaposing re-used
moving images with the song soundtrack. However, while these ‘essays’ can
appear without context, for example on visible streaming platforms such
as YouTube, they are part of a subculture, and a critical understanding of
them can be enhanced by knowing where and how they are made and for
what audience.
The visibility of vids beyond their specific subcultural contexts makes
them a familiar part of a contemporary digital experience of television
beyond the mere consumption of programmes themselves. The (relative)
mainstreaming of vids means the form appears in texts focusing on specific
vids’ source material. For example, Paul McEwan counts fic and vids as forms
of adaptation (2011: 41-45) in a discussion of the Canadian cult film Hard
Core Logo (Bruce McDonald, 1996).7 Chris Louttit (2013) discusses vids and
other fan-made video work when accounting for period novel adaptations.
Elsewhere, Stephen O’Neill accounts for vids of Shakespeare adaptations
on YouTube as digital paratexts (2014: 50-54). Beyond adaptation, Louisa
Ellen Stein (2015), who has written extensively about fan practices as well
as television, integrates a discussion of vids into larger arguments about
contemporary fans’ engagement with television texts, normalizing fannish
and scholarly engagement with the form.
Current scholarship on vids tends to single out exemplary works to analyse
their meanings within a particular fandom or fan context; for example, in
terms of fetishistic scopophilia (Coppa 2009), theology (Stein 2010), conflict
(Freund 2010), critical perversity (S.F. Winters 2012), or shame (Larsen and
Zubernis 2012). Scholarship on vids also includes analyses of vids that
compensate for a lack of representation in mainstream media (Ng 2008;
7 The film Hard Core Logo is itself an adaptation of Michael Turner’s poetry collection (1993)
of the same name.
Villarejo 2014; Nadkarni 2017), interviews with vidders (Coppa 2011, 2014;
Counteragent 2012; Booth and Bennett 2016), and reflections on curating
a vidshow (Stevens 2017a). Working more broadly, Tisha Turk and Joshua
Johnson (2012) have called for an increase of scholarly attention on the ‘ecol-
ogy’ of fan production to discover how the specific fannish contexts of a vid
become shared knowledge within fandom. Recently, Turk (2015) has explored
the form of vidding as a kind of expression in its own right, theorizing vids’
formal properties, including the function of music. For this monograph, I
am interested in exploring vids in and around their core contexts as media
texts that are indicative of a particular way of understanding and interacting
with television and other media.
I thus engage with vids as texts in their own right, drawing on a sus-
tained understanding of fanworks as evidence of interventions (resistant
or otherwise) with television and other media. Early scholarship on media
fandom (Fiske 1987, 1992; Jenkins 1988, 1992; Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992),
in the first wave of fan studies (per Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2017;
Click and Scott 2018), was concerned with fan practices and defined these
practices as resistance to capitalism. Examples of this resistance were found
in what John Fiske termed fans’ ‘textual productivity’ (1992: 39). However,
this approach assumes that fan ‘productivity’ elevates those fans from the
lesser status of mere ‘consumer’ (Hills 2002), and is complicated by fan
activity carried out in digital spaces (Hills 2013).
In Fiske’s analysis of the different kinds of fan activity (1992: 36-39),
fanworks are made to be shared within a community that shares an un-
derstanding of the codes, conventions, and tropes at play in that fanwork.
However, as Hills (2002) argues, Fiske’s approach reduces all fan activity to
‘productivity’, in which all interactions with media engender some form of
production. If the absence of production is gauged in capitalist terms, work
that explores the marginalization or decentralization of female-focused fan
approaches in industry-sanctioned transmedia spaces (Jenkins et al. 2013:
151; Russo 2016) takes on new resonance. Indeed, ‘participatory culture’
presumes that every individual who has access to production technologies
will produce their own content, leading producers of ‘official culture’ (Fiske
1992: 33) to exploit this apparent willingness to engage (Ross 2008; Russo
2009), often in (gendered) transmedia contexts (Scott 2013; Jenkins et al. 2013;
Stein 2015; Kohnen 2018). In the case of the vid, producers’ control largely
ends once an episode is broadcast or released on DVD, as fans can take over
its circulation, interpretation, and reconstruction.
Questions of textual productivity—of making—are still relevant in dis-
cussions of vidding in the constructing of queer or feminist representations
32 Fanvids
and in the practices of media consumption and distribution that vids make
visible. It is not just that fans have adopted characters and scenarios from
their objects of fandom to create their own works: they have re-made these
objects of fandom into new works. Vidders shape and re-make an experience
of visual media; indeed, to leave aside the visible labour involved in making
a vid—something that Alexis Lothian argues is among ‘the most feminized
and least mainstreamed kinds of fan labor’ (2015: 141)—is to discount the
practice entirely.8
The latest wave of fan studies is becoming comfortable with recognizing
that, contrary to earlier formulations of media fandom as resistance, fan
spaces replicate social hierarchies (MacDonald 1998; Sandvoss 2005) and
elide racial differences (Pande 2016; Morimoto and Chin 2017; Pande 2018)
even as they provide a space for making and remaking in cultural and
technological spaces not dominated by cultural elites. Vids are constructed
mainly by women in non-professional contexts, and women continue to
have a marginal role in the production of culture in industrial capitalism.
Therefore, looking at vids reveals the traces of a tradition of individual
counter-readings of texts, performed by an engaged audience who are
skilled users of home video technology. The demographics of media fandom
intersect with the gendering of television and with how television is accessed
in a post-broadcast context.
Gender, ‘Quality’ Television, and Digital Technology
As suggested by the title of this book, an awareness of gender underpins

this work. Drawing on previous scholarship about media fandom, I work
under the assumption that vidding is predominantly practiced by women
for a predominantly female audience, and I present textual evidence of
these fans’ counter-readings of existing texts that can be read through a
gendered frame. There is a minority of non-binary individuals, trans folk, and
cisgendered men who are active in vidding, and I do not wish to claim this as
a uniquely and exclusively female space. That said, it is a critical orthodoxy
that media fandom is ‘predominantly’ (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995: 197) or even
‘overwhelmingly’ (Coppa 2009: 107; Mittell 2010: 377) ‘female-dominated’
(Lothian 2009: 131); that is, fanworks are highly likely to have been made by
women. The technical competence of women in fandom—and particularly
of vidders—provides an exception to a recurring presumption of masculine
8 For work on fan labour, see: De Kosnik (2013); Turk (2014); Busse (2015).
competence in relation to media technologies as seen in interactions with

VCRs (Gray 1992; Dinsmore 1998), computers in general (Seiter 1999), and
file-sharing networks and platforms (Newman 2012) that vidding fans can
use to distribute their work. This technical competence is apparent when
watching vids, from videotape editing to the sophisticated use of digital
effects, and in negotiating source material originally produced with many
different aspect ratios. Perhaps more significantly, and as discussed in
Chapter 5, vids provide textual evidence of a gendered point of view on
media texts.
The presumption that computer users are male means that downloading
episodes can be seen as a ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and masculinized
form of television consumption’ where ‘the culture of filesharing is part
of a wider development in which TV is shifting its location on the cultural
hierarchy from low and disreputable to a more legitimated level’ (Newman
2012: 465). It is ‘sophisticated and cosmopolitan’ because of the time and
effort needed to learn about these file-sharing networks as well as the
confidence and competence to successfully navigate them. This is contrary
to perspectives on television that observe a ‘feminine mode of viewing which
is distracted and lacking in concentration’ (Gray 1992: 126) but indeed is
closer to Gauntlett and Hill’s later findings that girls and women of all ages
were comfortable in using time-shifted and pre-recorded tapes to shape
their entertainment needs to their individual schedules (1999).
The masculinization of television access through peer-to-peer file sharing
has occurred concurrently with the rise of so-called ‘quality’ television,
typified by long-form serial narratives spearheaded by HBO’s original drama
productions (Newman and Levine 2012). Indeed, television shared over
peer-to-peer networks ‘tends to be the most highly valued and aestheticized,
scripted prime-time comedies and dramas addressed to younger, more
affluent, and masculine audiences’ (Newman 2012: 466). These ‘quality’
programmes are typically lauded for ‘challenging’ experimentations in
narrative and form (Caldwell 2005: 91), intensifying a form of drama that
‘rewards discrimination, style consciousness, and viewer loyalty’ (Caldwell
1995: 26). Vids offer textual traces of this loyal, intense viewing.
Shawn Shimpach argues that these ‘Stylistically exhibitionist, character-
driven narrative television programs have taken on a new sort of value’ both
culturally and critically (2010: 29). Charlotte Brunsdon points out that once
film scholars began to pay attention to ‘quality’ television, there has been
‘often a stress on the way in which television has become more cinematic,
or at least, less televisual’ (2010: 65), where critical acclaim is levied ‘via
metaphors to other media’, with the implication that these comparisons are
34 Fanvids
flattering to television (Mittell 2010: 369). This characterization of ‘good’

programmes as not ‘television’—typified by HBO’s slogan ‘It’s not TV, it’s
HBO’ (Nelson 2007)—is particularly troubling when, as Brunsdon argues
elsewhere, the rest of television is implicitly characterized as lesser, bad
(e.g. non-quality), and above all feminine: ‘The technologies may develop,
but the gendered metaphors through which they are thought persist’ (2008:
128). Previously, ‘quality’ had been used to assess whether a programme had
succeeded in relation to ‘technical and craft production values, delivery
of schedules in line with stated company policy, and responsiveness to
demands of those audiences indicated in the public or commercial remit
of the channel’ (Corner 1999: 106). In the post-HBO era, ‘quality’ has been
used as a label to elevate and defeminize an entire medium.
Despite the gendered implications of ‘quality’, which has regularly pre-
sumed a default male television viewer, the textual evidence provided by
fanworks suggests that women in media fandom actively engage with these
programmes. Battlestar Galactica, which is the focus of the vids discussed
in my final chapter, is an example of this kind of ‘quality’ programme: a
long-form serial narrative that is characterized by a genre hybridity and
style of narration well-suited to ‘undistracted viewing (e.g. via DVD, DVR, or
on-demand)’ in which many time-shifted episodes can be watched in a single
sitting (Shimpach 2010: 48). This format eliminates the need for extended
exposition sequences every episode, meaning this leaves narrative space for
character development and complex narratives.9 This practice of sustained
viewing was also a part of VCR viewership in media fandom (Bacon-Smith
1992). What is novel in ‘quality’ programmes is the development of serial
narratives that seem to encourage an existing practice.
Returning to technology, DVD releases reinforce a hierarchy of ‘quality’
and also cult programmes over ‘ordinary’ television that has not been re-
leased on home video (Hills 2007). This leads to questions of archival practice
in which DVD releases create a false sense of a complete archive, one that
reinforces the idea that only ‘the out-of-the-ordinary, the critically acclaimed,
and the internationally significant’ television is worthy of preservation,
leaving fare such as programmes for daytime viewing by women without
much record (Moseley and Wheatley 2008: 156). Bjarkman argues that
through tape-sharing, ‘Fans and collectors build countercanons to rival the
“classic” television canon, often conferring great value on failed series that
were denied a chance to develop or find an audience’ (2004: 226), a practice
9 Glen Creeber has called this tendency ‘the “soap operaisation” of long-form television drama’
(2004: 13).
that has broadened beyond specialized tape collectors with digitization

enabling a more mainstream ‘curation’ of television (Robinson 2017). These
forgotten programmes can find a new life through fannish attention. For
example, vids made from digital transfers of off-air videotape recordings
increase the visibility of such a series. Vids of this sort also advertise the
existence of digital versions of episodes that might be shared, either ripped
by a vidder from DVD or DVR or obtained through other methods including
downloading.10 While Denzell Richards notes the value of file-sharing and
DVD releases, such that ‘new works such as fan videos can be created from
the digital archive of already existing materials’ (2010: 186), the existence
of a digital archive is not treated as unusual, and the implications of the
vid as archivally derived are not explored. Similarly, in Abigail De Kosnik’s
Rogue Archives (2016), vids are mentioned as examples of works that fans
have archived, not that fans use their archives to make vids in the first place.
As Jason Mittell argues, digital technologies give viewers ‘even more
immediate power to replay and redistribute images’ (2010: 6). Where VCRs
and digital recorders permit the skipping of advertising breaks and DVD
box sets present a sequence of episodes in an ad-free sequence, users who
share digital files of television episodes through peer-to-peer networks
have access to television via a method that is beyond the authorization of
broadcasters or producers.11 Vidders who distribute their works online as
digital files, uploading their vids to video streaming sites and using other
digital distribution methods, represent another use of file-sharing. As with
vidders’ VCR use (explored more in Chapters 3 and 4), this is not a majority
practice but is important to note for how it intersects with narratives of
online norms.
Televisual Flow, Segmentation, and Technologies of Control
Vidding is evidence of one way that control over watching television can
be extended into imagining a use for recorded television beyond viewing
or re-viewing episodes. At its core, the experience of watching television is
about encountering a sequence of segments in a ‘flow’, be that a programme
10 For work on downloading television, see: Strangelove (2005, 2015); May (2007); Lewis (2007);
Fisher and Harlow (2006); Leaver (2008); Newman (2012); Hamari, Sjöklint, and Ukkonen (2016);
Bisoni (2016); Crisp (2017); and Bury (2017).
11 For work on legal matters relating to fanworks, see: Murray (2004); Tushnet (2007); and
Lothian (2009).
36 Fanvids
punctuated by ads and bracketed with station idents or a single episode

watched with an understanding of ongoing narrative and character arcs.
File-sharing of television episodes by-passes this flow and values the
individual episode above the experience of ‘ordinary’ television but also
potentially perpetuates a persistent scepticism about television’s value. Yet
vids are possible because of the changing form and shape of television, from
home videocassette recording through to digital video. Audience control
over watching television, theorized as ways of controlling that flow, also
provides the technological tools for making vids, from off-air recording onto
VCRs or digital video ripped from DVD/DVR (or downloaded) to be edited
on a computer or tablet. The attentive fannish mode of watching televi-
sion identifies individual moments of significance due to their narrative
relevance, aesthetic appeal, and actors’ gestures and body language. Even
when vids are made from films or videogames, their logic is governed by
a mode associated with watching television: identifying and segmenting
meaningful moments from the source material. Vids fragment the linear
presentation of television segments; their re-assembly presents these frag-
ments in an intensified sequence, guided by the linear temporality of the
vid’s pop song soundtrack.
What I want to draw out here is that televisual flow, however it is encoun-
tered, is about compiling segments of televisual material. Raymond Williams
(1974) proposed ‘flow’ as a metaphor for the experience of watching television
during the network era, and it has endured as the central scholarly metaphor
for theorizing how we watch television despite changes in industry and
technology. For example, DVD box sets (see Kompare 2006) and streaming
services (Perks 2015; Jenner 2017) are discussed in terms of how they alter
broadcast flow, that is, how they alter the experience of watching television.
Although Williams argued that flow describes the ‘discrete units’ (1974: 88)
of programming promised by a broadcast schedule that are instead delivered
with unannounced interruptions such as advertising breaks, later writers
felt this compromised neither programme coherence (as experienced as
‘segments’; Ellis 1982) nor viewers’ ability to ‘construct meaningful relations
between the disparate elements’ (Gripsrud 1998: 27). Similarly, the coherence
of vids rests on their audience making connections between the fragmented
segments of the video source. Changes to network-era programming that
occurred as multichannel broadcasting took hold in the 1980s came about
alongside technological developments—remote control, VCR, tapes, etc.—
that made viewer activity ‘highly mobile and unpredictable’ (Uricchio 2004:
171) in a context where a fragmenting programming flow was superseded
by ‘audience/user “flows”’ (Caldwell 2003: 136). Helen Wood develops the
concept of ‘user flows’, noting that developments in television technology

make it more possible to ‘rupture’ television’s linear flow, offering audiences
the potential to experience television as ‘navigable space’ (2007: 489).12
Vids provide textual traces of vidders’ navigation—literal and semiotic—
through their source video, as each clip has been carefully selected for its
narrative and/or aesthetic significance. Borrowing David Bordwell’s concept
of ‘intensified continuity’ (2002), developed to characterize post-classical
Hollywood films that maintain yet intensify the classical era’s established
codes and conventions, I propose that vids are a form of intensified television.
Vidders take the segmented fragmentation of television to the extreme through
the agency that they have been given through industry practices, including
technologies of control. While vids are now made digitally—DVDs and digital
files provide source material and distribution methods—the form’s origins
are in videotape. Taking videotape as an antecedent to digital time-shifting,
and mindful of vidders’ use of these devices, the development of the vid text
reveals a continuity of the experience and use of television. The VCR is the
tool by which audiences first achieved personal control over programme
units, and its digital successors have not significantly changed these practices.
By the mid-1970s, while Williams was theorizing the experience of watch-
ing broadcast television, domestic VCRs meant audiences could record
programmes to watch later (time-shifting) or elsewhere (‘place-shifting’;
Bjarkman 2004), or they could rent/buy pre-recorded videocassettes. This
portability of segments of broadcast flow also allowed the viewer to construct
a composite sequence out of their recordings for ‘compressed multiple-
episode viewing’ (Bacon-Smith 1992: 130), a practice that was given ‘the
somatic metaphor of “bingeing”’ after the advent of DVD box sets (Brunsdon
2010: 64-65).13 Sony’s Betamax was marketed as a subversion of television
schedules ‘that would take control away from programmers and give it
back to the consumers’ (Wasser 2001: 83), though these consumers would
not have had control over what was broadcast. However, the technologies
of recording and playback that enable this control—videorecorders, DVDs,
personal computers—also provided the means for making vids, as they also
enable creation, which I will discuss later.
12 This echoes Newcomb and Hirsch’s description of audiences’ navigation of television

schedules in which ‘the viewer selects, examines, acknowledges, and makes texts of his or her
own’ (1983/2000: 570).
13 The popularity of Netflix and other on-demand internet streaming services, which have
supplanted the DVD in recent years, has led to critical reflections on binge-watching (Perks
2015; Mikos 2016; Jenner 2018); though it should be noted that watching television in this way
began with videotape (Stevens 2020).
38 Fanvids
Digital television and digital viewership call for an update of the concepts
of flow, broadcasting, and other metaphors. Two digital metaphors used to
describe newer ways of accessing televisual texts are ‘streaming’ (a linear
branching-off from a main channel) and ‘downloading’ (a spatial figur-
ing of the unit of programming as a discrete entity). James Bennett (2008)
argued that the ‘database’ potential of BBC’s then-new iPlayer platform
fundamentally disrupts television’s flow and turns the television ‘viewer’ into
a ‘user’. However, the same ‘viewers into users’ shift has also been claimed
for the advent of videotape by Lucas Hilderbrand (2009: 18). Where ‘database’
implies the administration of information about television as a catalogue of
titles (and/or airdates, ratings, content summaries, genres, etc.), in Chapter 4
I work with the term ‘archive’. The selection process of material to include
in one’s archive, the varying degrees of permanence—off-air recordings,
streamed episodes, downloads with or without an expiry date, purchases of
pre-recorded media—and the idiosyncratic manifestation and arrangement of
the objects themselves require terminology that can bridge the material and
the immaterial to include videotape and discs with digitally recorded media.
The VCR and the devices that followed continue to alter the experience of
watching television and raise questions surrounding the amateur archiving
and preservation of television content. Vitally, time-shifting creates copies of
programmes that the viewer then can control and manipulate and thereby
obtain the raw material for vid-making. In a classic study of British women’s
use of VCRs in the 1980s, Ann Gray found that short-term time-shifting was
normal but that longer-term archiving was much less common. This was
partially due to a lack of time to re-watch programmes but also because
responses indicated that once a story ‘is known, there seems little point
in re-engaging with the text’ (1992: 216). Wood notes that this tendency
to watch-and-delete persists when assessing the digital videorecorder as
a potential archive (2007: 499). However, the appeal of keeping up with a
series as it is broadcast/released is only one of the pleasures of television. As
discussed throughout this book, vidding suggests a sustained engagement
with texts’ visual pleasures and demonstrates the pleasures of re-working
televisual narratives. Vids are evidence of an alternative and attentive use
of this domestic technology by a largely female audience.
Vids should be better recognized as a part of home video history. An
essential context for vids is the increased opportunities for audiences to
assert control over their experience of television. The vid form represents
an extreme, intensified version of this control and is its textual evidence:
vids’ critical analyses are enabled by, and leave traces of, the engagement
allowed by evolving television and home video technologies. Jonathan
Gray describes fanworks’ non-linear re-presentation of their source texts

as ‘plotting a course through a narrative and leaving tracks for others to
follow’ (2010: 154): in other words, vids are a way of reading a text outside of
flow. If, as Helen Wood (2007) argues, television has become ‘navigable’, vids
construct a map detailing points of interest such as ‘specific characters and
relationships’ (Gray 2010: 154) but also, through multifandom vids, tropes
and trends in representation more broadly.
Vidding tends to be a marginal practice even within fandom, in part
due to the economic barriers to obtaining and updating video-editing
equipment and to building the related skills and confidence. In vidding’s
early days, Constance Penley (1991) observed that it was far easier for a fan
to access print technologies than video equipment, as the former might be
used clandestinely in one’s workplace but the latter would require a personal
investment and space within one’s home. For some fans, the solution was to
make vids collaboratively, sharing the economic burden and presumably the
pleasure of working with like-minded friends.14 The vid Pressure (Sterling
Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990) humorously details the laborious
process involved in making a Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993) vid. Pressure
contains self-shot footage of the vidders and their ‘rudimentary’ (Stein
2006: 249) tools such as stacked videotapes, snaking cables, and audio- and
video-cassette players, making this work a ‘unique record […] of the specific
technological difficulties of VCR vidding’ (Coppa 2008: 4.4). It is a clear
performance of the vidders’ technological competence and has been shown
at conventions even decades later as a curiosity and as a testament to how
fannish women once used their domestic video technologies.
While John T. Caldwell argues that flow is a reminder that ‘television
is […] about the experience of viewing extended, composite sequences
comprised of a succession of texts’ (2004: 63-64), this is an experience that
vidders subvert to obtain their source material. Vidders engage with single
programmes, and vids are evidence of this engagement outside of flow. The
isolation of the episode is performed not only cognitively but also practically
and materially, when the episode itself is fully extracted from the flow (for
storage, sale, rental, or ad-free digital access).
In summary, the idea of televisual flow as a sequence of segments and the
resulting need to account for programmes within this context are important
14 Several vids I screened during my research were produced collaboratively, including Who
Can It Be Now? (Kathleen Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985), A Fannish Taxonomy
of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005) and On the Prowl (sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010). Tisha Turk
(2010) examines collaborative processes in vidding.
40 Fanvids
for understanding what exactly vids are made from. Vids were developed
through the re-use of television material, and uses of home video technology
in relation to broadcast television first enabled the practice. While this has
broadened to include other media, the vid form can best be understood
through television and domestic media technologies.
Audiences’ use of videotape as an archival medium is part of their con-
tinually changing relationship with the texts of television broadcasting.
The vid form is textual proof of fans using the tools at their disposal to
intervene, respond, and create in a context wherein they have no official
role. This began with fans using the home video technology at their disposal:
VCRs dramatically affected the audience relationship with both films and
television programmes, signalling the ability to manipulate and create
personalized flows. This book is grounded in television studies; it also draws
on and is contextualized by work from fandom studies and other fields in
its approach to the vid form’s relationship with archives, visual pleasure,
and adaptation.
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2 Approach: How to Study a Vid
Abstract
A vid offers more than just access to the specific interpretive work of
the person who created it. The vid is a robust and complete form that
is capable of withstanding analysis independent of detailed knowledge
of either the source material or the vidder’s own interpretive motives/
beliefs. This chapter discusses the approach to textual analysis taken in
Fanvids and reveals what can be learned from studying vids as texts unto
themselves. This chapter also explores canon formation in television/
media studies and how this can apply to studying a marginal form. This
chapter finishes with a discussion of the canons of vids that are formed
through fan convention programming.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, methodology
The goal of this book is to take the vid seriously as a form in its own right,
with its own formal history and aesthetic strategies. Accordingly, I have
approached vids primarily through textual analysis, as is conventional
for a study largely grounded in television studies. I began my research by
viewing vids of all genres and made out of diverse source material: from
television, film, and other visual sources. To this end, I accessed digital files
streamed online, my personal collection of vid files, vidshows (screenings)
at vidding-focused fan conventions, and DVD compilations of vids included
in convention memberships and sold by individual vidders. I estimate that
I have watched at least 2,000 unique vids in the course of my research. I did
not undertake formal structured interviews, nor did I circulate surveys or
otherwise attempt a comprehensive audience study. Instead, I attended
these events as a fan and as a researcher, freely disclosing my academic
purposes and participating in convention panel discussions to share my
work. I acknowledge the limitations of this approach, which gives preference
to the media form. I also acknowledge the limitations of the study in terms of
geography and race. My experience of fanworks and fan spaces (both online
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch02
50 Fanvids
and offline) as well as the critical work on fans and fandoms that informs
this research is Anglo-American, predominantly white, female-dominated,
and exclusively focused on the English language.
Television studies is an appropriate frame for studying the vid form, as
the discipline offers ways of thinking about mode of address, sequential
narratives, and the textuality of video forms. Derived from television and
film sources, vids are neither television episodes nor films. Vids rely on songs
to create and structure meaning but are not abstract illustrations of songs.
Vids remake narratives for an attentive audience with a deep knowledge
of the source text or of the conventions of vidding, or both. While vids are
presently created digitally and are distributed online and at fan conventions,
the pre-digital antecedents of the form were made through media fans’ use
of media as an extension of their experience of television. However, this book
was not meant to be a deep examination of the practice of making vids as
much as an exploration of the vid form itself. As vids are neither film nor
television, I was compelled to adapt some of the standard approaches to the
close study of moving images to perform this analysis and occasionally to
develop a novel approach to pursue my questions about this form.
Academic engagement with vids has tended to position these fanworks as
examples of feminist and/or queer re-textualization (Coppa 2008; Ng 2008)
or as an entry point to a discussion of the works’ context in a particular

fandom (Lothian 2009; Stein 2010; Freund 2010; Nadkarni 2017), but it is less
common to approach vids as works of art/culture in and of themselves. Much
of this work comes from within fandom studies, which is a field historically
more interested in fanfiction than in vidding, perhaps due to disciplinary
biases and the less prominent place of vidding within fandom. Using textual
analysis enables me to attend to the vids themselves and to understand them
as: a) works of historiography that construct textual histories of ongoing
televisual and filmic narratives; b) works of art and culture that expose and
distil the forms of pleasure and fascination that viewers may find in the
media text; and c) works of criticism that construct a coherent argument
about a text, genre, or film/programme-making practice.
As a scholar who is also a fan of vids and vidding, this approach resonates
with my personal experience of vidding in which the form is understood
within fandom as a kind of audio-visual play, critique, and resistance. Of
course, my academic grounding in television and f ilm studies offers a
complementary suite of skills: an understanding of semiotics as a set of
tools with which to approach visual media; a perspective on media texts
that frames them as works of art and culture that operate on ‘ideological
machinery’ (Gray and Lotz 2012: 38); and the significance of audiences and
Approach: How to Study a Vid 51
production contexts (Casey et al. 2008) in understanding the complexities

of media texts. My purpose is not to provide a definitive historical overview
of vidding fandom or to contribute a meaningful ethnographic account
centred on this form of fanwork but to spend time with vids themselves.
My use of textual analysis is a turn that has also recently been taken
in the analysis of television, in addition to sociological or cultural studies
methods to the medium (see Caldwell 1995; Jacobs 2001; Creeber 2004;
Wheatley 2006; Shimpach 2010; Cardwell 2013; Jacobs and Peacock 2013).
Similarly, Steve Bailey proposes that textual analysis is an appropriate
method for studying fanworks, arguing that fanworks ‘offer particular
access to the interpretive work central to the fan experience’ (2005: 50).
However, the access offered by textual analysis is not just to the specific
interpretive work of the individual who created a particular vid but to the
meanings that are drawn out through analysis. As such, to borrow a phrase
from Helen Wheatley’s discussion of textual analysis in television studies,
I employ this method to ‘dwell […] on illuminating moments’ (2006: 21) in
vids to show how these meanings are created and how they may be read.
This approach to vids is found in Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately
(2010: 153-161). Discussing three vids, Gray describes how in each example
the clip choice with song lyrics guides the viewer’s interpretation of the
vid—akin to how marginalia guides a reader through a printed text, ‘leaving
tracks for others to follow’ (2010: 154)—which allows the viewer time and
space to reflect on character development in excess of what the source text
provided. Significantly, Gray’s analysis of the vids precedes his discussion of
vidders’ reflection on their practices. By first presenting vids as texts in their
own right, Gray takes these works seriously as critical objects for analysis. A
textual analysis of television implicitly includes ‘an awareness’ of audiences
and contexts (Casey et al. 2008: 289) if not always a deep study of those
audiences themselves. Close readings of texts will not lead to conclusions
about the subculture itself; however, the specific production context of vids
and what their existence reveals about conceptions of active audiences do
lead to a more nuanced understanding of a vid’s mode of address which
itself assumes an attentive, engaged viewer.
A textual analysis of media, as developed in relation to the study of films
(which in turn has its origins in the study of literature) and later applied
to television and other media, is fundamentally grounded in the scholar’s
understanding of the text in question and its cultural context. V.F. Perkins
argued in the foundational text Film as Film: Understanding and Judging
Movies (1972) that his approach is intended ‘to redirect attention to the movie
as it is seen, by shifting the emphasis back from creation to perception’,
52 Fanvids
where scholarly description is used to present and analyse the work ‘as it
exists for the spectator’ (1972: 27). Perkins writes that the interpretation of
films is done ‘in two ways, on the basis of its form and on the basis of our
experience’ (1972: 174). These bases together are the indivisible essence of
the approach, and the person of the critic/scholar is therefore very much a
part of the process. Indeed, he argues that ‘A descriptive analysis will need
at least to make claims about the distribution of the film’s emphasis; and
emphasis is as subjectively perceived, relies as much on a personal response,
as judgement’ (Perkins 1972: 191). Though Perkins does not unpack these
concepts of experience and subjective perception, the notion that personal
response will be informed by the context and experience of the critic/
scholar is therefore an understood and expected part of this approach.
Within the disciplines of film and television studies, this point often goes
unstated. Therefore, let me be clear: my experiences and perceptions of
vids have been informed by my experiences in fandom just as much as my
academic training. In the particular case of vids, as media fandom is not
as mainstream as ‘watching television’ or ‘going to the cinema’, I discuss
the potential for using concepts drawn from auto-ethnography to inform
a more classic textual analysis later in this chapter.
What Perkins argues for f ilm is also implicitly part of the strand of
television studies that focuses on televisual aesthetics (such as Zettl 1978;
Caldwell 1995; Cardwell 2006; Jacobs 2006; Creeber 2013; Jacobs and Peacock
2013), which relies on textual analysis as a methodology and which is also
grounded in a subject position (cf. Davies and Harré 1990) conscious of the
intimacy of critical perception. This work is part of an ongoing assertion
that television is ‘worthy of the kind of study that closely examines aspects
of style’ (Cardwell 2013: 23). Perkins’s work is part of that same process in
which film gained a similar status (as art worthy of aesthetic analysis). I
claim for vids a similar distinction: though derived from existing media, the
vid form is no less capable of withstanding similarly rigorous scholarship.
Corpus Selection
As mentioned earlier, I have watched hundreds of vids over the course of

my research. At vidding conventions, which I started attending in 2010, it
was common to watch 200 vids in a weekend. Given this bounty of potential
examples, a comprehensive survey of all vids was beyond the scope of a
study aimed at critically engaging with the form’s potential. Ultimately,
this book discusses approximately (only) 75 vids. Selecting a manageable
corpus involved deciding how to present and share these texts for an
academic audience unfamiliar with their existence, history, or potential
pleasures. In relation to television studies, Jonathan Bignell points out
that choosing to write about a particular series means that it ‘becomes an
example representing a larger context and history’ (2005: 16). Vids’ context
and history are not as immediately apparent as are those of other media
forms, contingent as they are on some degree of (sub)cultural familiarity.
Instead of attempting a systematic sampling, I chose examples that were
typical of broader tropes and genres of vidding.
When discussing films or television programmes, it is generally accepted
that the critic or scholar will have a wide viewing experience and general
knowledge of similar texts in order to determine exemplarity, and the
contextual viewing which informs these selections is accepted without
the need for further explication. However, as vids exist at the fringes of a
subculture, I will now discuss the scale of vid production. Vidders currently
offer their works for download and/or as streamed files; I make a habit of
downloading vids to an external hard drive as assurance against the loss
of web hosting and to allow for off-line research. This is complemented
by a DVD collection comprising vidders’ own releases as well as DVD sets
from a number of fan conventions including the vid-specific conventions
VividCon and VidUKon. Conventions are significant sites for encountering
new (‘premiering’) vids, with VividCon at its height premiering an average
of 100 vids each year. However, there are multiple starting points of vid
circulation, including the annual Festivids vid exchange and the recently
established Equinox exchange as well as vidders posting new works as they
are completed independent of an event release.15
In the initial phase of this study, I attended six vidding-focused conven-
tions: VividCon 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014 and VidUKon 2013 and 2014.16 I
did not attend these events purely as a researcher, though I was open about
my academic work and affiliations. From my prior experience in fandom, I
15 Festivids is an anonymous exchange that has run annually since 2009, modelled on similar
exchanges of other forms of fanworks, based on a Secret Santa format. Participants offer a list of
fandoms that they would be happy to use as source material, indicating the kinds of vids they
would like to receive in return. The number of vids produced in each exchange has regularly
exceeded 150; in 2013, there were 205 vids created for this event. Equinox, running biannually
(in the spring and fall), began in fall 2017. Unlike Festivids, which focuses on ‘rare’ fandoms,
each Equinox event is based on a theme that allows for work made out of more popular source.
16 As listed in the convention programme books, the total number of vids (new and already
existing) screened during each convention was as follows: VividCon 2010: 291 vids; VividCon
2011: 293 vids; VividCon 2012: 290 vids; VividCon 2014: 262 vids; VidUKon 2013: 169 vids; VidUKon
2014: 185 vids.
54 Fanvids
knew these events would be my best chance of seeing a substantial number

of new vids and of experiencing them as part of an engaged audience. I have
continued to attend VidUKon annually, and I have updated my corpus for
this project as warranted by its evolving focus.
Through the course of this cumulative viewing, key themes emerged
around questions of historiography, fascination, and critical adaptations.
It is neither possible nor necessary to view every vid ever made in order
to produce a critical analysis of the vid form, just as it is impossible and
unnecessary to view every film ever made in order to write about film.
Nonetheless, extensive viewing can reveal key thematic trends. Out of this
research, I selected a relatively modest number of vids to use as representa-
tive examples.
Canon Formation in a Marginal Practice
One particular challenge of the academic study of marginal forms is being

aware of what is at stake in selecting a few (or a few dozen) exemplary works
and the risk of mis-representing a long history of iterative fan practice.
Additionally, to borrow a positioning disclaimer from Anne Kustritz’s study
of fanworks, I focus on the transformative works made by a group that
organizes and understands itself as a community, while acknowledging
these practices may well be present in adjacent communities beyond the
scope of this study (see Kustritz 2014: 226n1). One important context of
fanworks of this type is the assumption, supported by empirical research
produced over several decades, that the producers and audiences of vids
are very likely to be women; therefore, it is reasonable to understand vids
as originating in a context of female authorship and spectatorship.
The canon of vids I have constructed in this project is a by-product of the
selections necessary to present a pointed—not comprehensive—overview
of vids. The examples enable me to explore particularly interesting and
critically significant aspects of the vid as text (as outlined in each chapter/
case study) rather than trying to offer an exhaustive analysis of the vid as
textual or cultural form. Through the process of extensive viewing, these
critical themes emerged as the most pressing and important. Ultimately,
the limitations of viewing some vids and not others have determined these
critical foci. As Bignell (2005) notes, access to texts does determine one’s
choice of examples, which can imply comprehensive evaluation and judge-
ment beyond the samples available. I screened the VCR vids analysed in
my first chapter from DVD compilations of older works made available at
VividCon by Kandy Fong, but these represent only a portion of the vid form’s
textual history; for example, more work must be done in exploring archival
records of fan conventions. While I tend to discuss vids as individual works
(which is how fans talk about vids), the convention vidshow and the DVD
offer individual vids to viewers as part of curated sequences. However, much
as a television scholar will often isolate programme segments from its flow
(broadcast or otherwise) in order to discuss that one programme, I extract
my vid examples from their initial distribution while acknowledging here
the many routes a vid may have to its audience.
Vids discussed in existing literature form the beginnings of an academic
canon. John Ellis’s definition of criteria for inclusion in a canon—‘that a text
should be amenable to use beyond the confines of the historical context
in which it was generated’ (2007: 25)—in relation to the vid form suggests
that ‘historical context’ could be not just a temporal periodization but also
a way of addressing the comprehensibility of vids for audiences who might
not know the source material. For example, God Is A DJ (Dualbunny, 2006)
as a text has fans distinct from fans of its source material. It was shown
during VidUKon 2011, with the VJ’s note in the programme saying of the
vid’s central character ‘I like her even though I’ve never seen the show’.
This is also a useful reminder that the form of textual analysis common to
film and television studies includes a critical awareness of a work’s context.
While the majority of vids discussed at length in this volume have not
been addressed in scholarship, I do return to some works—Closer, A Fannish
Taxonomy of Hotness, and On the Prowl—that already have an academic
presence, thereby affirming their canonical nature. For example, On the
Prowl offers a female narrative voice in its soundtrack that textually re-
frames its sequence of male bodies in pain to one explicitly seen through
a female gaze. One might make sense of this in reference to the fannish
concept-cum-genre-cum-trope of ‘hurt/comfort’ (cf. Larsen and Zubernis
2012; S.F. Winters 2012), but the vid itself is also a coherent work that intensi-
fies a form of spectatorship and spectatorial pleasure. Perhaps the emerging
canonical texts in vid scholarship are, like the fannish slash genre, those
that require some further explanation to those unfamiliar with the norms
and conventions of fanworks, in order to unpack their sociological import
(or to place the examples within a subcultural framework). Once that initial
work is done, it becomes possible to take a step back and evaluate the vid
form as texts on their own with something to offer in and of themselves.
A less significant criterion for academic canon formation is the popularity
of a text, which affects its visibility as a potential research subject. The
number of scholarly studies of The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008), for example,
56 Fanvids
suggests that critical acclaim and strong personal feeling are not unrelated
to the formation of an academic canon of media texts. According to the
VividCon database Vividcon.info, the vid A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness
was its most-shown vid, having been shown ten times; God Is A DJ was shown
nine times. This frequency is not the reason I chose these particular vids,
nor did popularity determine which vids I decided to use as my examples.
However, convention programmers choosing to include these particular vids
year after year does indicate something of these works’ clarity of authorial
intent and the effectiveness of their emotional appeals. In this case, the
academic canon and fannish canon overlap.
How to Study a Vid
In practice, the textual analysis of vids is similar to other qualitative ap-

proaches. Qualitative methods allow for a rich analysis that can draw out
a vid’s textual density, whereas content analysis would break apart a vid
to count its constituent parts, and would consequently break down the
juxtapositions that are the core of a vid’s meanings. The method of textual
analysis laid out by Perkins, described earlier, enables an approach that is
involved, interested, and passionate.
I have also largely limited my study to vids themselves. Vids can be
released with written commentary, detailing vidders’ process and intention,
with the conversation continuing in comments. While these authorial
statements and other forms of critical commentary can affect how a vid is
understood by its audience, it can never be guaranteed that even a fannish
viewer will have access to this contextualizing documentation. Indeed, as my
purpose is to view vids as works of art and culture that speak for themselves,
I do not analyze this material, which one might call the vids’ own paratexts.
With vidding, when commentary is presented with a vid, it is in the manner
of an artist’s statement or technical notes, not as a marketing tool or matrix
of assorted cultural information that leads up to one’s consumption of a
specific film or television series (per Gray 2010). If a vid could have its own
paratexts rather than merely being a paratext for its source material, a vid’s
paratext could arguably be an interest in the source, the song, and/or the
vidder. For my purposes, I take a vid as a self-contained object of study,
albeit one enmeshed in a web of contextualizing, intertextual information.
This web of information contributes to vids’ semiotic density. Vids
are read on several layers simultaneously: as a complete object based on
recognition of the context of the source clips both within a narrative and
in wider cultural conversations but also structured by the song’s lyrics.

Coppa argues that a vid’s song functions as ‘an interpretive lens’ (2008: 1.1)
that explicates a vid’s purpose. Inspired by foundational work from Roland
Barthes (1964) and John Berger (1972) exploring how text is used to direct
and limit the possible interpretations of a still image, I approach a vid’s song
as a caption that focuses the viewer’s interpretation and understanding.
The layers of meaning created in vids are accomplished through this aural
captioning. For example, in the multifandom vid A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (Skud, 2010), we are shown female characters from eighteenth/
nineteenth-century set media behaving in an unladylike fashion, without
concern for social convention. The vid’s use of Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’
captions these unruly women to give a collective voice to their defiance (‘I
don’t give a damn’) and not to condemn them. Amongst a range of other
contextual clues that suggest this vid is affirming a feminist position, the
song offers a narrowing to focus that interpretive lens on a particular range
of signification. While a more detailed exploration of the use of music in
vids is part of my final chapter, this captioning is at the core of how every
vid makes its meaning.
My use of textual analysis also mirrors my understanding of vids as
fundamentally the result of fans’ own close textual analyses of media texts.
I take this mode of viewing and creative practice as fandom’s own evidence
in support of contemporary television studies scholarship that ‘refutes
previous claims that television is a medium which defies intense analysis,
and which is subject to a distracted glance, rather than a more concentrated
gaze’ (Wheatley 2006: 21). Vids intensify that concentrated gaze: indeed,
they are textual evidence of it. Further, Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel
(2008) note that the ability to re-watch television texts on video (and now
digitally) was fundamental to the development of feminist textual analysis
of television and that the same domestic VCR technology is also what first
enabled vidding (see also Chapter 1). They conclude that ‘In this sense, textual
analysis is not just a critical mode but is also related to the production of
art and the cultures surrounding women’s investments in television series
more generally’ (Brunsdon and Spigel 2008: 8), making textual analysis an
apt methodology to explicate the mechanics of this dense form. Jason Mittell
similarly observed that recent ‘complex’ television encourages concentrated
viewing beyond scholarship and fandom, ‘convert[ing] many viewers to
amateur narratologists’ (2006: 38). The heterogeneity of television requires
a method that pays close attention to the specifics of a text through close
reading, and a similar range of vid genres, vidders, presumed audiences, and
distribution/exhibition contexts requires the same consideration.
58 Fanvids
However, as Bailey (2005) notes, textual analysis can be effective in

the study of fandoms when complemented by other methods. In contrast
to previous work on vids that use their examples to inform ethnographic
analyses, I include occasional observations where appropriate to help frame
the production and cultural context of the vid. These are not based on
structured interviews but on my experiences as a long-time participant
in media fandom. Whereas textual analysis implicitly allows the scholar’s
selection of texts to be guided, as Perkins (1972) argues, by individual taste
and judgement, the reflexive methodology of auto-ethnography could
enable a more explicitly personal voice throughout a project. Therefore, a
small reflection on auto-ethnography is warranted, as it is impossible to
determine the relative degree to which the systems of value and taste that
inform my critical perspective on vids have been formed by my scholastic
experience and my experience in fandom. Auto-ethnography is a form of
narrative inquiry that draws out lived experiences through a variety of
approaches and strategies, in which self-narration enables analysis and/
or interpretation of one’s own culture (Ellis and Bochner 1996; Denzin and
Lincoln 2000; Chang 2008). An auto-ethnographic approach might lend
certain insights into the culture of vidding from my subject position as a
vidfan and not someone who makes vids herself. However, I intended an
investigation of the vid as a textual form within a disciplinary framework
in which the scholar’s subject position is already a part.
A potential critique of Perkins’s version of academic film criticism—which
presumes an uncomplicated congruence between the theoretical spectator
and Perkins himself—is that his experience and therefore his judgements
are less applicable to those who occupy different subjectivities. As I am a
white cisgendered woman active in media fandom, I present interpretations
of vids for a theoretical spectator who is congruent with my experience.
However, I am aware that my focus on vids as texts in their own right allows
me to ‘“default” to the norm [of fandom studies], which remains white,
middle class, cisgender, and American’ (Pande 2016: 210), as my study has
engaged with the production or reception of vids with a level of detail that
would help me complicate that default. By acknowledging this bias, I mean
to offer my reader an analysis of vids that is consciously informed by that
experience. I work from a mode of viewing that I perceive to be typical but
not (as with Perkins) presumptively universal.
Ultimately, my purpose is not to record how vidding operates within
fandom but to situate these works within a broader textual context while
recognizing their particular production and distribution context (just as
one would do with any text under study). This involved finding ways to
articulate the pleasures and insights of vids within an academic frame and
to evaluate points of scholarly interest and not attempting to recreate each
vid in written form. Reading vids as a scholar and a fan has meant balancing
the vid’s affective emotional appeals with a critical analysis of the texts.
This also means I decided to emphasize vids—the form, through selected
examples—as opposed to vidding, the practice in its (sub-)cultural context.
The process of performing a textual analysis of a vid poses its own chal-
lenge. Vids are such dense works that to slow down a vid for analysis—rather
than experiencing the work in its usual impressionistic rush of image and
sound—distorts it even as it is rendered a more visible object of study. In
the course of my research, I attempted a range of approaches to determine a
suitable process for closely reading vids. I first tried to alter the vids’ playback
speed in order to consider the connections made through editing; I found
myself regularly pausing playback to take notes, replaying short sections,
and muting the volume to minimize the distraction caused by slowing
the audio. In some instances, I found it helpful to take hundreds of screen
captures per vid and create comprehensive ‘contact sheets’ for each work
to enable close analysis of a sequence.
This method enabled me to take the time to evaluate a vid’s complex
structure and to move non-linearly through the vid. The contact sheet also
acted as viewing notes, as a visual account of each vid’s content. Depending
on the rate of screen capture, this could operate like a storyboard, offering a
representation of camera movement or clip duration. More usually, this aided
in the identification and analysis of clips themselves. By creating contact
sheets for the vids under analysis, I could clearly see that in the vid’s opening
sequence, both the beginning and (near) end of the series is represented. For
example, in looking at my contact sheet for I’m Not Dead (Dualbunny, 2009),
it became easy to see where clips from the initial miniseries and the final
season of Battlestar Galactica were placed against each other in the opening
of the vid. A final consequence of using contact sheets is that its creation of
print-based research material enabled me to work away from computer or
television screen. After working with contact sheets, which helped me to
see a vid’s composition, when I returned to re-watch the vid in its entirety,
my focus would then shift to the soundtrack, and I could attend more fully
to its tight juxtapositions of image and sound.
Apart from this intensive analysis, I watched many vids in a more casual
fashion, including on DVD, streamed online, as digital files, and at conven-
tions. At vid-focused conventions I have attended, vidshows are screened in
darkened hotel meeting rooms, with the attendees seated in rows of chairs
facing a large screen at one end of the room. This arrangement of space
60 Fanvids
mimics the physical relationship of audience to screen in a cinema. Indeed,

the present viewing culture at vid-focused conventions asks the audience to
remain seated and silent during screenings, recalling the focus and intensity of
Christian Metz’s traditional model of ‘silent, motionless’ cinema spectatorship
(1986: 96).17 While discussion during the vidshow is discouraged, applause is
expected between vids and laughter (or other affective utterances) encour-
aged. Attentiveness to the mood in a room and discussion after a vidshow
was part of how I learned to read vids. The exception was VividCon’s Club
Vivid vidshow, an evening event in which the furniture in the convention
screening room is moved to allow dancing and conversation, accompanied
by a three-hour programme of vids with up-tempo soundtracks.
While at conventions, I also watched vids in the convention hotel room.
These semi-public spaces were used for informal convention programming
where the vidshows’ strict viewing rules are relaxed, sharing vids on laptop,
DVD, or via output cable to the room’s television. A vidder can use this space
to share works in progress; the convention attendees can dip into the conven-
tion’s own vid library; and it can also be the location for a vid-focused room
party. In such events, attention to the vids would wane as discussion arose
around the series and characters represented, with vids in this case almost
resembling a traditional understanding of television as casual and domestic,
‘watched without great intensity or continuity of attention’ (Ellis 1982: 146),
though striking moments in a vid would refocus our attention on the screen.
I have found that this informal middle ground acts as a space to perform and
affirm interpretive norms, such as commenting on unusual pairings or source
material, drawing attention to effective editing and song choice, and noting
effective or otherwise pleasurable vids. These different scales of viewing, with
different audiences and degrees of distraction, provided contrasting environ-
ments and contexts through which to analyse the vid’s form and content.
Conclusion
Therefore, my approach to the vid form is grounded in textual analysis, with

the goal of taking the vid form seriously as a text. Through an extensive
17 This code of behaviour has evolved from earlier vid screening practices, which reportedly
revealed a tension between experiencing the vid as a creative work on its own and the use of
a vid to prompt discussion: ‘They can’t take the complex ones in a large group. They get hyper.
They aren’t concentrating that deeply. They want to all laugh together or they want to share
their feelings’ (MVD, qtd. in Jenkins 1992: 239).
programme of viewing, I developed central research questions about

historiography, fascination, and adaptations and selected key examples to
develop arguments to answer those questions. As a member of the media
fandom subculture and a long-time vid-watcher, I bring to this project an
awareness of the context of vids; this subject position informs my corpus
selection and analysis in the same manner as any scholar in the humanities
is similarly grounded in and shaped by comparable personal experiences.
As argued earlier in this chapter, a vid offers more than just access
to the specific interpretive work of the person who created it. Vids are
comprehensible beyond the limits of one’s foreknowledge of a vid’s source
material. The vid is therefore a robust and complete form, akin to film or
television, which is capable of withstanding analysis independent of detailed
knowledge of either the source material or the vidder’s own interpretive
motives/beliefs. Indeed, the use of songs to guide meaning in vids helps
to nail down the ambiguities that would arise in interpreting a vid made
outside its context, because the limitation of different potential meanings
makes the work more durable.
List of Works Cited
Bailey, Steve, Media Audiences and Identity: Self Construction in the Fan Experience
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Barthes, Roland, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, Communications, 4 (1964), 40-51
Berger, John, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis, Ways
of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London: British
Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books Ltd, 1972)
Bignell, Jonathan, ‘Exemplarity, Pedagogy and Television History’, New Review of
Film and Television Studies, 3.1 (2005), 15-32
Brunsdon, Charlotte, and Lynn Spigel, ‘Introduction’, in Feminist Television Criticism:
A Reader, ed. by Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, 2nd edn (Maidenhead,
Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), pp. 1-20
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995)
Cardwell, Sarah, ‘Television Aesthetics’, Critical Studies in Television: The Interna-
tional Journal of Television Studies, 1.1 (2006), 72-80
— ‘Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond’, Television Aesthetics and Style,
ed. by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 23-44
Casey, Bernadette, Neil Casey, Ben Calvert, John Leam French, and Justin Lewis, Televi-
sion Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
62 Fanvids
Chang, Heewon, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press,
Inc., 2008)
Coppa, Francesca, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish
Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. <https://journal.
Publishing, 2004)
— Small Screen Aesthetics (London: Palgrave MacMillan/BFI, 2013)
Davies, Bronwyn, and Rom Harré, ‘Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves’,
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20.1 (1990), 43-63
Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research,
2nd edn (London: Sage, 2000)
Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner, ‘Introduction: Talking Over Ethnography’,
Composing Ethnography: Alternate Forms of Qualitative Writing, ed. by Carolyn
Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), pp. 13-45
Paul, 1982)
— ‘Is It Possible to Construct a Canon of Television Programmes? Immanent
Reading Versus Textual-Historicism’, in Re-Viewing Television History: Critical
Issues in Television Historiography, ed. by Helen Wheatley (London and New
York: I.B. Tauris, 2007)
Festivids, no date. <http://festivids.dreamwidth.org/> [accessed 9 May 2014]
‘Festivids: Frequently Asked Questions.’ Festivids: Fannish Vidding Exchange, no
date. <http://www.festivids.net/faq> [accessed 19 February 2018]
—, and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012)
— ‘Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder’, Journal of British Cinema and
Television, 3.1 (2006), 19-33
—, and Steven Peacock, ‘Introduction’, in Television Aesthetics and Style (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 1-20
Routledge, 1992)
Kustritz, Anne, ‘Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and
Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids’, TV/Series, 6 (2014), 225-261
Lothian, Alexis, ‘Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to
Ownership’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 130-136
Metz, Christian, ‘Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism)’, in The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
Mittell, Jason, ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television’, Velvet
Light Trap, 58 (2006), 29-40
Black Widow from Spy to Superhero: Essays on an Avenger with a Very Specific Skill
Set, ed. by Sherry Ginn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017), pp. 38-51
Academic, 2016), pp. 209-220
Perkins, V. F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Pelican, 1972; London:
Penguin, 1991)
Stein, Louisa Ellen, ‘“What You Don’t Know”: “Supernatural” Fan Vids and Millennial
Theology’, in ‘Saving People, Hunting Things,’ ed. by Catherine Tosenberger,
special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 4 (2010), no page. <https://
journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/192/158>
Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester and New York: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2006)
and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by
Zettl, Herbert, ‘The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics’, Journal of the University
Film Association, 30.2 (1978), 3-8
3 Proximate Forms and Sites of
Encounter: Music Video and
Experimental Tradition
Abstract
Vids resemble music videos and found footage films. They have the form
and appearance of a music video, and they re-use existing moving images
in a way that appears to meet the definition of found footage work or remix
video art. This chapter establishes some parameters within which the vid
can be viewed in relation to proximate forms. This chapter works through
specific academic framings of similar forms such as found footage films
in the experimental tradition and music video before discussing canons
of vids that are formed through recent gallery contexts. These additional
lenses—beyond fan studies and television studies—offer further reference
points through which to understand vids.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, found footage film, Wonder

Woman
Vids can be seen as both music videos and found footage f ilms. They
have the form and appearance of a music video, and they re-use existing
moving images in a way that appears to meet the def inition of found
footage work or remix video art.18 Of course, as a form of fanwork, the
vid form does not arise from commercial interests, and likewise it is not
aligned with traditions of experimental moving image art practice. Vids
are in dialogue with both as well as with other, newer forms of internet
video expression as found through YouTube (for example, see Burgess and
Green 2009; Grainge 2011; Vernallis 2013) and with a growing academic/
18 I am holding these distinct from found footage horror films, which take the ‘discovery’ of
existing film or video as an aesthetic and narrative framing device.
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch03
66 Fanvids
pedagogical interest in videographic criticism and video essays (led by

the work of Catherine Grant; see also McWhirter 2015). However, despite
being short videos with music, vids are not music videos; despite being
critically grounded experiments in recombining moving images, they are
arguably not experimental films or video works (in a traditional sense).
Vidding has resonances with these proximate forms, and there is, therefore,
value in exploring music video and experimental art alongside the vid
in building a more complete story of the re-use of existing media. This
chapter establishes some parameters within which the vid can be viewed
in relation to related instances of video and film work; these additional
lenses—beyond fan studies and television studies—offer further reference
points through which to understand vids.
Starting with an overview of critical perspectives on commercial music
video, I recount and examine how found footage and compilation film
forms have been understood. The chapter continues with a discussion of
the exhibitions Cut Up (Museum of the Moving Image, 2013) and MashUp
(Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), which included vids alongside experimental
video and film forms. I then move to a discussion of the ways in which
vids are distributed, exhibited, and curated by fans themselves. Finally,
the chapter concludes with a comparison of two responses to Wonder
Woman (ABC, 1975-1977; CBS, 1977-1979)—the video art piece Technology/
Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978) and the vid Titanium
(Gianduja Kiss, 2012)—in which the contrasting aims, outcomes, exhibition
contexts, and conflicting interpretations of contested representations reveal
something of what makes vidding a form unto itself, distinct from other
forms of video art.
My aim with this chapter is to discuss the vid form in a general sense
through some established theorizations of certain proximate forms and
to use these to explore how vids have been screened and shared by their
audiences. In Chapter 5, I return to specific examples of found footage film
and video art pieces to explore how multifandom vids demonstrate viewing
practices grounded in broad and enthusiastic consumption.
Music Video
The commercial music video is an important proximate form to the vid.

Like vids, the duration of a commercial music video is largely determined by
the pop song that is its soundtrack. In addition, both vids and music videos
tend towards rapid editing and experimental narrative styles. However, as
Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter 67
Francesca Coppa (2008) argues, vids are not motivated by the song—a vid is
primarily the manipulation of the visual source rather than an illustration
of a song—and as such, the similarities between music videos and vids can
be found in their appearance but not in their purpose. This similarity is not
accidental. In the videotape era, vidders explicitly drew on music video for
aesthetic inspiration (Bacon-Smith 1992: 175)—with experienced vidders
offering guidance such as ‘Watch MTV or VH1 and just see what they do’ to
those interested in taking up vidding (quoted in Penley 1991: 145-6)—and
positioning commercial music video as a way to understand how to edit
moving images to music. However, as Henry Jenkins argues regarding the
difference between the two forms, the uses and meanings of clips in vids
‘are shorthand for much longer segments of the program narrative’ and
therefore part of the vidder’s critical work, in contrast to music video’s use
of moving images as ‘free-floating signifiers’ (1992: 234). From the early days
of vidding, therefore, fans and fan studies scholars have agreed that these
two forms were proximate but differed in key ways in terms of the means
by which moving images were being employed. In Jenkins’ formulation, the
work of vidders appears to be in a more valued category than music videos,
as there is a critical and narrative purpose to clip choices that are always
in reference to the fans’ interpretive systems of the vids’ source material,
in contrast to music videos’ sometimes more casual association between
moving image and song.
However, Tisha Turk cautions against seeing vids’ clips only as short-
hand for the narratives from which they are taken, because ‘treating vids
primarily as media criticism positions vidders as interpreters rather than
producers’ (2015: 164). She convincingly argues that the role of music in
vids is more complex and fundamental to understanding the critical and
creative work of vids: it is ‘integral to vidders’ creative processes and central
to vids’ rhetorical and emotional effects on their audience’ (ibid.). I agree:
the transformative interplay between song and moving image is at the
core of how vidding works, and I direct readers to Turk’s vital essay on the
topic. However, I wish to remain for the moment with the idea of the music
video and to explore some of what has been written about music videos
as a way to lay out some of the similarities and differences between these
two similar forms.
Despite the prominence of music videos in the late twentieth century
through to the present day, Carol Vernallis argues that ‘Music video history
remains uncharted’, in no small part due to the volume and variety of
music video examples in existence (2013: 262). There has been productive
academic work recently through dedicated case studies, such as in the
68 Fanvids
collection Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Arnold et al., 2017),

that reflect the idiosyncrasies and complexities of the form’s relationship
to commercial imperatives, the artistic aims of individual directors, and
the unique needs of each music artist’s evolving star image. The focus of the
music video is the song and the artist, even if the music artists themselves
do not appear in the clip. Accordingly, all but one of Joe Gow’s categories
of music video ‘formulas’ concern performance: he lists special-effects
extravaganza, anti-performance, pseudo-reflexive performance, song and
dance number, performance documentary, and enhanced performance (1992:
56-66). While enumerating kinds of performances is a start to understanding
the ‘richness’ of music video (Gow 1992: 43), Diane Railton and Paul Watson
suggest approaching music videos with the more flexible concept of genre,
offering pseudo-documentary, art, narrative, and staged performance (2011:
41-65). In between these generic classifications—which tend to be based
on the moving images—is the question of authorial voice and particularly
‘the disjunction between a verbal narration which is first-person and the
specularization of that narrator within a particular fictional space’ (Straw
1993: 9). With vids, the narrator is dislocated and becomes multiple: it is an
authorial voice of the vidder who has constructed this space and whose role
is understood in constructing a space for the song’s narration to become
congruent with a spectacularized subject drawn from the vid’s video source
material.
Music videos are not, in themselves, films or programmes and therefore
do not have an easy disciplinary home. Vernallis writes that the music video
‘belongs somewhere among music, film, television studies, cultural studies,
ethnic studies, and communication studies, as well as philosophy, theater
and dance’ (2004: ix). Therefore, they may be read as commercial advertise-
ments for the recording artist, as artistically or aesthetically compelling
works of art, as dense semi-narrative texts with rapidly developing codes
and norms, and as key artifacts in discursive (sub-)cultural practices. Much
the same can be argued about vids. Michel Chion notes that ‘Cinephiles
especially attack music videos as eye-assaulting’, countering that the
music video is ‘altogether different’ to cinema ‘since it does not involve
dramatic time’ (1994: 166). Instead, the narrative of a music video—if there
is one—can offer narrative compression and interlacing of flashback with
staged performances.
Picking up on K.J. Donnelly’s argument that video mash-ups of all varieties
found online mean that ‘unofficial pop promos have lost the requirement
to act as an advertisement for a piece of music’ (2007: 178), it can be argued
that vids have long been engaged in advertising vidders’ interpretations
of the source material. While vids resemble the form of a music video, the
latter sells a song or artist (to promote record sales but also to perform a
legitimating social function for the artist, selling the artist as well as the
record) whereas the vid ‘sells’ a narrative or an analysis. Arguably, slash
vids sell a reading of a particular relationship, multifandom vids sell a way
of broadly viewing film and television texts, and character study vids sell a
way to view a specific character. Despite formal similarities, I am concerned
with the transformation/adaptation of a narrative and the representation
of fascination and desire rather than an exploration of editing. The music
video is a proximate form to the vid and one to which the vid bears more
than a superficial resemblance.
Found Footage, Collage, and the Experimental Tradition
Vids are an audio-visual form that re-uses existing moving images, and the
re-use of moving images has a considerable history within experimental and
mainstream traditions. Found footage and compilation films have been a
part of cinema history since the earliest days of the medium, and television
programmes regularly re-use existing material for a variety of purposes
(see Holdsworth 2011). The digital age enables access to and dissemination
of all manner of remix practices (see McIntosh 2012; Vernallis 2013). While
vidders may not link their practice to experimental film traditions, and
indeed vidding directs itself to a very different audience, the effect (if not
the motive) of vidding will have resonances with a well-documented canon
of experimental film and video forms. The proximate forms of found footage,
collage/compilation, and remix video all work with existing moving images
(regardless of medium—film, video, or digital forms) in ways that recover,
re-encounter, and re-present media histories. Later in this chapter, I will
return to specific examples of experimental film/video texts that re-use
moving images. For the moment, I am interested in working through some
of the ways these other methods of re-using moving images have been
theorized in order to give context to the analysis of vids and vidding that
follows through the rest of this monograph.
Using film clips ‘at variance with the original producer’s purpose’ (Leyda
1964: 13-14) occurred as early as 1898—a mere three years after the first film
screenings in 1895—when an enterprising Lumière projectionist illustrated
the 1894 Alfred Dreyfus scandal by constructing an untitled faux ‘actuality’
film using existing footage of military demonstrations and state buildings
to satisfy a demand for film representation of an event that pre-dated the
70 Fanvids
existence of appropriate recording technology. Despite the existence of

precedents such as this and of the compilation film The Fall of the Romanov
Dynasty (Esfir Shub, 1927), Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is regularly
credited as ‘an isolated early example of the found footage film’ (Barefoot
2011: 166). These early examples each created new, coherent texts using
images that had been constructed with a different purpose in mind. The
Dreyfus scandal had unfolded prior to the first Lumière exhibitions, but
the untitled 1898 sequence of later martial/institutional footage satisfied
audience demand for access to an indexical representation of those events
through this new medium. Following two months of archival research, Shub
compiled clips from Romanov home movies, newsreel footage, and newly
shot material to create a film that argued for the inevitability of the usurped
regime’s decline (Malitsky 2013: 164). Cornell’s film is the most intimate of
these examples, as he explores his fascination with Hobart by condensing
one of her film performances into a much shorter text. Vids can encompass
each of these positions: as Francesca Coppa notes, vids create a new work ‘to
make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108) using pieces of existing media.
Vids fragment their source text(s) to facilitate new layers of meaning. Like
found footage films, vids can be a ‘self-reflexive exposé of how meaning is
read’ (Desjardins 1995: 26), though in many cases that reflexivity is not the
purpose of the vid: it is the mechanism through which the vidder’s purpose
is expressed. William Wees argues that found footage films exhibit ‘an
analytical and critical attitude toward its images and their institutional
sources’ (1992: 53). While vids demonstrate the same reflexive qualities, the
transformative aspect of the vid form is essential to this process. In the same
way that Soviet montage saw editing as the instrument of meaning-creation
in film—one shot followed by another shot created a third meaning—vid-
ding is about re-using moving images to create new meanings.
I employ the phrase ‘moving image re-use’ to describe a range of ap-
proaches to practices and works that have elsewhere been called found-
footage film, archive film, experimental video, appropriation, film collage,
remix, montage, compilation, recycled images, and other terms that refer
to specific media, production contexts, and methodologies. Digital copies
of films and transfers of videotape sources may be combined in the same
vid, troubling the medium specificity of ‘found footage film’ and making
it inadmissible as a description of vids. Video montage and scratch video
(Meigh-Andrews 2006; Rees 2011) are respectively too vague and too precisely
tied to a specific movement to be of use. If pressed, I would argue that vids
are closer to archive films (Noordegraaf 2009) or Shub’s compilation/collage
films in which the editor returns to and re-presents existing material without
substantially altering the frames themselves, and in which the new ordering
of clips (and context of exhibition) creates the work’s argument.19 While
Bruce Conner, known particularly for found footage films A Movie (1958)
and Cosmic Ray (1961), can claim to have worked through ‘hundred-foot
reels from the sale bin’, discovering ‘less illustrious sources’ for his work
than prints of Hollywood films (Hatch 2012: 119), a vid is an outcome of
careful viewing, not rummaging through the garbage. Although Kandy
Fong’s pre-vid works were indeed made from discarded film stills, vids
made from off-air recordings, format-shifted DVDs, or digital downloads
blur the bounds of terminology linked to medium specificity. Therefore,
‘moving image re-use’ seems to most accurately represent the act of finding
secondary purposes for pre-existing film and video, regardless of differences
in intention, purpose, or medium.
Beyond the image, there is a resonance between the way vids and other
forms of moving image re-use work with pop music. Bruce Conner’s Cosmic
Ray (1961) was the first short film to use a pop song as its soundtrack over
silenced clips; this and other work have led Conner to (reluctantly) be known
as ‘the father of music video’ (Rogers 2017: 196). Conner’s use of pop music in
his works ‘stemmed from a desire to comment on, and undo, the conventions
of pop culture’ (Rogers 2017: 196), which is akin to what Sebastian F.K.
Svegaard (2015) has identified as critical vids (i.e. vids that set out to make
an argument) and to scholarly appraisals of vids in general. In discussing
the work of Conner and similar artists, Vernallis (2017) proposes a range of
approaches to working with pop songs amongst experimental artists who
incorporate pre-existing music into their works. The first of these, ‘Whole
Pop Songs, Added at a Late Stage of the Film’s Production’ (Vernallis 2017: 261),
is the most like how vids are composed, as the moving images are already
extant and the ‘whole pop song’ is used largely without alteration in the
new work. She notes that this approach was most prevalent in the 1970s and
1980s when the available technology did not allow a fine synchronization
between image and sound; it is interesting to reflect on how the same
technical limitations shaped and then were largely crystallized in the way
vids have developed since. (Newer vidders disseminating their work on
19 Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) includes footage of servants waiting to clear a
count’s table. Bill Nichols notes the count’s purpose in staging the sequence was ‘to document his
estate life’ and therefore his wealth and power; when the clips appear in Romanov Dynasty, ‘the
document’s moral value is reversed: it stands as a condemnation of what it once celebrated’ (2001:
76). Unlike fan fiction, which is limited only by the fan-writer’s imagination, vids are limited
by what source texts actually exist, re-presenting them in a context that layers in additional
(sometimes retrospective) meanings.
72 Fanvids
YouTube are far more likely to incorporate diegetic sound, in part to defeat
Content ID trackers that can lead to takedowns.)
However, beyond the use of music and the objective of broadly com-
menting on popular culture, vids approach their subject matter with a
very different ethos. Kevin Hatch writes that Conner’s found footage
f ilms ‘offer the viewer an apparent intimacy and abundance, only to
snap that viewer’s attention back to the inescapable void at the heart of
the cinematic experience’ (2012: 116). That cinema has an ‘inescapable
void’ at its heart is, of course, problematic and debatable and devalues the
pleasures it offers to its audiences.20 Cinema is not alone in being judged
as somehow empty: as John Corner argues, television has been the victim
of ‘a long tradition of seeing the medium as an agency of the culturally
trite or even of cultural debasement’ (1999: 93). These perspectives inform
artists’ responses to these media. For example, Dara Birnbaum’s video
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), discussed at the end
of this chapter, is explicitly critical of the TV series Wonder Woman and
was intended to educate its viewers on the failings of the series and its
representational politics (though without a sense of fondness that ac-
companies some vids critical of their source). As I will argue, vidding
enables a method of evaluating historical television texts and engaging
with the pleasures of visual media more broadly through enacting critical
and pleasurable modes of spectatorship.
William Wees distinguishes between critically pointed collage and vacu-
ous appropriation. The former, ‘exemplified’ by the ‘avant-garde film’ (Wees
1992: 39), involves ‘conscious, creative, and critical viewing of cinematic
representations’, whereas the latter, exemplified by music videos, ‘lacks the
deconstructive strategies and critical point of view’ (ibid.: 45). Wees proposes
three methods of using found footage: compilation (signifying ‘reality’,
used for documentary purposes), collage (signifying modernist ‘image’,
used in avant-garde film), and appropriation (signifying ‘simulacrum’ and
exemplified by postmodern music video), each with a different ‘aesthetic
bias’ (ibid.: 39). Where vids might lie depends on whether one is convinced
that a vid, like a collage, can offer ‘an analytical and critical attitude toward
its images and their institutional sources’ (ibid.: 53). While Wees is careful to
clarify that these distinctions are dependent on context, there are implica-
tions for the role of pleasure in such works that are inherent in dividing
the conscious, creative, and critical aims of experimental forms from the
non-critical commercial iterations.
20 Cinema’s relationship to death (cf. Mulvey 2006) is another matter entirely.

In evaluating works that re-edit moving images of stars—namely Rose

Hobart, Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, 1991), Rock Hudson’s Home
Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992), etc.—Wees argues that such films ‘betray
their makers’ fascination with the source of their images’ and lose their
power to challenge those sources (2002: 4). The notion that an artist is at
risk of losing their critical faculties in the wake of overwhelming visual
pleasure is an insistence that evidence of fascination is a betrayal of the
potential in the re-use of moving images for enacting critical oppositions.
In contrast to these divisions between pleasurable and critical reactions,
the vid argues for a richness of meaning and pleasure, both in the visual
pleasures of film and television and through the deeper critical competence
at play in reading across texts.
Henry Jenkins argues that videotape-era vidders were ‘making the series
[source] represent subtexts it normally represses’ as ‘the pleasure of the form
centres on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from
their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings’ (1992: 227-28).
The violence (and therapeutic function) described here is valid if one accepts
that a slash subtext is not already present; however, currently vids are more
likely to be emphasizing or enhancing textually present meanings, not
breaking a semiotic link back to the clips’ original context. Coppa argues
that the pleasure of viewing vids ‘is explicitly the fun of watching’ (2009:
113): vids allow vidders and vidfans to affirm their interest in media texts.
Instead of exposing the failings of film or television or failing themselves
to overcome the lure of their images, within fandom the success of a vid
is judged (sometimes explicitly, as in VividCon’s ‘Vid Review’ panel) on its
ability to communicate its point, to amuse, and to entertain.
Michael Zryd argues that the context of moving images is just as vital in
determining meaning as the images themselves, noting that the meaning
and significance of film footage is ‘extraordinarily malleable’ (2003: 47-48).
He notes that experimental films that re-use moving images ‘mark a specific
mode of film montage that hyperbolizes this malleability, recontextualizing
footage to foreground and critique the discourses behind the image’ (ibid.).
In the case of multifandom vids, the discourses that are foregrounded and
critiqued are articulated through sequences of montage that gather similar
clips from different film and television sources to note the similarities and
differences in the various iterations of representational tropes. The pleasure
in foregrounding and critiquing these representations comes from a place
of abundance (cf. Coppa 2009 on multifandom vids) instead of an approach
akin to Conner’s weary ‘commentaries on a world saturated with media
imagery’ (Hatch 2012: 117). The critical work of vids often also invites the
74 Fanvids
viewer to take pleasure from the analysis offered. With an example such as
Starships! (bironic, 2012), discussed at length in Chapter 5, the commentary
is not about saturation as much as a plenitude that offers a viewer multiple
points for engagement, both with the vid itself and with the genre writ large.
Therefore, the qualities of found footage films and other forms of com-
pilation art help us to see vids in ways beyond a series of acts of textual
productivity undertaken by a particularly engaged audience. The history
of moving image re-use reaches back to the very late nineteenth century.
There are many media, contexts, and methodologies that are part of more
than a hundred years of artistic, commercial, and political activity finding
new uses and purposes for film and video clips. Vids offer another set of
ways of thinking through moving image re-use that sometimes parallels
and sometimes diverges from more established narratives of these practices.
Vids in Gallery Spaces: Cut Up and MashUp
Two recent exhibitions, one at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI)
in New York City and another at the Vancouver Art Gallery, presented a
selection of vids in exhibitions of collage and remix art. In both cases, the
vids were included as part of a larger curatorial engagement with collage
and appropriation. The MOMI exhibition Cut Up (29 June to 14 October 2013)
focused on newer digital forms, whereas the Vancouver Art Gallery’s MashUp:
The Birth of Modern Culture (20 February to 12 June 2016) was described in a
press release as the ‘most ambitious exhibition in the history of the Gallery’
and covered all four storeys of the Gallery, exhibiting over a century of crea-
tive work (‘Groundbreaking Exhibition on Mashup Culture’, 2016). I do not
draw a distinction between museum and gallery as different kinds of public
spaces. Instead, I take both as sites where vidding has been given a framing
of cultural legitimacy outside of its typical exhibition sites. Interestingly,
in neither case was vidding presented as an edgy, contemporary digital
practice but rather as one with a deeper history that has weathered a few
technological shifts. These exhibitions have also disseminated specific vids
beyond their usual distribution networks.
Cut Up gathered different kinds of re-edited moving images and high-
lighted the unique context of vids’ distribution and exhibition. According
to the exhibition’s web page, the videos selected for the exhibition were
chosen because they had been made by ‘self-taught editors and emerging
artists’, not established video art practitioners. Cut Up gathered fifty-four
examples of video pieces mostly produced in the digital era but included
six produced before 2000 as precedents of the digital-era pieces. Three

of these historical examples are vids, which puts vids in an interesting
historical position in relation to the other works. In an interview with Moze
Halperin (2013), curator Jason Eppink stated that since ‘Vidding is difficult
for the uninitiated to understand’, the vids in the exhibition were presented
last, positioned as ‘the historical precedent for everything [visitors] just
watched’ (no page). The oldest vid, Kandy Fong’s Both Sides Now (1980),
is a filmed slide show that is generally claimed as a direct antecedent to
current vidding practices (see Coppa 2008).21 The rest of the vids—Temper of
Revenge (MVD and Caren Parnes, 1984), Data’s Dream (GF & Tashery, 1994),
A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot) (Clucking Belles, 2005), I Put
You There (Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll, 2006), and Vogue (Luminosity,
2007)—are from the American convention vidding tradition (via Escapade,
MediaWest, WisCon, and VividCon) and collectively represent the history of
vidding as it is currently understood.22 The inclusion of these vids alongside
other more contemporary examples of moving-image re-use such as trailer
mash-ups, long-form re-edits of feature films (supercuts), explicitly political
video pieces, and variations based on popular music is an example of the
museum as a public context for presenting and viewing works produced
within a subcultural community.
21 The oldest work listed in the exhibition—the British wartime propaganda film The Lambeth
Walk (Nazi Style) (Charles A. Ridley, 1942)—re-cuts Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
to music from the pre-war Lambeth Walk dance craze, such that it appears the ranks of troops
are dancing along. The MOMI exhibition website links to a video titled ‘Gen. Adolph Takes Over,
1942/01/07 (1942)’; <https://archive.org/details/1942-01-07_Gen_Adolph_Takes_Over>. However,
copies of a short film titled Lambeth Walk – Nazi Style (1941) may be found online. 1941 is also
the date given by Jonathan McIntosh (2012); the website Public Domain Review lists it as 1942,
whereas the IMDb.com trivia page for Triumph of the Will mentions a similar-sounding film
titled Germany Calling (1941). Chris Meigh-Andrews (2006: 84) lists a film titled The Panzer Ballet
(Charles Ridley, 1940), which is probably the same work; in his notes, Meigh-Andrews cautions
against confusing it with Swinging the Lambeth Walk (Len Lye, 1939). This is likely a response
to Jay Leyda (1964: 55) where the Lye film is given the description of Ridley’s work and a 1940
date. It is unlikely that Lye produced political found-footage f ilms, as his work was mainly
hand-painted abstract colour animation (Le Grice 1977; Rees 2011; Pillai 2017). However, Scott
MacKenzie (2007) cites a Swinging the Lambeth Walk (Charles Ridley, 1941) using the Lye title
but describing the live-action piece. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
website covers all bases in listing a Germany Calling/Lambeth Walk/Panzer Ballet (Charles Ridley,
1941) that was screened at its 1990 and 2005 Festivals. This footnote is what happens when you
want to quickly check that you have a film’s name correct.
22 This is not accidental: as part of the events supporting the exhibition, Francesca Coppa gave
a presentation titled ‘Remix Before YouTube’ (9 August 2013), leaving some traces of scholarly
input into how vidding history is being framed in museum and gallery spaces.
76 Fanvids
The exhibition’s name, Cut Up, returns to the persistent issue of what
to call video and film works that are made from other, pre-existing film
and video sources. The exhibition does not propose a general re-naming
(homogenizing all works included as ‘remix’ or similar); choosing ‘cut’
preserves the implicit violence of video editing but recognizes that collaged
images still remain recognizable even in their fractured state. The iconicity
of the images resists such generalization. There is some overlap between
other forms of moving image re-use online and the vid form: vids are not
music videos but are similar to them; they are not typically about politicians
but can communicate a political stance. Multifandom vids may combine
highlights from mainstream or cult sources similar to a supercut but do
so with much more rapid editing and with a focus on gestures. Vids are
concerned with creating novel sequences of moving images, not auto-tuning
political speeches into songs; vidding is much more about presenting an
emotional response to popular culture than creating an ironic distance
from it. These works—vids and other video pieces alike—are evidence
of ways of seeing that are no less critical, intense, or actively engaged in
media than those of recognized artists creating experimental works that
re-use moving images.
The Cut Up exhibition relocates the majority of its examples from do-
mestic spaces and small convention audiences to the more public context
of a museum exhibition. The exhibition’s website states that Cut Up is about
online video and its precedents. By definition, online video is accessed
through individual devices: while total views for a single clip may be in the
millions, the physical space around a computer screen limits the size of
the audience who can view together to significantly fewer than a cinema
audience. Indeed, the number of people capable of gathering around a
single computer screen is approximately the same number who could
comfortably gather in a living room to watch a television broadcast. This
is unlike vids, which have a history of being projected onto large screens
at conventions as well as distributed online; as it happens, each vid in Cut
Up was shown at least once at VividCon.23 Many of the non-vids in the
exhibition are from a tradition that is based on viral-style link-sharing
23 Both Sides Now was shown in 2005; Temper of Revenge was shown f irst in 2003 and then
again in two subsequent years; Data’s Dream was shown four times in its original form and
twice as a ‘remaster’; Fannish Taxonomy premiered in 2005 (in the Club Vivid vidshow, which
is a video dance party and not a traditional vidshow) and was shown in six subsequent years;
I Put You There was part of the Premieres vidshow in 2006; and finally, Vogue premiered in the
Club Vivid Show in 2007 and was subsequently seen in six later vidshows (per the vividcon.info
database).
online and therefore have a different assumption of who their audience

will be. Cut Up collapsed museum/gallery space and domestic spaces by
including links on its website to all but two of the exhibited works, allowing
a version of the exhibition to exist in a facsimile of its original decentralized
computer-based context. Interestingly, vidding proves elusive; the non-vids
in the collection are available on YouTube and Vimeo, while of the vids,
it is only Vogue (2007) that directs to YouTube. This reinforces the vid as
parallel to, but not an equal part of, other forms of contemporary moving
image re-use.
Operating on a much larger scale than the MOMI exhibition, the
Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2016 exhibition MashUp: The Birth of Modern
Culture was curated by Daina Augaitis, Bruce Grenville, and Stephanie
Rebick, and the seven vids (including two of Kandy Fong’s slide shows)
were critically framed in the exhibition catalogue by Francesca Coppa, a
key scholar of vidding history. The exhibition was arranged around three
‘ages’: the ‘Age of Mass Media’ (here defined as quotation/collage), the ‘Age
of Appropriation’ (street art), and the ‘Age of Post-Production’ (hacking/
remix). Much like with Cut Up, the vids were not positioned as contemporary
digital art and were included in the section of the exhibition titled ‘Early
20th Century: Collage, Montage and Readymade at The Birth of Modern
Culture’. Along with Both Sides Now and Data’s Dream (here given a date
of 1993 and credited to Shadow Songs), which were both included in the
Cut Up exhibition, MashUp also showed Something To Talk About (Kandy
Fong, c. 1990s), The Test (here’s luck, 2010), Starships! (bironic, 2012), The
Lightning Strike (obsessive24, 2012), and Flow (lim, 2013). Again, as with
Cut Up, the four most recent vids have all been shown at the VividCon
convention as well as having been circulated online. They are all by vidders
whose work is well-regarded and popular, and they all show vidding in its
most sophisticated light.
MashUp shows vidding’s kinship to a wider and pervasive cultural practice
spanning well over a century in which curious individuals use pieces of
their mediated world to create new works that interrogate and explore their
realities. Paraphrasing P. Adams Sitney and Akira Lippit, Carol Vernallis
argues that ‘avant-gardists aim to reveal a system (formal or institutional)
and critique it’ (2017: 258). By placing vids alongside works such as Rose
Hobart and other films by Cornell, Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation:
Wonder Woman, and works from Bruce Conner—not to mention heavy
hitters such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso—the
exhibition brings vidding’s vernacular practice into a frame of reference that
sees it as a unique contribution to the wider story of avant-garde art practice
78 Fanvids
across many media forms.24 In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Coppa
emphasizes how vidding is not like other forms of moving image re-use in
art or music video, arguing that emotion is at vidding’s core in terms of how
vids ‘subvert the typical genres of film and television by emphasizing the
expressive, the interior, and the felt over the exteriorized and distanced
spectacle so typical of mass media’ (2016: 150). Through this intervention,
Coppa offers a framing for vids and vidding to the gallery audience that
examines how vids, which appear familiar to anyone conversant in collage/
compilation moving image work, have a history and lineage apart from
other contemporary video mashups found online.
Together, these exhibitions raise questions about the visibility of vids and
vidding, not just as discoverable works on YouTube or viral video shared
without context but in spaces—and for audiences—outside their usual
distribution networks and subcultural exhibition spaces. The particular
vids chosen and the aesthetic congruence between them also raises ques-
tions of how much more recent forms of vidding, such as YouTube-based
communities that incorporate more diegetic sound from the source texts,
will be historicized alongside the more traditional vidding approaches.
Distributing, Exhibiting, and Curating Vids
The gallery and museum spaces of MashUp and Cut Up are not vids’ usual
sites for distribution and exhibition. These legitimizing framings, which
carefully situate a subcultural form of outsider video art for a broader public
view, do not resemble the ways vids have been circulated by vidders and
vidfans. What follows is largely a description of historical practices that
have shifted since I began this research. Just as vidding fan conventions and
LiveJournal blogs supplanted videotape distribution, in recent years, newer
social media sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Vimeo have been
taken up as platforms to market and stream vids. At the time of writing, I
am only just starting to understand something of how the newest generation
of YouTube-based vidders use tags and channel subscriptions to build and
24 Rose Hobart was initially made for gallery exhibition; at its premiere in a surrealist pro-
gramme, Jodi Hauptman (1999) notes that films by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray were also
screened alongside cartoons and newsreels. Salvador Dalí was present, and he reportedly
‘screamed that Cornell had stolen his ideas right out of his head’ (Hauptman 1999: 95) after
seeing Cornell’s film. Rose Hobart’s premiere in a programme of other short films somewhat
resembles a convention vidshow, which has persisted as a key distribution context for vids from
the videotape-based conventions through to the present day.
maintain their networks. Despite this latest platform shift and the end of
the long-running VividCon convention in 2018, there is value in sketching
out the particular spaces and contexts for vid-watching.
Unlike more traditional television or film scholarship, where a living
room and cinema are such normal sites of encounter for these forms as to
not require explanation, I cannot assume that the contexts or locations of
vids’ distribution and exhibition are generally familiar to a wider audience.
Therefore, I draw here on my own experiences of watching and collecting
vids in order to frame the analysis that follows in this book. My aim is
not to attempt to produce an ethnographic study of vidding practice, but
it is necessary to sketch these practices in order to provide a context in
which to situate my later argument about the archival qualities of vids
that emerge from a textual analysis of vid texts. To take vids seriously as
texts in their own right, the aesthetic and textual qualities of the form may
also be complemented by contextual information. I do acknowledge that
my own experiences of vidding fandom have been an essential part of my
research—primarily but not exclusively as a way of obtaining and viewing
the texts I proposed to study. The observations that underpin my analyses in
this section are based on my experiences with the circulation of vids online
and offline, and I have relied upon tacit knowledge gained during my 15+
years of vid-watching (and as a consumer of other online and viral video)
to be able to understand the norms and conventions of vid distribution and
exhibition. This section also relies on assumptions and extrapolations made
in light of my knowledge and understanding of the functions and capacities
of videocassette recorders and personal computers as an interested and
technologically literate individual.
Anticipating the exploration in Chapter 4 of archives and collections,
I examine the various material and experiential practices that surround
the circulation of vids and demonstrate how these contexts enable the
experience of shared fannish readings of texts based on ‘shared reference
points’ and a ‘sense of a common past’ (Dayan and Katz 2011: 363) prompted
by a vid’s use of recognizable clips. Here, the idea of ‘archive’ has a double
meaning, addressing both a physical archive of videotape and hard drives
and a metaphorical archive from which media fandom derives its ‘inter-
pretive conventions’ and shared readings (Jenkins 1992: 239) in what has
been labelled ‘memory-based digital making’ reliant on ‘actual and virtual
archives’ (De Kosnik 2016: 8). In vids, the physical archive is used to write
a history of the source films or television series but does so in reference
to the communally constituted codes and conventions that guide fannish
interpretation.
80 Fanvids
To give context to Chapter 4’s consideration of the physical archive, this

section discusses contemporary and past distribution networks that can
mimic the distribution of official media. Fans have accomplished this,
Constance Penley has argued, by ‘enthusiastically mimicking the technolo-
gies of mass-market cultural production’ (1991: 140). In the current digital
context, there are several ways in which vids may be screened, shared,
and stored. The exhibition and distribution of vids echo the distribution
of television and film. The process of curating and commissioning vids
for a convention screening programme slot (vidshow) at fan conventions
resembles the curation of film festivals, with new vids submitted by their
creators for a Premieres vidshow. Vids are distributed via compilation
tapes, DVDs, and USB drives as well as via downloads; they are screened
at conventions in programmes of older works and brand-new vids. DVD
sets of vids premiering at conventions can sit alongside commercial home
video and television box sets on a vidfan’s shelf.
Currently, vids are typically watched either on a fan’s computer (desktop,
laptop, or mobile device—typically in a living room or other domestic
spaces) or at conventions (in vidshows, in informal groups gathered around
laptops, or in hotel rooms). In playback, videotape compilations of vids were
limited to a single possible sequence of vids, in contrast to the potential of
on-the-fly playlist creation with digital files. However, compiling vids in
a fixed sequence is not merely a relic of the videotape era, as vidder’s own
DVD releases have a similar flow. On these vid releases, this sequence can
often be determined by production order: in the course of my research, I
have seen vids listed in chronological and reverse-chronological order. On
vidders’ blogs, where a ‘round-up’ post containing links to all vids can be
provided, vidders may choose to group their works by fandom. A similar
curatorial strategy can be seen in vidders’ YouTube channels where playlists
are used to group and direct a viewer’s interaction with the material on offer.
While convention programming includes a mix of never-before-seen
vids and existing works, the VividCon and VidUKon Premieres vidshows
are a concentration of new works. At its height, VividCon premieres shows
screened approximately 30 new vids; VidUKon has historically operated
on a smaller scale. An analysis of VividCon’s convention programme books
reveals that a vidshow typically has between 12-15 vids, of which one or
two can be premieres. Conventions’ premiere lists, programme books, and
online databases can act as a distribution catalogue, which is useful to the
fan and researcher in the absence of a comprehensive database of vids. The
VividCon and VidUKon conventions have maintained a library of previous
vidshow discs, preserving the vidshow’s sequence of vids, and these were
made available to attendees during the convention. Other conventions,

such as Wiscon, post their vid track playlists online.
Vid DVDs with the highest production values are typically those produced
by conventions and vid-making collectives, though in recent years, vidders
have started distributing their work on USB drives. The cover art on the
DVD set produced by VividCon each year features the convention’s llama
mascot ‘in costume’ as a different character, and the choice of character
follows whatever has been a popular property that year: a Buffy-like vampire
slayer, Captain Kirk, a Cylon, and so forth. In 2011, the cover art featured
many different llamas to celebrate the convention’s tenth anniversary by
referencing popular past fandoms. VidUKon has a similar strategy for its
DVD cover art, using a bunny mascot. Both conventions’ DVD sets carry this
homage-branding over to the discs themselves. Penley’s argument about
fan productions’ mimicry of the media industry is particularly notable in
relation to the custom-printed disc art for the VividCon 2010 DVD set, as
these borrow the branding of Doctor Who (both the new series and the
classic serials). This displays an affection for Doctor Who but is also a playful
acknowledgement of the relationship between fanworks and the source
material from which they are derived.
Currently, however, most vids are distributed online through streaming
sites for user-generated content; this practice mimics the networks’ on-
demand services like iPlayer (BBC) and 4oD (Channel 4) as well as streaming
subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Vids are also available
as direct downloads, mimicking the distribution of film and television in
official capacities (such as, in limited markets, through Apple’s iTunes) and
in bootleg contexts via peer-to-peer networks or digital lockers. Streamed
vids may be ‘saved’ through bookmarking, though for reasons to be explored
later, this is not a stable way to build a collection. Downloading copies of
vids raises the issue of labelling (renaming) and sorting files so they may
be easily retrieved.
Penley characterizes creative fan practices as a vertically integrated
industry with ‘control over every aspect of production, distribution, and
consumption’ (1991: 140). Just as fan writers also act as editors, publishers,
and publicists (cf. Penley 1991), vidders must similarly plan (locate the
source video and audio), edit (having gained mastery over their editing
apparatus or software), and release a vid (for exhibition and distribution).
Penley’s argument regarding productive fans’ ‘relation, as women, to those
technologies, through both the way they make decisions about how to use the
technological resources available to them and the way they rewrite bodies
and technologies in their utopian romances’ (1991: 140) is compelling and
82 Fanvids
well-argued and need not be replicated here. With regards to distribution,

the concept of a vid collection (an archive of vids) mirrors other practices
associated with home video more generally—bootleg tape-sharing, DVD
production, digital downloads—with familiar concerns of indexing, stor-
age, and curatorial practice (cf. Gray 1992; Dinsmore 1998; Bjarkman 2004;
Hilderbrand 2009).
While the distribution of vids mimics the distribution of film and of
television equally, it slightly favours film over television in certain spe-
cialized contexts. Special-event releases—such as premiering a vid at a
convention—borrow more from a film festival premiere (a single screening
to an exclusive audience, followed by a wider release) than a television series’
pilot episode (available broadly). The majority of aesthetic conventions
developed by videotape vidders are still relevant to the discussion of vids
in a digital context, as earlier and later iterations of the vid form ‘share an
aesthetic tradition and an analytical impulse’ (Coppa 2008: 1.4) that bridge
technological change. I am less concerned with the technical aspects of
vid-making than with how the movement of vids as objects often follows
the same paths as official media releases or of bootleg distribution. In this,
vids are both a subsidiary form of film and of television and an alternative
audio-visual medium (i.e. that which is not quite film or television but not
sufficiently anything else).
Two pieces of domestic technology are central to the distribution and
archiving of vids: the videocassette recorder and its successor, the personal
computer. Both the VCR and the computer are tools functioning as appara-
tuses that enable a fan’s own exploration and exploitation of their archive.
As Penley describes it, the VCR became the site of the creation, distribution,
and exhibition of the objects of fandom. Computers are complemented
by optical disc (Blu-ray, DVD) players and digital video recorders (DVRs)
in playback, but the computer is so far the only apparatus that allows for
playback as well as the VCR’s particular interventions, such as duplicating
episodes for redistribution, creating a backup for personal use, and acting
as the basic technology for vidding.25 Penley notes that the VCR:
along with the zine publishing apparatus, is the lifeblood of the fandom.
The ubiquitous VCR allows fans to copy episodes for swapping or for
closer examination of their slash possibilities, and provides the basic
technology for producing songtapes [vids]. Fans are deeply invested in
25 At the time of writing, tablet computers are becoming viable vidding tools, due to increases
in processing power and storage space, alongside the availability of mobile video editing apps.
VCR technology because it is cheap, widely available, easy to use, and

provides both escape and a chance to criticize the sexual status quo.
As one beautifully embroidered sampler at a fan art auction put it, “The
more I see of men, the more I love my VCR”. (1991: 146)
Within fandom, computers are as ubiquitous today as VCRs once were, as the
stack of videotapes required for gathering and cuing clips has been replaced
by high-capacity hard drives. The physical visibility of a vidding fan’s col-
lection or archive is obscured by digital technology and not enumerated
through material accumulation of videotape; however, the multifandom
vid genre (explored in Chapter 4) makes the extensiveness of this collection
visible in a different manner.
Writing in the early 1990s, Penley notes that vidding was a less active
practice than fan writing and zine publication owing in part to ‘the greater
difficulty of access to video equipment, than to desktop publishing and
photocopying technologies, which are often available in the fan’s own
workplace and can be used even while on the job’ (1991: 145). As a more
time-consuming and technically daunting form of fanwork, producing a vid
requires a significant commitment of time (to learn the technology and to
create the work itself) and money (to purchase the technology). However,
the distribution of vids only requires the technology and patience necessary
for basic duplication. When videotape predominated, any time-shifting
television viewer with access to a second VCR—her own or borrowed from
friends or family—could distribute videotape vids with as much ease as
bootlegging home video. Today, it is the computer-using fan who accesses
digital home video and vids alike.
Beyond a direct industrial mimicry of the success and persistence of
the official media’s home video releases, DVD/USB releases maintain vids’
connection to physical objects that can be collected and archived. There is
an affective pleasure in handling a physical object. Digital storage media
bears an extra burden of being the tangible manifestation (of sorts) of its
less-tangible contents. A DVD can also alter how a vid is watched, moving
the vidfan away from the choice offered by folders full of vids saved as
digital files to the disc’s flow. The DVD’s sequence recalls the videotape-era
compilations of several vids on a single tape (rather than a single tape
for each separate vid, allowing for ease of storage and distribution). In
the videotape era, fans would collect vids regardless of familiarity with
the source material, ‘assuming that one day they may have a meaningful
context’ for the works (Bacon-Smith 1992: 179). This practice also reveals the
instability of vid supply. There is also a degree of familiarity and an archival
84 Fanvids
confidence in the illusion of a more fixed version of the vids: a DVD is not
vulnerable to hard drive failure but can be the victim of physical damage
and technological obsolescence.
Indeed, web links only show where a vid once could be found, recall-
ing the experience of a historian whose archival work is frustrated by a
‘returned call-slip’ that confesses a desired file is long lost, ‘“destroyed by
enemy action during the Second World War”’ (Steedman 2001: 68). Vidders
do use streaming sites and digital lockers as distribution facilities, but
vids distributed through these means can be subject to deletion because
of inactivity (too long between downloads) or claims of infringement.26
Private server space for hosting digital video is one solution but is often
dependent on the vidder’s own interest in maintaining this service. All too
often, one might navigate to a personal website or a blog post only to find
an inactive download link where once there had been a vid file. While the
Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) has since 2009 maintained
member-owned servers in a bid ‘for a more secure relationship to digital
space’ (Lothian 2012: 547), at the time of writing the OTW’s Archive of Our
Own does not host video or audio directly and instead directs users to a
list of ‘whitelisted’ external sites (2019). In Eve Ng’s experience, even the
promise held by a request on a message board to re-post a vid was not usable,
as ‘some of the download sites were no longer active by the time that [she]
visited them’ (2008: 110). I have had similar (bad) luck in the course of my
research, leading me to maintain a personal archive.
As Jenkins argues, the accessibility of home video as a format allows
for the same unobstructed circulation of vids as the videotape from which
they are made (1992: 248). He notes that this circulation could lead to a
lack of proper attribution of authorship, though he was wrong to state that
vidders ‘lack the technology to generate their own credits’ (ibid.). Credit
sequences are generated by filming hand-written notes, as with the Starsky
and Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) vid The Boy Can’t Help It (Kendra Hunter and
Diane Barbour, c. 1980-1985), or added—potentially some years after the
vid was first made—through early computer graphics, such as with the
Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971) vid titled Who Can It Be Now? (Kathleen
Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985). The three shots that open
Who Can It Be Now? announce the names of the vidders, the song and the
artist used, and a shot taken from the credits from Dark Shadows itself.
26 Vids are vulnerable to takedown orders. Some jurisdictions protect artistic transformations
of copyrighted material, others expressly ban format-shifting, but enforcement of these laws
are typically left to corporate policy relating to each platform.
The Boy Can’t Help It also credits ‘PMG’, likely meaning actor Paul Michael
Glaser. Crediting the key actor featured in a vid is not usual in more recent
vids, which presume a different level of contextualization (through vidders’
notes and description or paratexts such as convention programmes) but
has the benefit of introducing the character and actor that are the focus
of this work. Early vidders were evidently not naïve about the circulation
of their work; credits provide some assurance of continued attribution as
fellow fans added these pieces to their own collections.
Currently, vids may be distributed without appropriate attribution
(credits, dedication, disclaimers) and may potentially be re-posted—for
example, from a private host to a third-party YouTube account.27 Vids can
be produced with watermarks unique to a vidder so that pilfered sequences
can be identified, or they can be provided through streaming sites with a
password-protection facility in order to (somewhat) regulate access to the
work, or they can be uploaded in a compressed file format that requires
a password, and so on. None of these methods will prevent unauthorized
mirroring or re-attribution, but they do act as gatekeepers of sorts. In all
these cases, credits sequences and watermarks affirm vids as authored
texts rather than orphaned or anonymous works. Credits provide a way
of cataloguing a vid collection constructed in compilation tapes; however,
these identifying marks are a further way in which the vid text contains
within itself textual traces of its authored, archival state.
File-sharing increases the potential number of participants in this ex-
pression of fandom, as it allows for a more anonymous and geographically
dispersed way of interacting with these works that does not require in-person
interaction with other fans. This is a benefit to geographically dispersed
fans and to lurkers. A vid can be downloaded with only page counts or
stream views as traces, for example, whereas sharing a videotape would
require face-to-face interaction or the use of mailing addresses connected
to what fans sometimes refer to as one’s ‘wallet name’ (as opposed to a
fannish pseudonym).
The exhibition and circulation of vids as outlined here relates to the con-
cept of the archive because the history of vids is knowable through individual
vidders and vidfans and through institutions such as fan conventions, each
maintaining their own collections of vids. This means new generations of
vidders and vidfans can, if they so choose, access the history of the form
through dedicated efforts of history-minded fans. The circulation of vids is
27 For example, Closer (T. Jonesy and Killa, 2003) has been removed from the vidders’ websites
but is still available online due to re-posting by other users.
86 Fanvids
important because sharing vids means sharing the analytical readings—the

‘discourses’ (cf. Bailey 2005)—of the contexts and individuals at play in
creating the work. This discursive participation does not need to mean
that every vid saved demands its own unique exegesis from every person
who saves it, but publicizing a work—by recommending it in some way or
sharing a collection with a friend—is a public recognition of a discursive
position and a contribution to a history of the form and the source material.
Titanium and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman –

Same Source, Different Conclusion
I finish this chapter by bringing together vidding and avant-garde art practice
in a comparison of two different responses to Wonder Woman (Warner Bros.
Television, 1975-1979): one coming from the avant-garde world and the other
a vid. These are two forms of moving image re-use, each of which comments
on the source text. These have had different exhibition and distribution
routes and demonstrate how vids have different aims and objectives to
gallery-focused compilation/collage art.
Vidding allows (or perhaps creates) space to reclaim representations that
have previously been condemned. Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece Technol-
ogy/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) is an attempt to demonstrate
the patriarchal structure inherent in Wonder Woman by ‘unlocking some
of the assumptions behind the programme’s message by highlighting and
exaggerating its absurdity’ in particular in its special effects sequences
(Meigh-Andrews 2006: 195). In contrast, the vid Titanium (Gianduja Kiss,
2012) takes the same clips that Birnbaum argued were symptomatic of
women’s oppression in Wonder Woman and re-presents them with ad-
ditional material from the series as an affirmation of independent female
agency.28 Birnbaum’s piece has arguably lost its critical edge over the years,
meaning that it fails to convey its analysis: contemporary audiences of the
video piece see Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Linda Carter) but not her
representational systems of oppression (Demos 2010). The fascination of the
image endures, not the anti-television criticism. What emerges is a possible
way to successfully return to the Wonder Woman series without problematic
narratives undermining what an image alone could be made to represent
(as per Penley’s comment about subtext in slash fiction). The vid does not
28 Some material in this section previously appeared in print as ‘To Watch Wonder Woman’
(Stevens 2015).
attempt to excuse or explain contradictory elements of the character’s

representation, but it takes the pleasurable images—a beautiful woman
with superpowers at the centre of her own narrative—and responds to the
fascination such representations still hold for an audience.
There are many vids that focus on the presentation of attractive male
bodies, but the vid form is not limited to a simple inversion of women watch-
ing men: many other vids present female bodies for the vidfan’s viewing
pleasure. However, as many of these feature women in action and science
fiction genres and focus on movement and motion as well as narrative/
generic contexts, they arguably reveal these vidding fans’ evident pleasure
in watching attractive women in active roles. Underlying these issues is the
question of what it means for a female spectator to watch women on screen. I
will return to this issue in Chapter 5, but for the moment I will quickly draw
attention to Jackie Stacey’s non-psychoanalytic response (1988) to Laura
Mulvey’s foundational essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) to
discuss the overlap of desire and identification in film and television texts,
which suggests that the pleasures of such spectatorship is not essentially
masochistic. According to T.J. Demos, Mulvey’s essay was the ‘signal text’
(2010: 50) guiding Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman.
This piece is an attempt to demonstrate the patriarchal structure inherent in
the Wonder Woman television series as indicative of the media’s unconscious
tendency to offer oppressive representations of women. Demos (2010: 2)
cites this video as ‘prefiguring’ current forms of moving image re-use, but
its 1978-79 production date places it between Kandy Fong’s first proto-vid
slide show in 1975 and the first VCR vids of the early 1980s. Birnbaum relied
on friends with access to professional video recorders (ibid.: 4). Although
consumer video recorders were available ‘as early as 1975’, these had only
reached 25 percent of US households a decade later (Hilderbrand 2009: 36).
Interestingly, by 1985 Birnbaum had abandoned her critiques of television
because ‘the proliferation of home video equipment has enabled almost
anyone to create his or her own deconstructions’ (Reidy 1985: 61).
Birnbaum’s video work in this era is described by Robin Reidy as ‘dense
video and aural collages that examined as well as undermined television’
(1985: 61). The back cover of the Vancouver Art Gallery MashUp exhibition
catalogue is a photo of the piece in one of its exhibition contexts: as an
installation, presented for public view in the window of a New York hair
salon. However, Birnbaum’s piece has lost its critical edge over the years,
meaning that it fails to convey its condemnatory analysis of Wonder Woman
as a series. This is an issue with the contradictory signification of Wonder
Woman herself, who was created as a female Superman, an ‘attempt to join
88 Fanvids
feminine strength and power with allure and beauty’, leaving her a contested
figure ‘either as a feminist icon, celebrated for her superior abilities, physical
power and independence, or as a sex object, denigrated as a crass product
of commercial exploitation’ (Demos 2010: 19). The ‘rapid fire editing’ of
Birnbaum’s piece ‘entirely eliminates the narrative from the original TV
series, leaving only the fantasy element’ and results in a visual spectacle
of special effects disconnected from purpose or context (Meigh-Andrews
2006: 172). Unlike a vid, Birnbaum manipulated the audio source as well
as the video, looping pieces of the Wonder Woman theme song to achieve
the same aural effect as the video’s focus on sequences of Diana spinning.
Demos refutes Birnbaum’s assertion that Technology/Transformation is a
resounding blow against the sexualized representation of women, arguing
that this interpretation is perhaps guilty of ‘overestimating the masochistic
nature of women’s identifying with the forces of sexual objectification and
commodification, or in dismissing the transformative energy that Birn-
baum’s video contains and unleashes as part of a tradition of oppositional
and emancipatory image-making’ (2010: 73-74). Perhaps one difficulty with
using this iteration of psychoanalysis to read works that re-use moving
images is signalled in the title of Mulvey’s essay: neither Birnbaum’s work
nor vids are the ‘narrative cinema’ of Hitchcock’s Hollywood. The removal of
narrative from image evacuates the original subject position, though Demos
(ibid.: 20) notes Birnbaum’s consternation that women and children would
uncritically enjoy the (to her) obvious sexual objectification of Diana as/and
Wonder Woman and not see the structures of patriarchal oppression. This
creates a problem of ambiguity/ambivalence in its ‘affirmative collusion
with its object of critique’ (ibid.: 6); the final work shows only the image
of Wonder Woman, not the series Wonder Woman, that is, the narrative
structures from which the character was taken. Demos adds the caveat that
Birnbaum’s work is ‘not a simple attack [since] an element of fascination
remains evident’ (ibid.: 49). The video is a success of feminist video art not
because it critiques an oppressive representation but because it accidentally
releases that representation from its structures of oppression.
Michael Pigott, in discussing the found footage films of Joseph Cornell
and Ken Jacobs, notes that a ‘key characteristic’ of that work is the ‘removal
of structures in order to reveal or release something contained, or latent,
within the footage’ (2013: 10). In this context, it is arguable that Birnbaum
unintentionally released Wonder Woman herself, or at least the notion
of gendered representation, by removing the structures of narrative. The
vid Titanium communicates the positive, affirmative aspects of the series
because it does not attempt to constrain the representation. The vid presents
the series in a more positive light than Birnbaum’s work, with impassioned
vocal performance (from Sia, in a song by DJ David Guetta) and lyrical af-
firmation of emotional strength—‘I’m criticized, but all your bullets ricochet
| You shoot me down, but I won’t fall | I am titanium’—matched with clips
of Diana blocking bullets with her bracelets and other super-powered feats
of physical strength. These take the song’s metaphor literally, allowing this
image of Wonder Woman to overcome the limitations of the series to create
a version of the character who is aware of her physical abilities and ability
to overcome doubts and criticism levelled at her. The work of the vid is in
negotiating the fascination and draw that these images have for a specific
fannish audience, and this is used to tactically engage with media to find
positive representations in texts generally assumed to be made for other
audiences.29 As stated earlier, this vid responds to—and amplifies—the
potential pleasures of viewing and understanding Diana’s role in the nar-
rative and the value her representation can hold for a willing audience.
Technology/Transformation ‘eliminates the TV show’s storyline and in-
stead draws on the imagery for its own deconstructive, analytical purpose’
(Demos 2010: 48), using clips from the television series as well as the opening
credits song, manipulating both image and sound. According to Chris Meigh-
Andrews, Technology/Transformation ‘was one of the earliest video art tapes
to appropriate broadcast television material as part of a critical strategy’
(2006: 170). The repetition of clips in this work is apparently ‘a simple multiple
repeat-edit strategy to critique and deconstruct the fantasy TV programme,
unlocking some of the assumptions behind the programme’s message by high-
lighting and exaggerating its absurdity’ (ibid.: 171). Meigh-Andrews does not
expand on these ‘assumptions’; one assumption in episodic television, taking
John Ellis’s work (1982) into consideration, is that an established scenario will
repeat in the subsequent episodes. Ellis writes that the ‘characteristic mode’
of television narrative ‘is not one of final closure or totalising vision; rather,
it offers a continuous refiguration of events’ (1982: 147). Birnbaum’s response
to Wonder Woman’s structure as an episodic series strives to emphasize the
cumulative impact of ‘oppressive’ special effects; the vidder Gianduja Kiss
finds in the repetition an accumulation of Wonder Woman’s good works,
using the narrative repetition in episodes of the series as evidence of her
constant use of superpowers to help others and thwart evil.
29 Titanium shows Diana’s interaction with femininity (in clothing stores, rejecting men’s
advances) as something she overcomes to be herself. The vid’s criticism is levelled at a broader
cultural context rather than the specific series or medium. However, this critique operates in
tension with the vid’s otherwise uncomplicated presentation of the Wonder Woman costume.
90 Fanvids
In neither work does the act of transformation refer to a specific narra-

tive; instead, both address the issue of representation. Demos argues that
Birnbaum’s purpose in using the spinning sequences is to expose the betrayal
of the television series’ feminist possibilities: Diana spins in isolation and
achieves nothing, in an illusion of emancipatory female power (2010: 21). In
Titanium, three different transformation clips are used and are placed at
the start of sequences that show Diana using her powers to deflect bullets,
stop moving vehicles with seemingly minimal effort, and perform other
feats of strength. As with Birnbaum’s work, the narrative context for the
action is removed and the clips are given a different purpose; however,
unlike Birnbaum, Gianduja Kiss presents these clips in a causal sequence
that justifies this action. Diana spins in order to transform her costume,
she transforms in order to use her powers, and then uses her powers to help
people. The sequences are structured such that her spin begins at the end
of the chorus, just as the word ‘titanium’ is heard, thereby captioning this
motion (and subsequent transformation) as the moment where Diana is at
her strongest or most resilient. There is a forward motion and purpose to
her actions: she is not trapped alone and struggling in an endless cycle of
exploitation created by ‘the manipulative spectacle of special effects’ (Demos
2010: 21). Titanium also benefits from its temporal distance from the Wonder
Woman series, as Carter’s sometimes stiff and awkward performance in the
role has its own appeal; also, special effects that may once have seemed
invasive or dishonest now appear harmless and primitive. However, this
does not account for the (retrospective) pleasure of watching bodies in
action. As the special effects (as reproduced in Technology/Transformation
and Titanium alike) seem to be mostly practical effects and some post-
produced flashes of light, there is an authenticity (or perhaps fidelity) that
can be read into a version of the character that is an embodied rather than
computer-generated performance.
Titanium ends with an extended sequence that commences at the climax
of the song, showing Diana recruiting, training with, and being rescued
by various other women. One way to read this trajectory in the vid is that
women within the series, upon meeting Wonder Woman, are inspired to
fight alongside her; another possible (simultaneous) reading is that women
watching the vid can similarly be included in Wonder Woman’s feminist
project. Significantly, the shot that immediately precedes this sequence
is another clip of a spinning transformation. Again, Diana is not shown
‘continually spinning around in circles but getting nowhere’ (Demos 2010:
21) but immediately after the costume transformation is shown running
alongside Wonder Girl and other Amazons.
In this sequence, the many different female characters shown with

Wonder Woman creates an invitation for the viewer to be her companion
in her quest for justice. In this, her costume takes on a different meaning:
in the many clips, none of which repeat and therefore have the effect of
being individual examples, the costume is only one element in a sequence
that emphasizes her interaction with the other female characters on screen.
When taken in the context of her actions, the low-cut top, short skirts,
and skin-tight briefs do more than present the character as a sexualized
spectacle/fetish: her interaction with other women within the frame (them-
selves in similar costumes) destabilizes the singularity and limitation of
her presentation as mere fetishized subject of a male gaze.
Finally, to situate Titanium in terms of distribution and exhibition, this
vid was made for the wintertime Festivids vid exchange. Festivids is a ‘Secret
Santa’ style exchange modelled on the Yuletide fanfiction event in which ‘gifts’
of vids (or, in the case of Yuletide, stories) are given anonymously, with vidder
and recipient having been matched based on their nominated fandoms for
which there are not a significant number of extant fanworks. For a period of
a few weeks, the vids are available in an ‘unsigned’ format, with exchange
participants and non-participating fans responding to the works without
knowing the identity of the vidder. The vidders’ identities are subsequently
revealed. Titanium was made as a gift in this exchange and therefore was first
distributed online. However, as a vid that resonated with a wide audience, it
was picked up by VJs programming vidshows for fan conventions. It was shown
at VidUKon 2013 in a vidshow collecting the highlights from the most recent
Festivids, and it was shown four times at VividCon, three times at the Club
Vivid dance party vidshow (in 2013, 2015, and 2016), and in 2017’s ‘Inspiration’
vidshow. The vid’s primary audience was arguably the individual Festivids
viewers at home on their computers, but its exhibition sites have included both
traditional vidshows, where audiences sit in silence to watch the VJ’s curated
programme, and Club Vivid, during which it is expected that convention-goers
will sing and dance along with the vids. The vid’s multiple forms of exhibition
enable different kinds of engagement with the text, from a close and careful
re-viewing of the text to a kinaesthetic experience on a different scale.
Titanium and Technology/Transformation take the same images and offer
two different kinds of resistant readings, each of which make sense to the
editor and immediate audience. As Coppa argues, the subversive or critical
work of vids is not found at the level of ‘distanced spectacle’ but in ‘appeal-
ing strongly to the emotions’ and working with interiority (2016: 150). The
emotional intimacy possible in vids allows for re-constructing potentially
problematic source material in ways that emphasize positive readings of
92 Fanvids
the text. This is not to say the vid eliminates these less favourable readings,
but it offers a version of the text that holds the conflicting representations
in tension and demonstrates a way of watching Wonder Woman that finds
and displays the pleasurable and empowering aspects of the series.
Conclusion
This chapter has addressed the political implications of different kinds of moving
image re-use and ways of understanding these media forms, which help us to
see vids in ways beyond that which is offered by the previous chapter’s framing
of vids and vidding within television studies and fan studies. Vids have been
circulated and exhibited in fan screening spaces that bear a closer resemblance
to film or gallery exhibitions as well as in living rooms and other domestic
contexts. This chapter has discussed the vid form in dialogue with some es-
tablished theorizations of proximate forms to the vid in order to demonstrate
the unique focus of vids and the ways in which vids’ construction and sites of
encounter overlap with commercial and gallery forms of moving image re-use.
Primarily, the descriptions and experiences of experimental works tend
to position visual pleasure or fascination as parts of media that are negative,
seductive, or part of an oppressive structure of representation and therefore
must be deconstructed. Vids may include such criticisms, but they also ‘show
off’ images that are themselves sources of pleasure and use clips to create
pleasurable critical analyses of film and television texts. In Chapter 4, I
return to specific examples of found footage film and video art pieces to
explore how vids demonstrate viewing practices grounded in broad and
enthusiastic consumption. However, an understanding of the vid form’s
approach to images outlined in this chapter—separated from narrative
context and recombined to create pleasurable and/or critical texts—will
continue to inform the analysis of vids throughout the rest of this book.
List of Works Cited
Archive of Our Own, ‘What sites can I use for hosting multimedia files? | Posting
and Editing FAQ’. Archive of Our Own. No date. <https://archiveofourown.org/
faq/posting-and-editing?language_id=en#hostsites> [accessed 1 February 2019]
Arnold, Gina, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, eds.,
Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (New York and London: Bloomsbury
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4 Textures of Fascination: Archives,
Vids, and Vernacular Historiography
Abstract
What does the analysis of vids reveal about histories, memories, and prac-
tices of watching television? This chapter compares contrasting theoretical
understandings of collections and archives to contextualize the archival
work done by vidders and watched by vids’ audiences. Videotape-era vids
(then called ‘songtapes’) bear traces of their archival origins as selective
use of clips, and the wear evident on the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s
favourite moments, telling a story of practices of re-viewing, interpretation,
and memorialization of texts. These archival traces are visible on the vids
themselves and chronicle the unofficial distribution networks of videotape
and the returning to favourite scenes that cause wear on the tape itself. These
personal historiographies are presented in the content and texture of a vid.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, archives, videotape, Star Trek
This chapter is concerned with the practical and material dimensions of

vids.30 Central to this are the following assertions: vids originate in personal
archives; they describe a history of home video; and they themselves act
as an archive in collating, organizing, and memorializing a body of work.
My concern is the vid’s place within the context of changing home video
technology, specifically the creation and maintenance of home video col-
lections that provide vidders with their raw material. The materiality of the
vid form exists beyond the transformation that occurs when video clips are
re-edited into new works. This chapter explores the traces of that materiality.
Throughout this book, I use home video to encompass television episodes
recorded off broadcast television (onto videotape, DVD, or hard drive),
films obtained in the same manner, as well as film and television sold in
30 Some material in this chapter previously appeared in print as ‘On Vidding’ (Stevens 2017b).
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch04
98 Fanvids
pre-recorded formats, obtained directly or duplicated from existing record-

ings. This duplication may be through tape-to-tape dubbing, format-shifting,
or downloading a copy of a file. Home video collections will often include
recordings of both television and film, and there is no useful reason to
separate film from television in instances when their distribution and storage
is so similar. Vids are made from both film and television sources—often
separately, but vids will mix media—and therefore vids embody this techni-
cal parity. What matters is the availability (and quality) of clips necessary
to make vids. As will be shown in this chapter’s Star Trek examples, to make
vids of a franchise with narrative continuity across television and film will
require the use of both kinds of source material.
A vid is made by an individual who uses their personal media collec-
tions—music and home video alike—selecting and editing together songs
and clips from recorded media in their possession. These collections have
a dual presence comprised of physical videotapes, DVDs, and/or other
digital storage formats and the media content contained therein. This
tension between housing and content highlights the differences between
a collection of home video and other kinds of collections: home video is
reproducible, and the intangible contents—recordings on magnetic tape,
digital files—are not fixed to (or determined by) their physical form. As is
explored below, wide-scale consumer access to the means of creating one’s
home video collection began with the videocassette recorder. Consequently,
videotape as an object and embodying an aesthetic is an important part of
this chapter. The CDs, DVDs, and hard drives on which digital video is stored
are all physical objects that require shelf space. Since these collections are
built from time-shifted broadcast sources or format-shifted media, it follows
that vids made out of these collections carry traces of that transformation.
The obvious dislocation of clips from the broadcast flow carries with it a
bootleg aesthetic (Hilderbrand 2009) that lends an archival textuality to
vidding as the borrowing of clips from a collection—borrowed, not excised,
because the original clip is not destroyed (and was not in fact the original
to begin with)—and leads the vid’s viewer back to its source material.
This chapter focuses on Star Trek (NBC, 1966-9) vids as a model for
thinking about film and television spectatorship based on home media.31
31 Star Trek was not the only series used as source for videotape vids. In my research, I viewed
vids made from videotape recordings of The Man From UNCLE (NBC, 1964-68), I Spy (NBC,
1965-68), Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-71), Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-73), Starsky & Hutch
(ABC, 1975-79), The Professionals (ITV, 1977-83), Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-81), Riptide (NBC, 1983-86),
and Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-93).
Tex tures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacul ar Historiogr aphy 99
Significantly, Star Trek vids that use clips from both the original series and
the films point to an erasure of medium specificity in a home media context.
Obtaining copies of Star Trek episodes enables the collector to re-visit these
moments; if episodes are subsequently edited into a vid, the clips chosen
will have a similar function for the vid’s audience in constructing a path
through the show (see Gray 2010). The move from videotape to digital vidding
has enabled more rapid editing. However, despite an increased pace and
potential for complexity in digital vids, descriptions of how songtapes
(videotape vids) were made, distributed, screened, and understood are
similar to the present digital form. The close textual analysis of videotape
vids, therefore, reveals a process of fan/vernacular historiography in which
the clips’ aesthetics show the source material’s history in home media
collections.
Vids are made out of the history of film and television, and this is some-
times very recent history in the case of a series just aired or a film just
released. To consider vids as archival, in relation to the broader ‘archival
turn’ in the humanities, is to illuminate specific forms and practices of the
vid and, to a lesser extent, of vidders and vidfans. As technologies for home
viewing erase the material difference between film and television sources,
histories of television, in particular, must recognize the breadth of home
video—which includes, for example, off-air broadcast recordings of films
alongside television episodes. Vids are the direct result of these technologi-
cal and material changes; the devices that have historically complicated
theories of broadcasting (for example, time-shifting and downloading) are
the same devices on which vids are made. Vidding can thus be seen as a
variety of amateur film and television historiography: vids are constructed
to communicate a reading of a historical source product and to represent
a critical perspective on that source.
This chapter will also consider the purpose of an archive and what
distinguishes a collection from an archive in relation to a way of thinking
about vidding as a form of vernacular historiography. In Chapters 5 and 6,
I discuss the visual and narrative pleasures contained in vids, but in this
chapter I analyse vids as audio-visual documents that present an interpreta-
tion of the experience and collective memory of fandom, constructed when
personal media collections are used archivally. This is not to say that being
an archivist, curator, or historian (professional or not) precludes a personal
relationship with archives. A collection, however, is most commonly the
work of an individual for his or her own reasons and edification and in
response to discourses of taste (Clifford 1988; Pearce 1995; Geraghty 2014).
An archive emerges from a different scale of individual participation, built
100 Fanvids
over many years and by many people, to capture documents and artifacts
for future study. Drawing these distinctions into the muddiness of fandom
as it is practiced shows these categories to be fluid: I might collect vids
for my own personal enjoyment, but if I tap into that collection to curate
a vidshow, surely that collection has now become an archive. When a
vidshow list from a convention is posted online with links to the vids
shown, the ‘private’/ticketed con space is opened to public view. However,
where I f ind this collection/archive disctinction interesting and useful
is in how vids get made in the first place: television episodes, films, and
other media used for vids are not typically made to be put to further use
in creative works.
This chapter is divided into four parts. First, I will discuss what is at stake
in thinking of an object as collectable or archival and the implications (in
purpose and value) of gathering objects together. Thinking of home video
objects in terms of archives and collections helps to understand how these
concepts relate to the vid form. The personal collection becomes archival
when it is put to use. Second, this chapter details how vids themselves
have been collected and/or archived. This will include a discussion of
contemporary and past distribution networks and will support Constance
Penley’s observation that fan practices mimic the production, distribution,
and exhibition cycle of official media (1991: 140). Indeed, the methods of
accessing vids mimic the distribution life of the television and film sources
of those very vids. Vids are parallel to, and are a product of, the distribution
and exhibition of film and television.
The third section is an analysis of the aesthetic of vids made out of the
personal collections of individual fans, in relation to the bootleg qualities
of home video. This section is indebted to Lucas Hilderbrand’s work on the
erotics of videotape and the freedoms of bootlegging and will demonstrate
vidders’ use of a private collection to create a public work, showing evidence
of how fan audiences watched a text, and most importantly, how that watch-
ing leaves its own archival traces. Finally, this chapter concludes with a closer
look at three Star Trek vids made in the last decade to illustrate how vids
can evoke their archival origins. This will build on the idea of the ‘archive’
established in the first section and elaborated through subsequent sections’
demonstrations of how vids can look and feel archival, how they can be
‘textually archival’ and in their form reflect an archival aesthetic. A further
concern is with the representation of memory, as these works interact with
Star Trek by constructing a kind of historiography based on an imagined
shared experience of a media text, and with the formal representation of
memory in film and television.
Collection and Archive
Vids are made out of personal home media collections and reveal home media
as a potentially rich archival source. This chapter compares contrasting
theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualize the
archival practices of vidders and the resulting vids themselves. A fruitful
distinction can be made between a collection and an archive insofar as each
relates to the use/utility of home media objects. Videotape vids bear traces
of their archival origins in the selective use of clips, and the wear evident on
the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s favourite moments, telling a historical
story about practices of re-viewing and interpreting texts. The home media
collection has therefore created conditions for media fans’ creative expression
and critical analysis. Recalling Jonathan Gray’s argument that vids offer a
look at a fan’s ‘path through a text’ similar to marginalia, I suggest that vids
provide textual evidence of a kind of spectatorship—and relationship with
home video formats—that is largely unaccounted for in media studies.
Vids have an intimate relationship with the history of media in the
home: vids are made out of time-shifted television and film sources, and
the development of the form occurred as domestic media technologies
became more sophisticated and enabled more control. In discussions of
cult media, syndication has been offered as an accidental but significant
condition for the production of cult audiences: by enabling a return to a
text through repeat broadcast, goes the argument, scheduling allows an
individual to intensify her involvement with a text (see Reeves, Rodgers, and
Epstein 1996). However, the ability to record, save, and revisit programmes
and films is characteristic of the last several decades of media consumption
(see Klinger 2011). Time-shifting—recording for later playback—enabled
audiences to keep and collect bits of broadcast television, constructing
their own potential archive of media. This has been complemented by
pre-recorded videotapes and subsequent formats. Indeed, Lincoln Geraghty
(2014) notes that the return of beloved past television series on DVD is part
of the contemporary experience of being a fan of cult media.
Within television studies, audiences’ use of videotape as an archival
medium has been understood as part of their changing relationship with
television broadcasting. This practice has been characterized as gendered:
Ann Gray’s description of domestic videotape use notes a ‘predominantly
male’ adherence to ‘the assumption that there will be more than one viewing
of the product’ (1992: 216). However, given the predominance of women in
media fandom (as discussed in Chapter 1), the existence of videotape vids
indicates a different kind of women’s viewing beyond a delayed experience
102 Fanvids
of broadcast television and the fact that these tapes were not immedi-
ately re-used for more time-shifting. Constance Penley (1991) notes that
syndication and time-shifting of Star Trek enabled the emergence of slash
fiction based on that series in the 1970s. This occurred ‘as fans recognized,
through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their
own taped copies, that there was an erotic homosexual subtext there, or at
least one that could easily be made to be there’ (Penley 1991: 137, emphasis in
original). The communities established by these attentive and productive
fans supported the production of fan fiction of all genres as well as other
forms of fanwork—including vids. Importantly, it is videotape technology
that enables repeat fannish viewing and subsequent analysis.
Videotape’s archival potential is also part of the audience’s changing
relationship with film, as home video led to a ‘domestication’ of cinema
(Dinsmore 1998: 315). Television is persistently considered a domestic me-
dium; however, through videotape and home video technologies, both media
can be experienced on an equal footing. In her work on videotape-sharing
communities, Kim Bjarkman describes a group of ‘avid fan-collectors’ for
whom the VCR’s ability for time-shifting becomes, as she argues, ‘a tool for
place-shifting’ (2004: 219, emphasis in original). International tape-sharing
communities (now supplemented by digital file-sharing) allow these col-
lectors to build multiple collections containing duplicate artifacts; the
movement of tapes is not the relocation of objects but rather their reproduc-
tion. Bjarkman argues that these ‘self-styled media historians’ are engaged
in ‘resisting the impermanence of television and of memory by preserving
physical records of cherished television moments’ (2004: 239). Hilderbrand
argues that Bjarkman’s ‘research subjects—and Bjarkman herself—act as
curators’ of television (2009: 64). This collection must be accessible to the
potential vidder in a format that allows for its manipulation and duplication
and in a context where these materials are available beyond broadcast flow
and in excess of official home video releases.
The distinction between a collection and an archive—as two ways to
think about grouping material objects—prompts two questions central
to this chapter: what is a home media collection, and how may it be used
archivally? I assert that a vid is made out of a personal collection that
through the practice of vidding is being treated as an archive. The differ-
ence between a collection and an archive rests not on intrinsic properties
of the objects archived or collected but in the imagined potential use of
the objects themselves. The idea of an archive promises something public,
something to do with governance, something related to official sources,
or—through historians’ efforts—something that has the potential to become
part of an official record or history. These connotations persist despite many

archives being accessible only to ‘professional’ researchers—academics,
historiographers, and others granted access by archives’ gatekeepers—and
therefore only available to a select few members of the public. To return this
to a fan context, ticketed events such as conventions are not open to a broader
public, but publication of vidshow screening lists, convention programmes,
and other outward-facing activity (liveblogging a panel; writing up a con
report) make these activities ‘public’. Fans’ efforts to archive, be that in a
structured way (Einwächter 2015; De Kosnik 2016) or unofficially (O’Neill
2015), are typically directed towards fellow fans interested in engaging with
fannish pasts in a variety of forms.
In contrast to the orderly connotations of an archive’s formation as
potentially indiscriminate but ultimately useful, a ‘collection’ often implies
a gathering together of objects for the gratification of the collector alone.
The objects of a collection can be intensely significant to the collector:
Susan Pearce argues that they offer ‘an enclosed and private world, where
collections mirror and extend [the collectors’] bodies and souls’ (1995: 21).
As a starting place to think about how home media collections may be used
archivally and therefore creatively, these value-laden connotations offer
implications for the access and use of, and the public/private split between,
these objects. Where a collection is understood as something personal and
self-directed—see, for example, collecting merchandise and memorabilia ‘to
connect with the histories of [fans’] favourite media texts’ (Geraghty 2014:
2)—an archive has active potential as something that can be put to use.
I will confess that my interest in this distinction arose in part from not
wanting to see ‘collecting’ and ‘archiving’ used as synonyms. I believe there
is value in thinking through the different ontologies of a piece of media.
This is not about whether a particular group of objects is definitively ‘col-
lected’ or ‘archived’ but rather how videotapes, DVDs, and video files can
occupy both positions: how what might otherwise be thought of as a mere
collection is presented and used as an archive. In the videotape era, fans
could share and augment their archives by duplicating videocassettes,
sometimes trading tapes internationally (Dinsmore 1998; Gauntlett and Hill
1999; Bjarkman 2004). Presently, it is possible for personal digital archives to
be transported and transferred via external hard drive. As I have observed
in my involvement with fan communities, a culture of fan-to-fan sharing
persists outside of official networks, placing both these collections and the
resulting works in the realm of the amateur. The private media collection
can be used to produce amateur historiography using the vid form, which
muddies the distinction between the public and private, the professional
104 Fanvids
and the amateur. Vids are made out of ‘private collections’ of home video
(Penley 1991: 145) and, once circulated amongst fans, can become a part
of others’ collections. However, the work of vids is more public insofar as
they are made for circulation to fellow fans (and are discoverable in fannish
circulation): they communicate and document an analysis of source material
as part of a discursive community. In this way, vidders could be seen to be
mediating these multiple ontologies in how they gather and use segments
of televisual flow to trace histories of interpretation.
Two further definitions are useful in unpicking this distinction. In his
1931 essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin writes passionately about the
books in his collection: not of the (emotional/financial) value of each volume
but of ‘the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting
rather than a collection’ (1992: 61) in a ‘relationship to objects which does
not emphasize […] their usefulness’ (ibid.: 62). This is a functionally inert
group of objects, albeit an emotionally active one. Theorists of collecting
argue that collectors collect to express individual identity, demonstrate
knowledge and mastery over a subject area, and assert their preference for
unique objects (Baudrillard 1994; Windsor 1994; Pearce 1995). Collecting,
notes Pearce, is characterized by its ‘subjective nature’ (1995: 16); writing in
1968, Jean Baudrillard similarly argued that ‘although the collection may
speak to other people, it is always first and foremost a discourse directed
toward oneself’ (1994: 22). Indeed, Benjamin argues that his ‘non-reading of
books’ is not unusual; rather, it is ‘characteristic of collectors’ (1992: 63-64).
This will certainly be familiar to anyone who has bought DVDs that go
unwatched. The value of these objects comes not from their content or
utility but rather from the collector’s memory of their acquisition, pride of
possession, and in their ability to help the collector demonstrate taste and
discrimination (see Clifford 1988).
Unlike a collector’s self-directed discourse in acquiring objects, the histo-
rian uses that discovery in a work that can communicate the value, meaning,
and context of the objects. In contrast, Dust (2001), Carolyn Steedman’s
exploration of archives and archival practice, reveals the emotional invest-
ment in ‘those quietly folded and filed documents’ (6) whose examination
promises to fulfil a ‘desire to find, or locate, or possess’ (3) clues on which to
base the writing of history (29). Vid-making corresponds to both positions:
while a fan may possess copies of films and television series, they do not
personally hold the copyright to this source material. However, until the
historian’s intervention, objects in the archive lack the same fundamental
utility as objects in a collection: ‘as stuff, it just sits there until it is read,
and used, and narrativized’ (ibid.: 68).
It is the reading, use, and narrativization that suggests differences

between a collection and an archive and therefore the potential of vids as
archival/historiographical objects. Both a collection and an archive will
have been formed through accumulation; however, where a collection has
private meaning to the collector, archives are for something more than
the pleasure of a collector. When a collection is opened up to curators or
researchers, the objects become accessible—to be used—and are open to
narrativization, with meanings re-inscribed in analytical projects. The use of
an archive can also be artistic, as in Fiona Tan’s gallery-based examinations
of Dutch colonial film archives (per Noordegraaf 2009) or Grayson Perry’s
2011 exhibition ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’, which addressed
the British Museum’s holdings. If we were to transpose these ideas to the
vid, when a viewer uses a technological apparatus to intervene in intangible
moving images by time-shifting, fragments of film and television can be
relocated from ephemeral flow to a fixed form able to communicate critical
or analytical commentary.
Steedman’s description of the passions and frustrations of archival work
is very similar to the process of selecting clips to make a vid: the formal
structure and content of a vid is evidence not just of an interpretive act
but of a search for clips to create a work ‘that pull[s] together scenes and
moments from across the [films and/or] series’ (Gray 2010: 58). This search
may require re-visiting hours of home video to create a vid’s interpretation
of narrative and character. This is compounded in the multifandom vid
genre, which includes clips from multiple series or films. In this respect,
perhaps the vidder is performing the job of the collector, the archivist, and
the historian: gathering artifacts and then using them to write a story.
I do not mean to argue that vidders need elevation to the level of a collector
or historian. Instead, I suggest that the vid’s historiographical potential is
a contrast to the insular connotations of collecting. With personal media
archives, especially of the sort that end up providing a vidder with their
source material, there is a definite overlap: archival qualities (or rather,
archival potential) exist in a collection, and the collector’s use of home
video is manifested in vids’ archival approach.
Creating a Path Through Star Trek
To illustrate how a home video collection of is used archivally in constructing

vids, I will first analyse the Star Trek vid It’s All Coming Back to Me Now
(Kandy Fong, 1997). This vid uses Céline Dion’s song of the same name as
106 Fanvids
its soundtrack and was made on the cusp of digital home video’s emer-
gence—1997 saw the f irst DVDs—meaning this vid was made from at
least second-generation videotape.32 All Coming Back uses video recordings
of Star Trek television series and films as archive footage and as source
material from which to write a history of one character. In this case, the
Star Trek home archive is tapped for evidence in interpreting the history of
the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock (Leonard Nimoy) as he is at the start of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986) during his recovery
from resurrection-induced amnesia. The collection of videotaped Star
Trek films and TV episodes that this vid was made from (and therefore the
collection that is represented in the vid) has thus been used as an archive
from which a historiographical work has been produced.
All Coming Back begins with a clip from The Voyage Home. The sequence
cuts between a close-up of Spock’s face and a computer monitor and finishes
with a freeze frame of a question displayed on the computer: ‘How do you
feel?’. It is a significant question for Spock at this point in the narrative
because, as stated above, he is recovering from amnesia. After we see the
computer’s question, the vid includes Spock’s puzzled reaction. While the
film continues from this point with Spock discussing this question with
his mother, the vid instead cuts to a clip from the television series. This
effectively proposes an answer to the question with evidence from the
vidder’s archive, drawing on her own knowledge of the Star Trek franchise
to construct connections between images and lyrics that are meaningful to
an audience that shares her experience of this series. This includes knowing
that Spock is a touch telepath capable of communicating ‘mind-to-mind’
through his hands. By selectively matching clips to appropriate lyrics, the
vid argues that the only way ‘it’ can ‘all come back’ to Spock is through (as
the lyrics state) being ‘touch[ed…] like this’. Spock’s amnesia was shown to
be redressed through touch at the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(Leonard Nimoy, 1984), but the vid suggests that further touch—specifically,
from Kirk (William Shatner)—is needed to help him remember.
Unlike fan f iction, which tends to create new scenarios for existing
characters, vids are made from what amounts to archival evidence. While
the lyrics imply a rush of returning memory inspired by a lover’s embrace, the
vid is constructed to suggest that when he is touched, Spock will recall—as
the song says—‘moments of gold’ (we see Kirk in his gold uniform) and
32 That is, a copy-of-a-copy. The DVD transfer of this vid that I screened for my research preserves
the flaws and glitches of the videotape source, which are limited to slight discolouration and
some tearing along the bottom edge of the frame.
‘flashes of light’ (that is, on the USS Enterprise viewscreen). The version of
Star Trek history written in this vid emphasizes a homoerotic (slash) reading
of Spock and Kirk’s relationship based on reading single gestures culled from
across the series in a wider (inter)textual context. For example, a clip from
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) showing Spock and Kirk
clasping hands is captioned with ‘if I kiss you like this’. The clip’s place in the
vid’s structure (at the start of a chorus), together with its lyrical captioning,
emphasizes this moment’s significance. However, the equation of handclasp
and kiss is more than a meaning made for the vid: it demonstrates a careful
reading of the gesture in reference to at least three intertextual frames, each
relating to the importance of Spock’s hands.
First, as Chris Gregory notes, ‘Spock’s “devices” such as the Vulcan hand
signal, the “neck pinch” and the “mind meld”’ are widely recognized (2000:
37); the latter two are accomplished by touch, and all three are gestures/
actions that involve the hands. Second, in the episode ‘Journey to Babel’ (tx.
17 November 1967), touching fingers is narratively presented as a gesture of
intimacy and affection for Vulcans, establishing a further diegetic Vulcan
touch to the ‘neck pinch’ and ‘mind meld’: in this case, one similar to a kiss.
Vulcan hands are therefore established as a potential site for erotic contact.
Penley notes that Spock’s alien physiology is elaborated upon in fan fiction,
for example, in order to give Spock ‘extra erogenous zones’ (1991: 158). A fan
focus on his hands is therefore unsurprising. Finally, the handclasp scene
in The Motion Picture can itself be read as important in the history of Kirk
and Spock’s interactions. Isla J. Bick evocatively describes the scene: the
pair ‘wordlessly express their feelings for one another, engage in an intense
few minutes of mutually affirming looks, and then profess [the central
importance of] the touch of their hands, this “simple feeling”’ (1996: 56).
Bick notes that the significance of this moment derives in part from the fact
that this is only the second time in the franchise where the two men ‘touch
in quite this way’ (ibid.), so ‘that homoerotic elements can be consciously
expressed’ (ibid.: 55). Therefore, the historiographical account of Star Trek
offered in this vid re-writes the bond between Kirk and Spock as attraction, as
it re-captions a touch shared after a near-fatal mission as a passionate lovers’
embrace, within a broader context of intertextual readings of the franchise.
Also at work in this vid is a temporal flattening, as a contemporary song
is used to discuss clips first broadcast in the 1960s, as reflected in the lyrics
‘so long ago/but it’s all coming back to me’. Nearly twenty years separate the
‘how do you feel’ sequence (1986) and the clip that follows it (from c. 1968).
Another decade after that (1997) is the vid’s release date. All Coming Back
moves with ease through these many decades of fan discourse surrounding
108 Fanvids
the series and incorporates key moments from its history. The mix of film
and television sources denotes the length of Spock’s relationship with Kirk
but is also a way for the vidder and viewers to recall their own relationships
with the series over as many years.
Looking Archival
When studying videotape vids, one feature that is strikingly common

to all surviving examples of the form is the worn-out appearance of the
video itself. Hilderbrand (2009: 13) contrasts home video recordings, which
become part of a ‘bootleg collection’, with an imagined perfect—‘archivally
pristine’—master copy that is perfectly preserved. Leaving aside the lack of
comprehensive television and audiovisual archives, the messiness of a home
media collection is in truth closer to the messiness found in archival work,
which Steedman names ‘the grubby trade’ (2001: 18), where one handles
crumbling documents, breathing in the dust of the past.
Benjamin describes how his collection was built through his own efforts,
time, and resources. Consequently, every object in the collection has its
own aura: each mass-produced book (even a rare edition) takes on the
status of a unique object. The material specificity of a collection, with the
intensely personal aura of one’s own copy of a mass-produced object, can
be translated to a digital context. Beyond the unique quirks and imperfec-
tions of videotape, creating a duplicate digital file of analogue media will
reproduce exactly the flaws of the original file.
With videotape, the bootleg aesthetic connotes a freedom from strict
controls: even though ‘everyday recordings of copyrighted material quickly
seemed to lack any transgressive edge’ (Hilderbrand 2009: 19), it still is
material evidence of the tape’s prior use. Videotape’s use creates its aesthetic
texture. Indeed, as Jonathan Price (1977) notes, this degradation is an es-
sential part of the experience:
The fuzziness makes it hard to see, and your natural impulse to stare is
heightened by the difficulty of figuring out exactly what is going on up
there. The effect is like a striptease: Now you see it, now you don’t. And
your imagination will inflame you more than a realistic picture could.
(quoted in Hilderbrand 2009: 66)
Though Hilderbrand’s examples are of rented pornographic videos, and

the wear comes from repeated pausing or rewinding around particular
sequences, the effect is similar to marked and worn archival documents.

However, the repetition of and focus on particular sequences is the basis not
only of meaning-making in vids but also of the fannish close (re-)reading
of episodes and characters.
Vids that survive from this era show all the marks Hilderbrand expects
to f ind on worn videotape. For example, the Star Trek slash vid Wind
Beneath My Wings (3 sisters, c. 1983-5) has been made from clips of dra-
matically varying video quality, indicated by factors such as inconsistent
colour saturation. The textuality of these works is conf irmation of the
bootleg origin of the source material and vid alike. In the learn-to-vid
workshop that Penley attended, she recalls that participants could use
clips ‘taken from fans’ private collections of the 78 (plus the pilot) Star
Trek episodes, and also the f ive Star Trek f ilms, which [were] also on
tape, copied from video store rentals’ (1991: 145). What makes this private
collection public is its use, but here it is not just the narratives that are
worked over (as with fan fiction) but copies of the episodes themselves.
The episodes and clips have had a role in a vidders’ collection before they
became vidding fodder.
Camille Bacon-Smith observed a tendency in media fandom to interpret
as erotic ‘glances, gestures, and postures that signal a focus on an equally
engaged second figure’ (1992: 184). Wind Beneath My Wings uses clips where
Kirk is looking at Spock; the vid collects moments of this focused attention
and captions them via the song’s lyrics as evidence of Kirk’s attraction. The
lyrics of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ are about looking back and honouring
the contributions of another person; this is done in an explicitly romantic
context and therefore characterizes Kirk’s professional regard for Spock
as being coupled with more intimate feelings. The vid has Kirk declare his
recognition of Spock’s importance to him and, by extension, to the narrative
of the series. Following Coppa’s analysis of fandom’s regard for Spock (2008),
this articulates a position already held by fans. Like All Coming Back, Wind
Beneath My Wings functions as the vidders’ demonstration of their reading
of the characters’ relationship. The captioning work of the lyrics is bolstered
by the version of the song recorded by Gary Morris (not Bette Midler’s later
cover), thereby tightly aligning the male voice and first-person address of
the lyrics with Kirk’s proposed inner monologue.
An analysis of many early vids reveals the variation in image quality
between clips, even within the same vid, as seen in Wind Beneath My Wings.
This indicates that the source video is not all from the same recording
and has received different amounts of wear from clip to clip, suggesting a
collection of tapes built up over time or of certain tapes getting more wear
110 Fanvids
than others and therefore degrading at different rates. The very nature
of time-shifting broadcast television means the episodes from which the
vids’ clips are extracted will have been recorded at different times. While
time-shifting must have occurred for it to be possible to make vids, vidding
is not necessarily the initial intended outcome of building a home video
collection. As Price (1977) and Hilderbrand (2009) suggest, there are moments
of wear preserved in vids made from this source material, moments that
signal scenes of particular interest.
A vid such as It’s All Coming Back to Me Now (Kandy Fong, 1997) takes
video recordings of the television series and films as archive footage to
use as a source from which to write a particular history of one character
as seen by the vidder: formally, the vid’s montage structure—one that is
characteristic of the vid form—resembles a televisual strategy of represent-
ing memory as a flashback collage in order ‘to effectively conjure that sense
of what remembering feels like’ (Holdsworth 2011: 44). In this case, as argued
above, the Star Trek archive is used to write Spock’s history as at the start
of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The vid is concerned with re-enacting an
imagined representation of the amnesiac Spock’s memory through archival
evidence and also represents a personal memory of the series, accumulated
over many hours of programming and performed through the assemblage
of clips. The collection of videotaped Star Trek episodes and films that this
vid was made from (and therefore, the collection that is represented in the
vid) has thus been used as an archive from which a historiographical work
has been produced.
Hilderbrand notes that bootlegging is a way to fill market gaps where
barriers of time and space block access to home video. The objects themselves
are in a format that can be used to create archives, as Hilderbrand states,
and to create new works that populate fannish discourses. The fan audience
is an example of what Hilderbrand calls ‘semi-institutionalized networks’
that circulate bootlegged media (2009: 63): episodes (in whole and in part)
are shared by interested amateurs, who also share information about past
television.33 These circulations dislocate certain historiographical practices
and they also undercut the connotation of idiosyncrasy and lack of utility
in ‘collection’ because the collectors who participate in these networks
33 In the UK, for example, groups like TV ARK and link-heavy sites like The Classic TV Archive
supplement work done by academic or commercial organizations such as the BFI, and networks
and production companies themselves (in some cases, the amateur sites are much more publicly
accessible than private corporate archives). The delightful Moving History site lists detailed
information about the UK’s public sector archives.
interact with private home video collections that are duplicated and shared.
As Hilderbrand notes, ‘VCRs made television viewers into users, and vide-
otapes introduced new uses of television’ (2007: 18, emphasis in original).
Again, vids are possible because videotape technology makes television into
something reproducible, not just transmittable—vidding is one of these
‘new uses’ of television in its reproducible state. Critically, this ability to
use the collection is possible because copying a videotape, optical disc, or
digital file will not immediately destroy the original (despite perceptible
wear on dubbed videotape).
Public and private are not absolute categories. Videotape collecting’s
relative public and private aspects rely on an individual’s movement from
outsider to insider: access to tapes and thus the opportunity to build one’s
personal collection are determined by participation in semi-underground
networks. These collections are not private in the sense of being individual;
they are still oriented towards a public and addressed in ads in zines, mailing
list dicussions, and message board posts, for example. Fandom has moved
online, with visibility outside fandom moderated in several ways (Busse and
Hellekson 2006; Coppa 2006; De Kosnik 2016). Access to vids is similarly
restricted to individuals with insider knowledge: while vids are currently
openly available on the internet, as is information about vid-centred conven-
tions, knowing where to look for vids comes with participation in the fandom
community.34 Vids posted on user-populated video streaming sites (YouTube,
Vimeo, blip.tv, the now-defunct imeem, etc.) can appear in search results
when a user’s search terms were intended only to find an official music video.
Sites such as Vimeo allow for password-protected files, restricting access
to only insiders; however, measures taken to protect against discovery by
copyright-holders also diminishes newcomer participation. These measures
can include using acronyms in tags or metadata, or ‘delisting’ a posted video
so that it can only be accessed through a direct link and not through search
functions. Sites such as these are not meant to be used as a broadcaster of
anything but original content, but they can and have in practice become
a compelling—if unstable—update of the temporary time-shifting found
in frequently used videotape.
No matter how extensive they appear, home video archives—like all
archives—ultimately contain dislocated fragments, as they are comprised
of films and television episodes that have been removed from their initial
34 As discussed in Chapter 2, in order to conduct a textual analysis of vids, I drew on my

understanding of fandom as a participant in order to locate my corpus.
112 Fanvids
context.35 Indeed, similar to clip shows that re-present historical television

footage, ‘what is central to the textual re-encounters with past television
is not the recovery of the original broadcast or viewing experience but its
positioning within new frames and contexts’ (Holdsworth 2011: 98). As the
vid relates to collections, a vid emerges from a collector’s ownership of and
control over private home video. Although collections are sometimes made
public, they are conceived of initially as private, and vids are part of a per-
sonal relationship with media products and home video. As historiography,
vidding involves searching through existing media and making something
of it (which perhaps echoes Steedman’s description of archival research).
As the source material of the vid, home video exists in a space between the
collection and the archive, though ultimately ‘archive’ is more accurate in
describing the use of these accumulations, as fans and vidders use them in
a project of historiography.
Vids from the Archive
This section is structured around an analysis of videotape-based vids

from the 1980s and 1990s, made from personal archives constructed by
television fans. The section concludes with an overview of some digital
equivalents. The collections generated by audiences through time-shifting
television programmes become archival in their use as a source for vids.
In a contemporary digital context, ‘the powerful archiving force of the
institution’ (Garde-Hansen 2009: 147) is being ‘challenged by the personal
archiving power of increasingly popular and easy-to-use digital media’
(ibid.: 148). Nevertheless, the existence of videotape vids points to a pre-
digital precedent for the construction of personal media archives. Of
interest here is less an individual connection to one’s own collection of
videotape (and digital equivalents) and more the texts produced from
that relationship. This is the historiography of a vid, akin to the historian’s
‘grubby trade’, accomplished by working through videotape of potentially
poor quality. On their surface, storage media do not appear to be subject
to the same intense material decay as fragile paper or vellum archival
documents. Indeed, Holdsworth, in discussing objects held by the National
Media Museum in Bradford, notes ‘a definite absence of dust that might
35 Bjarkman notes the potential significance of this context for videotape collectors, as amateur
off-air recordings ‘complete with original commercials, [are seen] as somehow more authentic’
(2004: 234).
have previously characterized the archive’ (2008: 141). However, in the

case of videotape, this dust is invisible until one plays the tape itself and
sees what it contains.
The media archive has a parallel existence, at least when one considers
the material objects (storage media) and the content contained (‘stored’)
therein. This allows for an individual videotape or hard drive to be a form
of archive—in much the same way an individual building holding material
files can be similarly recognized. The circulation of videotape, and of vide-
otape’s successor digital files, is just as important in thinking of vids and of
the constitution of personal archives as are the representations (the shows,
films, songs) contained therein.36 This repetitive consumption is registered
textually in that the wear on tapes—for example, ‘white noise, the jittery
image, the unnatural colours, the grain, the momentary loss of signal that
triggers the blank blue TV screen or the flash of tracking’ (Hilderbrand
2009: 65)—as seen in vids is a visible record of the literal consumption of
the text. Wear is the mark of the consumption of that raw material. Digital
duplication avoids this, with industrial opposition to file-sharing presuming
a different (e.g. monetary) loss.
A segment of degraded videotape hints at how a historical audience
watched a text, augmenting contemporary reports of that viewing context.
Hilderbrand writes that the materiality of videotape allows for the curious
quality of being able to read the previous views in the tape insofar as the
uneven degradation of the tape itself indicates its previous use. He argues
that the act of making a bootleg duplicate leads to the ‘distortion of the image
and sound tracks, [which will] materially record and reveal this process of
creation and history of circulation’ (ibid.: 61-62). The wear on old videotape
can be part of the format’s pleasure: as Hilderbrand notes, for texts like cult
films that do not have slick production values, ‘the addition of bootleg video
aesthetics—whether from sketchy distributors or personal copying—may
well enrich the text and add to the experience’ of viewing them (ibid.: 65).
This aesthetic enrichment is familiar in media fandom: Penley argues that
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, slash zines were ‘not as slick as they could
be’, a situation that ‘may arise from an impulse to keep them looking slightly
tacky to give them that illegitimate pornographic cast’ (1991: 141, emphasis
in original). For these zines, the ‘slightly tacky’ aesthetic is a deliberate
36 The notion of vidding from an archive raises issues of bootlegging and copyright and therefore
of access. As videotape objects, vids ‘offer lessons in progressive media policy and remain
essential tools of media access, even in the era of their apparent obsolescence or irrelevance’
(Hilderbrand 2009: 20). These implications are beyond the scope of this study.
114 Fanvids
decision that mimics accidental degradation for the same effect. For the
surviving videotape vids, poor image quality is an unavoidable side-effect
of well-worn and well-used tape.
In her discussion of appropriate and appropriated technologies, Penley
highlights a tension between the appearance of professionalism in zines
and vids and the fact that the concept of amateur, or bootleg, is tied to
an aesthetic and a material realization of these objects.37 However, in
the videotape era, making a vid look too much like a music video was
less probable than publishing a zine that too closely resembled a liter-
ary magazine. The rougher look and feel of vids is most likely a result of
technical limitations guiding the form’s overall aesthetic, which is a point
that Penley does not highlight in her description. At that time, given the
available source material for making a vid—off-air recordings and copies
taped ‘from video store rentals’ (ibid.: 145)—and production equipment of
limited sophistication, an aesthetic ‘commitment to amateurism’ (ibid.:
144) had few alternatives.
The vid Who Can It Be Now? mentioned earlier uses clips from the Gothic
series Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971) that feature the character Willie
Loomis (John Karlen). Dark Shadows ‘mingled tales of vampires, werewolves,
time travel and parallel universes with the more traditional family saga
of the daytime soap opera’ (Wheatley 2006: 146). As the unwilling servant
to the vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), Loomis must answer
the front door of his master’s house. The vid’s soundtrack is the Men at
Work song ‘Who Can it be Now?’ in which the song’s narrator knows he
has a caller but wishes to be left alone.38 By pairing these lyrics with clips
of Loomis’s repeated trips to the front door, this vid works as a character
study focusing on Loomis’s feelings about his servitude. The vid collates
multiple examples of this, a result of the vidders having recognized this
motif and then curated these collected moments into a vid (intercut with
other clips of the character). In the vid, as in the series, Loomis is condemned
to answer the door; as a work of narrative analysis and character study,
this vid gives voice to his resentment using the clips from the archive to
respond with a mixture of humour and pathos to the character’s role within
the narrative. The quality of the clips in this vid is well below broadcast
standard, and the effect of VCR-to-VCR dubbing is clearly visible in the
blurred and discoloured image. Importantly, the poor quality of the images
37 In subsequent decades, online publishing has largely supplanted print zines, but technologies
for self-publishing are available in the home as well as workplaces.
38 With lyrics, ‘Who can it be knocking at my door? | Go ‘way, don’t come ‘round here no more.’
indicates the probable frequency of the source videotapes’ use before being
excerpted in a vid, and indeed of the use of the videotape on which the vid
itself was recorded and shared.
Camille Bacon-Smith claims the majority of fannish American viewers
of the UK series The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983) in the 1980s had watched
episodes that were severely degraded as a result of being many generations
removed from their initial off-air recording (1992: 124). In some cases, group
screenings of episodes on degraded videotape included interlocutors who
would describe the action and actors’ expressions. Indeed, Bacon-Smith
reports that one American fan convention in 1984 invited actors from the
British series to attend as special guests because ‘Fans wanted to see what
the actors really looked like’ (ibid.). A British buddy cop show ‘in the vein
of US police series Starsky and Hutch’ (Oldham 2017: 58), The Professionals
was popular with slash fans, who focused on the relationship between
the protagonists Bodie (Lewis Collins) and Doyle (Martin Shaw). This
generational degradation is clearly seen in You Can’t Hurry Love (Tolbran,
1994), which was produced using videotape copies that are profoundly
worn. As with Wind Beneath My Wings, this vid shows the discolouration,
tracking tears, and grain (cf. Hilderbrand 2009: 65) that loudly announce the
motley origin and use of the vid’s source tapes. While the precise genealogy
of tapes used to create You Can’t Hurry Love is obscure, it is an entirely
credible assumption that this vid was made from tapes that could trace their
origins to sets that Bacon-Smith observed in her research: copies that were
‘derive[d] from one set recorded in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1981-82 and
distributed via torturous channels throughout the country’ (1992: 123-124).
These copies therefore were, at moments, nearly indecipherable from the
resulting generations between initial taping and duplication. In the case of
The Professionals, recording clean copies was not possible through much of
the 1980s and 1990s, as the series was not available in syndication due to a
contract dispute (Hunt 2001).
As Price (1977) and Hilderbrand (2009) suggest, there are moments of
wear preserved in vids made from this source material that signal scenes of
particular interest. One particularly striking example in You Can’t Hurry Love
is the near-decapitation of a discoloured Bodie. This glance is a significant
clip, as Bodie is meant to be gazing at his partner Doyle. Throughout the vid,
similar clips are captioned with lyrics that guide the viewer’s interpretation
of this as a slash vid and Bodie’s glances as longing; he does not ‘hurry’ love
but instead waits and watches. The vid’s use of the Phil Collins cover of ‘You
Can’t Hurry Love’ rather than the Supremes version further establishes
the vid’s point of view as originating with Bodie: these longing glances are
116 Fanvids
accompanied by a male vocal performance and grounded with a male aural

subjectivity. (It does, however, replace the voices of black women with that
of a white man, which should not pass without mention.) If we presume
an engaged television audience of the sort Bacon-Smith (1992) observed
watching together at conventions and pausing at significant moments for
explanation and discussion, we have a credible explanation for why this
gesture or that glance becomes more worn out on the videotape: there is
material stress on the source tape as a significant moment is identified,
paused, rewound, and re-viewed. The clips containing glances and gestures
upon which fans build their slash readings can therefore, understandably,
be the most affected clips in a vid.
This affectionate degradation is seen throughout You Can’t Hurry Love,
which is in the main a carefully curated catalogue of significant looks and
glances across many episodes. Interestingly, while The Professionals has a
reputation as ‘a show so absurdly and hysterically macho that it inadvertently
queers the whole genre’ (Hunt 2001: 128), the moments collected in the vid
tend to emphasize the connection between Bodie and Doyle. For example,
in the vid’s final sequence, the two men look out of a window, smile at
each other, and then move to either side of a nearby bed while they remove
their jackets. In the narrative of the vid, this sequence is a climax: the love
that can’t be hurried, referred to in the title of the song, is in the process
of reaching its consummation. Through the wear on the tape used as a
source for this clip, we know this moment was subject to attention by fans
revisiting a notable sequence. But unlike the pornographic tapes described
by Price (1977), this video striptease does not hide nudity. Rather, it reveals
a potential fan reading of this moment as significant in describing a slash
narrative for these characters. In the context of the vid, this expression of
comradeship (eye contact, smiling) in a scene with moderate undressing is
sufficient to signify the narrative extension of this scene into a culmination
of homoerotic attraction. The evidence in the video image of its tape’s heavy
use matches the descriptions in Penley (1991) and Bacon-Smith (1992) of
the VCR’s use to closely watch and review scenes of significance. That this
wear has been preserved in a vid built out of these moments is a lasting
record of these readings and viewing practices. Throughout the vid, the
clips most affected by wear are the clips of the gestures and glances upon
which a slash reading is based; speaking practically, they are also the clips
used to make a slash vid.
Bacon-Smith does not evoke the archive to frame her experiences of
watching episodes on tape at fan conventions in the United States. However,
her descriptions of the close readings (pause-and-rewind) and the ‘common’
practice of the ‘marathon viewing weekend’ (1992: 121)39 resemble Carolyn

Steedman’s account of archival research in Dust, particularly Steedman’s
statement that ‘You know you will not finish, that there will be something
left unread, unnoted, untranscribed’ (2001: 18). Both authors write of the
frantic compressed timeframe in which to watch (or read, or photograph) key
moments of a series (or a document, or an eighteenth-century account book)
and, temporally speaking, to get the most out of one’s limited exposure to the
texts. What videotape’s reproducibility offers, and what digital file-sharing
carries forth, is a duplicate archive. Preserved within a vid may be these
traces of invested viewing with the potential to ‘perform in mnemonic
ways […] to project the multiple, multiplying layers of complex connections
between people, places, pasts and possibilities’ (Garde-Hansen 2011: 42-43).
The frantic consumption before even more of the artifacts are consumed by
wear and time can now be somewhat delayed by digital duplication, be it a
digital transfer of videotape or digital photograph of a document. The limited
use that must occur in order for these copies to be made is unfortunate—as
it contributes to the accumulation of wear on the tape—but necessary.
Jenkins notes that at the time of his writing, vidders ‘increasingly rely
upon laserdiscs for their masters to allow more flexibility and sharper
images’ (1992: 244). In his chapter on vids (what he calls ‘fan music video’),
the question of image quality is mentioned only once more as part of his
concluding comments on the lack of control that videotape vidders had
over their work. Jenkins notes that, ‘Having worked so hard to overcome
“rainbow lines” and other glitches’, vidders report being ‘concerned about
the quality of these multiple-generation copies and are worried that people
often see their videos only in technically flawed prints’ (ibid.: 284), though
he is silent on the aesthetic or material consequences of using bootleg tape.
Francesca Coppa (2008) similarly comments on the challenge of making
videotape-era vids such as Pressure (Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman
Out, 1990)—which is itself a vid about vidding’s technical complexity—but
does not draw attention to the wear and discolouration apparent in the stills
she provides. While Penley notes ‘the high level of everyday technological
skills’ of fans in fandom (1991: 141), the quality of taped source material lim-
ited the visual sophistication of the resulting works. If the vidder purchased
consumer-grade home editing devices, more control over the editing of clips
was possible and could limit some of the negative effects (the ‘jittering’
39 Bacon-Smith describes watching ‘taped episodes of Blake’s 7 for sixteen hours [in one]
weekend’ (1992: 121) and reports that one of her contacts had watched ‘at least seven hours of
The Professionals’ the night before a group interview (1992: 123).
118 Fanvids
and ‘rainbow lines’) of tape-to-tape transfer but could not restore source
videotape that was already degraded.
The degradation that is so central to the experience of watching videotape
for Bacon-Smith and Hilderbrand is missing from Jenkins’ description of
videotape vids. Hilderbrand seems genuinely excited about the aesthetic and
affective sides of tape degradation. Bacon-Smith takes this as an unavoidable
condition of the form, plainly stating that in addition to the audio source, the
video source, and the audio/visual sync, a vidder ‘also needs as much source
material as possible, in as clear copy as possible’ (1992: 175), which alludes
to the existence of copies that are not clear. While she notes that vidders
are ‘sensitive to the technology of videotape’ and knowledgeable about the
potential for laserdisc and Betamax to provide higher-quality images, ‘few
community members are able or willing to devote the financial resources
necessary for the use of multiple technologies’ (ibid.: 176). The wear evident
in vids made using videotape source material, as indicated by degraded
image quality, is evidence of an engaged audience’s repeat viewings of
significant moments. It is interesting that Jenkins presents the problem of
video quality as arising in the editing process rather than the image itself,
given that in Who Can It Be Now, the ‘rainbow lines’ appear at the start and
end of clips, at the edit points. Perhaps this is because variations in image
quality in individual clips are so integral to the medium that it was beyond
comment, despite being part of the experience of watching a vid or of the
visual texture of vids. Part of the goal for this chapter is to demonstrate how
flaws in videotape images are markers of the vid’s particular historiography.
Despite Busse and Hellekson’s assertion that ‘VCR tapes of fan vids have
given way to sophisticated, perfectly synched, high-quality electronic files’
(2006: 16), the textual traces that would betray the bootleg history of a vid’s
source video are not limited to videotape. Nor, indeed, is the potential for
a bootleg thrill absent; instead, these traces are shifted onto a different
register of signification. In digital vids, there are three common ways to
make a vid with source material that has not been ripped from an official
DVD release and therefore shows traces of digital bootlegging. These also
represent three different contemporary origin points for media in one’s
personal home video archive.
First, a vid could be a contemporary re-working of archived videotape that
has been format-shifted from videotape: a digital rip of analogue time-shifted
footage. The aforementioned vid Fireworks (Jayne L., 2010) is made from the
Canadian television series Power Play (1998-2000), which focused on the
management of a fictional professional ice hockey team. This series has not
been released on DVD, but its modest fan base shares the VHS rips of the series,
keeping it in circulation long after its cancellation. The quality of the footage
will vary depending on the age of the videotapes before they were ripped and
the quality of the conversion. A slightly overlapping category is vids made
from digitally time-shifted television episodes (i.e. digitally recorded). For
example, the Supernatural vid Alone Now (hay1ock, 2007) includes clips from
Canadian and American broadcasts of the series, as indicated by watermark-
ing preserved in the vid (from channels CityTV and The CW, respectively).
Like the first group, these can include station-specific broadcast watermarks
that reveal a series’ international market, the global stretch of fandom, and
the digital equivalent of cross-border videotape sharing.
Finally, vidders may also use copies of films (openly available online and
of poor image quality) that have been recorded in a cinema or duplicated
from a screening copy. 40 The first cycle of Marvel Studios superhero films
have frequently been vidded from this ‘cam’ source material as fans seek
to participate in fannish discourse using their preferred form of fanwork
in the months between the theatrical release of a popular film and its DVD
release date. Vids using clips from Iron Man (John Favreau, 2008), Thor
(Kenneth Branagh, 2011), and Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012)—and,
for a different franchise, Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)—were circulated and
were shown at conventions before a ‘cleaner’ copy of the film was available
to use for clips, sometimes within a few weeks of the films’ release. Where
fans who write fiction or who create fan art have the capacity for immediate
response to a series or film, a vidder can seek out bootleg copies of these
objects to participate in the initial rush of fannish enthusiasm.
In each of these examples, the source video is easily recognizable as a
digital bootleg; the difference is clearly seen when compared to a DVD rip
of the same footage. The viewer’s ability to read the image quality adds a
thrill of illegitimacy, though I would dispute that these vids are made to
showcase the flaws in the video quality. Rather, as with Wind Beneath My
Wings and You Can’t Hurry Love, the clips are used despite their flaws, as
part of the passionate thrill of finding evidence to communicate different
interpretations of the films in the franchise. The notes in the vidder’s blog
post announcing the release of the Iron Man vid Freedom Hangs Like Heaven
bemoan the cinema audience member who appears in the frame, marring
the shot (quigonejinn 2008). This draws attention to the imperfection of
the source material, excusing its poor image quality while simultaneously
emphasizing the timeliness of the vid.
40 For work on user-led digital distribution, see Strangelove (2005); May (2007); Lewis (2007);
Lobato (2012); and Newman (2012).
120 Fanvids
This does not mean that vids made with poor-quality footage are im-
mutable. Thor was released on home video four months after Set Fire to the
Rain (talitha78, 2011) was made; the vidder isagel took this opportunity to
produce a shot-for-shot remake (known as a ‘remaster’) of talitha78s’s vid
using the newly available DVD rip footage. This potential to revise and
update vids raises a question of what a vid is for and how that purpose may
change: using cam footage is about the vidders’ immediate response to a
film, but remaking a cam footage vid with a better quality source suggests
that aesthetics and visual pleasure are just as important in vids as is timely
participation in fannish discourse (or contributing to the canonization of
a particular media event, cf. Dayan and Katz 2011). A vid constructs a way
to revisit the interpretive, narrative, and visual pleasures of the source
material. For example, the remastered Set Fire to the Rain reveals certain
visual pleasures of Thor that are obscured when bootleg source material is
used. For vidders engaged in the interpretation of films such as the Marvel
Studios film franchise, using low-quality source material is a reasonable
option in the absence of better footage in order to contribute to the creation
of fannish interpretations of these popular texts.
Hilderbrand’s assumption that the existence of bootleg home video
indicates ‘their source copies were probably actively sought’ (2009: 61) is
interesting when thinking about the audiences of home video. This is not
merely watching films or television by channel-surfing or by turning down
pages in TV Guide or Radio Times (i.e. waiting to see what is on); this is
seeking out that which has already been televized or exhibited in order to
watch closely and make use of the media. A personal home video archive,
built over time, allows access to present and past film and television. As
Aleida Assmann argues, ‘The archive is the basis of what can be said in
the future about the present when it will have become the past’ (2011: 335).
Home video is therefore more than a collection: it has the potential to be
archival and carries with it traces of its archive.
The Archival Aesthetic of Vids
Returning to a selection of Star Trek vids, this section discusses vids that are
not only made from fans’ personal archives but that also directly invoke the
idea of the archive and an archive’s relationship with personal and collective
memory. These vids look and feel archival; they are textually archival in
their form, as they reflect an archival aesthetic. The vidders’ access to source
material of varying quality or the decision to use worn videotape (or in one
case, film) is a sign of and reference to the vids’ source material as coming
from a larger repository of work. As detailed earlier, this section will focus
on three re-uses of Star Trek through the original television series and the
spin-off films though not the four subsequent television series. 41
Beyond the textual traces of archival origin, a vid can be a way for audi-
ences to sustain their interaction with cult media past and present. In the
case of Star Trek, this interaction can challenge assumptions surrounding
such a well-known franchise. The (digital) vid Star Trek: Tik Tok (MissSheenie,
2010) remakes the voyage of discovery undertaken by the USS Enterprise
into a frivolous pleasure cruise. In contrast, The Test (here’s luck, 2010) works
explicitly with the importance of memory (and, by extension, self-knowledge)
of a specific character. This vid also represents a technological progression
to digital production and online streaming from the videotape practices
that began with home VCR technology.
Steedman’s ‘prosaic definition’ of an archive is useful here: ‘archive’
is ‘a name for the many places in which the past ([…] which cannot be
retrieved, but which may be represented) has deposited some traces and
fragments’ (2001: 69). The clips used in these works are taken from the vid-
ders’ archives of Star Trek episodes and films; they are ‘traces and fragments’
of past television series and films broadcast and released. The experience of
watching Star Trek—of viewing the series, of the discursive interaction in
fandom—cannot be retrieved, but the vid’s re-use of clips can communicate
the interpretation/analysis of narrative moments, thereby representing a
version of its history. The act of recognizing the close friendship or romance
between Kirk and Spock will have initially happened once for a viewer, but
the representation of that recognition can be narrativized and held in a vid.
The non-linear sequencing of clips in vids allows a vidder to represent
a connection (thematic, narrative, formal) between different parts of a
series and to collect those isolated moments of significance into a sug-
gestive whole. Vids represent where those deposited traces and fragments
of home video’s past come to represent certain slices of that history. The
clips become significant objects containing the representation of actors
in character performing gestures, glances, and movements that turn a
collection of episodes into an archive out of which viewers and vidders
can build narratives. Vids as individual works may write a history of their
41 Cam footage (discussed earlier) is not represented in this section; however, examples do exist:
Don’t Stop Believing (arefadedaway, 2009) and I’m On A Boat (kiki_miserychic, 2009) were both
made within one month of the theatrical release of Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), and therefore
were made well in advance of the film’s home video release.
122 Fanvids
source material, but to do so they reflect the memory and imaginative work
of fans in recalling and experiencing their fandom. This is the interplay of
archive, memory, and history in vids.
I do not intend to make a claim about the inner lives of fans but rather
to examine what may be at stake when the vid form carries with it textual
traces of its archival origins. Joanne Garde-Hansen proposes a double articu-
lation of the past as written (history) or recollected (memory); significantly,
while ‘History (authoritative) and memory (private) appear to be at odds
with each other,’ media ‘negotiate both history and memory’ (2011: 6) and
the vid form acts as a site of reciprocation between written and recollected
versions of a film or series. The vid form appears to provide a variation on
Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, ‘which emerges at the
interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past’ (e.g.
through a film, museum exhibition, etc.) wherein ‘an experience occurs
through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history’
(2004: 2). Instead of offering viewers ‘memories of places and experiences
through which they have not lived’ (Garde-Hansen 2011: 62), the vid-as-
prosthetic-memory potentially offers access to historical fan discourses,
mediated through a vidder-created context. Individually, a vid’s clips ‘are
shorthand for much longer segments of the program narrative’ (Jenkins 1992:
234), but the vid as a whole can arguably be read as shorthand for much
more extensive relationships between a text; how it may be interpreted
personally and collectively; and how it may be articulated, re-framed, and
memorialized in a vid.
It is Steedman’s assertion that the desire to interact with an archive is
‘expressive of the more general fever to know and to have the past’ (2001:
75). The parodic and playful Tik Tok uses Kesha’s ‘Tik Tok’ as audio source
to suggest life on the Enterprise is a non-stop party, gathering clips where
the crew is shown drinking, dancing, or affected by alien influences. A key
pleasure of this vid is in recognizing the difference between the received
notion of Star Trek’s staid image as a venerable cult television text and the
vid’s exaggeration of its camp mise-en-scène. In Tik Tok, the series is re-written
as a carefree and consequence-free world, populated by a crew revelling in
their excesses as they careen around the universe. This is at odds with the
earnest and family-friendly popular perception of the series, which has a
reputation for being ‘inflexibly “moralistic” in presenting the “American
ideal”’ (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995: 167). The vid activates an association with
female-led pop music as trivial/disposable, using a mismatch between what
many Star Trek fans see as a future-utopian ‘model for how the USA can
be changed for the better’ (Geraghty 2015: 73) and a young woman singing
about partying as a way to undercut the show’s serious reputation. Kesha’s

music helps to reveal this less staid version of Star Trek, but the comparison
potentially relies on an implicit cultural hierarchy in which Star Trek is
‘brought down’ to Kesha’s level.
Aesthetically, Tik Tok’s vivid colour suggests that the vidder used restored
and remastered DVD releases as source footage, not ageing videotapes.
There is a crisp authority implied in the restoration’s clarity that aids in
the vid’s joking pretence to being a definitive view of Star Trek. The digital
compression of the vid on YouTube restores some of the fan-dance tease
of the archival aesthetic found in degraded videotape; however, its use of
simple cuts and split-screen manipulation rather than dissolves or fades
to construct its montage enacts a visual ‘texture of memory’ (Holdsworth
2011: 45) that is authoritative and matter-of-fact, and not one in which the
past is ‘forgotten, misremembered, repressed’ (Kuhn 2000: 184).
The vid’s purpose is not to re-write particular storylines but to use the
evidence found in the clips to momentarily shift the overall tone of the series.
A crucial moment in the vid is therefore the opening sequence, as quick
edits and literal matches between song lyric and visual content establish
the vid’s comic premise. The lyrics that begin the song are matched with
corresponding action in the frame: waking up (close-up on Shatner’s face,
as he rises from a bed) firmly aligns the song’s narrative to the actions as
(re-)presented and establishes a less metaphorical application of song to
image. The next line, ‘grab my glasses, I’m out the door’ is paired with two
quick shots of Kirk and Spock in garish protective eyewear; this continues to
establish the vid’s joke, as the glasses shown in the clips are transformed to
the height of extreme fashion. From there, the vidder locates commensurate
clips and builds the alternate version of the series out of disconnected
moments in the available archive of moving images. Textually, there is no
narrative beyond that which is provided by the song, which also makes the
vid accessible to viewers with casual knowledge of Star Trek.
Tik Tok emphasizes broad gestures rather than subtle glances, where
motion within the frame is matched to the song’s rhythm as it highlights
many of the series’ flamboyant visual moments. As both an adaptation
of and an argument about Star Trek, we are made to look at the series
rather than to read (interpret) its arguments about the series’ themes of
compassion and tolerance. As the vid’s purpose is to construct a joke from
the playful juxtaposition of classic science fiction television with a party
song, the force of the song’s narrative overwhelms the specific connection
between the clips’ original context. Holdsworth argues that ‘moments of
return’ in television narratives—moments that recall previous events and
124 Fanvids
thereby reward a committed viewer—are ‘best characterised by the brevity

of these momentary appearances’ (2011: 64). In Tik Tok, the clips chosen
represent brief moments of another sort, which in their re-presentation are
foregrounded. Even if there were only single scenes with an alien celebration
or consumption of alcohol every several episodes, the concentration of these
clips provides evidence to support the vid’s argument about the Enterprise as
a party boat.42 The resulting group of moving images ends up functioning as
the vidder’s archive of the camp and colourful visual style of Star Trek: this
is a history of the show’s visual style and not a presentation of its (real or
imagined) narrative history or cultural significance. This vid is a deliberate
misreading of archival traces that exploits the potential of Star Trek as an
open text. In material terms, the vid also exploits the existence of Star Trek
as a text that potentially exists in one’s personal archive.
In contrast, the (in)famous vid Closer (T. Jonesy and Killa, 2004) is a dark
take on the original series, using the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Closer’ to propose
a different version of the episode ‘Amok Time’ (tx. 15 September 1967). In the
episode, Spock’s behaviour becomes erratic; his alien physiology means he
must return to his home planet to take a mate or face death. The situation
is resolved through a convoluted scheme involving ceremonial combat in
which Spock believes he has killed Kirk. In the vid, the episode is re-cut
(with some additional external footage) to suggest that Spock’s compromised
state and superhuman strength result in his sexual assault of Kirk, thereby
constructing a ‘disturbing story about rape’ (Russo 2009: 126). The vid uses
shots in which Spock appears menacing and in which Kirk appears fearful in
order to build a narrative of mental and physical violation. Closer constructs
the possibility of a volatile world under the surface of this utopian military
setting through the combination of violent and sexually explicit lyrics with
shot choices.
The distressed, sepia-toned digital effect used in the vid as well as the
frequent use of jump cuts mimic the aesthetic of the song’s commercial
music video but are also ‘used to provide new meaning to the source footage’
(Coppa 2008: 1.3). Manipulation of the contrast levels and the addition of
various filters create a digital mimicry of decomposing and/or unevenly
processed nitrate film stock and therefore makes a knowing reference
to the moving image as found in the archive. There is an added sense of
urgency from the digital effect. Paolo Cherchi Usai notes that as cellulose
nitrate stock disintegrates, ‘the image tends to disappear and the base
42 While several clips are from ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ (tx. 29 December 1967), the use of
clips from several other episodes makes it more than an interpretation of one sequence.
takes on a brownish colour’ (1994: 20). Closer alludes to this disappearance

with effects such as a digital ‘tear’ in the pseudo film stock and off-centre
framing. The manipulated images pretend, therefore, to be only a few steps
away from being lost forever, disappearing into ‘an indistinct mass covered
by a brownish crust’ and eventually ‘reduced to a whitish object or even to
powder’ (ibid.). Therefore, the vidders’ visual quotation of the heavily stylized
original Nine Inch Nails video becomes a reminder of the fate of footage lost
in the archives, with its ‘discovery’ bringing with it the appeal of the exotic,
that is, the rare and nearly lost. (The jump cuts are created by removing short
sections of footage; these gaps could be read as footage that had already
been lost.) This put-on uniqueness—though this vid is digital and exists in
many copies—allows for the pretence that this is a singular object and that
it therefore must be witnessed before it is completely destroyed.
In addition to the alteration to the original narrative, the degraded visual
aesthetic of the vid also connotes the disintegration of Spock’s self-control.
Like Tik Tok, underneath the digital manipulation, the source material for
Closer appears to be free from the kind of videotape degradation as seen
in Wind Beneath My Wings or All Coming Back. What differs is the digital
processing of Closer, which evokes a rhetorical position regarding what the
vid pretends is the origin of its footage and what that aesthetic decision
could suggest about the performance of that archive. To begin with, there is
a suggestion of authenticity-through-age in the imperfection of the images.
The sepia tone, light bleed effects, and desaturation of some areas of the
image create an aesthetic of obscurity, of a distrust that restored footage
might tidy up vital elements. By using this effect, the vid evokes some hidden
truth that has been uncovered and archivally substantiated. This responds
to the indexical power of a photograph or moving image, or more precisely
a trust in what Arild Fetveit calls ‘the evidential credibility of photographic
images’ (2004: 543). The evidence presented in this vid is blatantly at odds
with what happens in the episode ‘Amok Time’, and yet the indexical proof
offered by the images—that the bodies captured on film did move through
these locations—can be so easily made to serve another version of that
history, another writing-up of the traces discovered in the archive.
The sonic dimension also follows this line of obscurity, as the bass rhythm
that begins the song itself is a two-beat (like a heartbeat), with a bass drum
hit followed by a burst of static/steam sound on the off-beat. This aural
element helps colour the soundscape of the vid in a similar manner as the
faux-distressed film effect: the mechanical failures implied in the degraded
video and distorted audio work together to create this aesthetic performance
of a crumbling, uncertain archival object. In these respects, Closer presents
126 Fanvids
itself as the last look at a hidden record that may not be restored and saved
from being eaten away through improper preservation. There is always the
possibility that archival research will reveal a dirty secret or other unpleasant
truth; this is a concept of the archive as a place where the historian’s task
in writing up the fragments and traces becomes a problem of balanced
narration. As a textual performance of the idea of archival evidence and
the state of objects in archives, the pretence offered in Closer plays with
an idea of what truths can be derived from the archive, becoming a kind
of play with perceptions of reality.
Closer is especially compelling because its source narrative, the episode
‘Amok Time’, has become central to several decades of fan attention (S.F.
Winters 2012). Where Tik Tok can be enjoyed solely through the context of
the song, Closer perhaps requires an awareness of the original episodes for
complete effect; this ‘feral’ Spock is not the vid’s invention but a narrative
element taken from the series. Indeed, Sarah Fiona Winters argues that being
able to recognize the vid as a reference to this specific episode ‘allows the
viewer to identify both men as victims of a lack of control’ (2012: 2.1) by recall-
ing the episode’s context for the characters’ actions. The comprehensibility
and analytic power of a vid is in the addition of a subsequent narrative and
layer of textual meaning and not the replacement of the original meanings.43
This is an individual sense of archive, where an audience’s memory of a
series—constructed in part thanks to television’s ‘provision of a public
sphere, a shared experience and a communal space’ (Holdsworth 2011:
125)—can be substantiated through a personal collection of episodes.
Finally, The Test (here’s luck, 2010) blends the film Star Trek (J.J. Abrams,
2009) with clips from the previous films and the original television series. It
works as a performance of memory, performing an understanding/reading
of references (intentional or unintentional) to the original franchise in the
reboot film. This creates an explicit continuity across the franchise for the
fan who is either aware of these connections or would benefit from having
those connections made clear. Like All Coming Back, the vid’s representation
of ‘what remembering feels like’ (Holdsworth 2011: 44) for its central character
is also a performance of fan memory and intertextual knowledge. This is
especially significant, as the concept of a ‘reboot’, borrowed from comic
book publishing, ‘has become a popular way to promote films and other
media forms that revisit familiar narratives with an altered origin story,
43 The process is similar to watching an adaptation (Chapter 6 expands on this point), where an
audience familiar with the work being adapted will ‘inevitably fill in the gaps in the adaptation
with information from the adapted text’ (Hutcheon 2013: 121).
narrative approach, or artistic aesthetic’ (Scahill 2016: 317). In the case of Star
Trek (2009) and its sequels, this has meant resetting or erasing the familiar
actors, art direction, and tone of the Shatner/Nimoy years. The only original
cast member to appear in the 2009 film is Leonard Nimoy, but the other
actors are made to appear in the vid and—for the vid’s audience—become
a proper part of the reboot’s alternate diegesis, re-introducing the history
of the franchise that the reboot seeks to supersede.
A key sequence in the vid (and the film) takes place in an ice cave where
the old Spock telepathically gives the new Kirk (Chris Pine) a flashback
exposition sequence to explain the reboot film as an alternate timeline. The
vid replaces this exposition with a rapid sequence of clips featuring Kirk
and Spock from the original series, captioned by the lyrics ‘Devil came by
this morning | Said he had something to show me | […] Pictures and things
that I’ve done before | Circling around me’. After the flashback sequence,
Kirk’s reaction elicits Spock’s apology for ‘emotional transference’, which
can be read as Spock’s apologizing for burdening Kirk with Spock’s own
guilt and shame for having caused the destruction of two planets, or of
Spock’s emotion of seeing his old (dead) friend again. The vidder here’s luck
composites partial frames from the original franchise, constructing a visual
representation of memory through what looks like a digitally added static/
tear effect reminicient of worn or degraded videotape. The left-hand side of
the frame shows a close-up of Kirk’s face, and the right-hand side of the frame
contains added, digitally clipped footage of Spock’s memory as experienced
by Kirk (and, therefore, by the audience as well). Like Holdsworth’s descrip-
tion of the BBC TV series Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007), in which episodes
were preceded by ‘the 1970s test card and colour bars flickering onto the
screen’ so that ‘Television appeared to be breaking down or rewinding to
a different time’ (2011: 111), The Test takes on a specific visual signifier to
indicate an ‘aesthetic shift in time’ (ibid.). What we see in the vid is the result
of Spock’s emotional transference: we see this new Kirk’s artificial memories
of a life not his but that he now remembers. Unlike the relative clarity of
Tik Tok’s editing, the digital mimicry of analogue degradation is used as a
textual representation of Kirk’s imperfect recall even as the comparison
of images performs the vidder’s critical comparison of the reboot with the
original cast’s films and episodes.
The Test intervenes in the narrative of the reboot film using clips from
Star Trek’s previous incarnations. Where All Coming Back performs a fan’s
memory of the franchise as represented through archival clips of that fran-
chise to ‘rebuild’ Spock’s own memory, The Test argues that this new Kirk
has gained access to that same historical information through the original
128 Fanvids
Spock. In both Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Star Trek (2009), Spock
arrives on the bridge of the Enterprise to publicly request Kirk’s permission
to re-join the Enterprise crew. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), this
takes place partway through the film, whereas in Star Trek (2009), the scene
is the dénouement. Shifting this reunion to the end of the film fulfils the
narrative promise of a reboot; the vid constructs a diegesis in which Kirk
expects to see Spock because of his foreknowledge of a similar moment
from his alternate’s past. This expectation is shared by the audience, who
share the same memory of the previous incarnation. The 2009 film visually
quotes its predecessor, as in both films Spock enters through a door on the
right side of the frame, pauses, and then moves right to left through the
shot; the vid’s complex invocation of memory and archive occur through
digitally compositing the two scenes. The overlay of the 1979 Spock (Leonard
Nimoy) on the 2009 Spock (Zachary Quinto) appears intentionally rough,
clearly positioning the older footage as a memory (or hallucination) that
intrudes on Kirk’s view of his current crew member. The vid does more than
point out a similarity in framing and blocking: it asks its audience to read
the new film in a deeper historical context, which is achieved by a ‘textual
re-encounter’ (Holdsworth 2011: 98) with these older texts.
As a film, Star Trek (2009) is more concerned with Kirk as an agent of
science fiction action than in permitting moments of reflection or introspec-
tion. Therefore, The Test works to fill in Kirk’s intensely personal journey to
establish self-worth and value in the eyes of Spock (who has power over him
as lecturer, as superior officer on the ship, and then as his captain), even as
he blows up alien spaceships and flees monsters. It does so by suggesting that
Kirks own past and his knowledge of the alternate timeline are constantly
present in his mind, in his recent memory. In a continuation of the sequence
detailing Spock’s return to duty described above, new Kirk’s memory of old
Spock’s happiness at seeing Kirk alive and well (at the end of ‘Amok Time’) is
suggested through juxtaposing a clip from the original series episode with a
clip of similar composition from the film (a two-shot from behind Kirk’s head
and showing Spock’s face) and context (Spock and Kirk seeing each other after
a period apart). Vitally, the vid pairs both narrative context and also formal
elements: the video effect and cross-cutting is placed so that Kirk’s memory of
a different timeline bleeds through in the middle of a reverse shot. The film’s
echo of the episode’s framing is recognizable as being from different source
material: while the aspect ratios of both are the same due to the compositing,
the television source appears slightly cropped and the film is differentiated
by a lens flare effect and detailed set decoration. The videotape distortion
links this ‘memory’ with the new Spock’s more reserved response.
Unlike All Coming Back and Closer, which both make Spock the main
character, The Test retains Kirk as the main character. It positions Spock
as watching Kirk, who himself is aware of being watched and judged (as
established through dissolves/fades) by Spocks from two universes/time-
lines. The question asked in the chorus (‘Did I pass | The acid test’) is made
into Kirk’s search for approval from Spock, who in this timeline is not his
friend (or lover). As with All Coming Back and Closer, there is a voyeuristic
quality to the more intimate tone of The Test that sets it apart from the
inclusive narrative of Tik Tok. Tik Tok contains a very public world, whereas
the introspection of The Test and the torment of Closer are invitations to
view the characters’ deeply personal moments which are exposed for the
pleasure of the audience.
This performance of memory is shared by the vid’s audience: we are
led through a historiographical exercise constructed in archival clips,
as a refresher (or f irst experience) of the franchise. Indeed, as they are
framed in The Test, these moments of significance may also be read as a
performance of the history of Kirk/Spock vids. The visual quotations and
narrative parallels in the reboot film take on extra significance as they
are called out by the vidder and integrated into a story of Kirk making
sense of his world and experiences. In these vids, and particularly in The
Test, certain moments—the handclasp from the end of Star Trek: The
Motion Picture, 3D chess, Spock appearing at the bridge—come to act as
shorthand for larger character and narrative arcs. Clips repeated in vids
are moments that Kirk and Spock would f ind meaningful if they were
emotionally complex people given to self-reflection, rather than being
characters formed ‘without the illusion of rounded personality’, as Lynne
Joyrich argues (1996: 73). Therefore, clips from the original series act as
the characters’ memories and as the vidders’ performance of their own
readings of the franchise.
Therefore, the vids in this section suggest three different ways of watching
Star Trek, three different archival ‘discoveries’, and three different rep-
resentations of the franchise. The Test deals explicitly with a character’s
recovery of memory, where Tik Tok and Closer suggest reinterpretations of
the original narrative and, by extension, of the way a series can be used as
an archive for fanworks that play on the expectations of an audience. Also,
to make sense of each clip and its place in the vid, the vid watcher must
recall the overarching narrative; therefore, vids demand a dense and active
reading predicated on one’s memory of a series or of similar works, codes,
and conventions. For Closer and The Test, the aesthetic of memory—how
memory is represented in these vids—is achieved through digital effects
130 Fanvids
replicating degraded film or video. In Tik Tok, unaltered footage evokes a

different role for the archive: it does not attempt to replicate the ‘look’ of an
archival artifact but instead demonstrates what stories may be told through
the mastery or command of an archive.
Therefore, vids help to variously constitute, recall, and demonstrate knowl-
edge and understanding of a series. The vid form permits a diverse range of
expression and comment by vidders, who invite their audiences to share in
their interpretations. Vitally, the form’s inherent reflexivity demands that the
vid be viewed and read alongside the viewer’s memory and understanding
of its source series as a whole. Vidding’s historiographical role moderates
the tension between the destruction of the series’ grand narrative (by being
pulled apart and having small sections removed) and its maintenance in
vids (as the master referent without which the vid is not comprehensible).
Conclusion
This chapter’s discussion of the differences between archiving and collecting

and between archives and collections shows how vids demonstrate vidders’
use of their personal media collections as archives to create works that both
constitute and respond to the shared experiences of media fandom. This
defies the logic of ‘disposable television’, as clip choices made in vids will
often highlight the personal meanings attached to texts and show evidence
of extensive re-watching over time. The experience of watching a vid can
become part of a shared history of watching a series or film, particularly
in convention vidshows.
Vids have an intimate relationship with the history of media in the home
in that vids are made out of a time-shifted collection or archive. The home
video archive is something that has the potential to be continually reworked.
Digital platforms permit a historical flattening, where the contents of a DVD
shelf or hard drives can permit this manner of interaction across several
decades. Experientially, the catalogues of on-demand streaming services
place titles in a similar proximity. What digital provides is not the ability to
create these kinds of works but more numerous and much more accessible
material with which to play. Therefore, vids describe the close relationship
between personal archives, individual and collective memory, and the way
memory and history are represented.
Raymond Williams’ hallucinatory account of watching American com-
mercial television in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) implies
a mode of interacting with television—a central source disseminated to
receiver boxes with very limited intervention possible from the (human)
receiver—that can no longer be assumed when conceiving of the audi-
ence who watches a programme (let alone the audience who watches the
advertising breaks, etc.). Vids, as objects of film and television and made from
home video, provide one way of considering a subset of film and television
audiences. Multiple sites of watching and methods of access as well as
temporal and spatial dislocation from an initial broadcast complicate the
question of what television this television audience is watching. The pictures
showing on a box in a living room might come from many sources, so it
becomes easier to think of television programmes as archived materials
accessed by curators/collectors and historians, or at least the metaphor might
prove fruitful when considering how vids come to be, both technically (in
terms of their technical heritage/genesis) and conceptually (the frameworks,
contexts, practices, and modes of watching).
The relative stability of a personal archive is an attractive grounding point
in the middle of so many points of access—syndication, box-set releases, home
media releases of any variety—where the ability to self-generate these archives
via taping things off the air or copying tapes (from friends, from video rental
stores, or from public libraries) removes the point of access from a rigorously
linear frame. The unique aura of one’s own copy persists even when versions
can be found online. YouTube is a false archive: copyright disputes or the whim
of the uploader can remove content, break links, and gut playlists. In many
senses, YouTube reaffirms Benjamin’s criteria for a personal library (or in this
case, a clip library): with VHS, discs, or digital files, the collector’s own copies
are in the collector’s control, whereas a streaming or digital locker link marks
only where something once was and not that it still exists. The relationship
between collections and archives therefore suggests complementary framings
of the vid form, which together help inform an understanding of vids as
discourse and as a kind of history and an object of historiography.
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5 Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle:
Multifandom Vids
Abstract
If a vid is a vidder’s path through a text, how do we account for vids that
combine multiple source texts into one work? This chapter focuses on
multifandom vids, a genre that draws together video clips from several
sources and that demonstrates ways of watching broadly across media
texts. In this, multifandom vids are the record of more than the interpreta-
tion of a single text: they construct a fannish spectator’s ‘paths’ through
genres, transmedia narratives, and even actors’ careers. Alongside critical
work on found footage films, this chapter analyses the visual pleasures
of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations of erotics, of
spectacle, and of the pleasures offered by various genres.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, transmedia, spectacle, found

footage films
combine multiple source texts into one work? This chapter focuses on
multifandom vids, a genre of vidding that draws together video clips from
several sources and that demonstrates ways of watching broadly across media
texts. It expands on the premise of the previous chapter to discuss the vid
form as detailing a mode of spectatorship that works across a genre (e.g.
science fiction) or other set of related texts (e.g. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor
in a transmedia romance across films, animated and live-action television
series, and comic book pages). In this, vids are the record of more than
the interpretation of a single text: they construct ‘paths’ through genres,
transmedia narratives, or even actors’ careers. Looking once again at critical
work on particular found footage films as close proximate forms to vids,
this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch05
138 Fanvids
audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures offered

by closely watching genres.
This chapter positions vids as works that describe the act of critical
engagement as a form of fascination. As Jenkins (1992: 24) has pointed out,
in media fandom this fascination can often be tinged with frustration of the
‘unrealized possibilities’ in the objects of their fandom. In this chapter I sort
these fascinations into somewhat different categories to Helen Wheatley’s
discussion of recent television programming in which she explores fascina-
tion with medicalized and abject televized bodies and fascination in relation
to the erotics of desiring and desired bodies (2016). Vids are arguably about
excess: excesses of emotion, spectacle, and of eroticism. Each of these forms
of excess are grounded in intense fascination with the image and with what
the image can signify in terms of narrative, character development, or other
representational paradigms. The works that are created out of this fascina-
tion have their own intensity, and this fascination is seen most intensely in
multifandom vids. As described in my Introduction, those who make and
watch vids are members of a predominantly female subculture; therefore,
I restate the academically substantiated assumption that women are very
likely to be the creators and viewers of vids and that, broadly speaking, vids
offer textual evidence of a gendered mode of media spectatorship beyond
passively watching. 44
Multifandom Vids
Where other vid genres use a single series, film, or franchise as their source
material, multifandom vids use multiple sources in their construction.
Where a series, film, book, or franchise is known as a ‘fandom’, multifandom
vids are so called because they are made using clips from different media
texts, or ‘multiple fandoms’. There is no agreed-upon limit on the number
of fandoms that can be used in a multifandom vid, and any potential sub-
categorizations relating to the number of sources used would need to be
weighed against the purpose (as stated by a vidder or discernible through
reasonable analysis) of the vid. Since a multifandom vid uses clips from
multiple fandoms to make a single work that compares several sources,
the resulting vids do not generally offer detailed arguments about singular
44 I acknowledge following the problematic orthodoxy of much of fan studies here, which as
Rukmini Pande notes, defaults to a demographic ‘norm [of] white, middle class, cisgender, and
American’ (2016: 210).
Critical Spec tatorship and Spec tacle: Multifandom Vids 139
characters or pairings, as with character study, ‘ship’ (relationship), or

recruiter vid genres. Instead, by spending less of their focus on a single source
or fandom, multifandom vids illustrate a comparison between different
film and television texts, allowing the vidder to comment on popular media
trends and tendencies.
When these comments relate to a single genre, the resulting vid is com-
parable to a scholarly genre study, since the identifiable markers/icons of
genre are isolated and presented for comparison in the final work, such as
the many spaceships seen in Starships! (bironic, 2012). Other multifandom
vids that have a different focus—beyond genre—will enable other forms
of analysis. For example, Around the Bend (Danegen, 2010) collects clips and
stills of female characters and real-life women driving and/or posing with
all manner of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, aircraft, spacecraft, tanks). One
possible reading of this vid is that it refutes a gendered perception that only
men can have mastery of these objects and thus can explore the themes
of freedom and agency that are associated with their use in fiction and in
broader cultural narratives. Other multifandom vids, such as Boulevard of
Broken Songs (Destina and Barkley, 2007), perform a more pointed analysis
of a limited number of texts towards a particular point: in this case, looking
at four television series that feature sad heroes who, as per the lyrics, ‘walk
alone’. In this vid the song that is used is a mash-up, which itself combines
a number of songs, each of which is identified with a different character.
As the aural layering increases, the vid’s cross-cutting intensifies, as does
the comparison between the four characters.
Many of the vids I use as examples in this chapter ask their audience
to identify the clips’ content in a seemingly superficial manner: do you
recognize this actor, this series, that character, or these visual signifiers of
those tropes? As sequences of images, these types of vids do not have the time
to make detailed comments on specific nuances in a story but instead draw
attention to more basic rapid identification of clips. It is possible to watch
a multifandom vid and not recognize a portion of the clips, particularly
when they draw on dozens of disparate sources, as with Around the Bend,
or a vid such as Long Live (Llin, 2014), which collects and connects dozens
of characters from across the various Star Trek iterations. Multifandom vids
are comprehensible not because every clip is immediately known: when
enough clips are familiar and the vid’s concept is apparent, the unknown
clips are not disruptive. Indeed, unfamiliar clips in a multifandom vid can
be akin to receiving a recommendation for a film or series. However, this is
not to say the clips are suddenly made anonymous when they are removed
from their context; their link to the source narrative is not broken, but
140 Fanvids
multifandom vids will often use clips for their iconicity as well as to recall
specific moments of plot or character development.
A vid’s segmentation and reconstruction of whole narratives into parts
(clips) can be read as indicative of the way this kind of audience watches
media, consumes narratives, and configures desire. Vids provide textual
evidence of an experience of film and television that is governed by fascina-
tion and attentive spectatorship. As Francesca Coppa writes, regarding the
multifandom vid A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005),
the vid’s segmentation of many different television series ‘is staging a way
of watching television familiar to most female fans and to all fan vidders:
a selective seeing’ (2009: 109). A vid’s clips are, by definition, parts of films
and television series that have been selectively noticed by fans and deemed
noteworthy for inclusion because of the clips’ significance or aesthetic appeal.
The intense fragmentation of vids, particularly of the kind demonstrated
in multifandom vids, reveals the fascinations of television and film texts
beyond narrative concerns. This purposeful fragmentation and then re-use
of clips means that though they are dislocated from their source narratives,
clips in a vid maintain a connection to their source material. This connec-
tion results from the clips’ recognizability, either through the audience’s
familiarity with the source material or through generic clues in mise-en-scène
or form. In the gallery/video art world, found footage films or remix video
(of whichever labels) have a different relationship to recognizability of clips
(Wees 1992; Desjardins 1995; Zryd 2003; Demos 2010; Hatch 2012). In some,
the specific context and location of clips become less important than the
bravura re-editing of the artist, for example in the work of Bruce Conner
or Craig Baldwin’s science fiction spectacle Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies
Under America (1991) or the critical re-appraisal of media representation
in Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978),
discussed earlier. While images predominate, these are not anonymous or
critically distanced images. Multifandom vids do not automatically ask a
vid’s audience to reconsider the finer details of a specific story or to examine
character development or relationships.
Anne Friedberg’s analysis of montage and audience interventions into
television’s broadcast flow is relevant here. She writes that the remote control
has changed the nature of montage; every viewer is a ready-made montag-

iste, cutting and pasting images from a wide repertoire or sources at the
push of a button. Montage, once an analogy to dialectical thought or the
shock value of the surreal, now also signifies a form of consumer choice
with the controls in the hands of a new virtual shoppe. (1993: 141-142)
Conceptualizing the action of changing channels as montage follows the 1983

description by Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch (2000) of the ‘viewing
strip’ as a text created out of the experience of changing channels to move
between different unrelated items. Both theorizations refocus the agency
of viewership back to the audience rather than the anonymous ‘author’ of
the channel’s scheduling team. This practice of viewership that is critically
understood in television studies to be a kind of authorship is arguably
simulated and formalized/textualized in a vid’s editing. A multifandom
vid mimics the behaviour of a television audience—which is not specific
to vid fandom—and makes an enduring record of it.
Multifandom vids are certainly easier to make when using digital source
files, but the comparative/analytical possibilities of the vid form are found
in much earlier videotape vids, such as That’s What Friends Are For (3 Sisters,
1985). This vid begins with title cards of Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968),
Riptide (NBC, 1983-1986), I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968), and Alias Smith and Jones
(ABC, 1971-1973), making it clear to the viewer which fandoms are included.
It continues with clips from each series that demonstrate the vid’s exhibition
of friendship between male protagonists on these television series. As the
clips span decades, this vid can be read as documenting the recurrence
or persistence of buddy cop tropes across spy, crime, and western genres.
It also documents a practical dimension of audience engagement with
television series: only Riptide was contemporary to the vid, with the other
clips likely only available through repeats, meaning That’s What Friends Are
For captures both an evolving scheduling practice (syndication) and the new
home video-recording technology. The vid can also be read as a catalogue
of ‘slashable’ shows: that is, television series that have homoerotic subtext
and that have inspired fan responses. It clearly shows bonds of friendship
between the featured characters by using clips that feature gestures and
glances—laughing together, offering physical support, sharing potentially
meaningful looks with each other. 45
Coppa argues that clips in the multifandom vid A Fannish Taxonomy of
Hotness, as ‘parts—tropes, movements, frames’ are ‘reappropriate[d]’ by
vidders who then ‘turn them into sites of pleasure and surplus’ (2009: 110).
These televisual segments (Ellis 1982; see also Chapter 1) are a vid’s building
45 The vid uses Dionne Warwick’s cover of ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, from her album
Friends (1985), for its soundtrack and not Rod Stewart’s earlier recording. The song features
Gladys Knight, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder, thereby constructing a further (inter-)textual
reference to friendship through the different performance styles of the singers, marking each
as distinct and yet part of a whole.
142 Fanvids
blocks. This potential for abundance means multifandom vids are therefore
well-placed to offer critical responses based on widely spanning comparisons
of many film and television texts. However, these critical comparisons are
not made without emotion. While Coppa defines the fannish tendency to
describe a vid’s thematic alignment as ‘a visual essay that stages an argu-
ment’ (2008: 1.1), using the term ‘argument’ potentially connotes a reserved,
pedagogical, or didactic mode of address, which disavows their emotional
intensity and their visual pleasures. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest that
vids make their particular form of argument through emotional appeals.
That’s What Friends Are For arguably asserts that, despite the different
genres and ages of its source series, they share a common way of representing
male friendship. The many sources of a multifandom vid evoke a sense of
plenty, excess, and fascinated celebration of the many pleasures of television
viewership. Therefore, the vid form relates to the pleasures of watching
broadly across many texts. Indeed, the act of recognizing and identifying
the many different sources in a massively multifandom vid is a real pleasure
of the genre. The vid form enacts an intense fannish spectatorship that is
characterized by fascination.
This critical looking as a form of fascination is a forthright statement
about desire/pleasure and is textual evidence of how media fans can watch
for more than the plot. The effect of muting the clips—removing diegetic
and non-diegetic sound—leads to an enhanced focus on camera movement
and motion within the frame. Improvements in editing technology have
meant that vidders’ use of so-called ‘talky face’ clips—static clips in which
characters are shown speaking significant elements of dialogue that was
a hallmark of videotape-era vidding—has dropped away as it became
possible to have finer editing, shorter clips, and a stronger sense of motion.
This allows the clips’ utility as image to predominate: a removal of dialogue
and an emphasis on gestures, glances, and movement both within the
frame and of the camera emphasizes the visual, the spectatorial, and the
representational aspects of a vid’s video source material. This is why the vid
song is so vital: it captions (narrates) the vid’s images in order to suggest a
range of meanings in which to read each clip’s inclusion.
This chapter examines a range of pleasurable fascination addressed in
multifandom vids: pleasures of genre, in bodies, of mastering a transmedia
storyworld, and through the lives of (subcultural) celebrities. If we can
understand a vid as a record of a viewer’s path through a text, multifandom
vids textualize a path through a set of texts, offering an interpretation
grounded in an invitation to play with recognition and comparison beyond
a single fandom or media text. This chapter is arranged around the four
pleasures mentioned above—genre, bodies, transmedia, and celebrity—in

which a channel-flipping perception of abundance is brought to the fore. As
discussed earlier, the artistic purpose in re-using moving images is generally
held to be some sort of critical evisceration of media culture, intended to
‘question and critique traditional history and institutions’ (Yeo 2004: 25),
but the vid is a comfortably ambiguous form that mediates the conflict
between a textual distancing and the fascination and pleasures offered by
film and television. The vid form’s approach to images—separated from
their narrative context and recombined to create pleasurable and/or critical
texts—is the focus of this chapter.
Genre Pleasures
The first form of fascination with images discussed in this chapter relates
to the pleasures offered by genres. The critical engagement of this kind of
multifandom vid is based on the intense spectatorship of a given genre and
therefore creates a form of visual critical genre study. Vids that focus on
genres create a kind of urtext that selects and amplifies iconic elements
by collecting and presenting the fragmented pieces into a new flow, where
cross-cutting between the various sources makes an argument about similar-
ity and comparison. Science fiction is a recurring (and favourite) subject
for media fandom, so there are many examples of vids that draw from this
genre. Data’s Dream (GF & Tashery, 1994; remastered by Morgan Dawn,
2004) is a canonical early vid that addresses specific science fiction tropes.
Shown regularly at fan conventions and set to Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ which
has a repeated lyric of ‘sail away, sail away’, it uses clips of the Star Trek: The
Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994) character Data (Brent
Spiner) to frame an extended montage of multifandom instances of sailing
and flight, with more than 30 sources used in the original and nearly twice
that number in the remaster. 46 The vid constructs a fantasy composed of
exploration sequences for the character ranging from film to television (and
including live-action and animation), with the likelihood that the audience
would recognize much of the material.
46 Such as The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989), Star Wars (George Lucas,
1977), Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-1981), Babylon 5 (PTEN/TNT, 1994-1998), Close Encounters of the Third
Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985), and Superman (Richard Donner,
1978). For a full list, see: the listing on the Fanlore wiki for the vid <https://fanlore.org/wiki/
Data%27s_Dream>.
144 Fanvids
A less reverent early example of a multifandom vid that plays with

genre is I Think I’m A Clone Now (Z Team, 1992; not to be confused with
rhoboat’s 2008 vid of the same name), which uses the ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic
parody/cover of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, which had recently been a
hit for the singer Tiffany. The vid begins with an extended series of clips
from an episode of Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) in which Captain Kirk (Wil-
liam Shatner) is duplicated 47 and continuing with clips from other film
and television sources where time travel or other circumstances mean
characters meet (or have to avoid meeting) themselves. This vid is clearly
meant to be fun, creating a dialogue between the (venerated, celebrated)
Star Trek clips and more contemporary uses of the trope. While it begins
as if it is a Star Trek vid, it is interrupted at the start of the first chorus with
a cut to a clip from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989)
of Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) jumping into the frame to
meet their past selves. Once the interruption takes place, other instances
of the trope from other films and series are introduced. 48 The song is used
to tie the clips together and provide a shared internal narration for each
set of characters who are presented to us as having found themselves in
this same situation.
In both Clone Now and Data’s Dream, the vidders’ deep knowledge of a
range of genre texts is employed to construct sequences of images where
the iconic or symbolic content of the clips can be read in isolation from
the narrative context from which they have been taken. Indeed, it is the
whole source film or series that is being represented, not precise story
elements or moments of character development. This is shifted somewhat
in multifandom vids that focus on a single actor through various roles.
However, since the actor is primary by virtue of being the subject of the
vid—and therefore their presence in the vid does not need to be further
decoded—the ‘game’ of a multifandom vid about an actor is identifying
the specific series/episodes and films rather than the actors themselves.
47 ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’, tx. 20 October 1966.

48 Including mainly Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989), The Muppet Movie
(James Frawlry, 1979), Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989), Tiny Toon Adventures
(NBC/FOX, 1990-1992), and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The ‘List of Star Trek Early Songvids’
entry on the Fanlore wiki does not indicate that this is a multifandom vid. It also states that it
was made by either California Crew or Z Team and gives a production date of 1989. I have based
my analysis on a DVD compilation of vids shown at the Escapade convention and have used
that attribution/dating here, in part because syndication and home video release dates make
a 1989 date unlikely. It is possible that Z Team remastered California Crew’s original vid, but I
have not been able to verify this.
Working with clips from similar genres is not unique to multifandom vids;
precedents in found footage, compilation/collage, and video art pieces offer
structurally similar returns to sets of texts. Luckhurst credits artist Bruce
Conner with discovering ‘that the coherence of spliced collages could be
held together by the instant recognition of genre iconography and narrative
formulae’ (2008: 195). Matthias Müller’s short film Home Stories (1990) is
similar to a multifandom vid in how it compares distinct texts related by
genre by editing together many similar scenes found in Hollywood films from
the 1950s and 1960s. 49 Home Stories creates an intense space of six minutes’
duration where many separate films are made to echo each other with
gestures, camera movements, and mise-en-scène alike, creating a unitary—if
fragmented—archetypal melodrama out of contemporaneous films.
Müller’s piece has been subject to different interpretations, categorized
as an example of New Queer Cinema (Hallas 2003) and as ‘a revealing and
amusing moment of meta-film noir’ (MacDonald 2005: 29). Akira Lippit
describes how, in Home Stories:
Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak, Lana Turner, among many
others, appear to repeat virtually identical gestures in a compulsive and
mechanical manner: falling onto a bed, shutting a door, listening at a shut
door, turning on and off lights, peering out of windows, being frightened
by noises, running to and from rooms in a house. (2008: 119)
Müller replaces the audio of the individual clips with a score composed for
his film, including subtle sound effects, which creates a continuous aural
space in which to situate the disparate clips. A similar effect is accomplished
in multifandom vids. Home Stories compares similar scenes, costuming,
performances, mise-en-scène—not making a new story but suggesting a
way to read any individual source used in the work as an example of a
wider genre.
In noticing the repetition of similar gestures and art direction, Home
Stories as well as massively multifandom vids demonstrate a fascination
with—or pleasure in—the search for these genre markers, showing off both
the visual pleasures shared by these works’ audiences and the investment of
49 Including All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956),
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957), Madame X (David Lowell
Rich, 1966), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), The Man
Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and possibly
also Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963). This list was compiled with thanks to Patrick Pilkington.
146 Fanvids
time necessary to construct these works. Müller’s blend of Sirk and Hitchcock
draws out the more mundane domestic spaces of Hitchcock’s thrillers and
adds a thread of horror to Sirk’s melodramas. With Home Stories, Müller
constructs sequences of gestures performed by individual women alone in
the frame that mimic or mirror their immediate predecessors, for example,
turning on a lamp or wall light switch. The fluidity of motion through these
shots constructs a sense of a shared diegesis. Multifandom vids likewise
demonstrate a comparison between similar texts, the idea being that the
vid watcher can appreciate the connections and will look for comparable
connections in future viewings.
If we view multifandom vids as being about textualizing an experience
of pleasurable abundance, genre-focused multifandom vids present engage-
ments with film and television genres based on the pleasures of viewership.
One key example, Starships! (bironic, 2012), is an affectionate, upbeat, and
emotional view of science fiction based around central images of the genre. It
was one of a handful of vids included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s MashUp
exhibition. Writing in the MashUp catalogue, Coppa argues that this vid ‘is
clearly a descendant of Data’s Dream [and is] not just about spaceships, but
about our feelings about spaceships’ (2016: 152, emphasis in original). This
appeal to emotion and the wide range of sources used are likely to be the
reason this vid quickly went viral and found an audience beyond its initial
convention audience.
Starships! includes clips from a large number of sources; by the vidder’s
own count, it contains approximately 257 clips covering dozens of individual
source texts (bironic, 2013). This type of vid suggests that one of the pleasures
of media viewership is the identification and comparison of different films
and series in both narrative and aesthetic terms. There is an echo here of the
‘archival cinephilia’ that Catherine Russell identifies as driving Christian
Marclay’s 24-hour collage piece The Clock (2010) that presents a film archive
where the history of film is ‘reduced to more basic units’ (much as a vid
reduces television to segments) and then employs ‘a larger vocabulary of
images that are deeply familiar, readable and recognizable’ (2013: 255) to
address its audience. In both multifandom vids and in Marclay’s work, this
is as much about watching broadly—recognizing narrative and aesthetic/
visual tropes across media—as it is about the interpretation of specific nar-
ratives or the appreciation of individual performances. The Clock is relatively
straightforward in its conceit: it gathers images of clocks and watches as
well as dialogue mentioning specific times to make a work about clocks
that may also function as a clock. Massively multifandom vids are no less
driven by meticulous research but also, as Coppa has suggested, engage with
an emotional framing of the vid’s core idea. While The Clock has repeatedly
been described as ‘playful’ (Russell 2013; Beugnet 2013; Levinson 2015) for
its breadth and its editing style, it is not asking its audience to reflect on
their deep love of timekeeping.
Massively multifandom vids also display a knowledge of a genre, trope,
or subject area and indulge in the pleasure of seeing that genre instanti-
ated outside of usual fannish sources. The fan wiki site Fanlore.org defines
massively multifandom vids of this sort—which include many sources and
tend to use clips for their iconicity rather than to perform an analysis of
related narratives—as ‘garbage can vids’ or ‘kitchen sink vids’, noting that
these works can use source material that ‘may not necessarily be fannish in
nature’. A vid that includes more than cult or fan-favourite sources makes
an implicit statement about the vid’s sophistication (and by extension
that of the vidder), as the work is not limited to niche texts. Recognizing
that multifandom vids can often include non-fannish clips is important
in describing the complexity of a specific genre. Starships! includes the
expected cult/fannish science fiction films and series such as Star Trek, Star
Wars (George Lucas, 1977), and the reboot Battlestar Galactica. However,
and in a similar vein to The Clock’s ‘non-hierarchical’ (Russell 2013: 255)
ethos that reaches across auteurist and more mundane sources, Starships!
also includes parodies such as Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, 1987) and clips from
a ‘Pigs in Space’ sketch from The Muppet Show (ATV/Henson, 1976-1981)
alongside more high-brow (and possibly, therefore, less fannish) films such
as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Sunshine (Danny Boyle,
2007). These inclusions also demonstrate the overlap between fannish texts,
cult texts, and genre-adjacent texts; in this way, Starships! is about a basic
setting of science fiction—the spaceship—and the many different stories
and kinds of stories told using this setting. It makes an implicit argument
that while a media fandom audience might elevate a few key texts, those
‘feelings about spaceships’ (Coppa 2016) can be applied much more broadly.
Due to this range of source material, massively multifandom vids can
therefore be considered tours de force in recognition of the sheer labour
needed to locate, create, and sequence the clips. The clips are not presented
chronologically in a way that suggests that an experience with the genre over
time is a journey toward maturation (of the individual or of science fiction),
with children’s media giving way to more ‘serious’ programmes. Instead,
the non-linear and, more importantly, non-hierarchical sequencing of clips
reflects much more the broad span of fannish fascination with genre and
the longevity of fannish memory rather than a linear historiography of the
genre. The breadth of sources presented can remind the viewer of forgotten
148 Fanvids
texts and characters; the vids therefore possess a hint of archival discovery
in their presentation of unanticipated inclusions. Indeed, while conducting
research for this project, I experienced first-hand how multifandom vids
can be well-suited to convention viewing, where an audience can react
together in a performance of group nostalgia.
Multifandom vids can also demonstrate why certain tropes seem familiar
or natural: by compiling a catalogue of examples, a vid shows where we
have seen these tropes before. Vids can compile a catalogue of actions and
settings that form the basis for genre-based expectations for particular
narrative conventions or representational norms. Most importantly, as the
soundtrack and dialogue of the clips are removed, the markers of genre that
remain are visual: mise-en-scène, lighting, camera movement, and framing.
The actors’ movements are, of course, also present; however, the clothes they
wear and the spaces they move through speak just as loudly in a vid (as it
were) as their gestures and glances. This is the visual representation of genre,
showing the repetition and variation of tropes performed through—and
made meaningful by—the organizing logic provided by the vid song.
The soundtrack of Starships!, Nicki Minaj’s pop/rap single ‘Starships’, is a
departure from the typical aural soundscapes of space-based science fiction
film and television scores (see Whittington 2007). The song itself is arguably
not about spaceships as much as it is about spending all one’s money on
a series of great parties (see lyrics such as ‘Have a drink, clink, found the
bud light’ and ‘Dance all ya life there’s no end in sight’). However, the song’s
ebullience is made to transfer over to our feelings about spaceships, as Coppa
says, both represented directly in the vid—pictures of spaceships—and
indirectly through clips of science fiction characters who seem to be having
a great time. Minaj’s voice signifies a female framing to the joys of science
fiction that complements the vid’s (presumed-to-be fannishly female) gaze
at male characters and advanced technology. Indeed, its upbeat tone means
that it suits the vid’s more joyful presentation of spacecraft and the pleasure
derived from watching narratives of space exploration.50 This makes a clip of
the title character of the Pixar film Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) reaching
up to the wave of golden space particles intensely emotional, as the inhuman
avatar experiences motion and joy. In this way, the vid can be read as a
50 It does, however, elide Minaj’s music video for this song, which shows a kaleidoscopic,
psychedelic beach party that can be easily read in terms of the history of black women’s self-
representation in Afrofuturism. (In contrast, the vid does not contain many representations of
non-white characters, though this arguably stems from the genre’s issues with representational
diversity.)
reaction against ‘edgy’ recent ‘reimaginings’ of generic tropes, where the

gritty realism of reboots and sequels replaces the genre’s escapist pleasures.
The song lyrics argue that ‘starships are meant to fly’, and as such the
vid makes an establishing shot of a spaceship or other craft into a joyful
fulfilment of purpose—it is meant to be there. Early in the vid there is a
montage in which a number of different spacecrafts are launched, take off,
or are seen in mid-flight. Disconnected from their narrative framings, these
clips show off the model work, computer graphics, and other special effects
necessary to accomplish these shots. This sequence evokes the joy of flight
and helps to establish this vid’s argument about the centrality of science
fiction’s blend of utopian narrative and excitement of frontier exploration
by showing this in action. More than flipping channels, the vid offers many
ways of imagining space flight, particularly in montages at points when the
song’s tempo picks up for an instrumental break and the pace of editing
increases, enabling more clips and therefore more references. As much as
the images of many different spaceships constitute/connote ‘science fiction’,
this vid is about more than machinery: it is about the emotional dimension
of watching science fiction and about finding points of identification with
characters. If starships are meant to fly, then one of the pleasures of science
fiction is the possibility of identification with the characters (or, indeed,
the ships themselves51) who make this happen. The vid’s sequence of pilots
shows actors of various races and genders engaged in piloting and gunnery.
This sequence constructs a shared diegesis in which piloting a spacecraft is
not motivated by narrative necessity but by the joy of the act itself.
The vid’s work of cataloguing the tropes that contribute to a genre extends
to parody. During an instrumental break that features what sound like siren
effects, the vid gathers clips of space battles and other dramatic moments,
punctuated by shots of alert/alarm messages. The sequence is full of motion
and quick cuts, building a sense of excitement. The warning messages,
with their similar text and red-and-black colouring—such as an ‘Alert:
Condition Red’ Star Trek screen and a ‘Master Alarm’ console button in
Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995)—are intercut with close-ups of console dials
being manipulated, constructing a hybrid diegesis of the vid in which these
many spaceships are being pushed together to their limits. This section
finishes with clips from the original Star Trek series featuring a swinging
camera and actors pretending to be jolted by external weapons fire, intercut
with a shot from Spaceballs of a futuristic speedometer reading ‘Ludicrous
51 My thanks to my reviewer for reminding me that we might also identify with the spaceships,
especially sentient ones such as the Leviathans in Farscape.
150 Fanvids
Speed’, tying together the supposed seriousness (or perhaps, the gravity) of
the earlier series with a later parodic response. While ‘highlighting’ a path
(cf. Gray 2010) through these different science fiction texts, the vidder points
out the repetition and variation at play across the genre.
Starships! is not about any specific film or series but works as a shorthand
for all iterations of the genre and plays into the audience’s enjoyment of
recognizing these tropes. The sequence that concludes Starships! is composed
of a dozen clips, each showing a different kind of ‘space tunnel’ or related
representation of movement through space and of movement beyond the
back of the frame towards something unseen. This continues the sense of
forward motion throughout the rest of the vid, but at the same time it also
demonstrates the variations between these different visually pleasing repre-
sentations. Establishing shots of outer space or of spacecraft are a repeating
feature throughout films, television series, and across space-based science
fiction. This sequence collects spectacularly pleasurable repetitions that
demonstrate the enjoyment taken in visual tropes as well as narrative ones.
The vid articulates this process of recognition and makes the connections
seem obvious, natural, and even comical once pointed out, as with a montage
of ‘speed’/’battle damage’ acting. It does not make a critical argument about
the evolution of the genre over time. The vid is a demonstration of a form of
spectatorship grounded in recognizing and sharing the scope of pleasures

associated with watching broadly across a range of media texts.
As a contrast, Space Girl (Charmax, 2011) is a multifandom vid that looks
at science fiction in a much more ambiguous way. Unlike Starships!, this
vid’s song—‘Space Girl’ by The Imagined Village—is explicitly about sci-
ence fiction, insofar as the lyrics take the perspective of a woman who has
disregarded her mother’s warnings to not go into space (‘but I did, I did’).
Gathering clips of many female characters in (Anglo-American) science
fiction, it is organized in broadly chronological sequence, with black-and-
white sources giving way to colour, moving forward in time with every verse
and chorus. In its early sequences, it articulates the historical frustration
felt by women who were fans of science ficiton but did not see themselves
represented in these genres except as objects of a male gaze. For example,
in the second verse, following a sequence of 1960s space-miniskirts and
futuristic semi-nudity, lyrics about meeting ‘a bug-eyed monster’ are used
to caption a longer clip of a male character distracted by (and staring at) a
woman who has walked into the frame. In this scene, the bug-eyed monster
is the man and the warning about aliens arguably refers to workplace har-
rassment. However, the vid continues with an instrumental break where
the slightly sinister tone of the song continues, but the emotional register
shifts with a montage of female friendships. In the latter half of the vid,
characters from more recent decades are shown to have more agency and
are seen to be participating in the wonder of exploration and discovery.
The chronological structure of the first half of the vid allows the vid-
der to make an argument about the genre’s history and its poor record of
female representation as well as about the fates of female characters in
cult-favourite and canonical science fiction films and series. The deep history
represented in the vid—from early Doctor Who through to the reboot of
Battlestar Galactica, stopping at many points in between—gives it weight
as a thoroughly researchered and therefore credible account of a gendered
experience of screen-based science fiction through its history. It textualizes
a path through the genre inflected with a critical eye, demonstrating how
the pleasures of science fiction are moderated by more limited points of
identification, reflecting on how narratives that may not be as forgiving to
the female characters have given way to more productive and well-rounded
representations. With its final shots, cutting from visually similar medium/
close-up shots of Gillian Anderson in The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002) to Jodie
Foster in Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) looking at the sky with awe-filled
expressions, the vid suggests that the genre has caught up with this half of
its audience. There is a further intertextual resonance here as Anderson’s
character in The X-Files was partially inspired by Foster’s character Clarice
Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Cutting between
the two clips acknowledges their similar composition and also the link
between the actors. The warnings in the lyrics, from mother to daughter,
could therefore be read in the final instances as the fears of a previous
generation whose fight for equality has given way to modestly improving
circumstances. Space Girl and Starships! prompt critical views of their
sources based on arguments made through images, but they also level and
homogenize insofar as they collect their moving images to show differences
and similarities. These are not clips presented out of historical context; the
totality of the vid provides the context.
In summary, multifandom vids arguably conduct a visual genre study by
collecting and presenting a range of related texts that show off the vidder’s
depth of genre knowledge and construct a space for the viewer’s reflection
on that genre’s tropes and expectations. From here, this chapter moves
through three further pleasures covered in multifandom vids: the pleasures
of bodily spectacle, the pleasures found in consuming transmedia texts,
and the pleasures of sharing affection for celebrities and cult actors. Each
of these types of multifandom vid displays vidding’s particular form of
fascinated and intense spectatorship.
152 Fanvids
Erotic and Bodily Spectacle
This section is about the centrality of bodies as spectacle in multifandom

vids. A focus on bodies is common to all vids—vids make meaning out of
characters’ looks and gestures, and those looks and gestures are performed
by actors and their bodies—but this focus is particularly apparent in mul-
tifandom vids. This particular regard for performers’ bodies is derived from
an intense, scopophilic, and highly engaged form of viewership that Coppa
(2009) has argued is typical of fandom. Her example, A Fannish Taxonomy of
Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005), is one of several variations of a subgenre of
multifandom vids that reflects and creates a spectacle of bodies. The bodies
in question here are not always taken from television and film sources that
Helen Wheatley (2016) might categorize as ‘intentional’ examples of ‘erotic
spectacle’, that is, programmes that foreground sex and desire. Instead, they
are closer to ‘accidental’ erotic spectacle (Wheatley 2016, citing Collie 2014),
which Wheatley defines as ‘moments where women take visual pleasure in
the text which is not anticipated by the programme-maker’ (2016: 221). In the
vids, these include action sequences, times when characters are shown gaz-
ing off screen, and moments of emotional intensity. This is partially because,
as Collie (2017) points out, Wheatley’s corpus was more contemporary and
reflects changes in television drama. However, while the vids in my study
also draw on older television and film texts, the framing of desirability is
fannish rather than conventional.
Early examples of vids that focus on displaying bodies for the viewer
include the evocatively titled Smut (Mary Van Deusen, c. 1985-1990), the fun
of watching actors play their own doppelgangers in I Think I’m A Clone Now,
and a roster of cross-dressing male characters in Men in Tights (Perri, 2000).
More recently, there have been catalogues of attractive men in Candymen
(jagwriter78, 2008), a collection of female characters expressing desire and
initiating intimacy with men in Take It Off (greensilver, 2009), an exploration
of hurt/comfort in On the Prowl (sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010), and a
subversion of a misogynist song by using it to caption men on display via
a vidder’s eye in Pornstar Dancing (Jayne L., 2011). In each example, the
framework of desire is signalled by the vids’ titles, and male characters
are framed as the object of a desiring female gaze. In multifandom vids
that focus on women, such as the aforementioned Around the Bend, Space
Girl, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, clips taken from media that
were originally produced for a presumed-male audience are repositioned
to concentrate the pleasures of representation for a presumed-female vid
audience. In these vids—and vids such as Girl 4 All Seasons (foomatic, 2008),
Hook Shot (Kuwdora, 2012), and Weapon of Choice (shinyjenni, 2015)—the

enjoyment for a female viewer is not necessarily limited to a platonic interest
in evaluating and appreciating representations of women; they offer an
explicitly erotic potential to gaze at women presented for consumption
outside of their narrative frame, where the pleasures of viewing bodies in
action potentially overlap with viewer motives of desire and identification.
Within the world of experimental moving-image re-use, a focus on
denarrativized bodies can have a very different motive to the norms of
multifandom vidding. One such artist is Martin Arnold, whose work is best
known for his slowing and looping of single shots from Hollywood films,
particularly in the three related pieces pièce touchée (1989), passage à l’acte
(1993), and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998). In these works, Arnold
takes these single shots and re-edits the fluid motion of the clip into jagged
loops that advance the motion a few frames, only to jump back to near the
start, forcing the actors’ gestures and movements to appear stuttering and
mechanical. Akira Lippit argues this work creates ‘uncanny’ bodies out of
the performances, erasing actor, narrative, and meaning from the source
clips, having ‘evacuated [the bodies] of all personhood and inscribed them
into an emptied-out cinema space’ (2008: 122). What remains is a resurrec-
tion of these cinematic bodies, where only a star image remains. However,
while the same could be true of multifandom vids—where the pace and
coherence of clips could result only in a sequence of ‘gestures without bodies’
(Lippit 2008: 127)—bodies in vids are reinscribed in a vidderly space that
is then stuffed to abundance in a visual feast comprised of a plethora of
pleasurable images. Where Arnold’s work slows the pace of movement to a
point where the actors are, per Lippit, evacuated from their performances,
multifandom vids’ presentation of bodies in rapid succession creates this
pleasure of semiotic density. Multifandom vids enact the vidders’ power to
collect so many bodies—or examples of genre tropes resulting from critical
viewing—together to be at the mercy of the audience’s gaze without the
consequence of expressing desire (as women, and for men and women) and
within a cultural context that positions intense critical readings of texts as
a fundamental pleasure of viewership.
Vids’ emphasis on images separated from sound and on bodies separated
from speech presents those bodies to the viewer as images primarily to
be looked at, to borrow from Laura Mulvey’s influential ‘Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). These are also images separated from nar-
rative. Editing a vid is based on a careful re-watching of a film or series;
therefore, a vid arguably preserves certain aspects of the gaze of the vidder
and constructs a way of watching for the vid’s audience. Multifandom vids
154 Fanvids
preserve that gaze as it moves across different television and film sources.
Given the gendering of fandom, the gaze enacted in the transformations is
a ‘female gaze’ (Gamman and Marshment 1988) rather than the normative
male gaze. As the subjects of this gaze are both men and women, and as
the practitioners of the form are not uniformly women, in this context it is
perhaps reasonable to speak of a vidding gaze.
Mulvey’s argument is that classic Hollywood cinema divides viewing
along a male/active – female/passive split where female characters are
traditionally ‘simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact’ (1975: 11). In this model of gendered
spectatorship, which has been widely used and critiqued (Rodowick 1982;
Ellis 1982; Gaines 1986; Gamman and Marshment 1988; White 1999; etc.),
women are therefore bereft of agency and entirely subjected to the ‘male
gaze’ of narrative cinema, and scopophilia is a fundamental part of audi-
ences’ relationship with moving images. The correction, Mulvey argues,
is for ‘radical film-makers’ (1975: 18) and their ilk to take control of the
camera and the gaze in the hope that awareness of these structures would
expose the illusion of conventional narrative film. However, such a hard-line
position arguably means Mulvey’s ‘unacceptably puritanical’ ultimate
goal becomes ‘the “destruction” of all the old pleasures associated with
Hollywood’ (Gamman 1988: 24). The vid form and other re-uses of moving
images work from the source material as it has been shot—working with
‘the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions’ (Mulvey
1975: 18)—in order to subvert them. In erotic multifandom vids, which
have a history of situating decontextualized images of men as the subject
of a desiring gaze, the pleasures of representational conventions are not
destroyed as much as they are repositioned.
A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005) is a spectacle of
bodies engaged in a variety of actions/poses, all organized under a loose
rubric of ‘hotness’. Following the lyrics of the vid’s song, ‘Hot Hot Hot’ (Buster
Poindexter), the vid proposes that ‘hotness’ is what the vid’s audience finds
attractive, enacting a shared desiring gaze. Instead of seeing the body as
a fetish substituting for something lost, Coppa argues that it is a work of
‘surplus and pleasure’ that ‘invites its female spectator to a veritable orgy
of scopophilia’ (2009: 107). The opening sequence makes it clear that this
vid is about the pleasures that its viewer may find in film and television.
The vast majority of the clips feature men; however, the vid’s first few clips
are a montage of women dancing in groups. This is followed by a trio of
clips starting with a male stripper (the first man in the vid), followed by a
performance clip of a boy band and cutting directly to a reaction shot of
a young woman whose pleased diegetic gaze means she functions as an

avatar for the vid’s audience, replicating their expressions as they watch the
vid. This is, potentially, how they had originally watched the clips in their
original context. This sequence establishes that the men shown in the vid
after this moment are performing for their female audience, just as the male
stripper and boy band perform for female audiences. The rest of the vid is
organized into sequences of ‘hotness’ tropes, each flowing into the next.
For example, a clip of a swordfighter tipping his hat connects a sequence
of sword fights with a sequence of men tipping their hats. These displays of
physical competence and chivalric actions are ‘hot’, but the vidders’ labour
in identifying and then collecting the suite of examples demonstrates a
mode of engaged spectatorship across a wide range of texts.
Common to both forms of erotic spectacle outlined at the start of this
section—one constructed to be desirable, the other read as such by the
viewer—is that both are ‘bodies that the viewer pauses to erotically con-
template’ (Wheatley 2016: 190). If vids can tell us something about a fannish
or vidderly way of watching television and other media, multifandom vids
are about literally segmenting and drawing out these pauses to dwell on
moments of ‘accidental’ erotic spectacle for additional (and repeat) contem-
plation. However, for a fannish viewer, one typified by the imagined spectator
of Fannish Taxonomy, the moments in multifandom vids about bodies do not
represent unexpected or accidental moments of visual pleasure. Insofar as
the specific eroticism of the bodies on screen needs to be decoded through
a fannish context, it could be reasonable to say that the clips connote wider
fannish discourses about what is erotic in a way that is almost metonymic
rather than intentional or accidental.
Coppa’s argument about Fannish Taxonomy is that, ultimately, the vid
‘isn’t about people; it’s about tropes’ (2009: 108). Enjoyment is taken in
recognizing the tropes, watching a staged presentation of familiar tropes
as articulated through the selection of these bodies, and feeling a sense of
recognition and affinity for them beyond the specific pleasures of seeing
certain people on screen. Indeed, in a tidy inversion of the Mulveyan gender-
ing of spectatorship, gender roles in this vid are neatly swapped, as active
women (the vidders) collect images of passive men (in the clips) for a female
viewer’s visual pleasure. The elements detailed in Fannish Taxonomy refer to
conventions and clichés in media fandom ranging from costuming choices
to narrative elements.52 In these sequences, the individual identities of the
men represented (as actors or their characters) are largely irrelevant, as they
52 Coppa’s essay includes an exhaustive list of these tropes.

156 Fanvids
become the avatars of these tropes. For example, in a sequence of muscular

men wearing plain black and plain white t-shirts, the focus becomes the
torsos and the recognition that this costuming choice can (and has been)
fetishized by the female fans of these films and series.
There are many multifandom vids that focus on the presentation of
attractive male bodies, but the vid form is not limited to a simple inversion of
women watching men: many other vids present female bodies for the same
gaze. As discussed above, multifandom vids such as Around the Bend, Girl
4 All Seasons, and Hook Shot articulate the pleasures of watching attractive
women in active roles. These are just three examples of what has been called
the ‘kick-ass ladies’ multifandom mode—vids that take evident pleasure
in gathering clips of action heroines and in watching female characters
performing stunts, wielding weapons, and otherwise being the focus of a
shot beyond being eye candy for a male gaze. In vids full of female bodies,
the clips have a dual signification: they focus on both the pleasure of seeing
women dominate a media text and the aesthetic pleasure of seeing many
thin, athletic, normatively beautiful, often leather-clad women perform.
Significantly, the clips chosen by vidders are cut to emphasize physical
ability or other forms of agency—these are women to be looked at as they
accomplish something, not to be gazed upon as passive objects. Underlying
this tension is the question of what it means for a woman to watch other
women on screen.
Working through the issue of the female spectator and the female gaze,
Jackie Stacey writes of the ways in which Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan
Seidelman, 1985) and All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) ‘tempt the
woman spectator with the fictional fulfilment of becoming an ideal feminine
other, while denying complete transformation by insisting upon differences
between women’ within the narrative (1988: 129). In multifandom vids
featuring women, the many different women exist in different universes
and are not narratively in conflict with each other. By bringing together so
many female characters, vids such as Hook Shot do not insist on differences
between women as much as they offer too many to compare, leaving the
viewer with a version of media where it is normal for women to predominate.
The vid form connects and unites these characters, showing a group of
women not narratively compelled to be in opposition for the audience to
identify with, feel affection for, and/or be attracted to.
As discussed earlier, clips in multifandom vids will maintain their
recognizability/iconicity for audiences who know the source material,
and they can be used to offer an analysis of similar narratives even as they
collect gendered bodies in action. Weapon of Choice (shinyjenni, 2015) focuses
on fight sequences performed by female characters in science fiction.53

Rather than these being performed purely for spectacle—though the vid
does gather many cool stunts—the vid’s structure aligns visually similar
moments that will have come from narratively congruent moments. In
each source narrative, the characters’ bodies have become weapons; the
vid explores how a lack of narrative agency unites characters across these
many texts. Multiple characters are shown to be backflipping through laser
security grids—all using similar weapons—or striding into a room at the
head of a team, not so that we might choose who did it best (because they
are not in competition with each other) but so that the similarities can be
noted. Weapon of Choice is not unusual in its twin appeals, capturing the
fun of seeing these characters in action while critiquing the fact that each
character’s strength resulted from overcoming past traumas.
Re-editing films and television series to decontextualize the narrative
results in a concentration of bodily spectacle. For Dara Birnbaum, whose
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) was discussed in Chapter 3,
this concentration was intended to condemn the spectacular visual presenta-
tion of Wonder Woman. In Titanium (2012), a similar concentration is not
intended to be about erotics alone but has a more comfortable, more confident
approach to the fascination with the resulting sequence of spectacular moving
images. Its spectacle is, additionally, one of representational affirmation. The
multifandom vids that are primarily about active and desirable bodies enact a
confident female gaze to look erotically (and unambiguously) at images of men
and women alike. The interpretation of the gaze cast by one woman to another
is limited in psychoanalytic theory, which supports the ‘rigid distinction
between either desire or identification’ and ‘fails to address the construction
of desires which involve a specific interplay of both processes’ (Stacey 1988:
129). The narrative constraints on these characters can be significant, and
knowledge of such constraints can add poignancy to seeing these women freed.
In the multifandom vid On the Prowl, its explicit eroticism takes the
vidded body to an extreme of fetishistic scopophilia that reframes the
male presence on screen as the sexual object of the fannish/female gaze.
The soundtrack of this vid, ‘On the Prowl’, features Lydia Lunch’s vocals on
a track by Blow-Up;54 its lyrics are a clear statement of female erotic desire
53 Sources used include Agent Carter (ABC, 2015-2016), Babylon 5 (PTEN/TNT, 1994-1998), Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997-2003), Dark Angel (FOX, 2000-2002), Firefly (FOX, 2002),
Fringe (FOX, 2008-2013), Legend of the Seeker (Renaissance Pictures/ABC, 2008-2010), various
Marvel films, and Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present).
54 The vid exclusively credits Lydia Lunch, as does S.F. Winters (2012).
158 Fanvids
(and intention) as the song begins, ‘I was thinking about picking up some |
Young boys…’. Mulvey’s characterization of ‘woman as image; man as bearer
of the look’ (1975: 11), which is flipped in vids about bodies, is augmented
in On the Prowl with its rapid montage of passive men who begin the vid
showing off muscled torsos but who very quickly are shown crying, bleeding,
captive, and variously tortured. The hurt/comfort genre of fanworks has
a long history in media fandom (Bacon-Smith 1992; Larsen and Zubernis
2012). The ‘hurts’ can be psychological or physiological, with the former
represented in the vid by crying and the latter through beatings, mutilation,
and blood-stained faces. None of the violence in the vid is explicitly sexual,
nor does the vid include clips of pornography. Whereas in fan fiction, ‘hurt’
is typically followed by ‘comfort’—via emotional and/or physical support
from another character, often as a prelude to a romantic coupling—On the
Prowl frustrates the expectation of comfort, leaving the viewer ‘confronted
with its persistent absence’ (S.F. Winters 2012: 3.11). The vid’s final shot, a
brief clip of Marion (Karen Allen) kissing an injured Indiana Jones (Harrison
Ford) in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), provides a brief
moment of comfort, referring at the last to a fulfilment of the trope while
denying its potential cathartic effect.
On the Prowl takes its examples of ‘hurt’ from over 60 mainstream and cult
film and television sources.55 As with other multifandom vids, On the Prowl’s
55 In order of appearance, according to the vidders’ explanatory blog post (sweetestdrain 2010),
the clips are from: The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009), Memento (Christopher Nolan,
2000), I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009), The
Salton Sea (D.J. Caruso, 2002), Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979), Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993),
American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000), Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present), The Outsiders (Francis
Ford Coppola, 1983), Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-2020), Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991),
Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004), Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011), Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012), The
Matrix: Revolutions (The Wachowski Brothers, 2003), Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe, 1989),
The Boondock Saints (Troy Duffy, 1999), Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007-2013), Casino Royale
(Martin Campbell, 2006), Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Renaissance/Universal, 1995-1999),
The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997-2003), Farscape
(Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003), Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), Bones (FOX,
2005-2017), Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010), The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002), Fight Club (David Fincher,
1999), Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009), Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007), Blade Runner (Ridley
Scott, 1982), 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Terminator: Salvation (McG, 2009), The Covenant
(Renny Harlin, 2006), The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994), Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), Due South
(CTV/CBS, 1994-1999), Road House (Rowdy Herrington, 1989), Spartacus: Blood and Sand (Starz,
2010), Firefly (FOX, 2002), The Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009-2017), Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), Legend
of the Seeker (ABC, 2008-2010), True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014), Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011), Angel
(WB, 1999-2004), Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kirshner, 1980), The Da
Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013), Wiseguy (CBS, 1987-1990), Die
Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002), The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner,
numerous examples reveal the breadth of viewing necessary to construct

such a work; as such, it constructs an argument about the range of possible
examples available to the fan and the vidder. As in Fannish Taxonomy, the
montage is grouped in sequences of tropes: for example, crying in the rain,
physical restraint, and even a sequence of religious angst. Throughout,
male bodies predominate; however, while the vid’s rapid succession of
male protagonists ‘command the stage’ in Mulveyan terms, no man in
this vid either ‘articulates the look [or] commands the action’. As with all
vids, On the Prowl is a montage of silenced bodies, though in this case the
silencing is aggressive: mouths opened in (silenced) screams are overridden
by Lunch’s breathy moans of ‘And then I wanted more’. These bodies are
frequently alone in the frame, but in close-up shots, disembodied hands
and arms emerge from beyond the frame to act upon these isolated and
passive bodies. An argument could be made that the vid’s unseen torturers
are the vidders whose editing work ‘commands the action’. The path that
the vid constructs is through the vid’s many source texts, coupling the
song’s narrative of female sexual desire with a mode of spectatorship that
identifies and fetishizes these moments of male passivity and pain when
they appear in a narrative.
Among its various effects, On the Prowl is an effective demonstration of
the ‘hurting hero’ trope and, as with all multifandom vids, it poses broader
questions about representation: in this case, how masculinity is depicted
across a broad cross-section of fictional narratives. This vid provokes a review
of John Ellis’s assertion that a televisual body is distinct from a cinematic
one, as television’s ‘techniques of rapid cutting prevent the access of the
gaze at the body being displayed’ (1982: 142). For Ellis, televisual bodies are
‘hidden, made obscure by the heavy emphasis that broadcast TV gives to
various kinds of close-up’ (ibid.: 143). The vid, in turn, gathers these glancing
looks into an object that promotes a sustained (and desiring) gaze across
the whole vid. As in all multifandom vids, filmic and televisual bodies are
indistinguishable from each other, with both appearing equally in brief
clips in a typical elision of the medium specificity of vids’ source material.
On the Prowl begins and ends with film clips—The Twilight Saga: New Moon
(Chris Weitz, 2009) and Raiders of the Lost Ark, respectively—and features a
near-even split between film and television sources, with 32 of the vid’s 63
1987), Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005-2020), Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009), Near Dark
(Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), China Beach (ABC, 1988-1991), Star Trek: Next Generation (Paramount,
1987-1994), Carnivàle (HBO, 2003-2005), The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2001), X-Men
Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood, 2009), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981).
160 Fanvids
sources taken from films. The television sources are drawn from episodic
network series as well as high-end ‘quality’ dramas; these televisual bodies
are equally able to be the spectacular objects of a fetishizing gaze. There
are two separate pleasures at play in On the Prowl: that of identifying the
clips and that of fetishistic scopophilia. The work done by the viewer in
unpacking the vid’s semiotic density is another way in which the form
mediates critical detachment and fascination with images.
The interpretation of vids requires an explication of context rather than
an examination of subtext. Vids are engaged in a play with subtexts in
narrative and performance, grounded in the vidders’ reading of glances and
gazes on screen (Russo 2017) and employing their own desiring gaze. Vids
take a position on the ‘highly contradictory constructions of femininity in
mainstream films’ (Stacey 1988: 127) and television by removing the narrative
constraints that would condemn the (female) spectator’s desiring gaze. In
watching vids that collect representations of female characters being active,
discussed throughout this section, there is not an internal structural or
narrative denial that refuses (or complicates) the desire and/or identification,
as can be the case in Hollywood films (Stacey 1988). Multifandom vids
addressing passive male bodies, as per Coppa’s argument about Fannish
Taxonomy, can be about casting a desiring gaze as much as they are about
participating in a collective conversation about the pleasurable tropes those
bodies instantiate. Vids’ clips are both the images themselves and also the
points of orientation that lead back to the source narrative. However, in
multifandom vids that dislocate the images of bodies from their narratives,
the images can offer up an erotic fascination while implicitly commenting
on representational norms.
In the next section, I move from discussing moving images removed from
their narrative to function as spectacle to examining multifandom vids that
are about situating a viewer within a web of transmedia texts. Instead of
actors’ bodies being presented as an unabashed erotic spectacle and being
displayed for the pleasure of a predominantly female gaze, the vids in the
next section engage with a spectacle of narrative. These vids work with
narratives that cross many media and many years of production and revel
in a broad span of engagement with these transmedia texts.
Pleasures of Transmedia Consumption
Tisha Turk argues that ‘Vids reinvent storytelling for transmedia contexts’,
offering clues about ‘how and why audiences both respond to and repurpose
commercial media, including music’ (2015: 174). The excesses and visual
spectacle of multifandom vids can be used to show a clear path through
a range of multimedia paratexts and transmedia iterations of linked sto-
ryworlds. In the case of vids where the ‘fandom’ being vidded is located
across a range of film, television, print, and digital media—or across a
series of films contributing to the same extensive storyworld—the vids
offer responses to commercial media that synthesize narratives which
may have taken decades to unfold. Vidders create in a media context where
sprawling storyworlds are intensely visible, with abundant remakes and
reboots offering different points of entry to a fandom and creating an excess
of potential source material even for a single fandom.
In this section, I am not using ‘transmedia’ to mean a core text and ancil-
lary marketing strategies that extend the storyworld (Scott 2013; Stein 2013;
Kohnen 2018) but rather vids made out of a range of related source material
that we recognize as constituting ‘the multiplatform cultural life of a media
text’ (Stein 2015: 6) in a transmedia context. This is one in which ‘repetition,
replication, sequelization, and rebooting’ (Klein and Palmer 2016: 7) are an
ever-present factor in making sense of the current media landscape. All vids
are arguably transmedia texts in that they extend the source storyworld
into a paratextual iteration. However, vids such as those discussed below
demonstrate how vidding fans understand these webs of interconnectedness,
given that they work with material from sprawling and cross-platform
storyworlds to achieve their aims. As with massively multifandom vids that
focus on genre or bodies in motion, vids that textualize encounters with
the pleasures of transmedia can be quite labour-intensive and, if nothing
else, demonstrate the careful viewing and deep knowledge of a storyworld
that is required to make such a work.
In this section, I explore vids that work with this contemporary dispersal
of storyworlds: Superman, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek. Each makes a
different argument about its varied source material, and each interacts with
excess, transmediality, and spectatorship in their own way. As a classic
comics character, Superman (and his human alias Clark Kent) has existed
in a transmedia storyworld (comics, newspaper cartoons, live shows, radio
serials, etc.) from his earliest appearances (Scholari, Bertetti, and Freeman
2014); however, the record for what Roberta Pearson calls the ‘most portrayed’
(2015) fictional character is reportedly held by Sherlock Holmes. Both are
examples of expansive transmedia storyworks with their many adaptations.
Star Trek, on the other hand, is an example of a franchise with many sequels
and, at the time of writing, a comparatively minimal number of reboots and
divergent plotlines. All three offer a puzzle for a viewer in how to navigate
162 Fanvids
the volume of related material: the vids I discuss here are examples of
navigating these broad storyworlds.
The Lex Luthor vid Bad Romance (sisabet, 2010) begins with two long shots:
the first is an animated clip of what looks to be Luthor’s mobile base from
Challenge of the Super Friends (ABC, 1978) emerging from a swamp, and the
second pans across a scanned page from a DC comic in which Superman
is seen in proximity to Luthor’s grave, signalling that it will encompass the
broader Superman storyworld. However, these are followed by a sequence
of clips from Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011) featuring a young Lex Luthor
(Michael Rosenbaum) aligning his subjectivity with the first-person lyrics
of the song—Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’—and therefore addressing his
conflicted feelings (‘I don’t want to be friends’) to Clark Kent (Tom Welling).
From there, the vid mainly draws on Smallville but regularly cuts to scanned
comics pages and clips from a range of animated and live-action sources to
highlight echoes and inversions—characters in similar poses, or the adult
Lex Luthor enacting villainous plans—in Smallville or other platforms’
iterations of the characters. These clips could be read as this Lex’s fantasy of
all the possible ways he could provoke Clark’s ‘love and revenge’; they equally
stand as evidence of a curatorial awareness of the transmedia characters
beyond a teen-skewed television series.
As Melanie E.S. Kohnen argues, ‘Smallville re-imagines the original
Superman canon’ (2008: 211) so that the archrivals are now teenage friends
whose relationship is doomed. In this sense, and with full awareness of how
these characters fit with their broader storyworld, this Lex cannot (again,
in the words of the song) ‘want to be friends’ with this Clark because they
are destined to be enemies. However, since the vid textualizes a mode
of spectatorship that draws out the ‘homoerotic undercurrent’ of Clark
and Lex’s relationship in Smallville (Kohnen 2008: 211), it exploits the full
potential of the lyrics to ask what Lex does want, if not to be friends. (The
answer seems to be a torrid affair of mutual destruction.) The specific
narrative context of many of the clips is irrelevant to the overall argument,
which is constructed in no small part through the insistent lyrics and driving
tempo of the song: an early sequence of close-ups gathering reaction shots
of Lex after Clark walks away from him is captioned ‘I want your love, love,
love, love, I want your love’, leaving little room for an alternative explanation
for Lex’s disappointed expression.
Bad Romance is a slash vid that gathers together different iterations of
the characters, extending the undercurrent from one piece of the Superman
storyworld. The comics and other storyworld source material make these
different media all present for a simultaneous encounter with the intricacy of
superhero backstories and canon. Rather than playing to a trope of Smallville

fanworks that ‘transformed Lex into a redemptive figure’ (Stein 2006: 249),
Bad Romance constructs a transmedia identity that encompasses his many
misdeeds but suggests that his obsession with Superman has an erotic
undercurrent. The vid makes an argument that Smallville fans are not
unusual in noticing the potential connection between Clark Kent and Lex
Luthor because the alternating friendship and antagonism between the
two men is ‘slashable’ in other iterations of the characters. This is all made
possible because of the chosen song, which lends a camp aural and lyrical
excess of emotion and performance that is pitched at about the same level
as the excesses of comic-book super villainy. In another sense, the vid pares
down an excessive amount of transmedia source material to present one
way of locating meaning amongst a web of interconnected texts.
Another example, Whole New Way (Mr E Sundance, 2011), draws together
two contemporaneous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories: Sherlock
Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009) and Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present), which as of
2012 were merely two out of 254 film and television derivations of Arthur
Conan Doyle’s characters (Pearson 2015: 186). This tally does not include
the sequel to the Ritchie film, released in late 2011, or the American series,
Elementary (CBS, 2012-2019). These many adaptations enable digital fandom,
as represented in the vid, to offer novel-seeming ‘avenues of fan devotion and
investment’ (Stein and Busse 2012: 9) as well as offering slash fans a whole
new set of romantic scenarios in which to place the characters. In Whole New
Way, the ‘big screen spectacular’ (Pearson 2015: 189) of the Ritchie film and
exportable ‘heritage television’ mode (Steward 2012: 145) of the BBC series
are brought together with stills and screenshots from fanfiction and fan
art, and also incorporates photographs of text from the original stories and
Sidney Paget’s illustrations from the stories’ original publication. The vid
gives the song lyrics ‘I found a whole new way to love you’ a clear multiple
meaning that recognizes how the adaptations offer new iterations of the
characters for fans to love, and just as significantly, whole new Holmeses
to love whole new Watsons.
Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse have argued that Whole New Way’s
multimedia scope ‘exemplifies the wide reach, breadth and multiplicity of
Holmes and Watson’ across digital media forms to fans old and new (2012:
9). One cut in particular takes us from Sherlock’s Watson (Martin Freeman)
performing a web search for ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to screenshots of fan blogs
discussing the stories themselves (including a scan of a Paget illustration),
which introduces the breadth of the vid and also argues that if this Watson
was truly searching for that name online, he would find a wealth of ready
164 Fanvids
reading material. This cut also addresses the ‘acknowledgement and then
disavowal of homoeroticisim’ that Lisa Purse (2011: 136) observes throughout
the Ritchie film; a similar denial is arguably at play in the BBC series as
well (Fathallah 2015; Ng 2017). In Whole New Way, the acknowledgement of
fans asserting the viability of Holmes/Watson as a slash pairing is validated
by showing examples of that fan commentary, essentially disavowing the
disavowals offered in the adaptations themselves.
In comparison to other more controlled franchises, ‘whose transmedia
narratives generally cohere as part of designed, corporately owned world-
building across media platforms,’ Matt Hills writes that ‘the narrative world
of Sherlock Holmes is fractured and fragmented across parallel versions’
(2012: 37), with the BBC series’ transmedia extensions competing with other
adaptations of the stories. Whole New Way engages in critical spectatorship
through close textual analysis, reconciling the two potentially competing
texts by showing them as equal to each other and as equally capable of
inspiring fanworks. Hierarchies between film and television—which here
might be inverted, placing a ‘quality’ television text above a splashy action
movie—are levelled, with these different platforms shown to be equally
capable of being repurposed for a vid. Beyond the proximity of the clips,
the vid matches congruent movements and gestures from both iterations:
for example, clips in which the main pair call to each other when one or
the other is in danger, using the song’s reference to drug use as a prompt to
compare the similar way both film and series represent Holmes’s boredom-
fuelled cocaine habit, or clips showing both Watsons having been injured in
bomb blasts. The vid does not reconcile the fracturing and fragmentation
but emphasizes similarities between the texts, demonstrating how the act
of critical engagement can be enacted as a form of fascination.
Finally, the Star Trek vid Long Live (Llin, 2014) argues that a set of related
texts with a greater longevity have a long history of representing respect and
mutual support amongst colleagues. Its initial montage focuses on Yeoman
Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), seemingly aligning the song’s lyrics (‘I remember
this moment’) with her until a tracking shot ends with Rand bringing food to
Sulu (George Takei). The vid then cuts to a shot of Sulu and Chekov (Walter
Koenig) together, then to Chekov with Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), with each
cut introducing a new two-shot that moves from the original Star Trek
series to The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994) to Deep Space Nine
(Paramount, 1993-1999) and finally to Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001) through
a series of clips showing conversation, hugs, and other convivial gestures
before the cycle ends—three minutes later—with Rand’s appearance in
an episode of Voyager. The final section of the vid focuses on moments of
togetherness and celebration that serves to link the original cast films, the
television series Enterprise (UPN, 2001-2005), and the reboot films into the
continuities established in the vid’s first half.
Aside from its curatorial prowess, Long Live’s accomplishment is that
it transforms a critical argument regarding what the franchise should be
about to show that (for the duration of the vid) Star Trek is about support-
ing and acknowledging friends and colleagues as you all move together
through the furthest reaches of the universe. Connecting the different
properties is handled by using clips of crossover moments, transforming
the franchise’s transmedia strategies into moments of affective resonance.
The final lyrics of the song—‘One day, we will be remembered’—is almost
a comic understatement given the wealth of possible Trek moments to
remember for a dedicated fan. While the clips are numerous, a knowledgeable
Star Trek fan will be able to identify most of the characters if not all of the
episodes. For someone without a deep knowledge of the franchise, the
decontextualized images show many dozens of characters united across
many decades of production. With the exception of being a vid and therefore
not being an industry-approved (e.g. commodifiable; see Kohnen 2018) way
of interacting with the franchise, in many ways this vid models the affective
response that this density of texts is ‘supposed’ to elicit. This particular
path through the transmedia narrative argues for Trek as a franchise that
rewards sustained engagement, where each new instalment will fulfil the
promise of introducing the viewer to a newfound family.
These examples engage in different ways with transmedia franchises,
critically and otherwise, and demonstrate vidding fans’ use of the vid
form to comment on contemporary ways to consume media. Amanda
Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer argue that transmedia texts, which they
term ‘multiplicities’, ‘invite viewers to appreciate the new in the context
of the familiar and already approved, sanctioning readings that crisscross
textual borders’ (2016: 1). Bad Romance does not dwell on the context of
each version of Clark and Lex beyond Smallville but instead sanctions a
slash reading of these other media, allowing the iconic signifiers of the
characters to suggest how each iteration fits into a slash reading, where a
long history of antagonism arguably masks a fraught sexual attraction. Whole
New Way similarly demonstrates how interpretive frameworks already in
place—for example, a slash reading or simply an awareness of the Holmes
and Watson characters from other adaptations or encounters with the source
stories—arguably sanction the digital media fandom practices that have
followed the newest iterations. Likewise, Long Live argues that Star Trek
has always been, and continues to be, a franchise interested in exploring
166 Fanvids
enduring friendships and cross-cultural understandings as much as it

is about exploring the unknown. Therefore, this variety of multifandom
vid textualizes spectatorship across different branches of a franchise or
storyworld, mediates adaptations of well-known texts, and models an
affective engagement with these transmedia source texts.
Fascinating People
As signalled at the start of this chapter, a fourth form of pleasurable fascina-

tion enacted by multifandom vids addresses celebrity. Real person vids are a
vidding subgenre that are not quite multifandom vids in the strictest sense
but that gather clips from across a range of sources and interact with ideas
of fascination, image, and critical interactions with mediated representa-
tions. Instead of having a genre, concept, or relationship as the topic of
the vid, real person vids look to real people, that is, celebrities. This strand
of vidding is related to the real person fiction (RPF) subset of fanfiction,
which addresses actors, musicians, and other public figures rather than
fictional narratives (Hagen 2015; Fathallah 2018). These can take the form
of lighthearted tributes to a regular guest actor in American television,
such as One Way or Another (diannelamerc, 2010) which highlights Mark
Sheppard’s work, or profoundly moving memorials, such as the Carrie Fisher
vid A Better Son/Daughter (eruthros, 2016). In each, the vidder uses clips
from performances—sometimes including backstage material, candid
clips, interviews, and press appearances alongside fan-made material—to
construct an argument about the individual, which is also an argument
about the experience of watching that person on screen. The final section
of A Better Son/Daughter includes fan art, photos of protest signs featuring
Fisher’s image, and other real-world evidence of how much she has mattered
to her fans.
Real person vids have a very high-profile precedent in the history of mov-
ing image re-use in Joseph Cornell’s film Rose Hobart (1936), which provides
an interesting starting point for thinking through vids’ textualization of
spectatorship focused on an individual. Cornell, who was ‘best known for
his surrealist collage art’ (Rees 2011: 72), edited the feature-length adventure
film East of Borneo (George Melford, 1931) into a shorter film focusing on its
star, Rose Hobart. Cornell altered the footage by tinting it (in some versions
blue, in others pink; Pigott 2013: 114 n17) and added a soundtrack of ‘Brazilian
samba music’ (Barefoot 2011: 160). The result uses glances off-screen, moving
camera shots, and a lack of dialogue to keep its viewer adrift in a formless
presentation of clips that (we trust) once had meaning. Rose Hobart begins
with a shot of a crowd all looking off-screen, not with a shot of Hobart
herself; significantly, this shot is not from East of Borneo but is an addition
provided by Cornell (Pigott 2013: 16). When cited in discussions of found
footage film, Rose Hobart tends to be characterized as a film about Cornell’s
fascination with the actress’s star image (Rony 2003). The addition of this
opening shot establishes and underscores the film’s concern with looking
and its textualization of spectatorship.
Hauptman argues that Rose Hobart is a portrait rather than a film, as
it does not offer information about the actress so much as it ‘reveals […]
much about the desires of every fan’ and ‘how performers in general are
constructed and interpreted on-screen’ (Hauptman 1999: 87). Hobart herself
remains out of reach, but Cornell’s concerns are apparent in how her image is
manipulated. Barefoot writes that Hobart is ‘now known for being forgotten’
(2011: 153); Cornell’s film and his intense regard for Hobart’s star image are
why she is remembered at all. East of Borneo was not a financial success,
but neither was it a cheap B-movie (Barefoot 2011: 157). Fatimah Tobing
Rony argues that Rose Hobart ‘embodies a kind of infatuation, or amour
fou (crazy love), on the part of Cornell for Rose Hobart, and its qualities of
disruption, disjunction, and the oneiric are still focused on the pursuit of an
ideal woman’ (2003: 132). Cornell’s film is notable because it concentrates the
star image of a single actress (taken from a single film) into an intense work
that betrays what we might read as his excessive engagement with Hobart
as well as his familiarity with more general formal film conventions ‘from
years of carefully watching films, collecting footage, and cutting up and
re-using bits of celluloid’ (Hauptman 1999: 88). Cornell’s fascination with the
potential of Hobart’s image was enabled through a different fascination: that
of film form, which provided the tools to enact this fixation on a specific
star/performer image.
This fascination with a single performance from a single actress has a
contemporary echo in vids that take a single individual—rather than a
series or a film—as their subject. These are technically multifandom vids,
as they use clips from many different sources; however, the ‘fandom’ in
the vid is for an individual performer’s star image. Richard Dyer proposed
that a Hollywood star’s persona is constructed through a variety of media
texts, with a real person somewhere at the locus of these mediations (1979).
Real person vids are based on a celebrity’s public image and not solely the
characters they play, with a greater emphasis on the vids’ subjects as actors or
performers rather than as celebrities. They textually represent a fascination
with and pleasure in screen appearances and, as Hauptman argues about
168 Fanvids
Cornell’s work in making Rose Hobart, rely on an intimate understanding of

media enabled by years of engaged spectatorship. As with other multifandom
vids, real person vids offer access to reading broadly across texts: in this
case, reading across a career rather than a genre or the different constituent
parts of a transmedia story. Rather than a path through a text, this vidding
subject offers a path through a life on screen.
This shift from watching representations (genres, bodies, navigations of
texts) to watching performances is not simply a way to collect and display
celebrity images. Instead, this is a method through which vidders com-
municate an analysis of the subject’s star persona, constructed using pieces
of that same web of media texts through which the stars are known to their
vidders. Real person vids directly address the celebrity image as a construct.
Indeed, this form can be used to question aspects of the celebrity’s persona.
Unlike the proximate video art pieces Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
(Todd Haynes, 1987) and Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992),
real person vids are not made with audio or video elements created by the
vidders: the soundtracks provide framing and commentary, and the images
are exclusively the star’s media texts. Writing about Superstar, Rock Hudson’s
Home Movies, and related early-1990s queer-themed pieces focusing on cult
figures, Glyn Davis (2008: 102-104) suggests these works function as fan
letters to their subjects. Given their fannish origins, vids about real people
perform much the same function, and as Davis suggests about this cycle of
queer art titles, they are made to ‘contribute to a collective sense of pleasure
in a chosen object, text, or individual’ (ibid.). Where character study vids
elaborate on a fictional person’s emotional depth and complexity, real person
vids use the same codes and structures to suggest that the celebrity—known
only through their media texts—possesses similar qualities.
In Dyer’s schema, promotion and publicity are the controlled and
uncontrolled making of the star image. Britney Spears has spent much of
her career experiencing the tension between these two. Her 2007 single
‘Piece of Me’ was released amid well-publicized personal and legal troubles.
The single’s official music video is defiant: being a celebrity looks exciting
(evading paparazzi with gal-pal decoys), and she looks happy, healthy, and
stable as she tears down a fake tabloid spread. In contrast, obsessive24’s
vid, also titled Piece of Me (2008), edits clips of actual news/tabloid coverage
together with Spears’s own music videos to present a more ambiguous
reflection on her relationship with the media. Critically, however, it is also
more sympathetic in that it argues for a more vulnerable and complex
understanding of Spears than the official video allows. By combining un-
sympathetic media coverage with her teenage pop videos, the vid effectively
lays out evidence for its audience to examine its own view of Spears. The
song’s lyrics quote a paraphrased version of the criticism levelled against
Spears (e.g. ‘that Britney’s shameless’) while the music videos and public
life that prompted that criticism are shown, creating a subtler rebuttal to
public opinion. This is a demonstration of watching broadly across texts,
offering a resistant reading to the truth claims of the official music video,
and working with these different representations to suggest an alternate
path to understanding Spears.
In this vid, the lyrics of the song ‘Piece of Me’ are used provocatively: in
using Spears’s own voice to caption an alternate interpretation of her public
image, the official music video begins to feel frothy and hollow. The official
video finishes with Spears staring directly into the camera: her slight sneer,
the commanding close-up, and her flawless hair and makeup are designed
to show a sane and strong Spears, with her troubles behind her. In contrast,
the vid ends by redeploying an official image of Spears in character as a
victim—from the music video for her single ‘Every Time’—in which her
hair partially covers her face and she seems vulnerable and isolated, gazing
back at the audience over her shoulder. The vid appears to argue that this
apparent fragility is more accurate to the ‘real’ Spears than the controlled,
official mediation.
A growing group of vids focus on cult actors: individuals who are known
for their various guest appearances in non-leading roles. These vids make
these cult actors stars of their own vids, treating an accumulation of appear-
ances as one ‘text’. As Matt Hills points out, while theorizations of celebrity
and stardom presume that these figures are ubiquitous in mass media,
certain cult actors ‘are treated as famous only by and for their fan audience’
(2003: 61), where an intensity of recognition is limited to a niche audience.
This intense spectatorship textually demonstrated in vids perpetuates the
pleasures of watching performances: not by typical red-carpet celebrities,
but by actors who will turn up in guest roles or as supporting cast in short-
lived genre series. Actor-focused vids are not interested in the interiority
of fictional characters but rather in identifying and celebrating actors who
are not usually considered to be ‘stars’. Real person vids about ‘subcultural
celebrities’ (Hills 2003; Williams 2016) grant these familiar faces a starring
role in tributes to their continuing employment. This is more than the close
watching of a single text, as with Rose Hobart, but is the result of careful
consideration of an array of a star’s appearances across a wide range of
media texts.
The actor Mark Sheppard is featured in the vid One Way or Another (dian-
nelamerc, 2010), cut to the Blondie song of the same name. A character actor
170 Fanvids
best known for guest roles in North American network and cable television
series, he tends to play smug antagonists. The vid uses the song’s lyrics—‘One
way or another I’m gonna find ya’ at the start, which turns into ‘I’m gonna
give you the slip’ by the last verse—to comment on Sheppard’s regular
guest role as pursuer/pursued. The vid accordingly gathers clips from many
of his roles, which regularly derive from a narrative in which Sheppard’s
character appears to hold power over the protagonists but is outfoxed at
the last minute. This language of pursuit is playfully echoed in the vid’s
textual demonstration of the vidder’s (and audience’s) pursuit of Sheppard
through his career. By the vid’s end, he seems poised to escape—not from
custody but to his next guest appearance. The song promises ‘I’m gonna
get ya’: like Joseph Cornell’s possession of Rose Hobart’s image, Sheppard’s
audience can likewise dominate and manipulate copies of his appearances.
The ‘real’ Mark Sheppard is not as much a concern in this vid as the
pleasures of being reminded of his quiet ubiquity: as a familiar face in
other people’s stories. For the audience, Sheppard’s appearance in a guest
role brings a particular set of narrative expectations. In this, the individual
characters matter less than the trope of his appearance. One Way or Another
takes pleasure in recognizing Sheppard’s typecasting and then demonstrat-
ing this tendency in operation, using the clips as evidence. Other similar
vids—such as Strange Little Girl (Heather, 2007)56 about Jodelle Ferland’s
many ‘creepy child’ roles, and Live and Let Die (valoise, 2012) about Peter
Wingfield’s British and American careers—encounter and enact these
actors’ subcultural celebrity.
The next example, Brick House (Gwyneth, 2010), focuses on Gina Torres. As
with One Way or Another, the vid includes clips from many different series, and
the subject of the work is an appreciation of Torres’s television appearances
across cult TV. The Commodores song used in the vid includes lyrics like
‘She’s the one, the only one | who’s built like an Amazon’, helping to construct
the vid’s argument about the pleasures associated with the typical Torres
role. This navigates some of the same territory as other vids in this chapter
56 I have dated this vid based on the age of the digital file in my collection and its presence in a
list of vids nominated for a fan-run award (Buffyann c. 2007). No date on the page is visible, and
the overwhelming majority of links are to defunct personal homepages or purged LiveJournal
accounts. Few of the vidders’ names are familiar to me as individuals who may still be active
in fandom. Based on a small handful of live links that provide dates, and given that each other
vid was made in 2007, I presume Strange Little Girl is of a similar age to its fellow nominees.
As further datable evidence, Tori Amos covered ‘Strange Little Girl’ in 2001, and the source
video—Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006), and an early episode
of Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-present)—make a 2007 date reasonable.
concerning the issues of representing a woman as attractive and active at the

same time and operating with a tension at play in recognizing Torres as being
simultaneously beautiful and capable without one quality excluding the other.
Through a series of reaction shots from characters—mostly but not
exclusively men—in several series casting desiring looks out of the frame, the
vid then cuts to Torres as Cleopatra in Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance
Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001), being partially undressed by attendants.
This opening sequence constructs a relationship between Torres as the
subject of the vid and the audience actively engaged in watching these
many fragments of her career. The sequence continues with three clips of
Torres in roles from different series. In each shot she is active, though in
different ways: walking towards the frame in front of men in Hercules: The
Legendary Journeys (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-1999), ogling
a man’s bare torso and then sharing a smile with the woman on her other
side in Cleopatra 2525 (Renaissance Pictures, 2000-2001), and wielding a
pair of guns in Firefly (FOX, 2002). From then on, clips alternate between
images of Torres as a figure of desire and as an agent of action (or sometimes
both at the same time).
In presenting Torres’s characters as physically active, desiring, and so
forth, the clips somewhat moderate her potential objectification (as a thin,
‘exotic’ woman of colour dressed in revealing costumes). The majority of the
clips feature Torres confidently in motion, in combat, or engaged in seduc-
tion. The lyrics are partially subverted in order to describe empowerment,
redirecting lines such as ‘She knows she’s built and knows how to please |
Sure enough to knock a strong man to his knees’ into a critical position that
equally notices the roles she plays—strong women in control of themselves
and, frequently, those around them—and constructs a possible space for
identification as well as desire. As a work that responds to the star image of a
cult actress, this vid performs the pleasures of noticing representation, giving
this woman of colour a starring role in a fan-created overview of her appeal.
The cult actors in these examples are presented as actors first, in their
various roles, not in their various public performances of ‘themselves’. The
intense fascination that fans have for these actors is not always a fascination
for their personal lives but rather for the pleasure fans take in following
these actors through their careers or in noticing their work across media
texts. The performance of this broad viewership is evident when genre is
considered: One Way or Another demonstrates that Sheppard’s typecasting
has been featured across television genres and includes clips from The
X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002), The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2001),
Firefly (FOX, 2002), Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-2020), Burn Notice (USA
172 Fanvids
Network, 2007-2013), The Middleman (ABC, 2008), and Leverage (TNT, 2008-
2012), among others. The fascination demonstrated in Brick House is with
Torres’s physical attributes as much as her acting ability, but the vid takes
pleasure in demonstrating that her presence on American television—in
roles where the colour of her skin is apparent but is not a vital point of her
characterization—has not gone unnoticed. In contrast, Piece of Me and A
Better Son/Daughter examine the fissure between a private life and the
public commentary arising from visible mental health struggles.
These close readings of celebrities’ and actors’ works demonstrate a
fascination with star images and performance and with what can be ac-
complished through the manipulation of media texts. Whereas the intensity
of Cornell’s gaze reduces Hobart into a scopophilic object, real person vids
are as much about the operation of cult stardom as they are about the
intense scrutiny and dedication required to notice and clip all these actors’
guest appearances. Vids about people are about paying close attention to
the individuals in question and sharing the pleasures and fascinations of
this mode of spectatorship with fellow fans.
Conclusion
combine multiple source texts into one work? Multifandom vids provide
evidence of interpretive paths through genres, tropes, and transmedia texts
as well as how fans make sense of celebrities’ public lives. This is not merely
watching broadly across many texts but often with a historical depth. To
account for vids solely in terms of narrative transformation denies the
other pleasures of the form. Multifandom vids in particular demonstrate a
mode of spectatorship that is media-literate and actively analytical, willing
to identify and share that which is pleasurable, spectacular, erotic, and
fascinating in and about film and television texts.
As Coppa (2008) and Brunsdon and Spigel (2008) argue, vidding is about
how fannish women watch television, and this careful viewership is enacted
through the vid form. The multifandom vids that have been the focus of this
chapter demonstrate the qualities of this fannish viewing because of their
potential to emphasize genres, bodies, stories, and lives. These clips are
re-used to create dense expressions of desire and fascination and in doing
so preserve that way of watching. The vidding gaze is directed not only
toward images of spectacular bodies or elaborate special effects but also
to more abstract attractions represented by the multifandom vid: sharing
a pleasure in consuming media. Functioning partially as a scrapbook of

past and current attractions and partially as a catalogue of sources, the
massively multifandom vid offers both the mastery of a subject area and
the opportunity to fill in gaps in one’s knowledge. The repetition of this
form updates and reinforces the canon of fan attractions.
The key difference is that the fannish affection for or fascination with the
image-bodies keeps them from being read as empty or void. The star image,
the location of a clip within an understanding of genre, or the recognition
of fascination and/or pleasurable images is not severed in the clips, even
though a nuanced connection to the original narrative is disrupted because
the fascination of the image is strong enough to override the violence of the
cut. Therefore, decontextualized clips are read as images, not as indicating
character or plot in the same way as other vid genres, and not thereby in
constant dialogue with the source material.
My purpose in offering comparisons to experimental film and video is
to provide a level of exposure to these ‘underground’ works and to argue
for the ways they have value for those who create and those who watch
them. In multifandom vids in particular, the rapid presentation of clips
from diverse source material creates a spectacle for the pleasure of the vid’s
audience and emphasizes the fascinations of images at play when analysing
the visual side of the vid form. As with the vids discussed in the previous
chapter, song and soundtrack are the fundamental mechanism by which a
vid’s decontextualized images are anchored to a defined range of meanings,
ordering these clips into a comprehensible, legible sequence. As I will argue
in the next chapter, the interaction of audio and video sources goes beyond
simple captioning, as in the connotations of a pop song’s clichés and tropes.
However, the vid remains a form about watching and about taking pleasure
in watching; therefore, the scopophilic aspect of this form of fanwork should
not be forgotten in more literary analyses of lyrical functioning.
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(Milwaukee/New York: Milwaukee Art Museum/Distributed Art Publishers,

2004), pp. 13-27
6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s
Battlestar Galactica Trilogy
Abstract
What does it mean for a series or f ilm to be adapted to a vid? The
f inal chapter of Fanvids is an analysis of three Battlestar Galactica
(2004-2009) vids, designed to examine both the vid’s relationship with
adaptation and the central role that songs play in making meaning
in vids. Vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure meaning,
with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation vital in completing the vid’s
reinterpretation of its source text. In this case, the music, voice, and star
image of the recording artist Pink are used to appraise Kara ‘Starbuck’
Thrace. Each vid in the trilogy was made at different points during
Battlestar’s production; the trilogy reflects the character’s development
and memorializes the series’ (frustrated) potential for a particular kind
of feminist representation.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, adaptation, Battlestar Galactica,

Pink
Moving on from questions of history and of spectatorship, this chapter

addresses three key aspects of how vids make meaning: through intertextual
conversation with their source texts, by adopting semiotic density from
the songs used as soundtrack, and by using established vid genres to guide
interpretation. This chapter focuses on a case study of three Battlestar Ga-
lactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009) character study vids by Dualbunny—God
Is A DJ (2006), Cuz I Can (2007), and I’m Not Dead (2009)—to analyse the
construction of narrative and argument through the interplay of popular
music and moving images in the vid form. In relation to the growing body of
literature on the use of popular, pre-existing, pre-recorded music on televi-
sion, this chapter will investigate the aural aspect of the vid, particularly in
relation to how music is key to the vid’s work as an adaptation. The chapter
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch06
180 Fanvids
begins with an overview of Battlestar Galactica, followed by an analysis

of God Is A DJ. It continues with an extended discussion of popular music
and television as a way into talking about how vids use music. The chapter
rounds off with analyses of the second and third vids of the trilogy, which
each account for the central character’s development over the final two
seasons of Battlestar. As Julie Levin Russo has pointed out, ‘vidding is not
merely visual but also audiovisual, and music is an inextricable component
of the form’ (2017: 1.9). Therefore, this chapter is concerned with exploring
some of the ways that songs and music are used to add meaning to film and
television narratives in a vid.
The vids in the case study—chosen from among many Battlestar vids in
existence—use the moving image’s relationship with songs to reform and
refocus Battlestar Galactica into a trilogy of character-focused vids that
foreground the experience of the female fighter pilot, Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace
(Katee Sackhoff), each using—and taking as its title—a different song by Pink
(Alecia Moore).57 The interaction of Pink’s songs with clips that emphasize
Kara creates vids that present a female-centred narrative, adapting the science
fiction world of Battlestar in a way that augments the melodramatic aspects of
the series’ generic hybridity. The change in focus means the distance between
the source material and the vid is critically compelling. In addition to a direct
narrative analysis, I will also examine the semiotic implications of adopting
Pink’s music and celebrity image in these adaptations.
This vid trilogy produces a critical adaptation of Battlestar that analy-
ses its source text. Vids can be explicitly critical texts, as with so-called
‘meta’ vids such as Stay Awake (Laura Shapiro, 2010), which comments on
problematic representations of female bodies and human reproduction
in science fiction. Laura Shapiro’s multifandom vid uses Suzanne Vega’s a
cappella cover of a lullaby from Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) to
shape a nightmarish concentration of alien/demonic pregnancy plotlines
across many series.58 However, vids made without such pointed criticism
may carry implicit critiques of their source texts through their editing
choices: this is the analytical work of character study vids. The emotional
work of character study vids is in creating a space to imagine the characters’
57 While some (Kalinak 2010; Burns and Watson 2013) style her name ‘P!nk’, following the
typography on the albums, I use ‘Pink’ throughout this volume (following Railton and Watson
2011).
58 She draws from Angel (WB, 1999-2004), Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003),
Stargate SG-1 (Showtime/Sci-Fi Channel, 1997-2007), Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009),
Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994), Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011), as well as
Battlestar Galactica.
ADAPTING STARBUCK: DUALBUNNY’S BAT TLESTAR GAL AC TICA TRILOGY 181
interiority. As Tisha Turk points out, because pop songs offer themselves
for our identification, when used in vids ‘we allow songs to give shape and
voice to the emotions of fictional characters; we make those characters say
what we assume or believe they are thinking’ (2015: 171). The interaction
between image choice and song lyrics provokes an immediate emotional
reaction but draws on codes and conventions of music/image juxtapositions
in other media forms.
Dualbunny is one of many fans who have vidded Battlestar Galactica. For
example, 50+ individual Battlestar vids were shown at VividCon, and these
represent a fraction of the total made. Different vid adaptations of Battlestar
Galactica demonstrate the various ways a series can be adapted in vid form to
focus on different aspects of its narrative, characters, and themes. Borrowing
Michel Chion’s evocative metaphor from his description of music videos,
each vid ‘turns the prism’ of the source series ‘to show its facets’ (1994: 166).
As adaptations of Battlestar, each vid creates an intense focus on one feature
of the series’ generic hybridity through prioritizing the experience of a few
characters in the ensemble cast or plot points in the multi-strand narrative. In
each, there is a re-telling of Battlestar’s story in such a way that emphasizes an
interpretation of different plot threads or relationships. The naked emotion
of the pieces manipulates the melodramatic plot elements and intensifies
their effect. Dualbunny’s three vids about Kara Thrace turn the prism of
the series to reveal a facet of Battlestar Galactica that adapts the series into
a female-centred melodrama, where Kara becomes the main character and
her identity and emotional journey are these works’ sole concern.
Deciding to use a particular song in a vid is more than choosing relevant
lyrics: the vidder will have made a decision about artist and genre, tempo
and timbre, selecting an album track over a radio single or acoustic version
(or vice versa), and whether to use a cover version (which might then add a
further layer of intertextual complexity). Beyond the bare lyrics, the rest of
this information—genre, artist, aural texture—is part of the metaphor used
to describe the particular version of the primary (source) work as presented
in the vid. This is implicit critique as metaphor because it employs one system
of connotations to describe another, but it does so without listing them or
plainly stating the various points of comparison. Of course, the vid form
has evolved to rely on this kind of metaphor because precise literal matches
are frequently impossible. With the Kara/Pink trilogy, Pink’s songs suggest
a vast amount of information about how to read the character of Kara even
as the lyrics provide and direct explicit meanings within the vid itself.
It is useful to understand vids as adaptations (see McEwan 2011; Louttit
2013; O’Neill 2014)—particularly, vids that adapt a single text—as a vidder
182 Fanvids
creates a new version of the source material through selecting and extracting
clips. In a transmedia industrial context where remakes and adaptations
are commonplace and the ‘repetition, replication, sequelization, and reboot-
ing’ (Klein and Palmer 2016: 7) of existing texts is normal, any definition
of adaptation quickly becomes expansive. To invoke a straightforward
definition, Colin McCabe positions an adaptation as a work ‘that relies for
some of its material’ on an already extant text (2011: 3). A vid literally relies
on existing media texts, both video and audio, but also relies on already
extant traditions of commentary in fandom. Paul McEwan argues that if
one accepts adaptation as ‘a legitimate form of art, it becomes impossible to
justify any criterion of cultural value that excludes [fannish adaptations]’,
and the fanworks ‘that fill the gaps between looks and gestures are all, in
their own ways, essays on the original text’ (2011: 45). This fannish working-
over of source material to create fanworks does crystalize one appeal of
adaptations more generally, that ‘we seem to desire the repetition as much
as the change’ with each iteration (Hutcheson 2013: 9).
The context of vids’ repetition as adaptations is not merely a relationship
between source text and individual vid. Instead, there are intertextual and
transmedial relationships at play between the source text, the individual
vid, other vids for that fandom, and other forms of fanwork (e.g. fic, meta,
commentary via gifset, etc.) that extend and elaborate on that source text.
Indeed, an ‘important frame for the “creative” and “interpretive” act [of an
adaptation] that is the fan video is the work and commentary of others in
the community’ (Louttit 2013: 181). Character study and relationship vids
construct a narrative space for characters’ emotional lives as an expression of
their imagined subjectivity. This act of adaptation demonstrates (textualizes)
the attentive spectatorship of the vidder and of a vid-watching audience
that shares in this mode of interacting with a text.
Music is the method (or tool) of the vidder’s authorial intervention as
adapter, giving the character a ‘voice’ by using the lyrics, instrumentation,
and other connotations of the song to animate a sequence of silenced images.
In discussing authorship in collaborative adaptations, Linda Hutcheon notes
the complexity of film and television’s collaborative ‘model of creation’ and
the resulting difficulty in establishing a ‘primary adapter’ beyond the usual
candidates of director and screenwriter (2013: 80-81). Hutcheon notes in
particular the roles of music directors and editors in shaping a text: they are
responsible for ‘the music that reinforces or provokes reactions in the audience
and directs our interpretation of different characters’ (ibid.: 81). As music and
editing greatly influence how narratives are presented, it is entirely reasonable
to view vidders as adapters because their contributions are in a similar line.
Questions of scope and inclusion are at the core of adaptation, especially

when adapting between media forms. As Hutcheon observes, cross-media
adaptations—for example, films from novels—may often be ‘reduced in
size, and thus, inevitably, complexity’ (2013: 36). However, rather than this
reduction acting as a ‘subtraction’ and therefore being detrimental, in fact
‘when plots are condensed and concentrated, they can sometimes become
more powerful’ (ibid.). As Turk has argued, the formal and narrative ‘compres-
sion’ makes vids ‘often much more dense with meaning than the original
materials, and both music itself and music/image synchronicity are key to
decoding those meanings’ (2015: 170). In the Battlestar vids discussed in this
chapter, the serial narrative is condensed, as is the formal presentation of the
character and events, reduced from seventy-five episodes (plus associated
miniseries) to the duration of three pop songs. This raises the question of
absences in the vid: what is at stake in considering what is left out, and
what does a vid’s audience make of what has been left in? The volume of
the material that has been cut will always exceed that which is included
due to the relative durations of the vid and the source. By viewing vids as
critical responses enacted as adaptations, the choices made in condensing
and concentrating a vid out of a longer text indicate what the vidders want
to say about their source material, how it has been interpreted, and how
the vidders want to present their work or their argument.
One key change made by the Kara/Pink trilogy is that the vids turn a
masculine-coded, ‘quality’ (Caldwell 2005; Shimpach 2010; Mittell 2015) serial
drama into a more feminine-coded melodrama by following the emotional
life of a single female character. It is through the vid form—in which popular
music is made to function in a manner similar to musical montage sequences
in television or music video—that this adaptation takes place. Borrowing
an argument I have made elsewhere about character study vids (Stevens
2017a), the Kara/Pink trilogy are relatively conservative adaptations insofar
as they do not introduce new meanings not already present in the text. The
vids intensify a slice of Sci-Fi Channel’s remake of Battlestar Galactica into
a trilogy that are each coherent texts in their own right and that chart the
development of a character centred by the vids, focusing on her emotions
and responses to her story.
Overview of Battlestar Galactica
The Battlestar Galactica used as source video for Dualbunny’s vids is the
Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) version of the original series, led by executive
184 Fanvids
producer Ronald D. Moore. The 2003 miniseries became the pilot for a series
(2004-2009) that expanded on the Glen A. Larsen original (ABC, 1978-9, 1980).
Some commentators use the term ‘re-imagining’ to describe the series rather
than remake or reboot (see, for example, Hatch 2006; Liedl 2010; Picarelli
2012; Scott 2013), emphasizing Moore’s auteurship and distancing the serious
new work from its somewhat campy antecedent. In both series, a small
group of humans have survived an attack by robots (the Cylons) and flee,
seeking a mythical planet called ‘Earth’. In the 2003 series, Cylons were built
by humans, not an alien race, and have been absent for a generation-long
armistice that followed a human/Cylon war. The central tension is between
the civilian President of the Colonies and the military commander of the
titular spaceship, the Galactica. The 2003 series is generally considered to be
an allegory of contemporary American politics and was ‘endlessly dissected
on discussion boards by fans and in popular print by critics’ (Nishime 2011:
452). It ‘offers itself as an allegory of the politics of war and terror after 9/11’
(Tranter 2007: 45), including ‘debates about women in the military’ (Sharp
2010: 61), representations of torture (Randell 2011), and organized resistance
to military occupation (Herbert 2012).
Its focus on policy and governance meant that it was easy for fans, critics,
and creators to pretend that Battlestar’s killer robots and spaceships were
incidental. Jennifer Stoy suggests that the narrative weakening of Battlestar
in its latter seasons was in part due to its disavowal of ‘the science fiction
tradition’, for ‘one cannot upend clichés if one has lost a grip on them’ (2010:
25). Indeed, Daniel Herbert argues that Battlestar’s allegorical appeals
lack consistency, twisting abstract references to social issues ‘such that
the relation between the program and reality is incoherent’ (2012: 195).
Herbert suggests that the ‘apparent polysemy’ of the series is derived from
the characters’ own inconsistencies (2012: 196), which makes it difficult
to identify an unambiguous social or political position taken by the series
(see also Dzialo 2008). Unlike Star Trek, in which the main characters are
mostly senior officers in a system of rank where meritocracy elides class
difference, Battlestar includes very clear stratification between deckhands,
pilot-officers, civilian workers, social and political elites, and so forth.
However, the vids in this case study are not concerned with the struggle for
humanity’s survival or with questions of governance, as in the series, but with
the experiences of one character, the fighter pilot Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace.
In 1978’s Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck was a male character and was
played by Dirk Benedict. In the 2003 series, ‘Starbuck’ is the call-sign of
female officer Lt. Kara Thrace, as Anne Kustritz notes, ‘altering the biol-
ogy of the character without significantly altering the original version’s
personality or abilities’ (2012: 16). Benedict himself weighed in on the issue,

seemingly finding this choice both personally offensive and symptomatic
of a feminist corruption of science fiction in particular and of Western
civilization in general (Kungl 2008; Johnson 2011). Hutcheon writes that,
when experiencing an adaptation ‘as an adaptation’ (2013: 111, emphasis
in original), awareness of the adapted text will ‘oscillate in our memories
with what we are experiencing’ (ibid.: 121). For what she calls the ‘knowing
audience’ (ibid.: 120), both adaptation and adapted text are present in the
experience of the adaptation. In the change from Starbuck to Kara, the
oscillation between these two characters became a point of controversy
in the lead-up to the broadcast of the miniseries, and this affects the way
the character is approached in scholarship. Derek Johnson argues that
the 2003 series ‘effectively transgendered the familiar Starbuck character,
transforming the tough-talking, cigar-chomping, male action hero played by
Dirk Benedict in the original series into the tough-talking, cigar-chomping,
female action heroine played by Katee Sackhoff in the remake’ (2011: 1089).
Johnson’s use of ‘transgendered’ is deeply problematic; this word choice
echoes Sharp’s description of the ‘woman fighter pilot Starbuck’ (2010: 57) as
‘gender-bending’ (2010: 58). Under this naming, Starbuck is ‘transgendered’
due to intertextuality because twenty years before, a character with a similar
name was a man. These attempts to account for a change from one version
of Battlestar to another reveal, amongst other things, the strength of the
oscillation of audience memory.
This reluctance to accept a female action heroine is not unique to Kara
Thrace. Yvonne Tasker, in her analysis of female characters in Alien (Ridley
Scott, 1979) and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), notes the ‘arguments made
by some critics that figures like Ripley [(Sigourney Weaver)] are merely men
in drag’ (1993: 149); by implication, such heroines are not just unfeminine
but inauthentically or insufficiently female. Kara typifies the persistent
problem of genres such as action and science fiction where representations of
‘femininity, defined and redefined through the body’ in a military (or other
action) context rupture expectations and come to represent a ‘transgression
of the kinds of behaviour considered appropriate for women’ (Tasker 1993:
148). As a female character, Kara embodies the problems in representing
women in science fiction and action genres. As a long-form serial narrative,
Battlestar has space available to address both her profession as military pilot
and her private life. Hutcheon writes that a favourable adaptation is ‘success-
ful in its own right… for both knowing and unknowing audiences’ (2013: 121).
However, it seems difficult for a female Starbuck to defeat the oscillation
of memories of the 1978 series. In contrast, the vid trilogy accepts Kara as
186 Fanvids
a female character and examines the contradictions of her representation

beyond a dismissive labelling of her as ‘a post-feminist pinup’ (Tranter
2007: 56). Taking this further, understanding the vids as adaptations of the
already adapted series relies on that oscillation between the 2003 series and
the vids to create narratives that emphasize and naturalize Kara Thrace as
a complex female character.
In academic takes on the series, Kara is frequently referred to only as
Starbuck and not via her given or family name (see Tranter 2007; Kirkland
2008; Rawle 2010; Sharp 2010; Raney and Meagher 2015). Turning Starbuck
into Kara Thrace is more than changing the gender of the character; introduc-
ing a given and family name was, as Rawle notes, ‘a significant part of the
series’ attempt to diminish its obvious basis in fantasy’ and to emphasize
its relative realism (2010: 133). However, subsuming Kara under Starbuck
aligns her with her male predecessor; other characters in the 2003 series
refer to her variously by her given name, call sign, and rank. There is an
uncomfortable subtext to referring to the character as only Starbuck, given
that re-writing the character as a woman had caused such offense prior to
the series’ premiere. Doing so diminishes the reality effect of granting her
a more complex potential identity.
The 2003 Battlestar Galactica is a textbook example of early-2000s ‘quality’
television characterized by ensemble casts, expensive production, and
serialized character development across many seasons (Shimpach 2010;
Mittell 2015). Shawn Shimpach argues that the genre hybridity of such
series is characterized by their ‘blending of traditional action elements
with significant aspects of the televised domestic melodrama’ (2010: 36). In
Battlestar, military/governance plots are set against more personal strands
of representational politics (Hellstrand 2011) or interracial marriage and
adoption (Nishime 2011). Writing more generally, Shimpach argues that
melodrama’s focus on domesticity:
involves more than these characters simply having love lives. Their
narrative worlds are intertwined with complex domestic issues, blur-
ring public and private, domestic and professional. […] The famously
mutable, emotionally excitable characters of melodrama meanwhile are
the antithesis of stoic, masculine heroism. (2010: 37)
This blurring of public and private narrative worlds occurs regularly in

Battlestar. For example, when called upon to train new pilots in the first
season, Kara is reluctant to return to her pre-series role as a flight instruc-
tor because of lingering guilt over inadvertently causing the death of her
f iancé, a trainee pilot whom Kara decided to let pass despite knowing
his flying was inadequate. Her private life directly relates to her public,
professional abilities: her commanding officer on Galactica is her deceased
fiancé’s father. The problem of Kara Thrace as a female hero is articulated
in Dualbunny’s trilogy: as a woman, she is indeed ‘the antithesis of stoic,
masculine heroism’ (Shimpach 2010: 37). As an adaptation, the trilogy
imagines a coherent subject position for Kara, working to resolve contradic-
tions in how the character is presented by aligning this with Pink’s own
public self-narration. The vids do address Kara’s love life but only as one
aspect of the character’s interiority. That is not to say the vids remove
references to action and science fiction genres; indeed, the spectacular
special effects and Kara’s status as an action heroine are just as important.
If, as Shimpach notes, the characters of television melodrama are shown to
be ‘motivated by deep and complex syntheses of psychology and biography’
(2010: 49), then the vids construct spaces in which these motivations are
brought to the fore.
Dualbunny’s vid trilogy concerns Kara’s specific character development
across the series; as context, I will provide a brief overview of her place in
the narrative. She is introduced before the Cylon attack as a confident and
competent fighter pilot who enjoys a father/daughter relationship with
her commander, William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the respect
of her fellow officers despite a tendency towards swaggering arrogance.
Throughout the first series, she proves her piloting skill and tactical abilities,
she successfully trains Galactica’s new pilots, and her religious convictions
lead her to accept President Laura Roslin’s (Mary McDonnell) secret solo
mission to fulfil vision and prophecy by returning to her abandoned home
planet, Caprica, one of the Twelve Colonies (which are each separate planets).
At the start of the second season Kara is still on Caprica, separated from
the fleet. She falls in love with the leader of the resistance, Samuel Anders
(Michael Trucco) but must leave him and his followers on the planet when
she returns to the fleet. The surprise appearance of another surviving
warship leads to her promotion and reassignment to the other vessel; the
responsibilities of the position and guilt over personnel losses increase
her reckless and self-destructive behaviour. After fulfilling her promise to
return for the humans on Caprica, she marries Anders and leaves the fleet
to join a settlement on the newly established colony of New Caprica. In
the final episode of the second season, the narrative advances a full year;
Cylons arrive and occupy the planet.
In the third season, after the humans escape their failed colony and
return to space, Kara’s recklessness returns in the wake of her imprisonment
188 Fanvids
and torture59 during the period of occupation; she experiences nightmares

and starts an affair with Commander Adama’s son, Lee (Jamie Bamber).
Her romantic turmoil is mirrored in her decreasing ability to adequately
perform her duties as a pilot; a few close calls foreshadow her (apparent)
death toward the end of the season. She returns, however, in the season’s
final episode, claiming to know the location of Earth. In the final season,
she fights general suspicion that she is a Cylon (because of her miraculous
re-appearance), struggles to convince the fleet to follow her directions back
to Earth (which turns out to be a nuclear wasteland), remains loyal during
a mutiny (during which Anders receives severe brain injuries), and finds a
more adequate faux-Earth to settle on thanks to elaborate visions featuring
her long-absent father. By the end, it is revealed that Kara did indeed die in
the third season: what returned was an ‘angel’ whose function was to lead
the humans to their new home, and this supernatural Kara disappears into
thin air at the end of the series.
As one would expect from a serial narrative, Kara’s character changes
over time, and her decisions have consequences later in the narrative. The
vid trilogy at the heart of this chapter addresses these changes by closely
reading the elements that construct the representation of the character
and by using Pink’s songs to re-present this fractured representation as
a cohesive whole. This works in an interesting tension with what Carla
Kungl identifies as one of the problems posed by the character of Kara
Thrace: that ‘women in science fiction… operate at a safe distance from
the present, mitigating their ability to challenge the status quo’ (2008:
204). If Battlestar is an allegory for early twenty-first-century American
foreign policy and society, it may be that the political allegory permeates
this genre boundary while representational politics are rendered ineffective.
Kara’s pseudo-resurrection could be read as a decision to avoid the issue
of identification completely. As Patrick B. Sharp argues, Kara’s ‘subversive
potential… is limited by her status as a supernatural creature’ (2010: 58): she
is contained by both her safe distance from the present and her non-human
state. As a supernatural creature, guided by predestination and stripped
of her agency, Kara’s potential to challenge the status quo is diluted by the
ongoing narrative of the series.
I’m Not Dead, the final vid of the trilogy, presents the supernatural Kara
as possessing an interiority as complex as (and in continuity with) her
59 Unlike the ‘waterboarding’ used by humans on Cylon prisoners, Kara’s imprisonment

takes the form of house arrest and extended emotional abuse in a domestic setting. Cuz I Can
addresses this plotline.
human predecessor. The vids are adaptations that work to make sense of
the character’s experience. Battlestar’s use of complicated personal narra-
tives is amplified in the vid trilogy; the vids eliminate overt discussions of
governance and posthuman philosophy and policy to focus on the immediate
emotional experience of a single character.
God Is A DJ (2006)
God Is A DJ (2006) is the first vid of the trilogy and is based on the eponymous
song by PinkIt elevates Kara to a starring role and addresses the character’s
representation of non-traditional womanhood in a context of military science
fiction. God Is A DJ extracts this one character from the elaborate narrative
and adapts that narrative in terms that emphasize her story and turn her
into a protagonist. It is constructed out of clips that represent both that
which is most important to her and that which is vital in understanding her
motivations as the star of this adaptation. John Mercer and Martin Shingler’s
overview of melodrama notes that this genre is regularly equated with the
‘woman’s film’ in feminist film scholarship (2004: 27). Insofar as this vid has
a female protagonist, uses a female artist’s song to tell its story and make
its argument, and is produced for a largely female audience, this vid can
be considered a variant of the woman’s film. The vid is not concerned with
the series’ political allegories; other characters appear only in relation to
Kara. It does not extract only ‘girl-friendly’ parts of Battlestar, but it does
reconfigure the character’s representation in relation to its longer source
narrative. Nor is it constructing an argument about what modern women
should be. Rather, it focuses on how this specific female character can be
interpreted in this case.
God Is A DJ premiered at VividCon 2006 as part of the Club Vivid vidshow
following the end of Battlestar’s second season, and it summarizes these two
seasons from Kara’s perspective. The vid begins with Kara’s introduction
in the series, where she is shown winning at cards, and the final clip is
from the final episode of the second season, as she looks to the sky to see
the Cylons flying over the new colony. While the initial clips suggest the
vid will be about pleasure and/or leisure, the next (pre-lyrics) sequence of
quick clips includes a flashback to her fiancé’s funeral and to her first-season
crash onto a desert planet. This shift from scenes showing Kara in control
to those revealing her more vulnerable moments, from facing the camera
and dominating the frame to having her face alternately obscured and
moving out of the shot, establishes that this character has moments of
190 Fanvids
strength and weakness and that the vid will address those highs and lows.
The vid ultimately constructs a version of Battlestar that argues that Kara’s
outlook on life is about making the best of positive and negative moments,
largely by seeking pleasure and distraction. In the words of the song, her
ability to ‘take what you’re given | it’s all how you use it’ is what helps her
to overcome various obstacles. Further, the opening sequence establishes
the vid’s balanced blend of personal and professional narratives. As noted
earlier, this is typical of long-form serial television drama; the vid preserves
these two aspects of the character’s life in its adaptation of the larger series.
God Is A DJ does not compare this character with other women in Bat-
tlestar nor with more general representational norms: it is interested in
(the representation of) Kara herself. As previously noted, Kara’s gender
caused issues for those members of the audience who were defeated by
their oscillations of memory (per Hutcheon 2013) in reference to the 1978
series. In the 2003 Battlestar, ‘Starbuck’ has always been female. This vid
preserves Starbuck’s cigar-smoking, liquor-drinking, card-playing habits
and showcases the character’s abilities both in piloting and in hand-to-hand
combat; however, her gender is reinforced by Sackhoff’s unambiguously
gendered body. God Is A DJ does not argue that to see a woman in a macho
military context is a perversion (cf. Tasker 1993, on comic strip heroines);
rather, its assertive and persuasive mode of address naturalizes the Kara
shown in this vid and does not mark her as transgressive.60 Pink’s song, with
its rough and throaty vocals and electric guitars, is the vid’s other model
of femininity. The vid does not approach Kara as a problem; it integrates
(masculine) military imagery with more typically ‘feminine’ activity, such
as wearing a blue satin dress to a formal occasion.
The vid naturalizes the female-centred diegesis it creates, thanks in
no small part to the confidence in Pink’s song. Instrumentally, the song
begins with a plucked acoustic guitar under a subtle synthesized sound;
this electronic thread is quickly joined by a simple drum fill and more
ambient (though rhythmically structured) synthesized noise. The blend of
the acoustic guitar and live drums with electronic sounds connotes a blend
of rock sensibility and processed pop to position the song (and therefore the
60 I do not read the vid as purposely representing transgressive behaviour or subjectivity;

the predominant pleasure is arguably closer to an aspirational social construction of a diegesis
where Kara is not transgressive, rather than the pleasure of watching Kara’s transgressive acts.
There is transgression in the vidder’s manipulation of existing texts; however, within vid genres,
character study vids are based on a promise of a truthful or authentic (re-)presentation of the
character. The Kara in the vid is shown performing actions that are wholly her own and not
overtly compared either to male fighter pilots or to Dirk Benedict.
vid) as adopting the acoustic semiotics of both the authentic self-expression

of a singer-songwriter and a more fabricated pop persona (see Whiteley
2000; Frith 2007a; Moy 2015). The core of the instrumentation—the guitar
and drums—can connote a direct, honest, and authentic form of musical
self-expression. Accordingly, the electronic elements are used as fill and
colour to augment that authentic core. Acoustically, then, the song begins
with this statement of authenticity, with what Simon Frith might count as
an example of ‘performing sincerity’ (2007b: 167)—in this case, borrow-
ing discourses of authenticity from folk music to perform the craft of an
individualized emotional appeal. This double claim to a polished exterior
(or a public face) and a rougher subjectivity is well-used in the latter half of
the vid to undercut the devil-may-care enthusiasm of the vid’s beginning.
Before the lyrics begin, Pink is heard humming and laughing over
the introduction, with her ‘slightly breathy and raspy voice’ (Burns and
Watson 2013: 122) both audible and recognizable before she starts singing.
Interestingly, though certainly parenthetically, in Film Music: A Very Short
Introduction, Kathryn Kalinak uses Pink’s voice as an example of timbre,
suggesting in an aside that ‘most listeners can probably tell the difference
between’ her and Mariah Carey (2010: 13). The vid’s opening connotes a
woman (both the star persona of Pink and the fictional Kara) who cannot
be contained by a strict verse-chorus structure or conventional behaviour
in other realms. The vid’s first three clips are taken from the character’s
introduction in the series. The quick upward camera movement of the clip
between the title cards—following Kara raising and drinking from a shot
glass—begins with a tightly framed shot of her cleavage; the sequence
establishes Kara as the main character of the vid and also makes a clear
statement of this Starbuck’s gender. (It also establishes the character as the
subject of a gendered gaze on behalf of the vid’s presumptively non-male
audience.) The song’s suggestion of rule-breaking establishes this character as
a woman who narratively challenges authority and whose representation also
defies simple norms. Even without her voice, Kara’s subjectivity is affirmed
through the vid’s frequent use of shots of her face. Significantly, these are
not shots of her speaking but of looking, inviting the audience to view the
world from her perspective: how she sees them and how she sees herself.
Considering the lyrics ‘it’s all how you use it’, her look implies a constant
evaluation of her circumstances to figure out how to use what she has.
For example, in the final chorus, Kara’s escape from the Cylon breeding
experiment in the second-season episode ‘The Farm’ (tx. 12 August 2005)
uses her act of stabbing her captor, the Cylon Simon (Rick Worthy) as a
message of control and empowerment. Yvonne Tasker’s work on female
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action heroes details the scarcity of such characters: instead, ‘More often
female characters are either raped or killed, or both, in order to provide a
motivation for the hero’s revenge’ (1993: 16). One of Battlestar’s early suc-
cesses in trope subversion—of the sort that Stoy (2010) applauds in her
overview of the series’ narrative decay—addresses this use of women in
action genres. In ‘The Farm’, it is revealed that the Cylons use captured
human women as tissue donors and living incubators for the production of
hybrid Cylon/human children. Despite her injuries, Kara fights her way out
alone—captioned in the vid by the lyrics ‘you get what you’re given | it’s all
how you use it’—not waiting for (or expecting) any male characters to rescue
her. This medical and sexual violation is therefore not a set-up for acts of
heroic revenge but for Kara herself to accomplish her own escape. The vid
cuts directly from a clip of Kara falling unconscious to a scene several days
later where she stabs the Cylon ‘doctor’ in the neck. Instead of preserving
sequences where she appears to be a passive victim, the vid uses a clip full
of motion, positioning Kara as actively responding to her circumstances.
In one sense, this choice not to include clips of the intervening moments
could be seen as an example of ‘narractivity’ or ‘the way that members of a
community bring together different elements in different orders to change
the narrative of a digital text’ (Booth 2017: 85) if we think of Battlestar
as a database or a wiki and the process of making a vid as shuffling that
database to produce a single narrative thread. However, this moment of the
vid is an elision, not a restructuring of a wiki with which the viewer can
immediately interact. A vid is certainly the result of interacting with a text,
but the piece itself is not, in this sense, interactive in the same way as Paul
Booth (2017) describes shifting how one recounts narrative events. What is
useful here is to reflect on how vidders approach their source material as a
pool of clips, each connoting the broader context of their original position
within a narrative. Aesthetically, the motion within the clip matches the
surrounding clips of explosions and science fiction action. This is not about
Kara’s knowledge or her investigative skills but rather the actions she takes
to rescue herself. As a construction of Kara’s subjectivity, the upbeat tone of
the vid suggests an inner life for the character that does not emphasize these
moments of powerlessness and draws attention to the feminist potential of
Kara as a character able to take her own revenge.
Character study vids demonstrate a complexity in the way images can be
used to serve a song, as shown in the way the narratives of two seasons of
Battlestar are condensed and reshaped in the vid’s adaptation to emphasize
Kara’s agency and motivation. The relationship between song and image
in a vid exists in a more complex hierarchy—negotiating two pre-existing
texts rather than a sequence of images created to serve the song—meaning

there are different matters at stake in handling the realities of diegesis and
the visualization of lyrics. Through the combination of song and re-edited
moving images, Kara inhabits Pink’s landscape of LA parties and broken
families, just as Pink inhabits Kara’s post-apocalyptic allegorical science
fiction.
By using a different Pink song for each of the three vids, Dualbunny
employs a consistent point of cultural reference, adapting aspects of Pink’s
celebrity image (not in the least that these are two young blonde white
women) to inform this re-presentation of Kara.61 This persona draws on
‘tough’ (tomboyish, aggressive) connotations more expected in rock genres
than in pop music and uses Pink’s work to address (what can be read as)
postfeminist concerns. For example, the music video for ‘Stupid Girls’
(2006) ‘deploys parody to critique normative def initions of sexualized
female identity, that is to say, a culture which equates idealized femininity
with “stupidity”’ (Railton and Watson 2011: 17). In this video, Pink performs
parodies of contemporary female celebrities, emphasizing their obsession
with normative (‘stupid’) activities. She contrasts this with confident per-
formances of traditionally male activities. While this might seem to reject
femininity in favour of feminism, as Railton and Watson (ibid.: 35-36) argue
in their analysis of Pink’s celebrity image beyond the single music video,
the ‘model of contemporary womanhood’ she provides ‘is one in which it
is possible to be intelligent and good-looking, to be politically motivated
and work within the popular, to be sexy and respected, to be successful and
feminine’. Therefore the ‘Stupid Girls’ video is less a rejection of femininity
and more one where a ‘relevant form of postfeminist feminist identity’
can be negotiated (ibid.: 35). This potential for an embodied ‘postfeminist
feminism’ is one of the key representational discourses used in the trilogy
to analyze Kara’s representation and development.
Based on her albums and public performances, Pink’s persona is grounded
in a deeply confessional and confrontational style where a ‘conf ident,
independent and tough exterior’ (Burns and Watson 2013: 105) operates in
dialogue with narratives in her song lyrics that are alternately boastful and
confessional. Her notionally autobiographical (albeit co-written) songwrit-
ing, has covered an abusive childhood, a failed marriage, and the tension
61 Dualbunny has used Pink songs in other vids. These include: One Foot Wrong (2011), a
character study of Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) as she appears in Batman Returns (Tim Burton,
1992); Missundaztood (2011), a character study of Wickham (Tom Riley) from Lost in Austen (ITV,
2008); and Who Knew? (2010), a Battlestar Kara/Lee relationship vid.
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between revelling in the freedom of a life filled with alcohol and excessive
behaviour and reflecting on those destructive aspects. The personal details
Pink includes in her lyrics—both confessions and boasts—are made to
broadly match elements of Kara’s story; the vids take these existing cor-
respondences and intensify the link between singer and character as they
adapt and condense the episodes.
If one of the purposes of a music video is to ‘perform some function of
legitimation and authentication’ on behalf of the performer (Railton and
Watson 2011: 62), in the case of vids, the authenticity of the recording artist
is less the issue. If anything, the lyrics need to be ‘read’ more directly so
as to not overwhelm the play of recontextualizing images. The burden of
authenticity, then, shifts to the relationship between the vid’s source material
(and the vid-as-adaptation) and how ‘truthful’ a vid feels: if it has emotional
resonance. The character in a vid remains distinct from the singer; the two
are not conflated into a singular identity, so the overture to authenticity
is made in spite of this distance. Kara Thrace is not an LA party girl, and
Pink does not fight robots in space, but the broad strokes of their parallel
experiences inform the character study performed in the vids.
Hutcheon suggests that adaptations are possessed of a ‘“palimpsestuous”
intertextuality’ as texts that are ‘openly and directly connected to recognis-
able other works’ (2013: 21). Particularly palimpsestuous adaptations occur
when previous versions are exceptionally visible in the new work: in vids,
this visibility is compulsory. The definitions established in Battlestar and in
Pink’s music—of serious, ‘quality’ realist science fiction and of aggressive
pop-rock femininity—must both be present and visible in Dualbunny’s three
vids in order for the vids to function as complete texts. Hutcheon argues that,
regardless of how successful a palimpsestuously intertextual adaptation may
be, ‘our intertextual expectations about medium and genre, as well as about
this specific work, are brought to the forefront of our attention’ (ibid.: 22). In
watching the vids as re-edits of Battlestar and recontextualizations of Pink,
the expectations of series and songs inform and direct the vids’ audience.
The Kara trilogy therefore draws out and emphasizes one aspect of
Battlestar’s hybridity. Dualbunny’s trilogy adapts the series in such a way
that it argues for a rich interiority of the female Starbuck. As adaptations,
vids remake their source material: the new work (vid) recalls the narrative
of the source but presents it differently. Fundamentally, this is more than
summary; it is analysis (cf. Mittell 2006; Brunsdon and Spigel 2008). The
vid form’s potential for critical analysis is a different kind of work than
academic analyses; it is not work that trumps or replaces critical writing
but rather one that has a different audience for its particular arguments
(Russo 2017; Morrissey 2018) and that presents these arguments in a mode
recently echoed by explorations in film and television studies of videographic
criticism and video essays (McWhirter 2015; Keathley, Mittell, and Grant
2019). As an adaptation, repetition of the original narrative is narrowed and
directed and its context augmented by the song choice. Before returning
to a detailed discussion of the rest of the vid trilogy, I will take some time
to think through how music is used in vids, drawing on literature that
addresses music in television.
Popular Music and Television
This section situates the use of popular music in vids within a broader
discussion of how music is used in film and television. The songs in vidding
are the mechanisms through which these adaptations are enacted: song
choice directs and shapes the audience’s decoding of the vid, guiding how to
read its condensed and re-ordered narrative. The role of music in how vids
make meaning deserves sustained academic attention. Indeed, Julie Levin
Russo cites Tisha Turk (2010, 2015) on the importance of music in a vid and
on its role in providing structure, shape, and ‘affective tone and impact of
the vid’ (2017: 1.9). The constraints of the duration and linear progression of
lyrics introduced by the song function as aural (and conceptual) captions
for the vid’s clips, the instrumentation provides its own affective shaping,
and together these elements of the chosen song narrow the range of possible
interpretations. The constraints of duration are malleable: vidders will edit
out unwanted verses or repetition. However, even if the song is reconstructed,
its linearity and temporality still offer a structuring boundary to a vid.
Unlike the tradition of experimental found footage filmmaking, a vid’s
audio is not typically part of the experiment.
In order to work through how vids use music, and following this book’s
assertion that vids are fundamentally of television, this section draws on
theorizations of how music and songs have been used in television and film.
Television’s use of sound and music has many functions that set it apart from
film, primarily in how it guides its audience through the fragmentary and
layered composition of televisual flow and signals indicating when and to
what the audience should pay attention (see Altman 1987; Frith 2002; Hilmes
2008). In vids, songs are used as cues to read juxtapositions in particular
ways, functioning as score, as captioning, and as compensation for the
silencing of decontextualized moving images. This is in contrast to films
where, with the exception of production bumpers, sound is primarily used to
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support the narrative. The vid form exploits a use of music as compensation
for film and television’s medium-specific shortcomings.
Claudia Gorbman writes that the classical Hollywood film score ‘inflects
scenes with emotional or dramatic resonance, suggests character, setting
and mood, influences perceptions of narrative time and space, creates
formal unity and a sense of continuity’ (1998: 44). Film music thus has a
subsidiary role, working behind or under the audience’s attention to create
its effects. After the studio era, the use of pre-recorded music has allowed
for a postmodern reflexivity in scoring that does not ‘function illustratively
and subordinately’ but instead ‘shatter[s] the aesthetic of unobtrusiveness’ of
the classical scores (ibid.: 45). The vid form takes full advantage of this kind
of reflexivity: if the song choices made by vidders resulted in unobtrusive
‘scores’, vids would not be legible texts. The overall argument of God Is A DJ,
discussed above, relies on ‘reading’ the lyrics of Pink’s song against the life
and decisions of Kara; as the vid’s score, the song must be obtrusive. Film
scores are never neutral, and even if music is not obtrusively reflexive, it
still acts upon the narrative and the audience.
Even the few vids made to songs without lyrics demand that their audi-
ences notice the music, as the song choice will structure and guide the
interpretation of the vid’s recontextualized images. The ‘Let My Lyrics Go!’
vidshow at VividCon 2012 contained eighteen vids without lyrics, such as
a Doctor Who vid titled 1969 (beccatoria, 2011) that used Daft Punk’s song
‘Rinzler’ and Danse Macabre (chaila, 2012) that paired Terminator: The
Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009) with the Camille Saint-Saëns
work. Coincidentally, another vid premiering at the same convention, Mr.
Brightside (jarrow, 2012), uses a Vitamin String Quartet cover of the song
‘Mr. Brightside’ by The Killers in a vid of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony
Minghella, 1999). The vid responds to the love triangle narrative of the
song’s lyrics, even as the lyrics are not actually heard in the vid, and the
classical instrumentation of the cover version arguably better suits the
film’s period setting and evocation of European glamour than the original.
In the convention programme, the description of the vid is a line from the
song (‘How did it end up like this?’), creating an explicit connection to the
aural space where lyrics would have been if the original song had been used.
While a random allocation of song to image can produce compelling
juxtapositions, vids are constructed with much care and deliberation: a
vid song choice must ‘fit’ in some way, as the song must be made to stand
as a reasonable commentary on the vid’s source material (an argument
made through editing choices). This could be either an apparently close
textual match—Pink and Kara share a general physical resemblance and
attitude—or something entirely unrelated that can be made into a coherent

metaphor. In working with vids, especially with character study vids, it is
tempting to begin and end an analysis with song lyrics—as a function of
structure and narrative—without also considering instrumentation, though
such an approach leaves a great deal unheard in relation to the way meaning
is made through music in the vid.
Nick Davis offers the mathematical metaphor of a Klein bottle to describe
how music can be both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ narrative space (2012). A Klein
bottle ‘has no inside and outside, no recto and verso, but is one continuous
surface’ (Davis 2012: 14). In Davis’s analogy, music in film and television is
not wholly beyond or below a story but rather part of its fabric, experienced
simultaneously as part of and separate from the narrative form and content.
A song might be extradiegetic, but it is not extranarrative. Put another
way, the composer Igor Stravinsky’s reported dismissal of film music in the
1940s as ‘aural wallpaper’ (Dahl 2010: 275) misses a significant point that a
film score ‘may be just as essential as wallpaper (or set design generally) in
characterising the feel and emotional content of the space in which the action
takes place—but does not narrate said action any more than wallpaper
does’ (B. Winters 2012: 5). Instead, rather than music being separate from
the narrative, it should be considered one of many elements that combine
to create the narrative, even if it is not directly narrating action, much in
the same way that the melodramas of Douglas Sirk typify the possibilities
of mise-en-scène to express deep meaning. In the vid, it is the interaction
between the song and the source video that creates meaning; neither element
dominates in creating the vid’s narrative. Kara Thrace, the tough female
character, is not overdetermined by Pink, the outspoken female recording
artist. Instead, Pink’s song structures an examination of Kara but does
not itself completely define that reading. Pre-recorded popular music can
therefore be used like a prop: it may remain in the background of a scene
or become an essential part of the action.
The use of music as a prop or wallpaper is especially apparent in historical
television series. For example, as Estella Tincknell (2010) argues, the use of
early-1970s rock music in Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007) is a form of aural
set-dressing that adopts the loose set of ideas and associations the listener
may have with the songs and the historical periods. Sets and costume are
constructed to suit the historical period; song choices have a similar ability
to ‘dress’ a soundtrack. The use of music from a different time period—con-
temporary music for a period piece—is a reflexive device that prompts the
audience to consider thematic links between the contemporary sentiment
and historical narrative. Vids will employ contemporary songs in vids of
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older films or television series; this can have the effect of taking on the
vidder’s voice, speaking from the present to evaluate historical texts through
deliberately anachronistic aural set-dressing.
Kay Dickinson points out that pre-recorded songs used in television and
film ‘have already established a set of definitions for themselves’ (2004:
100). Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that pre-recorded popular music can
be ‘more powerful than traditional cues’ in connoting specific cultural
information (Rodman 2011: 81). Songs have a greater mobility than films or
television episodes: individual songs are heard in public and private spaces,
incidentally or by choice, and over time, aggregating the listener’s potential
associations with a song. These associations are beyond the control of a music
director; however, elements such as genre, time period, instrumentation,
style of vocal performance, and tempo can be relied upon for their connota-
tion and are duly ‘stitched into’ a sequence. In the context of vids, these
formal elements are added to a sequence made from video that already has
its own ‘established set of definitions’ (Dickinson 2004: 100). In relation to
this chapter’s case study, the arguments about Kara Thrace are constructed
by her textual proximity to Pink in each vid through the vidder’s authorial
intervention and use of music to create the imagined subject position.
A song’s specific connotations are used, as Alexander Binns says, ‘to
deepen the narrative for those with the interpretative keys’ (2007: 195). What
are the implications for using a referent that requires unlocking? Even if the
song in question is unfamiliar, the use of certain instruments, arrangements,
or specific ‘musical idioms’ (Dickinson 2004: 106) and ‘referential clichés’
(Binns 2007: 195) goes a long way to provide these interpretive keys. These
idioms and clichés can be used ironically or subversively: for example, a
rock song can be used as aural wallpaper for a character failing to achieve
the spirit of youthful rebellion, suggesting the character is ‘trying too hard’.
There is a large amount of cultural information communicated by a song’s
idioms and clichés, and much can depend on the audience’s prior knowledge.
Lyrics provide more precise and more complex connotations than the more
open semiotics of instrumentation; working together, these are used in
character study vids to construct a narrative space for subjectivity.
Indeed, the audience’s knowledge of a specific song may affect the way
the narrative is experienced. What follows are two contrasting examples
of recognizable music used non-diegetically to this end. The oscillation of
memory that Hutcheon (2013) describes in the experience of adaptations
is evocative in illustrating the different yet simultaneous use of songs as
wallpaper or as prop. For example, the opening chords of Jeff Buckley’s
‘Last Goodbye’ are used at a key moment in Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe,
2001). The song’s use is ironic, although the opening lyrics—‘This is our last
goodbye’—are not heard. Its use signals the end of a romantic relationship
during a sequence that seems to establish the film’s central couple. Its
minute-long introduction is easily read as a light pop-rock cue in which
the song’s laid-back solo slide guitar augments the couple’s happy and
flirtatious parting. The next sequence contains the car crash that separates
the pair in reality; their subsequent scenes together take place in a virtual-
reality dream, meaning therefore that their parting was indeed their last
goodbye. The song’s instrumentation creates an immediate emotional
effect, but knowledge of its unheard lyrics contradicts this emotion by
way of foreshadowing the plot’s central twist. The denotation of the song’s
unheard lyrics is at odds with the connotations of its instrumental clichés.
‘Last Goodbye’ functions perfectly well as wallpaper in this sequence, though
as a prop its meaning is much more pointed.
Music, both pre-existing and specially composed, is used on television
in episodic credits sequences. Michelle Hilmes’ description of the form and
function of credits (2008: 159) broadly resembles the vid form’s relation-
ship with music. As Hilmes describes it, the music and visuals in a credits
sequence offer a thematic overview of the series, set up generic expectations
for the episode to follow, and operate outside the episode’s diegesis but
not completely externally to the series as a whole. Credits music narrates
a summary of the series, but this is ‘musical material that is apparently
alien to the programme subject matter’ that is nonetheless ‘assimilated by
television’ (Donnelly 2005: 145).62 The so-called recruiter vid—one designed
to ‘recruit’ potential fans into the vid’s fandom—is somewhat similar to
a credits sequence that uses popular music (see also Gray 2010: 154). This
vid genre is very clear in how they communicate points of interest, such
as featured cast and key relationships, or representing the source’s use of
genre tropes as an enticement to watch the film or series. God Is A DJ can
be used as a recruiter vid because its summary of Kara offers a thematic
overview of her role in the series and models an emotional response to
this character.
62 Related to this use of music in credits is Supernatural’s version of ‘previously on’ sequences,
which take a form common to episodic television dramas (in which key clips from prior episodes
are compiled and framed with a voice-over or a subtitle that begins ‘Previously on…’) but
approach a more vidderly mode (see Cornillon 2015). For example, while it is common for series
to create these sequences from clips containing significant lines of dialogue mixed with the
series’ musical score, the Supernatural episode ‘Salvation’ (tx. 27 April 2006) made prominent
use of the Kansas song ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ in a vid-like summary of the previous episodes,
using clips with an emphasis on movement and gesture to start the episode.
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More traditional uses of pre-existing songs in television occur in musical

montage sequences; these montage sequences can have different roles to
play in the narrative. One frequent use of songs in television narratives
is as a non-diegetic accompaniment to a montage sequence within the
narrative, where lyrics and instrumentation colour and shape the sequence’s
emotional pitch. Musically accompanied and dialogue-less, montages can
also be used as codas at the ends of episodes. Julie Brown points out that
the musically accompanied montages that are ‘a particular favourite for
the play-out’ of Ally McBeal (Fox USA, 1997-2002) episodes serve ‘a dramatic
recapitulatory function of helping to draw together the various story-lines
of the episode’ (2001: 285). This may also be used for a more general tool for
examining character interiority. This is particularly effective in genres such
as police procedurals, where using a song (whole or fragmentary) relieves
the burden of having the writers find dialogue for the characters during
repetitive scenes, all the while trading on the emotional authenticity of the
song’s instrumentation.
The critical literature on the uses of music in film and television offers
two ways of using music to convey character and narrative information
without actors performing synchronized speech acts: through silent
scores and in programmes that rely on voice-over acting. Michel Chion
sees a similarity between silent cinema and music videos in particular,

arguing that ‘it is precisely insofar as music does form its basis, and none
of the narration is propelled by dialogue, that the music video’s image is
fully liberated from the linearity normally imposed by sound’ (1994: 167,
emphasis in original). When providing an overview of the history of film
music, Gorbman suggests that the ‘semiotic functions’ of silent film scores
‘compensated for the characters’ lack of speech’ before synchronized sound
became the norm (1998: 46). K.J. Donnelly, writing about Barry Gray’s scores
for Gerry Anderson’s various puppet-based series (such as Thunderbirds
[ATV, 1965-1966]), notes that ‘the music to some degree compensates for
the limited range of facial expressions, adding a further sense of emotion
that was lacking in such “wooden” drama’ (2005: 120). In both cases, music
is used to offset an emotional deficit caused by the lack of the simultaneous
presence of actors’ bodies and their synchronized voices. (I acknowledge
re-recording dialogue in post-production, but for simplicity’s sake I will
assume a perceived unity of actor’s body and voice.) In silent films, the
actor’s body is present without their voice; in puppet work (and indeed in
animation), the actor’s voice is present without their body. Notably, both
examples use the word ‘compensation’ to describe the function of music in
each kind of production. In one, scores stand in for speech, and in the other,
musical cues do the work of facial expressions and bodily performance.

Not only does this suggest that speech and facial expressions, if missing or
drastically limited, leave a gap in performance (and therefore in the potential
of the audience’s identification with or enjoyment of the character being
performed), it also argues that the common element to fully realize these
characters is to augment their performance with music.
Gorbman’s aside about silent cinema scores standing in for the emo-
tive voices of actors and Donnelly’s analysis of the role played by music
in humanizing the frozen faces of the puppets are therefore important in
understanding the function of songs in vids. The parallel between silent
cinema and vids is more immediately apparent than with the Thunderbirds
example because in vids, the characters are silenced by both the literal
removal of the source video’s soundtrack and the development of an aesthetic
convention that discourages the use of dialogue-heavy clips in favour of
reaction shots, gestures, and glances. Glances and gestures not only become
indicators of subtext or a character’s emotions but also provide much more
interesting visuals with which to construct a vid. As vidding has developed,
these so-called ‘talky face’ moments are increasingly avoided because shots
of an actor performing dialogue tend to be framed in close-up from a static
position and therefore do not include much action or movement in the
frame. A variation is the Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009) vid
My Brilliant Idea (lim, 2007), which shows the vid’s ‘narrating’ character
delivering an extended monologue—following the rambling, stream-of-
consciousness lyrics of the song (Jason Robert Brown’s ‘I Could Be in Love
With Someone Like You’)—punctuated by the actor’s dynamic gesticulation.
The amount of motion within the frame and the vid’s mode of address (i.e.
from the perspective of this verbose character) demonstrates how careful
use of dialogue-heavy clips can augment characterization. The vid also
makes heavy use of lim’s own animations to add motion. However, for the
most part, contemporary vids tend to contain sequences of clips where
characters rarely engage in conversation or have the power of speech.
Like Anderson’s marionettes, the version of Kara as seen in God Is A DJ
does open and close her mouth but not to speak. Like silent films, the vid
form relies on non-diegetic sound and intertitles—and not synchronized
sound—for conveying complexities of character information beyond the
actors’ bodily performances. The compensation that popular songs offer the
vid is the provision of a voice: not directly as dialogue but as a subjective
expression of the emotional lives of characters. Therefore, it is reasonable to
argue that songs used in vids, especially in character studies, can stand in
for the character’s internal monologue because the song does not function
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exclusively as an external addition imposed on the semiotic world of the

source material. It is an imposition but one that fills in a missing piece
and therefore an imposition that sits quite comfortably. In the adaptation
of the vid, music compensates for the contextual unmooring of image and
sound alike.
The idea of compensation and of the presence and absence of embodied
vocalizations is demonstrated through a bridging sequence in God Is A DJ.
There is a moment of pleasurable subjective disruption in this vid when the
singer Pink’s vocalizations are made to match Kara’s head and mouth. After
the first chorus but before the second verse, there is a brief transition passage
where the majority of the instrumentation drops away, leaving the bass and
live drums for a few measures to play under some abstract vocalizations.
Unlike the song’s opening, where a similar non-verbal vocalization leads into
the first verse, this section disrupts the high-energy chorus as the electric
guitars and other instruments drop out, leaving only percussion and subtle
ambient synthesizer tones over which is mixed record-scratch noises and
a fractured manipulation of the vocal line. In the vid, this scat-like singing
is matched with Kara blinking and shaking her head to bring herself to
alertness. Here, more than any point yet in the vid, Pink’s voice stands in
directly for Kara’s. Further, the noticeable manipulation of the vocal track
in the song resonates with the formal disruption of the narrative in the
vid’s re-sequencing of clips.
This sequence rapidly intercuts a blue-tinted close-up of Kara’s face with
a yellow-tinted sequence taken from the Caprica/Arrow of Apollo plot arc
that starts the second season. The tinting is present in the original episodes
and is not an addition by the vidder. Following the song’s cue, the sequence
is a transition between Kara’s life aboard Galactica and her covert return
to the planet Caprica. Where the f irst verse and chorus drew from the
miniseries and episodes earlier in the season, the second verse and chorus
broadly contextualize the end of the first season and the character arc at the
start of the second. The blue-tinted head shake is a single gesture broken up
between clips of her arrival on the planet. These yellow-tinted scenes take
place on either side of a kinetic fight sequence which itself is not shown in
the vid until later, during the second chorus.
This vid sequence takes the in-between lyrical/instrumental moment
and makes it signify a moment of change for the character; the yellow
sections are taken from a plot arc that saw her defy her commander, leave
the fleet, and meet her future husband. As the voice of Pink is dubbed onto
Kara’s movements, it turns the image into a puppet of sorts, aligning the
first-person subjectivity of the song with the close-up of Kara by further
collapsing the distance between Pink and Kara. The loss of Sackhoff’s voice
is compensated by Pink’s performance: that is, the plot of Battlestar is lost
as the series is ‘condensed and concentrated’ (Hutcheon 2013: 36) in the vid,
but the character is reconstituted by the connotations and narrative of the
chosen vid song. This editing choice does not arguably break the custom
of choosing clips without dialogue, but it does subvert the convention to
breach the conceptual segregation between audio and video sources.
Gorbman and Donnelly argue that music contributes to how we might
read a character, and the way music is used in vids constructs a text that
offers a focused and sustained reading of a character’s motivations and
interiority. In all three genres—vids, silent films, and puppet work—music
is used to convey emotional complexity, doing the work of making characters
more ‘real’ or relatable. Indeed, the expression of profilmic excesses associ-
ated with melodrama (see Williams 1984, 1998)—as one of the genres that
comprise the ‘quality’ serial narrative hybrid—is not limited to performance
or dialogue: the combination of music and art direction is actively involved
in expressing intense emotions, where ‘the mise-en-scène directly represents
the emotions and conflict that the film’s narrative and characters cannot
articulate’ (Mercer and Shingler 2004: 23). In an echo of how Brief Encounter
(David Lean, 1945) uses a Rachmaninov concerto and voice-overs to convey
a depth of feeling for Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) that is not present in
the dialogue (Dyer 1993), vids such as God Is A DJ use music to offer their
subjects a space for emotional expression not present in the video source.
This is, perhaps, another form of compensation. Drawing on Railton and
Watson’s argument that music videos are used to ‘perform some function
of legitimation and authentication’ of recording artists’ credibility (2011:
62), I argue that the use of popular music in vids—particularly in character
study vids—helps to elide the ruptures inherent in the artificial/collage
nature of the vid form in order to construct a space for character analysis
that trades on the connotative and denotative aspects of popular music to
create works that perform credibly complex characters.
Cuz I Can (2007)
Dualbunny’s vid trilogy was produced as the series itself was being aired,
making these three vids a unique document of how the character’s develop-
ment was interpreted as the series progressed. They provide snapshots of the
character, using the songs to give Kara a ‘voice’ through which to explain
the character’s motivations as she changes. God Is A DJ constructs a version
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of the series and of Kara that can easily be re-visited in its condensed form.
In this case, the vid aligns the character with the public persona of Pink
through adopting Pink’s voice, words, and music to construct a pleasurably
confident and feminist adaptation of Battlestar.
Continuing the trilogy, the sequel vids Cuz I Can (2007) and I’m Not Dead
(2009)63 respond to the problematic development of the Kara character in
the second half of Battlestar. As Jennifer Stoy argues, ‘after the interesting
and genre-refuting narratives that the female characters have in the first
half of the series, the writers […] lapse back into the same sexist clichés’
(2010: 13). God Is A DJ is a character study that examines a successful balance
of personal and public roles, and the two sequel vids compensate for the
series’ failings by continuing their female-centred feminist narratives in
order to make sense of the source material’s anaemic character development.
With their greater focus on domestic emotional and existential questions,
the sequel vids rely more on the series’ melodramatic elements. This is
particularly true in Cuz I Can, which works through Kara’s experiences
with motherhood as a daughter and a potential mother herself, and her dis-
satisfaction with her choice of spouse. I’m Not Dead concerns the character’s
transformation into a supernatural being and addresses that development
in continuity with the established character. Where God Is A DJ functions
best as a summary of the character and her feminist potential, the next two
vids build on that foundation to construct a more pointed self-reflection of
the character and a critical analysis of her development.
Along with the use of the same font for the vid’s titles, Cuz I Can begins
with an intertextual joke cued by the song (Pink asking ‘Missed me?’),
acknowledging that this vid is a sequel. The opening shot—Kara sliding
down a ladder—signals that the vid is concerned with the character’s
emotional descent through Battlestar’s third season, following (among other
events) her incarceration in a scenario of enforced domesticity during the
Cylon occupation and culminating in her apparent death in action. (She
returns some episodes later, in the season finale, having no memory of her
explosive demise.) The song itself is more aggressive, defensive, and angry
than ‘God is a DJ’, and its confrontational lyrics and heavy drum and bass
distinguish it from the lighter sincerity of the song in the first vid. The
lyrical repetition of ‘[I] don’t give a damn’ overstates a lack of emotional
attachment; however, in the vid, the contrast between reserved reaction
63 ‘Cuz I Can’ follows ‘I’m Not Dead’ on the album I’m Not Dead (2006), but the vids reverse the
track order; the reversal creates a narrative where the defence of ‘bad’ behaviour is followed by
a confessional account. (‘God is a DJ’ is from Pink’s 2003 album Try This.)
shots and emphatically disinterested lyrics means the vid’s performance

of Kara’s inner monologue is constructed through the disjuncture between
Pink’s expressive vocal performance and this subdued Kara. Cuz I Can makes
frequent use of the boxing matches in the episode ‘Unfinished Business’
(tx. 1 December 2006), maintaining visual energy and movement within the
frame. This display sets up a tension between the action heroine Kara and
the Kara experiencing the emotional consequences of her imprisonment,
which comprises the vid’s other significant thread.
In Battlestar’s third season, Kara’s story takes a domestic direction to
include a husband, a faux-daughter, and memories of her mother’s abuse. In
the early episodes of the third season, Kara is held by the Cylons in a prison
made up like a family home and presented with a child who is supposedly
her daughter, courtesy of the previous season’s breeding experiments. This
enforced domesticity runs counter to the Kara from the first two seasons,
who appeared to pursue sexual partners without any motive of marriage
or family. This approach is eloquently captured in God Is A DJ in a sequence
where Kara is shown moving away from two potential partners—captioned
by the lyrics ‘Lover, hey fuck you’ and intercut with their reaction shots—in
favour of launching her Viper (fighter spacecraft). However, in the third
season, Kara is isolated from these pursuits. Patrick B. Sharp is explicitly
critical of Kara’s incarceration on New Caprica, seeing Leoben’s actions as
his ‘attempts to force Starbuck into a conservative and traditional woman’s
role […] representing domestic life as captivity’ (2010: 76). As a Cylon, her
captor Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie) has access to unlimited clone copies in
which to ‘download’ his consciousness: every time Kara kills him, he returns
again in a fresh body and the cycle continues. This recalls Yvonne Tasker’s
analysis of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day
(James Cameron, 1991), where the representations of a ‘heroine as mother, an
image which emphasises her womanhood’ are so contradictory that it can
only be reconciled if the character is also mentally ill (1993: 27). For Kara, the
apparent reconciliation of her representation as heroine and mother occurs
while she is a prisoner in a dark parody of domesticity. The third season’s
footage gives Cuz I Can the material to address this family melodrama as
an analysis of what these narrative changes mean to Kara’s development,
using Pink’s song as the tool for adaptation and analysis.
The vid helps explain Kara’s behaviour and choices in this season by using
Pink’s words to suggest that Kara suffers from low self-esteem and that she
believes she deserves these bad things happening to her. This synthesis of
many points in the character’s arc creates a coherent commentary typical of
a character study vid. While the ‘no-regrets’ theme of ‘Cuz I Can’ is similar to
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that of ‘God is a DJ’, the vid Cuz I Can pairs the song to images that subvert
the lyrics—with a focus on loss and emotional trauma—which aligns with
the more desperate vocal performance and aggressive instrumentation to
give the vid its more sombre tone. The vid’s examination of Kara’s emotional
response to motherhood continues through the subsequent repetition of
the lyrics ‘I’m fucked because | I live a life of sin’, where the vid equates
physical and emotional defeat by rapidly cutting between clips where she
flees her mother’s flat (in flashback), discovers the truth of the child’s origins
(a kidnap victim and not related to Kara), and is knocked from her feet in
the boxing ring.
The interiority imagined by the vid for Kara constructs explicit irony by
pairing the lyrics ‘It’s all right | I don’t give a damn’ with Kara’s reaction to
the child’s reunion with her real mother. The song lyrics have Kara express
indifference to these profound disappointments, but the vid undercuts this
reaction by intercutting the boxing fall, positing that the emotional pain Kara
feels is as real as physical harm. After the character growth of first rejecting
the child and then allowing herself to respond with maternal affection
despite her own childhood trauma, this trajectory is undercut when Kara
learns the truth. Using Pink’s lyrics, the vid gives Kara an internal monologue
that sounds credible for the character in that moment and then exposes
that monologue as an exercise in self-deception. The vid’s Kara believes the
violence done to her is justified because she deserves it—as payback for
her ‘life of sin’—but the vid simultaneously argues that she lies to herself
about how much she ‘give[s] a damn’, thereby performing an analysis of the
character even as the character’s interiority is explored. The bragging in
the lyrics and raw emotion of the vocal performance do not negate Kara’s
story but instead explicate her inner conflict. The vid does not step back
from the idea of ‘domestic captivity’ to condemn it as a retrograde feminist
representation but rather stays with the character’s experience to make
sense of it on a more intimate level, as a series of challenges and revelations.
Cuz I Can uses the song lyrics to express Kara’s discomfort with being
the object of unwanted attention. The verse accompanying the domestic
captivity plot begins with the lyrics ‘you think I’m rare | you stop and stare
| you think I care | I don’t’ and produces a montage of the male gaze, pairing
clips of men who watch Kara—Leoben, Adama, Anders, and Lee—with
Pink’s words to imagine a conversation with these characters that does not
happen in the series. In its original context, the verse reads as a response
to critics of Pink’s celebrity lifestyle, as the verse boasts about her material
wealth, with subtext that Pink has earned—through her own hard work—all
that she possesses. In the vid, it signals that Kara’s breezy independence in
the first two seasons of Battlestar, celebrated in God Is A DJ, has been replaced
by emotional isolation related to others’ scrutiny and expectations. This
can further be read as the vid’s commentary about Kara’s representation in
this third season. The lyrics that recall being the passive object of a gaze (as
a celebrity) and of accumulating material wealth are used to highlight the
perversion of domesticity in the New Caprica captivity plotline. The lyrics
where Pink boasts she can ‘fit your home in my swimming pool’ because
‘my whole life’s a fantasy’ are subverted, as the vid uses these references to
celebrity excess to work through Kara’s feelings about Leoben and the child.
The reference to domesticity (home/pool) and the twist on ‘fantasy’ here
do not connote a perfect life but a dark parody of one. As argued earlier,
one constraint of the vid form is that lyrics structure the presentation; in
this case, without an obvious match between clips and song, the creative
adaptation of the vid finds a ‘fit’ that resonates, communicating something
about the character through irony.
In contrast to the emotional traumas of the maternal melodrama refer-
ences in this vid, the boxing sequences are used as metaphors for Kara’s
combativeness as she attempts to take control of her life. Including boxing
scenes also means Kara’s tattoos are visible—notably a large arm piece
matching that of her husband, Anders—signifying both the temporal
distance from the previous vid and Kara’s marriage itself. The boxing
sequences are aggressive, sustaining Kara as an action heroine, but this is
balanced with clips from Kara’s romantic entanglements and the problem
of motherhood. The vid’s first chorus establishes the vidder’s view of the
Lee-Kara-Anders love triangle: the lyrics ‘cash my cheques and place my
bets’ are used to suggest that Kara sees her marriage to Anders as a gamble
and therefore her dissatisfaction is the result of bad luck, not her own poor
decision. While the continuation ‘I hope I always win’ is paired with Kara’s
enthusiastic embrace of Anders, on the lyrical caveat ‘even if I don’t’, the vid
cuts to Kara with Lee (just before what the knowing audience recognizes as
her proposal to Anders). The vid’s sympathies are with Lee, but the vid also
explores Kara’s motivation: the gambling connotation of the lyrics is used
to suggest that Kara could not make the choice the vidder would have liked
to see because such a choice would not have been in character. Romantic
complication is absent from God Is A DJ, which clearly states a preference
against attachment. In contrast, Cuz I Can questions Battlestar’s softening
of the previous seasons’ feminist assurance by showing Kara struggling
with self-doubt.
The vid finishes by intercutting clips from ‘Unfinished Business’ and
‘Maelstrom’ (tx. 4 March 2007), where the aggressive boxing match that
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ends in Kara and Lee embracing (and, the knowing audience will recall,
restarting their affair64) is intercut with Kara’s death (the prelude to which
is a series of hallucinations featuring her mother in which Kara’s overtures
of sympathy and comfort are not rejected by the other woman on her own
deathbed). Given that the vid concludes with her return, the rhythm of the
cross-cuts along with the pace of the song create a sense of forward motion,
arguing for the narrative inevitability of Kara and Lee’s reconciliation and
of the hallucinatory resolution of Kara’s relationship with her mother’s
memory. While the fourth season later revealed the Kara who died was
not the Kara who returned, at this point in the series it was possible to
understand Kara’s dying hallucinations as the character earning peace and
closure after the emotional trauma externalized in the boxing sequences.
The representation of Kara’s interiority condenses and narrows the scope of
the series to her own experience, implicitly arguing that an action heroine
can have a complex inner life.
As a character study vid, Cuz I Can offers an analysis of Kara’s journey
through the series, beginning with her captivity, continuing with the
breakdown of her marriage, and ending with her death. It primarily con-
cerns Kara’s various models of family as other concerns of the season—an
extended Iraq War allegory in the aftermath of the Cylon occupation of New
Caprica (see Herbert 2012: 195)—are not part of the vid, except as providing a
broader context to the clips. Kara is shown suffering from specific emotional
traumas, not political disillusionment: her reckless behaviour comes about
because of jealousy and self-doubt, not the larger political questions that
guided the founding of the colony. It is an intensely personal and emotional
response to Battlestar’s political allegory.
A reviewer of the scholarly collection Cylons in America (2008), published
between Battlestar’s second and third seasons, mourned the volume as ‘a
victim of its timeliness’ due to its inability to provide a comprehensive critical
perspective on the series (Murphy 2011: 128). However, as an adaptation, Cuz
I Can is able to critically discuss the character’s progression through the
available narrative without the pressure to produce scholarly conclusions.
Indeed, as a sequel to God Is A DJ, this vid is a mid-stream analysis of how
the character has developed. In itself, Cuz I Can does not seem intended as a
definitive overview of the character but instead offers a critical perspective
on the story as it developed. It is possible to read Cuz I Can as expressing
dissatisfaction with the reduction of the character’s agency and vibrancy
64 Which had been interrupted by Kara’s marriage to Anders and Lee’s marriage to Anastasia
Dualla (Kandyse McClure).
in this third season. The vid uses Pink’s bravado to adapt and rebuild the
character’s strength even as it summarizes her failings. While Kara’s apparent
death in ‘Maelstrom’ and mysterious return in the season finale leave the
character unresolved at the end of the season, Cuz I Can provides its own
resolution by intensifying the themes of self-discovery and forgiveness after
much pain and doubt.
I’m Not Dead (2009)
Dualbunny’s vid trilogy provides three different iterations of self-expression:

from conf ident, competent, and playful in God Is A DJ to the def iantly
self-destructive response to the melodramatic tropes of a lost child and
unhappy marriage in Cuz I Can to a new level of introspection and spirituality
in I’m Not Dead. Kara’s transformation in the fourth season from a human
woman into an ‘angel’ who guides the fleet to a new home planet before
disappearing into thin air in the final episode is disappointing: it ‘dulls the
critical edge of any progressive readings’ of a character that had, ‘For most of
the series… defied and exceeded traditional gender norms’ (Sharp 2010: 76).
As Tracey Raney and Michelle Meagher point out, by having Kara disappear,
the series removes a troublesome reminder of non-traditional femininity
in its project to establish the New Earth as a paradise in which traditional
family structures and gender roles will allow humanity to survive. What is
more, as Raney and Meagher argue, ‘the erasure of the Starbuck character
suggests to viewers that the masculine female hero resides only in a state
of unnatural disorder, outside of which she ceases to exist’ (2015: 53). This
state of unnatural disorder is the war-torn remnants of the Twelve Colonies,
but this also means that the ‘most obviously transformative, progressive,
and even feminist’ (ibid.: 55) parts of Battlestar are disavowed alongside
the character of Kara herself as she disappears.
However, I’m Not Dead presents a woman struggling to define herself, her
relationships, and her place in the world after a series of traumatic events,
thereby engaging with the character’s development. While critical frustration
with the fourth-season Kara as a ‘traditional hysterical woman’ (Sharp 2010:
76) is entirely justified, as with Cuz I Can, this vid’s project as an adaptation
makes sense of the character herself and how she might try to understand
her own existential shift from fighter pilot to ‘angel’. The solid and certain
embodiment of Kara as a feminist female character from the first two seasons
(and God Is A DJ) is replaced by an uncertain and fundamentally insubstantial
character. However, I’m Not Dead includes several clips from early seasons to
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bolster this shaky later-season representation. Taken as a trilogy, these vids

integrate different forms of female identity in a work that, like Pink’s public
image, argues for a ‘model of contemporary womanhood’ that integrates
multiple contradictory identities (Railton and Watson 2011: 35).65 It could
be argued that the faults in Kara’s development as a character reflect the
persistent difficulties in representing these contemporary contradictions.
The song ‘I’m Not Dead’ features a quieter, more acoustic instrumentation
than the previous two songs, immediately giving this vid a different tone
to the previous pair. Its verses and bridge use electric guitars, live drums,
back-up vocals, and more typical rock instrumentation, but the choruses pare
back this full sound to the single voice, strummed acoustic guitar, and subtle
background drum machine fills. This structures the vid’s balance between
the more energetic verses that make use of frequent moving-camera shots
and clips, which have a significant amount of motion within the frame, and
the subdued but earnest choruses, which favour calmer close-up reaction
shots. The vid’s opening is a shot of a pyre that tracks left to Kara watching,
isolated against a black background. This is Kara’s own body, discovered
in her own Viper several episodes after Kara mysteriously returned to the
fleet. In burning the body, the living Kara is literally laying her past self
to rest, a significantly symbolic moment; and in continuing this trilogy
with another Pink song, Dualbunny constructs a continuity of character
that bridges this rupture. This opening is tonally opposed to that of the
first vid: God is a DJ begins with Kara triumphant, enjoying her victory at
cards and in the middle of action, whereas I’m Not Dead begins with Kara
directing her own funeral at which she is the only mourner. The title of
the song seems an obvious match for the character’s return; however, the
vid attempts to propose what the statement ‘I’m not dead’ means to Kara
throughout the season, particularly in answering what she is if she is ‘not
dead’. Matthew Jones (2010: 175) points out that the end of the series is one
of the only times Kara appears totally at ease, and despite critical failings
in the way the series constructs her character, I’m Not Dead finds a way to
follow her journey to peace.
This vid is something of a eulogy that summarizes Kara’s life, with refer-
ences to happier moments in previous seasons intercut with significant
events from the series’ f inal season. The mode of address in the lyrics
65 While beyond the scope of this chapter, it could be fruitful to consider the contradictions
and ambiguities of the character’s development and presentation in terms of post-feminism,
particularly in relation to Alison Horbury’s argument that academic responses to post-feminist
discourses have created an ‘impasse in feminist media criticism’ (2014: 219).
shifts away from a general life philosophy (God Is A DJ) or exercise in self-
justification (Cuz I Can), as I’m Not Dead works through Kara’s relationship
with specific individuals. The vid’s structure is important: the lyrics are
focused on an unnamed third party (e.g. ‘you’re my crack of sunlight’), and
the vid returns to Kara’s significant relationships. The first section examines
Kara’s relationship with her surrogate parents, Adama and Roslin. The
middle section looks at her history with Lee, making the argument in favour
of Lee as a preferred partner for Kara over her (estranged) husband Anders,
who is largely absent from this vid. The vid ends with an extended look at
Kara after her reappearance, integrating the complicated series mythology
with an overview of the character’s role in the series. It is not an adaptation
of the fourth season alone but rather defines Kara in the context of her final
development. In the fourth season, Kara becomes a ‘hysterical’ oracle whose
insistence that she can lead the fleet to Earth is only reluctantly believed,
and the urgency of the song’s verses thematically match Kara’s need to
fulfil her mission and reconcile her new mystical tendencies with her more
grounded temperament. By including references to previous seasons, the
vid works to present the character’s alteration as credible and ‘in character’,
which brings the more recent changes to the character in line with the more
progressive previous representation.
For example, clips representing Kara’s fourth-season failure to convince
Roslin and Adama that she has vital intelligence—Roslin pointing a gun
at Kara; Adama tackling Kara to the floor—are followed by clips from
the previous seasons that show these relationships in more amicable
circumstances. To establish that Kara sees Roslin and Adama as surrogate
parents, the sequence begins with Kara fleeing her mother’s flat. While
this sequence lacks the explicit captioning of a sequence in God Is A DJ in
which characters are identified as Kara’s (metaphorical) family members,
the lyrics ‘I was never looking for approval from anyone but you’ and the
actor’s expressive close-ups are used to suggest Kara’s emotional invest-
ment in the judgement of Roslin and Adama. As the third part of a trilogy,
knowledge of the previous works guides a reading of this sequence as a
reference to the proposal made in God Is A DJ that Kara views this pair as
surrogate parents; this maintains a consistent subjective exploration of
the character across the trilogy. This structure, with clips from the fourth
season followed by earlier clips, allows the vidder to have Kara explain
her own actions, using Pink’s voice and words. In this way, Kara reminds
Roslin and Adama that Kara once held their trust, both personally and
professionally; it constructs Kara’s defence against seeming irrational (the
‘traditional hysterical woman’; Sharp 2010) by conveying it in these terms
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and providing a frame through which to analyse Kara’s relationship with

authority figures. As an adaptation, the vid does not judge Kara’s mystical
transformation as a betrayal of a feminist character but puts narrative events
in the context of long-developing character relationships.
The address of the second verse shifts Kara’s attention to Lee and begins
with the lyrics ‘You can do the math a thousand ways but you can’t erase
the facts | That others come and others go but you always come back’. Under
these lines there are clips taken from at least five scenes featuring Kara with
Lee—not important plot events but moments where they are working and
laughing together over the series—with this handful of scenes intended
to stand in for the ‘thousand ways’ Kara’s attractions could be tabulated.
The others who come and go in the lyrics are Anders (alone in the frame)
and Kara at her fiancé’s funeral (in a clip taken from a flashback shown
in a first-season episode), which effectively dismisses Kara’s husband and
deceased fiancé in favour of Lee. The verse continues with a kiss between
Kara and Lee that occurs late in the season and quickly intercuts the pair
fighting side by side later in the episode, implying their professional affinity
proves they should not have married other characters. One advantage in an
adaptation that condenses the narrative is that the vidder’s disagreement
with Kara’s choice of husband, for example, is expressed in a version of the
series where Anders barely appears and Lee is central to Kara’s life. The vid
does not deviate from the series but carefully chooses clips that present
Lee as a steadfast and constant companion. This verse summarizes Kara’s
romantic story across the whole series but emphasizes that these men are
hers to pursue, continuing the feminist representation of Kara as a character
able to choose her partners.
At the vid’s climax, rising music and Pink’s scream are accompanied by
spectacular science fiction explosions, as the lyrics continue ‘I’m not dead
just yet’. While these images of space battles follow a sequence concerning
Kara’s body and could be read as drawing a parallel between the fragile integ-
rity of the spaceships and Kara’s fluid mortality and unsettled embodiment,
they are more an affirmation of Kara’s professional competence. The activity
and energy of Kara in the final sequence—narratively and aesthetically
as well as musically through the song’s excess of emotion—give a strong
impression of Kara’s continuing vitality as she is shown piloting her Viper.
The chorus of ‘I’m not dead | just changing’ becomes Kara’s articulation of
her own struggle to accept the ‘destiny’ she must fulfil, most significantly in
the second chorus which compiles the visions of her long-absent father that
give Kara the clues to her role in leading the fleet to its eventual permanent
home. Unlike confrontational boasts in the lyrics of ‘Cuz I Can’ that are
made into symptoms of inner turmoil, I’m Not Dead turns its lyrics into an
expression of acceptance, even as they become the vidder’s attempt to make
sense of the character’s retrograde development. When Kara is faced with
her own corpse, she must confront her own sense of embodied identity; the
vid takes similar stock of Kara as her story is reshuffled to maintain the
feminist agency of the character.
Conclusion
Dualbunny’s trilogy turns a quality television text into a melodramatic vid

that follows the emotional life of a single female character through the series.
As is often the case, female characters as the focus of the narrative ‘are a
well-known rarity’ in science fiction (Stoy 2010: 3). While academic writing
on Kara focuses on the complicated coding of the character as she meets
and defies various gender norms and expectations (Peirce 2008; Kirkland
2008; Kungl 2008; Jones 2010; Sharp 2010; Raney and Meagher 2015), the vids
seem much more comfortable in setting aside direct commentary on what
the character may represent and instead focus on what she feels. Insofar
as vids present a view of a series or film, supported by a set of examples
(clips), vids make arguments. They can and must be understood as a creative
manifestation of the critical work done by the engaged viewer of a complex
drama.
This trilogy’s argument is that Kara can be imagined with a complex
interiority. This approach transposes a longstanding fannish practice of
speaking with/for a character while watching episodes with fellow fans,
interjecting comments to reflect a character’s ‘projected inner state […]
underlining a particular interpretation of a character perception’ (Amesley
1989: 335). Rather than utterances made directly by Dualbunny, it is Pink’s
voice and the songs’ lyrics and instrumentation that provide this function
through the vid form. As with all character study vids, the trilogy argues
in favour of a rich emotional life that augments, but does not supersede,
the character as she appears in Battlestar. Through constructing a Kara
with complex subjectivity via internal monologues that are articulated by
Pink, the vids comment on Kara’s representation. The Kara of God Is A DJ is
a confident party girl who has not yet had to face the complex challenges
of her later development. Cuz I Can and I’m Not Dead show that character
study vids give a character a ‘voice’ that helps explain questionable character
development in terms of the imagined inner life of that character. In the vids,
Kara is neither stoically masculine-military nor passively (or hysterically)
214 Fanvids
feminine; the works augment a complex female character and realize her
feminist potential outside of binary stereotypes.
While all three songs used in the vid trilogy are from the same artist and
fall within the broad generic confines of top-40 pop-rock, differences in
lyrics, instrumentation, and tempo provide three iterations of self-expression
from a single artist. This chapter has been an opportunity to discuss certain
uses of music on television as proximate forms to vids. Additionally, focusing
on Dualbunny’s three vids as a trilogy forces sustained awareness of the Pink
songs used in these vids. This trilogy works the connotations of Pink’s voice
and celebrity against the feminist potential of Battlestar Galactica. Vids,
especially character studies, highlight a tension between emotional and
critical responses to texts, as lapses in the source material can be ameliorated
or explained in an adaptation. While not altering the narrative, the vid
form can construct a female-centred narrative out of a political allegory
by selectively adapting the source material. Dualbunny’s trilogy describes
the way a hybrid-genre ‘quality’ series accomplishes some form of character
development over a serial narrative and also proposes how audiences might
work to understand and integrate those changes in their view of a specific
character. As adaptations that drastically condense their source, character
study vids take silenced images and use lyrics, instrumentation, and other
connotations of the song to interpret and analyse that character.
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Conclusion
Abstract
The vid form represents a diverse range of expression and comment. The
existence of vids relies on the existence of home video technologies—first
analogue, now digital—for access to source material. The vid form’s inher-
ent reflexivity demands that vids be read alongside the viewer’s memory
and understanding of its source texts as a whole. Vids help constitute an
individual’s knowledge and understanding of a series, film, franchise, or
broader viewing landscape. A close look at vids and vidding uncovers a
hidden ‘afterlife’ of programmes, films, and other visual media. Vids offer
fans’ interpretations of media texts, construct histories of viewership and
engagement, and demonstrate a mode of productive audience behaviour
that has seldom been part of the story of television.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, archives
Vids as Vids and the Afterlife of Television
In his book The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology (2005),
Aaron Barlow argued that DVD technology brings new possibilities as a
distribution medium and as source material for fanworks, offering the
prognostication that, ‘Technological possibilities have progressed to the point
where film and video, as well as fiction, can be used to create significant
fan art. […] The use of the moving image in fan art, however, is still in its
infancy’ (56-57). However, the case of vidding conclusively proves that the
use of the moving image by fans pre-dates the DVD by several decades
and that it has unquestionably reached its maturity. More charitably, in
recent years the visibility offered by digital platforms such as YouTube
and cultural platforms such as gallery exhibitions and academic attention
has worked to weave the story of vidding into broader understandings of
how fans and audiences respond to and make use of changes in moving
image technology. It is important to emphasize that the vid does not date
doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_concl
220 Fanvids
from the introduction of the DVD or of YouTube, though these are both
significant technological developments in its history. The personal media
archive—containing film, television, user-captured video, music, photos,
and masses of text—is something that has the potential to be continually
(and playfully) reworked.
In this book, I have sought to describe and analyse the critical and crea-
tive output of a keenly attentive fan audience whose method of watching
and interpreting television and film has remained largely peripheral and
marginal. The history of vidding, as seen through the vids themselves, is
a history of a geographically dispersed community’s engagement with
television. This is not a mainstream use, but it does demonstrate a sustained
and multi-generational response to television.
I began this project to answer the question of what vids are, and what
vids are to television. I have answered this question via textual analysis
in order to approach ‘vids as vids’, to paraphrase V.F. Perkins (1972), taking
the vid seriously as a work of art and culture. I have shown that vids are
a highly developed form with a history that runs parallel to the history of
home video and found footage film. More importantly, an analysis of vids
reveals material interventions into television and film that suggests a mode
of engaged spectatorship that runs counter to academic histories of media
audiences and technologies. The vid is not the only form to creatively and
critically re-use moving images; however, the rich range of vids that have
survived, despite changes in media, preserves ways of watching television
and films that demonstrate a fluid and contingent relationship with narra-
tives and visual images. Clips from Battlestar Galactica are arguably used
mnemonically to prompt a viewer’s recall of a scene’s place in the series’
narrative arc and to evaluate its use in the vid; but in massively multifandom
vids, clips are used iconically as part of a comparative reflection on generic
or meta-narrative patterns, as the pace of editing is too swift to allow for
sustained reflection upon Battlestar as a whole. Vids collect and redistribute
the visual and narrative pleasures of television series and film while at the
same time communicating the vidder’s interpretation of the source material.
The vid therefore reveals both critical activity and an articulation of intense
textual engagement and fascination.
As Constance Penley observed, it was ‘through seeing the episodes
countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies’ (1991: 137)
that these female television fans began to play (semiotically and materially)
with media texts. The afterlife of television, as indicated by the existence
and complexity of vids, is based on returning to favoured or compelling
texts after their broadcast or cinematic release, at which point it becomes
Conclusion 221
possible (using the works themselves) to articulate the texts’ pleasures and
to construct critical responses to these works. Structurally, a vid is a montage
of extracts from episodes and/or films in a personal archive. Functionally,
the ‘exchanged glances, gestures, and expressions [of] actors’ (Jenkins 1992:
228) in each clip are, by their inclusion, positioned as significant moments,
often referring to points of character development or narrative moves in
the source material. As Amy Holdsworth argues in relation to ‘milestone
moments’ in long-running series, recap (and similar) sequences, which are
often constructed of archival clips drawn from previously aired episodes,
‘operate as an aide-memoire’ for audiences to recall significant moments
relating to ‘character and diegesis’ (2011: 36). Obtaining copies of Star Trek
episodes enables the collector to re-visit these moments; if episodes are
subsequently edited into a vid, the clips chosen will have a similar aide-
memoire function for the vid’s audience in constructing a path through
the show. While each viewer of the vid will have individual experiences of
Star Trek, I borrow from Holdsworth an understanding of the ‘complexity
of memory formation with regards to television as both private viewing
experience and cultural form’ (2011: 46) to presume that geographically
and temporally distinct viewers may nevertheless share memories and
experiences of the franchise via the vid.
Throughout this book, I have described and analysed a range of vids
produced over several decades in order to explore the vid form from a
range of related perspectives. I have adopted vidding fandom’s own sense
of history and community as a frame through which to understand the
form and its works; however, I am emphatic that I am not intending this
to have been a comprehensive or definitive history of the form. Vids of-
fer access to spectatorship practices based on the traces (of affection, for
television) that they leave which make them noteworthy forms. While vids
currently exist in digital spaces, their analogue origins on videotape and
the persistence of offline viewing practices through convention vidshows
mean they are part of a continuity of interaction with media that cannot
be explained solely by YouTube or a rise in digital remix culture. While I
claim that I have not wanted to attempt explanations of how specific vids
are cyphers for significant fandom activity, the existence of vidding is itself
a significant fandom activity, as it exposes a relationship with television and
other media tied to the development of distribution technologies. Equally,
and perhaps more significantly, a study of vidding reveals—and individual
vids preserve—the particular ways in which fans have been able to share
with fellow fans something of their emotional and critical responses to cult
and mainstream media.
222 Fanvids
The decision to write about vids means confronting the problem of how
to choose particular vids to use as examples. The relatively long history of
vidding and its state as a loosely networked community of practitioners who
work independently of each other, releasing new works periodically through
the year and across many sites, mean there is a wealth of possible examples
but far too many to address each one individually. Therefore, I chose to use
examples that resonate as exemplars based on my long experience of fandom.
This is similar to how film scholars, as I argued earlier in this book, accept
that their analyses are based on a wider understanding of what films are and
how they operate within community or cultural norms. My examples are
therefore chosen as illustrative examples of what a vid can be, the pleasures
they can offer their audience, and the critical avenues they may open up
for scholars. Any vid mentioned in this book can be approached from many
different angles, and I look forward to all future re-interpretations of the
works discussed herein. As discussed in Chapter 2, over the course of my
research, I found some of my chosen examples—namely Closer, A Fannish
Taxonomy of Hotness, and On the Prowl—had drawn the attention of fellow
scholars (Coppa 2009; Russo 2009; Larsen and Zubernis 2012; S.F. Winters
2012). To date, and as discussed in Chapter 1, journal articles and parts of
books that discuss vids tend to focus on one specific vid or a limited range
of examples. Together, we are constructing a canon of noteworthy vids; I
will leave it to others to evaluate the suitability of this canon.
As media fandom arises from a gendered (female) subculture, I have
been conscious of an impulse to over-essentialize the relationship between
gender, technology, and the resulting fanworks. This is redoubled as, during
the long progress of this project, the wider cultural conversation around
gender has shifted to be much more accepting of the possibilities for living
beyond a gendered binary. There are non-binary and trans* vidders and
vidfans active in vidding fandom, as well as a small number of cisgendered
men. However, in surveys that try to capture the demographics of media
fandom (De Kosnik 2016; Fansplaining 2019), an overwhelming majority
of respondents identify as female. It is therefore reasonable to generalize
about media fandom as a whole—and vidding as a subset—as a space
predominantly for and by women. In contrast to vidding’s other proximate
forms—experimental film, music video, digital remix forms—vidding
remains a space where it is not typical for the creators or the audience of
these works to be cisgendered men. This book has therefore examined the
relationship between a predominantly female subculture and television as
a medium that has historically been strongly associated with the female,
the domestic, and the ephemeral.
Conclusion 223
My overview of television studies at the start of this book argued that the
changing ways in which audiences experience and access television is highly
significant to the study of vids, as the same technologies and practices that
allow time-shifting also create source material for vids (cf. Brunsdon and
Spigel 2008). Debates around ‘quality’ television and the rise of digital televi-
sion platforms describe modes of sustained and attentive viewing, something
that can be seen in vids’ careful selection and the use of significant clips, as
vids textually enact this form of viewing. However, vids are made from a range
of television series and films and pre-date digital change; the impartiality
with which vids re-present both film and television also underscores a lack
of difference between film and television once both become ‘home video’.
Indeed, the present diversity of vid source material suggests that vids preserve
counter-canons of media consumption through clip choices.
Through an analysis of analogue and digital vids, I argue that vids are
documents of a sort—sometimes quite worn-looking documents due to
their source material and circulation prior to digital transfer—that preserve
interpretations and viewing contexts particular to the vids’ creation. The
textures and textualities of the vid’s image—as wear, decay, and interference
on videotape and digital images—reveal the origins of its source material.
Further, the public uses of these private collections are an archival use of
media: vids present selections of clips from videotape, DVD, and digital
files in such a way as to represent critical and/or creative interpretations
or counter-readings of the series or film source. Particularly with the Star
Trek examples, vids document a way of watching and understanding the
franchise, and their textual qualities indicate how home video technologies
enable the collecting, re-watching, and sharing of television episodes and
films beyond traditional broadcasting or cinema distribution.
Vids enact histories or evidence of media spectatorship beyond attentive
viewership focused on specif ic characters or pairings. With massively
multifandom vids, it is clear that this attention ranges beyond individual
series or films, engaging with spectacles of stardom, bodies, and genres.
Multifandom vids emphasize the decontextualized (non-narrative) pres-
entation of the spectacular and visually pleasurable aspects of television,
film, and transmedia texts. Underlying these presentations is a reflexive
sensibility that takes pleasure in the images themselves and deals in a
pleasurable recognition of the images as being part of genre tropes and
conventions of representation. Character study vids offer pleasurable critical
analysis and can be easily read as adaptations of their source material, in
which the vidder’s intervention is enacted through choices in editing and
song selection.
224 Fanvids
Thinking About Music
The importance of music in vids cannot be overstated. The relationship

between image and sound is critical, as the song both structures a vid
and makes sense of the fragmented, segmented pieces of television that
are reconstructed in these works. While the vid trilogy in Chapter 6 is
an exceptional case—a vidder revisiting one character over the life of a
series to follow that character’s development is highly unusual—the vids
provide a model for addressing character study as a genre and a critical
activity. Without altering the source narrative, character study vids convey
an interpretation of the character’s interiority, using the song as a key tool
for critical analysis alongside perceptive editing. The analyses they produce
also reproduce (and intensify) the aesthetic pleasures of the source material.
Therefore, a vid is a site of mediation between critical detachment and the
fascinations and pleasures of film and television.
As discussed previously, Tisha Turk (2015) argues for the need to recognize
vids’ songs as central to their meaning making. In writing about the use
of music in experimental film, Holly Rogers observes that video works in
which ‘new sounds extend across several disjointed clips’ offer the viewer
an experience that ‘mobilises a vertical form of deconstruction (between
sound and image) [and which] requires a double form of engagement’ (2017:
187). The horizontal deconstruction enacted in vids, e.g. between clips,
offers a chance to compare and contrast different moments across a source
text or between separate texts entirely. The relationship between sound
and image allows the audience to engage equally with the potential of the
song to semiotically amplify and transform (per Turk’s work) the images
and with the images to shape an interpretation of the song.
For example, the Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) vid Kryptonite
(Seah and Margie, 2002) uses the 3 Doors Down song ‘Kryptonite’ as its
soundtrack. The song’s softer bridge (a repeat of the chorus but with stripped-
back instrumentation and quieter vocals) ends with a crescendo and a quick
yelled ‘yeah!’ before a full-force return to another chorus. In the vid, two
clips in which characters raise their hands over their head in celebration
are followed by a longer shot of a background explosion igniting—these are
shown at the same time as the end-of-bridge yell. This ties the (silenced) voice
of the character to the audible voice of the singer but just as significantly
builds a semiotic framework underneath that generic rock yell to give it
meaning within a new interpretive context. The yell becomes more than an
aural signpost in the song, signifying a shift from quiet to loud: in the vid, it
vocalizes an explosive release. (A further layer of significance arises from
Conclusion 225
the knowledge that the two characters represented were the fandom’s main
slash pairing for the series, meaning that this yell and explosion has a precise
metaphorical sexual connotation.) In this, sound and image work together
to create a new set of meanings, with neither video nor audio subordinated,
as the viewer must engage with both simultaneously.
While I discussed the importance of instrumentation and performance
in Chapter 6, these factors can apply equally across every vid discussed.
Questions of performance and of the relationship between the genders
of the recording artist and the vid subject are key to Rogers’ ‘double form
of engagement’. For example, the use of Pink’s songs in all three vids of
Dualbunny’s trilogy is an essential part of the intertextual logic that connects
God Is A DJ with its sequels and constructs the trilogy as a related set of
works. Similarly, Skud’s vid Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2010) relies
on Joan Jett’s vocal performance and the strength of the electric guitars for
its energy and power; an acoustic or more mild-mannered performance
would have created a very different effect. The vid’s rapid editing provides its
own energy, but the particular timbre of Jett’s voice and her half-screamed,
half-sung performance give rise to a growling and defiant sensibility within
the vid’s diegesis that unites the many different clips and provides a single
point of reference for each separate representation of women in period
dramas. Charmax’s Space Girl (2011) absolutely relies on Eliza Carthy’s voice
and careful delivery to narrate the vid’s tale of regret, space exploration, and
spaces for empowerment and representation in imaginations of the future.
In each of these, the woman’s audible voice substitutes for the silenced
voices—often over clips where characters are not shown speaking.
The question of gender and performance in vid songs touches on covers
and of using songs sung by women to caption the experience of male
characters (and vice-versa). As discussed in Chapter 4, You Can’t Hurry Love
(Tolbran, 1994) uses a Phil Collins cover of the song rather than the original
by The Supremes; doing so constructs an exploration of male desire in this
slash vid, using a man’s voice. For an ultra-masculine ‘action-adventure
program about a civilian antiterrorist squad’ (Bacon-Smith 1992: 116), the
connotations of Diana Ross’s voice—and her identity as a black female
performer—arguably would have provided a less credible interiority for
a white man than is provided by Phil Collins. However, in Bad Romance
(sisabet, 2010), discussed in Chapter 5, the use of Lady Gaga means that Lex
Luthor’s inner world and his desire for Clark Kent is expressed through a
female voice, as the vid makes Lex Luthor express himself through Gaga.
She speaks for him and gives her voice to his strong feelings. Indeed,
some of the vid’s pleasure is in its use of an aural performance to enact
226 Fanvids
an imagination of a man’s desire for another man. Vids offer the characters
space to express the inexpressible, both because it would be narratively
impossible to do so but also by committing incongruous utterances that
are nevertheless made to appear accurate and natural, if only for the
duration of the vid.
Future Work
As one might expect when engaging with any kind of digital practice, the
vidding landscape has changed over the course of my research. In many
ways, this book is a snapshot of past activity and describes contexts that
are more historical now than when I started writing. When I started this
research, the VividCon convention was a central point in vidding fandom. To
have a vid premiere at VividCon was to guarantee a dedicated and engaged
audience, the opportunity for feedback and critique, and the distribution
of your vid to the convention’s wider membership. As its convention tapes
and DVDs are being donated to university and library archives, VividCon’s
premieres have been granted the potential for longevity (to say nothing of
the social life of the convention). However, in announcing that 2018 would
be the final year for VividCon, the organizers noted that digital distribution
has supplanted a core function of the convention when it began in 2002,
which was providing access to great vids and screening them in good-quality
copies (renenet 2017).
Despite this, and as I have written elsewhere, ‘a key pleasure of conven-
tion screenings is in being a member of a live audience’ (Stevens 2017a).
The end of VividCon means the collective experience of vids will be de-
centralized but still found at vidshows (or vid parties) forming one track of
programming at more general conventions. The UK’s vidding convention,
VidUKon, is poised to continue past 2020; however, in 2017 it shifted its
programming to include collaborative vid-making alongside the more
traditional programming of vidshows and vid-focused structured panel
discussions. Beyond these shifts in the sites and spaces of vidding, the
visibility of vidding on YouTube has led to interactions between what has
been called ‘traditional vidding’ (laurashapiro, 2007) and an independent
community engaged in similar video practices that has established itself
on YouTube, undertaking aesthetic innovations and being composed of
an anecdotally much younger group of practitioners. These vidders have
taken the form in a new direction and have a calendar of collaborative
events that produce vids that work with diegetic audio in ways that would
Conclusion 227
not have been possible with videotape and that seem designed to prevent
these vids from being automatically removed from the platform due to
over-active Content ID algorithms.66
Looking to the future of this study, it would be fascinating to conduct
an analysis of the commentaries produced by fans when vids are posted
online or released on DVD and the short descriptions of vids included in
vidding convention notes. The paratext that frequently accompanies a
vid’s release would provide insight into the vidders’ intent or process, an
analysis of which could form the basis for understanding vidding as an
authorial practice. Convention vidshow notes, written by the vidshow’s
curator and functioning as taglines or framing that indicate why the vid
has been included in the vidshow, could expand a view of the vid form as
part of fannish discourse. However, through the course of this research I
have become interested in the panel discussions at vidding conventions,
and in particular the kinds of training and support offered within this
peer group. Conventions include programmed workshops and technical
demonstrations, and convention reports online will summarize the discus-
sion for future reference and for the benefit of those who were not able to
attend the session.
I am particularly keen to pursue archival research to extend my work
so far. For example, the Morgan Dawn Collection at the University of Iowa
includes many older vids as well as fanzines from the 1980s and 1990s; the
vids themselves represent the development of the vid form, and the fanzines
may make mention of vids themselves and the process of vidding. Penley
(1991) describes attending a vid-making workshop at a convention, and
Bacon-Smith cites a brief passage from a zine regarding audio/visual technol-
ogy (1992: 175). From my own preliminary exploration of Starsky and Hutch
letterzines at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Toronto
Public Library), the correspondence between fans located in the UK and
the US does include convention reports and guidance on how to make one’s
own zines alongside more general discussion of the series themselves. For
example, one contribution to S&H #36 (October 1982) discusses appropriate
spacing in a zine, pointing out that a Selectric makes it possible to leave
a half-line space between paragraphs. University archives in the UK, the
US and Australia, the Toronto Public Library in Canada, and the National
Library of Australia all hold collections of zines and convention ephemera.
There is a story here waiting to be told.
66 Thank you to Lim, a ‘traditional’ vidder who kindly offered insights into the norms and
practices of YouTube vidders.
228 Fanvids
I am interested to see what precedents exist in the collections’ print zines

for online vidding tutorials, including information about ripping/trading
source material, and for discussions of individual vids and vidshows as they
developed. As Jessie Lymn has argued, discussions of print technologies in
fan correspondence ‘provide insight and context […] that other historical
print publications do not’ (2018: 34-35). I expect to find similar conversa-
tions about audio-visual technologies in zines produced toward the end of
the 1980s. As fan conventions hosted training for fanvid making (Penley
1991), it is reasonable to anticipate that zines hosted further information
about these activities. Histories of vids and vidding may also be found in
archival material beyond the zines: some of the works included in Kandy
Fong’s DVD transfers of vid compilations from the 1980s are accompanied
by a few words of description about the vidders, their practices, and their
works. Aside from vidding itself, archives of media fandom material contain
descriptions of fan viewing practices (Stevens 2020), which can deepen
current academic perspectives on binge-watching activity prior to DVDs and
streaming: Bacon-Smith (1992: 121-123) describes a precedent for concentrated
(‘marathon’) viewing, which was familiar to my experience as a teenage fan
with my stacks of off-air videotape recordings of The X-Files.
This archival work would also be of aid in answering questions about an
evolution of the vid form from its origins to the present. While convention-
based exhibition is still significant in vidding, there is a question to be asked
about the present state of vidding as a specifically digital practice. For those
in vidding fandom, vids are conceivably one of the ‘ordinary experiences of
being online’ (Garde-Hansen and Gorton 2013: 11). If this is the case, it would
be worth investigating whether the vid form as described in this monograph
is an old media practice borne out in new media or whether, for example,
the digital accessibility of source material elides medium specificity in a
manner unique to (or typical of) new/digital media.
The digital replication and preservation of documents does not neces-
sarily lead to remote access for researchers; accession of stacks of videotape
or hard drives containing video files does not result in the audio-visual
material being available to researchers (either academic or otherwise)
without making a visit in person. While online spaces preserve fanworks in
‘a series of archives’ (Lothian 2011: 1.1), these earlier activities are obscured
by a lack of access. There is a tension between print practices and online
spaces in preserving and making accessible offline practices in a world that
prefers digital access. This is particularly the case when geographically
dispersed communities will not have easy access to physical holdings in
distant locations.
Conclusion 229
Final Thoughts
The vid form represents a diverse range of expression and comment. The
existence of vids relies on the existence of home video technologies—first
analogue, now digital—for access to source material. The vid form’s inher-
ent reflexivity demands that vids be read alongside the viewer’s memory
and understanding of its source texts as a whole. Vids help constitute an
individual’s knowledge and understanding of a series, film, franchise, or
broader viewing landscape.
Kim Bjarkman, writing about videotape collections, offered that ‘While
museums turn history into spectacle, video archives turn spectacle into
history’ (2004: 235). For video archives that preserve the spectacle of television
and film, the archives preserve these media forms in situ. In the case of vids,
these fanworks serve as a record of past fannish interpretations. The capture,
mediation, and display of cultural artifacts from the past perpetuate access to
objects, discourses, and histories (see Baker 2015) with which we maintain a
relationship. While older vids are discoverable through traces such as vidshow
listings and vid compilations, these listings are not always made with vidding’s
heritage in mind, and more work needs to be done to comprehensively account
for vidding’s history. Vids are, on the whole, intended to provoke an immediate
reaction: to incite the emotions of a spectator (laughter, sorrow, desire) and
to operate within a framework of contemporary fannish discourse, offering
critical perspectives on ‘hot’ fandoms or critiquing norms of representation.
Past this immediate moment, vids take ordinary television, films, ‘quality’
television, and cult texts and textually represent how a character, pairing,
series, film, genre, or set of tropes can be interpreted. Ultimately, this book
is about how film and television can be watched: the vid form demonstrates
complex responses to media in a community that is increasingly visible but
also offers a model of how to be an attentive audience.
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of Toronto Press, 2015)
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[accessed 19 May 2014]
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Akademisk Kvarter, 11 (2015), 104-114
Tasker, Yvonne, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London
and New York: Comedia/Routledge, 1993)
Tincknell, Estella, ‘A Sunken Dream: Music and the Gendering of Nostalgia in Life
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Tranter, Kieran, ‘“Frakking Toasters” and Jurisprudences of Technology: The Excep-
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(2007), 45-75
— ‘Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction’, in Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed.
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Fandom and/as labor, guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special
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Turner, Michael, Hard Core Logo (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)
Tushnet, Rebecca, ‘Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author’,
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Flow’, in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. by Lynn Spigel
and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 163-182
Verba, Joan Marie, Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987, 2nd
edn (Minnetonka, Minnesota: FTL Publications, 2003)
Vernallis, Carol, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New
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— Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford:
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— ‘Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music,’ in The Music and Sound of Experi-
mental Film, ed. by Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), pp. 257-281
Villarejo, Amy, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham, NC: Duke
‘Vividcon Vid Database | Videos Shown at 2012 Let My Lyrics Go!’, no date. <http://
vividcon.info/vidshows/162/> [accessed 19 May 2014]
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Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974)
Williams, Rebecca, ‘“No Lynch, No Peaks!”: Auteurism, fan/actor campaigns and
the challenges of Twin Peaks’ return(s)’, Series: International Journal of TV Serial
Narratives, 2.2 (2016), 5-19
Windsor, John, ‘Identity Parades’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner
Winters, Ben, ‘Music and Narrative: An Introduction’, Music, Sound, and the Moving
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ing Digital Television Reception’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10 (2007),
485-506
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(Milwaukee/New York: Milwaukee Art Museum/Distributed Art Publishers,
2004), pp. 13-27
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256 Fanvids
Fanvids Cited
A vid typically shares a title with its song source; I have noted song titles only
when they differ from that of the vid. Following the example set by Louisa Ellen
Stein (2015: 178) to limit traffic to the ‘intimate yet public’ fan spaces where vids
are posted, I have not included links to personal blogs.
1969, vid by beccatoria, 2011. Video: Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present). Audio: Daft
Punk, ‘Rinzler.’ Posted at ‘Doctor Who Vid: 1969’, LiveJournal, 9 May 2011
The Adventure, vid by Greensilver [Trelkez], 2012. Video: Harry Potter film series
(2001-2011). Audio: Angels and Airwaves. Posted at ‘The Adventure – Neville Long-
bottom’, 12 August 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc7Wz03VKfA>
[accessed 8 April 2014]
Alone Now, vid by hay1ock, 2007. Video: Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The
CW, 2006-2020). Audio: The Click Five, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now.’ Available at
‘Supernatural: Sam And Dean-Alone Now’, 14 April 2007. <http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=bRg7o6J5fC8> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Around the Bend, vid by Danegen, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Posted at ‘Vividcon premiere: Around the
Bend (multi)’, LiveJournal, 9 August 2010
Bad Romance, vid by sisabet, 2010. Video: Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011), Super-
man Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006), DC animated universe clips, scans of DC
comics. Audio: Lady Gaga. Posted at ‘New Vid!! Lex/Clark!!! VVC Club Vivid!!!’,
LiveJournal, 9 August 2010
A Better Son/Daughter, vid by eruthros, 2016. Video: various (Carrie Fisher, and
her dog Gary). Audio: Rilo Kiley. Posted at ‘Gift for cupidsbow by eruthros
(RPF – Carrie Fisher and Gary), 28 January 2017. <https://fv-poster.dreamwidth.
org/326598.html> [accessed 6 April 2018]
Bloody Shirt, vid by unfinishedidea, 2014. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: To Kill a King, ‘Bloody Shirt (BASTILLE remix).’ Posted at ‘Vid: Bloody
Shirt [Welcome to Night Vale]’, Dreamwidth, 13 April 2014
Both Sides Now, vid by Kandy Fong, c. 1980, taped 1986. Video: stills from Star
Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Leonard Nimoy. Posted at ‘Both Sides Now (vid)’,
backdated to 1 January 1980. <http://archiveofourown.org/works/839489> [ac-
cessed 8 April 2014]
Boulevard of Broken Songs, vid by Destina and Barkley, 2007. Video: Stargate SG-1
(Showtime/Sci-Fi, 1997-2007), Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 2006-
2020), Farscape (Nine/Sci-Fi, 1999-2003), and Firefly (FOX, 2002). Audio: Dean
Gray. Posted at ‘New vids: Want (SPN), Boulevard of Broken Dreams (multi)’,
References 257
The Boy Can’t Help It, vid by Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour, c. 1980-1985. Video:
Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979). Audio: Bonnie Raitt. Included in the Vidding
History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD
Brick House, vid by Gwyneth, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources, focus on
Gina Torres). Audio: Commodores. Posted at ‘Vids by Gwyneth and L’Abattoir’,
no date. <http://www.gwynethr.net/vid/vidspage.html> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Candymen, vid by jagwriter78, 2008. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: Christina Aguilera, ‘Candyman’. Posted at ‘Multi-Fandom: Candy-
men’, 16 August 2008. <http://www.duckiescave.com/misc/308> [accessed
8 April 2014]
Closer, vid by T. Jonesy and Killa, 2004. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Nine
Inch Nails. First screened at Shore Leave, 2004. Available online via third-party
upload, ‘Star Trek + Nine Inch Nails = Closer’, 8 September 2006. <http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=3uxTpyCdriY> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Cuz I Can, vid by Dualbunny, 2007. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel,
2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Cuz I Can – (BSG – Starbuck) – VVC Club
Vivid 2007’, LiveJournal, August 2007
Danse Macabre, vid by chaila, 2012. Video: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
(FOX, 2008-2009). Audio: performer unknown. Posted at ‘Galentine’s Day Vidlet:
Danse Macabre [TSCC] [Ensemble]’, Dreamwidth, 13 February 2012
Data’s Dream, vid by GF & Tashery, 1994. Video: multifandom (various sources),
framed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994).
Audio: Enya, ‘Orinoco Flow’. Remastered by Morgan Dawn, 2004. Screened in
‘History: Pre-VividCon Favourites’, VividCon 2010. Chicago, IL: 6-8 August 2010
Destiny Calling: A Tribute to Vidding, vid by counteragent, 2008. Video: clips from 40+
previous vids. Audio: James. Posted at ‘More Joy Day – Destiny Calling – A tribute
to vidding – Multi-fandom video commentary’, LiveJournal, 10 January 2008
Don’t Stop Believing, vid by arefadedaway, 2009. Video: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009).
Audio: The cast of Glee (FOX, 2009-2015). Screened in ‘Vid Karaoke’, VividCon
2009, 14-16 August 2009
A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, vid by Clucking Belles, 2005. Video: multifandom
(various sources). Audio: Buster Poindexter, ‘Hot Hot Hot’. Posted at ‘Vids by
Clucking Belles: Sandy ‘n Rache -- Rache ‘n Sandy’, 2005. <http://www.relative-
obscurity.org/belles/cb.html> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Fever, vid by talitha78, 2010. Video: Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). Audio:
Adam Lambert. Posted at ‘REMASTER: “Fever”--Sherlock Holmes (Watson/
Holmes)’, Dreamwidth, 18 January 2010
Fireworks, vid by Jayne L., 2010. Video: Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000). Audio: The
Tragically Hip. Posted at ‘VividCon 2010 Premiere Vid: Power Play’, LiveJournal
7 August 2010
258 Fanvids
Flow, vid by lim, 2013. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Paul Hartnoll,
‘Nothing Else Matters’. Posted at ‘Flow | Multifandom’, 18 March 2013. <https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf VpVfjtPN0> [accessed 27 March 2018]
Freedom Hangs Like Heaven, vid by quigonejinn, 2008. Video: Iron Man (John
Favreau, 2008). Audio: Iron and Wine. Posted at Fifty-Three Stitches, LiveJournal,
26 May 2008
Girl 4 All Seasons, vid by foomatic, 2008. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: Northern State, ‘Girl For All Seasons’. Posted at ‘VVC 2008 Club Vivid
Submission – Girl 4 All Seasons, Multifandom’, LiveJournal, 22 August 2008
God Is A DJ, vid by Dualbunny, 2006. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel,
2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘My 2006 VVC Club Vivid Vid – (God Is A
DJ – Starbuck – BSG)’, LiveJournal, 17 August 2006
Hook Shot, vid by kuwdora, 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio:
Wolfgang Gartner. Posted at ‘[riot grrls premiere, VVC 2011]: Hook Shot (multi)’,
DreamWidth, 16 August 2011
I’m Not Dead, vid by Dualbunny, 2009. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel,
2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘I’m Not Dead – (BSG – Starbuck) – VVC Club
Vivid 2009’, LiveJournal, 14 August 2009
I’m on a Boat, vid by kiki_miserychic, 2009. Video: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009).
Audio: The Lonely Island feat. T-Pain. Screened in ‘Club Vivid’, VividCon 2009,
14-16 August 2009
I Put You There, vid by Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll, 2006. Video: (Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, The WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003). Audio: Mary Schmary.
<http://www.laurasha.com/> [accessed 8 April 2014]
I Think I’m A Clone Now, vid by Z Team or California Crew, 1992. Video: multifandom
(various sources). Audio: ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic. Shown at Escapade 1992. Included
in Escapade Vid Show Retrospective 1992-2001 compilation DVD, attributed to
Z Team. [NB: A 1989 date is given on the Fanlore wiki and lists two possible
collective authors. The vid is unlikely to predate 1990, given broadcast and VHS
release dates of some source clips.]
I Think I’m A Clone Now, vid by rhoboat, 2008. Video: multifandom (various
sources). Audio: ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic. Posted at ‘Multi – I Think I’m a Clone
Now’, 22 August 2008. <http://swirlythings.net/2008/08/22/clone/> [accessed
12 December 2018]
It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, vid by Kandy Fong, 1997. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-
1969), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), Star Trek III: The Search
for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984). Audio: Celine Dion. Included in Escapade Vid
Show Retrospective 1992-2001 compilation DVD, dated 1997. Also posted at ‘Coming
Back To Me Now’, backdated to 17 January 1996. <https://archiveofourown.org/
works/5738755> [accessed 23 March 2018]
References 259
Kryptonite, vid by Seah and Margie, 2002. Video: The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Chan-
nel, 2000-2002). Audio: 3 Doors Down. Posted at ‘Our First Vid! Kryptonite’,
LiveJournal, 28 February 2002
The Lightning Strike, vid by obsessive24, 2012. Video: Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004),
Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012), Kings (NBC, 2009). Audio: Snow Patrol. Posted at ‘new vid
– “The Lightning Strike” – Alexander/Merlin/Kings’, LiveJournal, 12 August 2012
Live and Let Die, vid by valoise, 2012. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio:
Paul McCartney and Wings. Posted at ‘Peter Wingf ield vids’, Dreamwidth,
26 March 2012. Reposted at ‘Vid: Live and Let Die’, 31 May 2015. <http://archi-
veofourown.org/works/4049623> [accessed 21 January 2018]
Long Live, vid by Llin, 2014. Video: Star Trek franchise (various television series and
films, approx. 1966-2009). Audio: Taylor Swift. Posted at ‘Vid: Long Live (Star
Trek)’, Dreamwidth, 29 June 2014
Men in Tights, vid by Perri, 2000. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio:
taken from Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Mel Brooks, 1993). Included in Apocalypse
West Vidding Collection 2000 to 2005 compilation DVD
Missundaztood, vid by Dualbunny, 2010. Video: Lost in Austen (ITV, 2008). Audio:
Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post: Missundaztood – (Lost in Austen – Wickham) –
Festivids 2010’, LiveJournal, 5 February 2011
Mr Brightside, vid by jarrow 2012. Video: The Talented Mr Ripley (Anthony Minghella,
1999). Audio: Vitamin String Quartet, covering The Killers. Posted in ‘NEW VID:
Mr. Brightside’, LiveJournal, 12 August 2012
My Brilliant Idea, vid by lim, 2007. Video: Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi, 2004-2009).
Audio: Jason Robert Brown, ‘I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You.’ Posted
at ‘My Brilliant Idea | Stargate Atlantis’, 3 June 2007. <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Sa2cM6oFdTg> [accessed 8 April 2014]
On the Prowl, vid by sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010. Video: multifandom (various
sources). Audio: Blow-Up, feat. Lydia Lunch. Posted at ‘New Vid!! VVC Challenge:
Self Portrait’, LiveJournal, 10 August 2010
One Foot Wrong, vid by Dualbunny, 2011. Video: Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992).
Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post – One Foot Wrong – (Batman Returns – Cat-
woman) – VVC 2011 Premieres’, LiveJournal, 15 August 2011
One Way or Another, vid by diannelamerc, 2010. Video: multifandom (various
sources, focus on Mark Sheppard). Audio: Blondie. Posted at ‘Vid Posted: One
Way Or Another’, LiveJournal, 25 August 2010
Opportunities: Let’s Make Lots Of Money, vid by Killa and Carol S., c. 2001. Video:
(Highlander: The Series. Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998). Audio: Pet Shop Boys.
Posted at ‘Opportunities vid remaster’, LiveJournal, 12 November 2007
Parachute, vid by thingswithwings, 2014. Video: Leverage (TNT, 2008-2012).
Audio: Ingrid Michaelson. Posted at ‘Parachute – Alec/Eliot/Parker Fanvid’,
260 Fanvids
3 July 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrqWzkoTJGQ> [accessed

16 October 2019]
Piece of Me, vid by obsessive24, 2008. Video: Britney Spears (various paratexts).
Audio: Britney Spears. Posted at ‘new vid – “Piece of Me” – Britney Spears’,
LiveJournal, 17 February 2008
Pornstar Dancing, vid by Jayne L., 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: My Darkest Days feat. Chad Kroeger. Posted at ‘New Vid! Heh. Oh my,
yes’, LiveJournal, 18 February 2011
Pressure, vid by Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990. Video: original
footage, with some visible clips of Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993). Audio: Billy
Joel. Screened in ‘History: Pre-VividCon Favourites’, VividCon 2010. Chicago,
IL: 6-8 August 2010
Set Fire to the Rain, vid by talitha78, 2011. Video: Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011).
Audio: Adele. Posted as ‘New Vid: “Set Fire to the Rain”--Thor (Thor/Loki)’,
LiveJournal, May 2011. Remastered by isagel, ‘REMASTERED VID: Set Fire to
the Rain by talitha78’, Dreamwidth, 18 September 2011
Seven Nation Army, vid by Charmax, 2009. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: Effcee. Posted at ‘Seven Nation Army’, 17 April 2011. <https://archiveo-
fourown.org/works/185667> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Smut, vid by Mary Van Deusen, c. 1985-1990. Included in the Vidding History 1985
to 1990 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD
Something To Talk About, vid by Kandy Fong, c. 1990. Screened at MashUp: The
Birth of Modern Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016
Space Girl, vid by Charmax, 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: The
Imagined Village. Posted at ‘Space Girl’, 30 May 2011. <https://archiveofourown.
org/works/205815> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Star Trek: Tik Tok, vid by MissSheenie, 2009. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969).
Audio: Kesha. Posted at ‘Star Trek: Tik Tok’, 17 April 2010. <http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=7ZWaWrvJ7nA> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Starships!, vid by bironic, 2012. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio:
Nicki Minaj. Posted at ‘New vid: “Starships!” multifandom SPACE VID YAY’,
Stay Awake, vid by Laura Shapiro, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio:
Suzanne Vega, covering Mary Poppins soundtrack. Posted at ‘VVC PREMIERE:
STAY AWAKE (MULTI)’, Dreamwidth, 10 August 2010
Strange Little Girl, vid by Heather, c. 2007. Video: Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004),
Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006), and Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006;
The CW, 2006-2020). Audio: Tori Amos. Available at ‘Multifandoms and
Crossovers’, No date. <http://endless-creation.tripod.com/id70.html> [accessed
21 January 2018]
References 261
Take It Off, vid by Greensilver [Trelkez], 2009. Video: multifandom (various sources).
Audio: The Donnas. Posted at ‘Vid: Take It Off (Multi)’, Dreamwidth, 15 Au-
gust 2009. Reposted with commentary at Vid Farr: A Tumblr About Vidding,
Tumblr, 7 September 2012
Temper of Revenge, vid by MVD and Caren Parnes, 1984. Video: Miami Vice (NBC,
1984-1990). Audio: Julia Ecklar. Cited on Museum of the Moving Image Cut Up
exhibition website as Tempers of Revenge; listed as Temper of Revenge in the
VividCon.info database). <http://www.iment.com/maida/tv/songvids/jesong.
htm> [accessed 8 April 2014]
The Test, vid by here’s luck, 2010. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969), Star Trek: The
Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). Audio: The
Chemical Brothers. Posted at ‘[Vid] The Test’, 15 March 2010. <http://archiveo-
fourown.org/works/176712> [accessed 8 April 2014]
That’s What Friends Are For, vid by 3 Sisters, 1985. Video: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
(NBC, 1964-1968), Riptide (NBC, 1983-1986), I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968), Alias Smith
and Jones (ABC, 1971-1973). Audio: Dionne Warwick feat. Gladys Knight, Elton
John, Stevie Wonder. Included in Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong
compilation DVD
Thousand Eyes, vid by thuvia ptarth, 2018. Video: Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong
Film & TV Production Co., Ltd./Daylight Entertainment (Dongyang) Television
Ltd., 2015). Audio: Of Monsters and Men. Posted at ‘[vid] Thousand Eyes’, 17 Decem-
ber 2018. <https://archiveofourown.org/works/17010738> [accessed 16 October 2019]
Titanium, vid by Gianduja Kiss, 2012. Video: Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975-1977;
CBS, 1977-1979). Audio: David Guetta feat. Sia. Posted at ‘Gift for diannelamerc
by Gianduja Kiss (Wonder Woman – 1975)’, 19 January 2013. <http://fv-poster.
dreamwidth.org/126671.html> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Us, vid by lim, 2007. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Regina Spektor.
Posted at ‘lim: Us, by Regina Spektor. multifandom’, 1 May 2007. <http://vidding.
livejournal.com/989634.html> [accessed 8 April 2014]
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, vid by Skud, 2010. Video: multifandom (various
sources). Audio: Joan Jett. Premiered in ‘Club Vivid’ vidshow, VividCon 2010.
Chicago, IL: 6-8 August 2010. Included in VividCon 2010 DVD set. Posted at
‘New vid: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Age of Sail multi-fandom)’,
Dreamwidth, 6 August 2010
Vogue, vid by Luminosity, 2007. Video: 300 (Zach Snyder, 2006). Audio: Madonna.
Available at ‘Luminosity’s Vids: Vogue (May 2007).’ <http://www.lumsvids.com/
vid/080-vogue/> [accessed 23 March 2018]
Weapon of Choice, vid by shinyjenni, 2015. Video: multifandom (various sources). Au-
dio: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Posted at ‘Weapon of Choice [vid]’, 14 June 2015.
<https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/4134462> [accessed 5 April 2018]
262 Fanvids
What Do You Do With A Drunken Vulcan?, vid by Kandy Fong, 1975. Video: stills
from Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Fong and friends performing a filk of
‘What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor’. Posted at ‘What Do You Do With A
Drunken Vulcan?’ Post backdated to 24 May 1975. <http://archiveofourown.
org/works/846732> [accessed 8 April 2014]
Who Can It Be Now, vid by Kathleen Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985.
Video: Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971). Audio: Men at Work. Included in Vidding
History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD
Who Knew?, vid by Dualbunny, 2010. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel,
2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post: Who Knew – (BSG – Kara/Lee)’,
LiveJournal, 1 December 2010
Whole New Way, vid by Mr E Sundance, 2011. Video: Sherlock Holmes (Guy
Ritchie, 2009), Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present), ancillary content. Audio: Scissor
Sisters. Posted at ‘Whole New Way’, 31 July 2011. <https://archiveofourown.org/
works/232133> [accessed 6 April 2018]
Wind Beneath My Wings, vid by 3 Sisters, c. 1983-1985. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-
1969). Audio: Gary Morris. Included in Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong
compilation DVD
You Can’t Hurry Love, vid by Tolbran, 1994. Video: The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983).
Audio: Phil Collins. Included in the Escapade Vid Show Retrospective 1992-2001
compilation DVD, 2011
Other Audio-Visual Works Cited
12 Monkeys, dir. by Terry Gilliam (Universal Pictures, USA, 1995)

300, dir. by Zack Snyder (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2006)
2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. by Stanley Kubrick (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA/UK,
1968)
Agent Carter (ABC, 2015-2016)
Alexander, dir. by Oliver Stone (Warner Bros. Pictures, Germany/France/Italy/
Netherlands/UK/USA, 2004)
Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-1973)
Alien, dir. by Ridley Scott (20th Century Fox, USA, 1979)
Aliens, dir. by James Cameron (20th Century Fox, USA, 1986)
All About Eve, dir. by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (20th Century Fox, USA, 1950)
All My Children (ABC, 1970-2011)
All That Heaven Allows, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal Pictures, USA, 1955)
Ally McBeal (FOX, USA, 1997-2002)
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1998)
References 263
American Psycho, dir. by Mary Harron (Lions Gate Films, USA, 2000)
‘Amok Time’, Star Trek, NBC, 15 September 1967
Angel (The WB, 1999-2004)
Apollo 13, dir. by Ron Howard (Universal Pictures, USA, 1995)
Avengers Assemble, dir. by Joss Whedon (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures,
USA, 2012)
Babylon 5 (PTEN, 1994-1997; TNT, 1998)
Back to the Future Part II, dir. by Robert Zemeckis (Universal Pictures, USA, 1989)
Badlands, dir. by Terrence Malick (Warner Bros., USA, 1973)
‘Bastille Day’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 1 November 2004
Batman Returns, dir. by Tim Burton (Warner Bros., USA, 1992)
Battlestar Galactica (ABC 1978-9, 1980)
Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009)
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, dir. by Stephen Herek (Orion Pictures, USA, 1989)
The Birds, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Universal Pictures, USA, 1963)
Blade Runner, dir. by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., USA, 1982)
Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-1981)
Bones (FOX, 2005-2017)
The Boondock Saints, dir. by Troy Duffy (Indican Pictures, USA/Canada, 1999)
Brief Encounter, dir. by David Lean (Eagle-Lion Distributors, UK, 1945)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003)
Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007-2013)
Carnivàle (HBO, 2003-2005)
Casino Royale, dir. by Martin Campbell (Sony Pictures Releasing, UK/US/Czech
Republic/Germany, 2006)
Challenge of the Super Friends (ABC, 1978)
Charade, dir. by Stanley Donen (Universal Pictures, USA, 1963)
China Beach (ABC, 1988-1991)
Cleopatra 2525 (Renaissance Pictures, 2000-2001)
The Clock, dir. by Christian Marclay (UK, 2010)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures,
USA, 1977)
Community (NBC, 2009-2015)
Constantine, dir. by Francis Lawrence (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/Germany, 2005)
Contact, dir. by Robert Zemeckis (Warner Bros., USA, 1997)
Cosmic Ray, dir. by Bruce Conner (USA, 1961)
The Covenant, dir. by Renny Harlin (Screen Gems, USA, 2006)
Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005-2020)
The Crow, dir. by Alex Proyas (Miramax Films, USA, 1994)
The Da Vinci Code, dir. by Ron Howard (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA, 2006)
264 Fanvids
Dark Angel (FOX, 2000-2002)

Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971)
Desperately Seeking Susan, dir. by Susan Seidelman (Orion Pictures, USA, 1985)
Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013)
Die Hard, dir. by John McTiernan (20th Century Fox, USA, 1988)
Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-1989)
Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present)
Due South (CTV/CBS, 1994-1999)
East of Borneo, dir. by George Melford (Universal Studios, USA, 1931)
Elementary (CBS, 2012-2019)
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, dir. by Esfir Shub (USSR, 1927)
‘The Farm’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 12 August 2005
Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003)
Fight Club, dir. by David Fincher (20th Century Fox, USA, 1999)
Firefly (FOX, 2002)
Fringe (FOX, 2008-2013)
Ghostbusters, dir. by Paul Feig (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA/Australia, 2016)
Glee (FOX, 2009-2015)
Hard Core Logo, dir. by Bruce McDonald (Shadow Shows Incorporated, Canada, 1996)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, dir. by Chris Columbus (Warner Bros.
Pictures, USA/UK, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, dir. by Mike Newell (Warner Bros. Pictures,
USA/UK, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures,
USA/UK, 2009)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures,
USA/UK, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, dir. by Chris Columbus (Warner Bros.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (Warner Bros.
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-1999)
Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010)
Highlander: The Series (Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998)
Home Stories, dir. by Matthias Muller (Germany, 1990)
Hornblower (ITV, 1998-2003)
References 265
I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968)

I, Robot, dir. by Alex Proyas (20th Century Fox, USA, 2004)
Imitation of Life, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal Pictures, USA, 1959)
The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002)
Iron Man, dir. by John Favreau (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2008)
‘Journey to Babel’, Star Trek, NBC, 17 November 1967
Kingdom Hospital (ABC, USA, 2004)
Kings (NBC, 2009)
Ladyhawke, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., USA, 1985)
The Lambeth Walk (Nazi Style), dir. by Charles A. Ridley (UK, 1942)
Legend of the Seeker (Renaissance Pictures/ABC, 2008-2010)
Lethal Weapon, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., USA, 1987)
Leverage (TNT, 2008-2012)
Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007)
The Little Mermaid, dir. by Ron Clements and John Musker (Buena Vista Pictures,
USA, 1989)
Lost (ABC, 2004-2010)
Madame X, dir. by David Lowell Rich (Universal Picture, USA, 1966)
‘Maelstrom’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 4 March 2007
Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-1990)
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968)
Man on Fire, dir. by Tony Scott (20th Century Fox, USA, 2004)
The Man Who Knew Too Much, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures,
USA, 1956)
Mary Poppins, dir. by Robert Stevenson (Buena Vista Distribution, USA, 1964)
The Matrix, dir. by The Wachowskis [credited as The Wachowski Brothers] (Warner
Bros., USA/Australia, 1999)
The Matrix: Revolutions, dir. by The Wachowskis [credited as The Wachowski
Brothers] (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/Australia, 2003)
Meeting of Two Queens, dir. by Cecilia Barriga (USA, 1991)
Memento, directed/written by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket Films, USA, 2000)
Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012)
The Middleman (ABC, 2008)
A Movie, dir. by Bruce Conner (USA, 1958)
The Muppet Movie, dir. by James Frawley (Associated Film Distribution, USA, 1979)
The Muppet Show, created by Jim Henson (ITV/syndication, 1976-1981)
Near Dark, dir. by Kathryn Bigelow (DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, USA, 1987)
Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong Film & TV Production Co., Ltd./Daylight
Entertainment (Dongyang) Television Ltd., 2015)
Ocean’s Eight, dir. by Gary Ross (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2018)
266 Fanvids
The Outsiders, dir. by Francis Ford Coppola (Warner Bros., USA, 1983)
passage à l’acte, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1993)
Peyton Place, dir. by Mark Robson (20th Century Fox, USA, 1957)
pièce touchée, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1989)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, dir. by Gore Verbinski (Buena Vista
Pictures, USA, 2006)
Point Break, dir. by Kathryn Bigelow (20th Century Fox, USA, 1991)
Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000)
The Princess Bride, dir. by Rob Reiner (20th Century Fox, USA, 1987)
The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983)
Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993)
Raiders of the Lost Ark, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1981)
Rear Window, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1954)
Riget [The Kingdom] (Danmarks Radio, 1994-1997)
Riptide (NBC, 1984-1986)
Road House, dir. by Rowdy Herrington (MGM/UA Communications Co., USA, 1989)
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, dir. by Mark Rappaport (USA, 1992)
Robin Hood: Men in Tights, dir. by Mel Brooks (20th Centruy Fox, USA, 1993)
Rose Hobart, dir. by Joseph Cornell (USA, 1936)
The Salton Sea, dir. by D. J. Caruso (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2002)
‘Salvation’, Supernatural, The WB, 27 April 2006
Say Anything…, dir. by Cameron Crowe (20th Century Fox, USA, 1989)
Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present)
Sherlock Holmes, dir. by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros. Pictures, UK/USA/Australia,
2009)
The Silence of the Lambs, dir. by Jonathan Demme (Orion Pictures, USA, 1991)
Silent Hill, dir. by Christophe Gans (Alliance Atlantic Communications, Canada/
France, 2006)
Smallville (The WB, 2001-2006; The CW, 2006-2011)
Spaceballs, dir. by Mel Brooks (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA, 1987)
Spartacus: Blood and Sand (Starz, 2010)
Spider-Man, dir. by Sam Raimi (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA, 2002)
Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969)
Star Trek, dir. by J. J. Abrams (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2009)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, dir. by Leonard Nimoy (Paramount Pictures,
USA, 1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. by Leonard Nimoy (Paramount Pictures, USA,
1986)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Paramount/syndication, 1993-1999)
Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017-present)
References 267
Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN, 2001-2005)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture, dir. by Robert Wise (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1979)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994)
Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001)
Stargate SG-1 (Showtime, 1997-2002; Sci-Fi Channel, 2002-2007)
Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009)
Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979)
Star Wars, dir. by George Lucas (20th Century Fox, USA, 1977)
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, dir. by Irvin Kirshner (20th Century
Fox, USA, 1980)
Sunshine, dir. by Danny Boyle (Fox Searchlight Pictures, UK/USA, 2007)
Superman, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., UK/Switzerland/Panama/USA,
1978)
Superman Returns, dir. by Bryan Singer (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2006)
Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 2006-2020)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, dir. by Todd Haynes (USA, 1987)
Swinging the Lambeth Walk, dir. by Len Lye (UK, 1939)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, dir. by Anthony Minghella (Paramount Pictures/Miramax
Films, USA, 1999)
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, dir. by Dara Birnbaum (USA, 1978)
The Terminator, dir. by James Cameron (Orion Pictures, USA, 1984)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, dir. by James Cameron (TriStar Pictures, USA, 1991)
Terminator: Salvation, dir. by McG (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2009)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009)
Thor, dir. by Kenneth Branagh (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2011)
Thunderbirds (ATV, 1965-1966)
Tiny Toon Adventures (CBS/FOX/syndication, 1990-1992)
Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011)
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, dir. by Craig Baldwin (USA, 1991)
Triumph of the Will, dir. by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany, 1935)
‘The Trouble with Tribbles’, Star Trek, NBC, 29 December 1967
True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon, dir. by Chris Weitz (Summit Entertainment, USA, 2009)
‘Unfinished Business’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 1 December 2006
The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 2009-2017)
Vanilla Sky, dir. by Cameron Crowe (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2001)
Vertigo, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1958)
Wall-E, dir. by Andrew Stanton (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, USA, 2008)
Welcome to Night Vale (Commonplace Books, USA, 2012-present)
‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’, Star Trek, NBC, 20 October 1966
268 Fanvids
Wiseguy (CBS, 1987-1990)

Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975-1977; CBS, 1977-1979)
Written on the Wind, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal International Pictures, USA,
1956)
Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001)
The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, dir. by Gavin Hood (20th Century Fox, USA, 2009)
Songs Cited
3 Doors Down, ‘Kryptonite’, The Better Life (Universal Republic Records, 2000)
Adele, ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, 21 (Columbia Records, 2011)
Aguilera, Christina, ‘Candyman’, Back to Basics (RCA Records, 2007)
Amos, Tori, ‘Strange Little Girl’, Strange Little Girls (Atlantic, 2001). Cover of The
Stranglers, ‘Strange Little Girl’, The Collection 1977-1982 (Liberty Records, 1982)
Angels and Airwaves, ‘The Adventure’, We Don’t Need to Whisper (Geffen, 2006)
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, ‘Around the Bend’, Fruit (Small Giants, 2009)
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, ‘Weapon of Choice’, Baby 81 (RCA/Island, 2007)
Blondie, ‘One Way or Another’, Parallel Lines (Chrysalis Records, 1979)
Blow-Up, feat. Lydia Lunch, ‘On the Prowl’, Exploding Plastic Pleasure (Electrovenus,
2003)
Brown, Jason Robert, ‘I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You’, Wearing Someone
Else’s Clothes (Sh-K-Boom Records/Razor & Tie, 2005)
Buckley, Jeff, ‘Last Goodbye’, Grace (Columbia Records, 1994)
The Chemical Brothers, feat. Richard Ashcroft, ‘The Test’, Come with Us (Virgin
Records/Astralwerks/Ultra Records, 2002)
The Click Five, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, Greetings from Imrie House, Japanese
edition (Atlantic/Lava, 2005). First released by Tommy James and the Shondells,
‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, I Think We’re Alone Now (Roulette, 1967)
Collins, Phil, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, Hello, I Must Be Going (Virgin Records/Atlantic
Records, 1982). First released by The Supremes, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, The
Supremes A’ Go-Go (Motown, 1966)
Commodores, ‘Brick House’, Commodores (Motown, 1977)
Daft Punk, ‘Rinzler’, Tron: Legacy (Walt Disney Records, 2010)
Dion, Céline, ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’, Falling Into You (Epic Records/550
Music, 1996)
The Donnas, ‘Take it Off’, Spend the Night (Atlantic, 2002)
Ecklar, Julia, ‘Temper of Revenge’ (filk song), The Horse-Tamer’s Daughter (independ-
ent release, 1984)
References 269
Effcee, feat. Sly Bastard, ‘Seven Nation Army (Effcee Remix)’, Perfect (Cleopatra/
Hypnotic, 2004). Cover of The White Stripes, ‘Seven Nation Army’, Elephant
(XL/V2/Third Man, 2003)
Enya, ‘Orinoco Flow’, Watermark (Warner Music/Geffen, 1988)
Glee cast, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Glee: The Music, Volume 1 (Columbia, 2009). Cover
of Journey, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Escape (Columbia Records, 1981)
Guetta, David, feat. Sia, ‘Titanium’, Nothing but the Beat (Virgin Records, 2011)
Hartnoll, Paul, feat. Akayzia Parker, ‘Nothing Else Matters’, The Ideal Condition
(ACP Recordings, 2007)
Imagined Village, The, ‘Space Girl’, Empire & Love (EEC Records, 2010). Cover of
Ewan MacColl (feat. Peggy Seeger), ‘Space Girl’s Song’, You’re Only Young Once
(Theatre Workshop, 1953). Parody of traditional ballad ‘The Ghost Soldier Song’;
recorded as ‘Space Girl’ for The World of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (Argo
Records, 1970)
Iron and Wine, ‘Freedom Hangs Like Heaven’, Woman King (Sub Pop, 2005)
James, ‘Destiny Calling’, The Best Of (Mercury, 1998)
Jett, Joan, ‘Bad Reputation’, Bad Reputation (Boardwalk Records, 1981). Re-issue of
Joan Jett (no label/self-release, 1980)
Joel, Billy, ‘Pressure’, The Nylon Curtain (Columbia, 1982)
Kansas, ‘Carry On Wayward Son’, Leftoverture (Epic Records, 1976)
Kesha, feat. P. Diddy, ‘Tik Tok’, Animal (RCA, 2010)
Lady Gaga, ‘Bad Romance’, The Fame Monster (Cherrytree/Interscope, 2009)
Lambert, Adam, ‘Fever’, For Your Entertainment (RCA/Jive, 2009)
The Lonely Island, feat. T-Pain, ‘I’m on a Boat’, Indcredibad (Universal Republic
Records, 2009)
Madonna, ‘Vogue’, I’m Breathless (Sire/Warner Bros., 1990)
McCartney, Paul and Wings, ‘Live and Let Die’, Live and Let Die (Apple Records, 1971)
Men at Work, ‘Who Can It Be Now?’, Business As Usual (CBS/Columbia Records, 1981)
Michaelson, Ingrid, ‘Parachute,’ no album (standalone single digital release, 2010)
Minaj, Nicki (Onika Maraj), ‘Starships’, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (Universal
Republic Records, 2012)
Morris, Gary, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, Why Lady Why (Warner Bros. Records,
1983). First released by Roger Whittaker, as ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’, The
Wind Beneath My Wings (RCA Records, 1982)
My Darkest Days feat. Chad Kroeger, ‘Pornstar Dancing’, My Darkest Days (604
Records, 2010)
Nimoy, Leonard, ‘Both Sides Now.’ The Way I Feel (Dot Records, 1968). First released
by Judy Collins, Wildflowers (Elektra, 1968)
Nine Inch Nails, ‘Closer’, The Downward Spiral (Nothing Records/Interscope Records,
1994)
270 Fanvids
Northern State, ‘Girl for All Seasons’, All City (Columbia Records, 2004)
Of Monsters and Men, ‘Thousand Eyes’, Beneath the Skin (Republic, 2015)
Party Ben (DJ), ‘Boulevard of Broken Songs’, mash-up of Green Day (‘Boulevard of
Broken Dreams’), Oasis (‘Wonderwall’), Travis (‘Writing to Reach You’), Aero-
smith (‘Dream On’), first released as a digital download, 2004. Later remixed
and released on Best Mashups in the World Ever are from San Francisco (Juno
Records, 2005)
Pet Shop Boys, ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)’, Please (Parlophone, 1986)
Pink (Alicia Moore), ‘Cuz I Can’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006)
— ‘God is a DJ’, Try This (Arista Records, 2003)
— ‘I’m Not Dead’, I’m Not Dead. LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006
— ‘M!ssundaztood’, Missundaztood (Arista Records, 2001)
— ‘One Foot Wrong’, Funhouse (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2008)
— ‘Stupid Girls’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006)
— ‘Who Knew’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006)
Poindexter, Buster, ‘Hot Hot Hot’, Buster Poindexter (RCA Records, 1987)
Raitt, Bonnie, ‘The Boy Can’t Help It’, Glow (Warner Bros., 1979)
Rilo Kiley, ‘A Better Son/Daughter’, The Execution of All Things (Saddle Creek
Records, 2002)
Scissor Sisters, ‘Whole New Way’, Night Work (Polydor Records, 2010)
Snow Patrol, ‘The Lightning Strike’, A Hundred Million Suns (Fiction/Interscope,
2008)
Spears, Britney, ‘Piece of Me’, Blackout (Jive Records, 2007)
Spektor, Regina, ‘Us’, Soviet Kitsch (Sire/Transgressive, 2004)
Swift, Taylor, ‘Long Live’, Speak Now (Big Machine/Universal, 2012)
To Kill A King, ‘Bloody Shirt (BASTILLE remix)’, My Crooked Saint (released via
Bandcamp, 2012)
The Tragically Hip, ‘Fireworks’, Phantom Power (Universal, 1998)
Vega, Suzanne, ‘Stay Awake’, Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from
Vintage Disney Films (A&M Records, 1988)
Vitamin String Quartet, ‘Mr. Brightside’, The String Quartet Tribute to The Killers
(Vitamin Records, 2005). Cover of The Killers, ‘Mr. Brightside’, Hot Fuss (Lizard
King Records/Vertigo Records/Island Records, 2004)
Warwick, Dionne, feat. Gladys Knight, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, ‘That’s What
Friends Are For’, Friends (Arista Records, 1985). First released by Rod Stewart,
Night Shift soundtrack (Ladd Company/Warner Bros., 1982)
Wolfgang Gartner (Joey Youngman), ‘Hook Shot’, Hook Shot (Ultra Records, 2010)
Yankovic, ‘Weird Al’, ‘I Think I’m A Clone Now’, Even Worse (Rock ‘n Roll Records,
Scotti Brothers Records, 1988). Based on Tommy James and the Shondells, ‘I
Think We’re Alone Now’, I Think We’re Alone Now (Roulette, 1967)
Index
3 Doors Down 18, 224 overview of 183-189
1969 (2011) 196 quality television 34
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 147 Baudrillard, Jean 104
BBC iPlayer 38, 81
action heroines 156-157, 185-186, 191-192 Benedict, Dirk 184-185
adaptations 10, 30, 163-164, 181-183, 185-186, 194 Benjamin, Walter 104, 108, 131
Adventure, The (2012) 19 Bennett, James 38
aesthetic degradation 113-120, 124-125, 127 Berger, John 57
Alias Smith and Jones (1971-1973) 141 Betamax 37
Alien (1979) 185 Better Son/Daughter, A (2016) 166, 172
Aliens (1986) 185 Bick, Isla J. 107
All About Eve (1950) 156 Bignell, Jonathan 53-54
All My Children (1970-2011) 30 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) 144
Ally McBeal (1997-2002) 200 Binns, Alexander 198
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) 153 Birnbaum, Dara 72, 77, 86-89, 140, 157
Alone Now (2007) 119 Bjarkman, Kim 34, 102, 229
Anderson, Gerry 200 Bloody Shirt (2014) 20
Anderson, Gillian 151 Blow-Up (band) 157
Apollo 13 (1995) 149 bodily spectacle 29, 55, 87, 152-160
appropriation 72, 74 Booth, Paul 192
archives 38, 228-229 bootlegging (of media) 82, 108-111, 113, 118-120
archival aesthetic 120-130 Bordwell, David 37
distinction from collections 99-105 Both Sides Now (1980) 75, 77
exhibiting and circulating vids 79-86 Boulevard of Broken Songs (2007) 139
looking archival 108-112 Boy Can’t Help It, The (1980-1985) 29, 84-85
Star Trek case study 105-108 Brick House (2010) 170, 172
videotape-based vids 112-120 Brief Encounter (1945) 203
Arnold, Martin 153 Brown, Julie 200
Around the Bend (2010) 20, 139, 152, 156 Brundson, Charlotte 33-34, 57, 172
Assmann, Aleida 120 Buckley, Jeff 198
Asteroids Galaxy Tour, The 20 Burn Notice (2007-2013) 171
attribution of authorship 84-85 Busse, Kristina 9, 118, 163
audience control 140-141
Augaitis, Daina 77 Caldwell, John T. 39
authorship 84-85, 182 cam footage 119-120
auto-ethnography 58 Candymen (2008) 152
avant-garde practice 72, 77-78 canon formation 54-56, 220; see also corpus
Avengers Assemble (2012) 119 selection
Carthy, Eliza 225
Bacon-Smith, Camille 13, 29, 109, 115-118, celebrity vids see real person vids
227-228 Challenge of the Super Friends (1978) 162
Bad Romance (2010) 162, 165, 225 channel changing 140-141
Bailey, Steve 51, 58 character psychology 17
Baldwin, Craig 140 character study vids 19, 179-182
Barbour, Diane 12 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209
Barefoot, Guy 167 God Is A DJ (2006) 55-56, 189-196, 199,
Barlow, Aaron 219 202-205
Barthes, Roland 57 I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204,
Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) 179-183 209-213
and Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 use of music 197, 203
and God Is A DJ (2006) 189-196, 199, 202-205 Who Can It Be Now (1981-1985) 114
and I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204, Cherchi Usai, Paolo 124
209-213 Chion, Michel 68, 181, 200
meta vids 20 Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2001) 171
multifandom vids 147, 151, 220 Clock, The (2010) 146-147
272 Fanvids
Closer (2004) 55, 124-126, 129-130 dialogue 142, 200-201

Club Vivid 60, 91, 189 Dickinson, Kay 198
collage 69-74, 110, 145 digital effects 124-125
collections 100-105 digital lockers 84
looking archival 108-112 digital technology 99
Star Trek case study 105-108 archiving 83
Collie, Hazel 152 bootlegging 118-120
Collins, Phil 115, 225 digital transfers 35
Commodores, The 170 distribution of vids 84
compilations 69-74, 145 televisual flow 38
compressed narratives 68, 183, 192 Dion, Céline 105
Conner, Bruce 71, 73, 77, 140, 145 Distribution 78-86, 91
constructed reality vids 19-20 Doctor Who (1963-present) 81, 151, 196
Contact (1997) 151 Donnelly, K.J. 68, 200-201, 203
contact sheets 59 downloading 38, 53, 81, 84
conventions 12, 53-54 Doyle, Arthur Conan 163
curating vids 80-81 Dreyfus, Alfred 69-70
future research 226-227 Dualbunny 179, 181, 187
multifandom vids 148 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209
popular vids 56 God Is A DJ (2006) 189-195
viewing culture 59-60 I’m Not Dead (2009) 209-213
see also VidUKon; VividCon Duchamp, Marcel 77
Coppa, Francesca Dust (2001) 104, 117
bodily spectacle 152, 155 DVD 34-35, 53, 81, 83-84, 219
definition of vids 9, 30, 172 Dyer, Richard 167
MashUp exhibition 77-78, 146
multifandom vids 141-142, 148 East of Borneo (1931) 166-167
music 57, 67 editing technology 117-118, 142
popularity of Spock 109 Elementary (2012-2019) 163
re-constructing material 70, 91 Ellis, John 55, 89, 159
segmentation 140 emotional expression 148, 180-181, 199, 203
videotapes 117 Enterprise (2001-2005) 165
vids as entertainment 73 Enya 143
Cornell, Joseph 70, 77, 88, 166-167 Eppink, Jason 75
Corner, John 72 Equinox 53
corpus selection 52-54; see also canon erotic spectacle 29, 152-160; see also
formation homoeroticism
Cosmic Ray (1961) 71 Escapade 12
credit sequences 84-85, 199 ethnography see auto-ethnography
critical commentaries 11-12, 29-30, 56 excess 138
critical readings 30, 153, 180, 194-195 exhibiting vids 78-86, 91, 228
cross-media adaptations 183 exhibitions 74-78
cult actors 169-172 experimental film traditions 65-66, 69-74
cultural contexts 51-52, 58
curating vids 78-86 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (1927) 70
Cut Up (2013) 66, 74-77 fan art 11, 163
Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 fan fiction 11, 29-30, 163, 166
Cylons in America (2008) 208 fan studies 28-32, 50
Fanlore.org 18, 147
Daft Punk 196 Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, A (2005) 55-56,
Danse Macabre (2012) 196 75, 140-141, 152, 154-156
Dark Shadows (1966-1971) 84, 114 fanvids, introduction to
Data’s Dream (1994) 75, 77, 143-144, 146 definition 9-11
Davis, Glyn 168 future work 226-228
Davis, Nick 197 genres 17-22
De Kosnik, Abigail 35 historical background 12-14, 220
Demos, T.J. 87-88, 90 media fandom 11-12
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) 156 structure and aims 14-16
Destiny Calling (2008) 20 fanzines see zines
Index 273
Farscape (1999-2003) 20-21 VCR and videotapes 38, 101-102

fascination 138, 142 see also female representations; Kara
fascinating people 166-172 ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (fictional character)
genre pleasures 143-151 genres 17-22, 139, 143-151
transmedia storytelling 160-166 Geraghty, Lincoln 101
female audiences 13, 38, 87, 155-156 Gianduja Kiss 89-90
female gaze 154-157, 160 Girl 4 All Seasons (2008) 152-153, 156
female representations Glaser, Paul Michael 85
action heroines 156-157, 185-186, 191-192 God Is A DJ (2006) 55-56, 189-196, 199, 202-205
Around the Bend (2010) 20, 139 Gorbman, Claudia 196, 200-201, 203
attraction and objectification 87-88 Gow, Joe 68
empowerment 171 Gray, Ann 38, 101
erotic spectacle 152-153 Gray, Barry 200
in science fiction 150-151 Gray, Jonathan 17, 21, 30, 38-39, 51, 101
Wonder Woman 87-89 Gregory, Chris 107
see also gender; Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace Grenville, Bruce 77
(fictional character)
feminism 57, 88, 189, 193, 204 Halperin, Moze 75
femslash 18 Hard Core Logo (1996) 30
Ferland, Jodelle 170 Harry Potter (2001-2011) 19
Festivids 53, 91 Hatch, Kevin 72
fetishistic scopophilia 30, 157, 160 Hauptman, Jodi 167-168
Fetveit, Arild 125 HBO 34
Fever (2010) 18 Hellekson, Karen 9, 118
file-sharing 33, 35-36, 85 Herbert, Daniel 184
Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
(1972) 51-52 (1995-1999) 171
film music 195-203 het works 17
Film Music: A Very Short Introduction (2010) 191 Highlander: The Series (1992-1998) 19
film studies 51-52 Hilderbrand, Lucas 38, 100, 102, 108-111, 113,
Firefly (2002) 171 115, 118, 120
Fireworks (2010) 21, 118 Hill, Annette 33
Fisher, Carrie 166 Hills, Matt 31, 164, 169
Fiske, John 31 Hilmes, Michelle 199
Flow (2013) 77 Hirsch, Paul M. 141
Fong, Kandy 12, 55, 71, 75, 228 history
Foster, Jodie 151 beyond historical context 55
found footage 69-74, 88, 145, 167 historical narratives 197-198
fragmentation 36-37, 121, 140 of home media 14, 38, 101, 130
franchises 10, 98, 161-166 of moving image re-use 69, 74, 166
Freedom Hangs Like Heaven (2008) 119 new histories of source material 106-107,
Friedberg, Anna 140 110, 121-122, 124, 129
friendshippy works 18, 142 of science fiction 151
Frith, Simon 191 of television and film 99, 146
future work 226-228 of vidding 12-13, 53, 74-75, 85-86, 220
see also archives
gallery spaces 74-78 Hitchcock, Alfred 146
Garde-Hansen, Joanne 122 Holdsworth, Amy 112, 123-124, 127, 221
Gauntlett, David 33 home media see archives; collections; digital
gen (general) fanworks 17 technology; DVD; home video technologies;
gender videotapes
digital technology 33 Home Stories (1990) 145-146
erotic spectacle 152-160 home video technologies 37-38, 97-99, 101-102,
female audiences 13, 38, 87, 155-156 141; see also digital technology
female gaze 154-157, 160 homoeroticism 17-18, 102, 107, 116, 141, 162-164
female vidding subculture 13-14, 32-33, 222 Hook Shot (2012) 153, 156
performance in vid songs 225 Hunter, Kendra 12
quality television 33-34 hurt/comfort concept 55, 158-159
in science fiction 150-151 Hutcheon, Linda 183, 185, 194, 198
274 Fanvids
I Put You There (2006) 75 McCabe, Colin 182

I Spy (1965-1968) 141 McEwan, Paul 30, 182
I Think I’m A Clone Now (1992) 144, 152 Meagher, Michelle 209
I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204, 209-213 media fandom, introduction to 11-12, 31-32,
image quality 109, 113-120 228
Imagined Village, The 150 Media West 12
intensified television 37 medium specificity 10-11
Invisible Man, The (2000-2002) 18, 171, 224 Meeting of Two Queens (1991) 73
Iron Man (2008) 119 Meigh-Andrews, Chris 89
It’s All Coming Back To Me Now (1997) 105-108, melodrama 181, 186-187, 189, 204
110 memory 100, 110, 120-122, 126-130, 221
men see gender
Jacobs, Jason 10 Men at Work 114
Jacobs, Ken 88 Men in Tights (2000) 152
Jenkins, Henry 13, 21, 29, 67, 73, 84, 117-118, 138 Mercer, John 189
Jett, Joan 57, 225 Merril Collection of Science Fiction and
Johnson, Derek 185 Fantasy (Toronto Public Library) 227
Johnson, Joshua 31 meta vids 20, 180
Jones, Matthew 210 Metz, Christian 60
Joyrich, Lynne 129 Middleman, The (2008) 172
Minaj, Nicki 148
Kalinak, Kathryn 191 Mittell, Jason 35, 57
Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (fictional character) montage 70, 73, 110, 140-141, 158-159, 200
Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) 184-189 Moore, Ronald D. 184
Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 Morgan Dawn Collection (University of
God Is A DJ (2006) 189-195, 202-203 Iowa) 227
I’m Not Dead (2009) 209-213 Morris, Gary 109
Kesha 122-123 Movie, A (1958) 71
Killers, The 196 moving image re-use 69-74, 76-77, 153,
Klein, Amanda Ann 165 166-167
Kohnen, Melanie E.S. 162 Mr. Brightside (2012) 196
Kryptonite (2002) 18, 224-225 Müller, Matthias 145-146
Kungl, Carla 188 multifandom vids 20, 69, 138-143
Kustritz, Anne 9, 54, 184-185 bodily spectacle 152-160
fascinating people 166-172
Lady Gaga 162, 225 genre pleasures 143-151
Lambert, Adam 18 music 21-22
Landsberg, Alison 122 representational tropes 73
Larsen, Glen A. 184 and supercuts 76
Last Goodbye (1994) 198-199 transmedia storytelling 160-166
Leverage (2008-2012) 18, 172 Mulvey, Laura 87, 153-154, 158
Life on Mars (2006-2007) 127, 197 Muppet Show, The (1976-1981) 147
Lightning Strike, The (2012) 77 Museum of the Moving Image
Lippit, Akira 77, 145, 153 (MOMI) 74-77
Live and Let Die (2012) 170 music 224-226
Long Live (2014) 139, 164-166 authorial adaptations 182-183
Louttit, Chris 30 Cuz I Can (2007) 204-207
Luckhurst, Roger 145 genre and performance 21
Lymn, Jessie 228 God Is A DJ (2006) 190-194
I’m Not Dead (2009) 210-213
male gaze 154 and moving image re-use 71-72
male representations 154-156, 159-160, Starships! (2012) 148-149
225-226; see also homoeroticism television, film, and vids 195-203
Man from U.N.C.L.E., The (1964-1968) 11, 141 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A
Marclay, Christian 146 (2010) 57
marginal practice 54-56 music videos 65-69, 193, 200
Mary Poppins (1964) 180 Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media
MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture (2017) 68
(2016) 66, 74, 77-78, 87, 146 My Brilliant Idea (2007) 201
Index 275
narratives pleasure, viewing 72-74, 142

compression of 68, 183, 192 fascinating people 166-172
montage sequences 200 genre pleasures 143-151
multifandom vids 156-157, 160 transmedia storytelling 160-166
in music videos 68 poached culture 29
music’s role in 180, 197-200 podfic 11
quality television 33-34 political allegory 184, 188
reconstruction of 14, 38, 50, 120-122, 129, popularity (of texts) 55-56
140, 192, 194-195 Pornstar Dancing (2011) 152
removal of 88, 90, 153-154 postfeminism 193
see also transmedia storytelling Power Play (1998-2000) 21, 118-119
National Library of Australia 227 Pressure (1990) 39, 117
National Science and Media Museum (UK) 112 Price, Jonathan 108, 110, 115
New Queer Cinema 145 Professionals, The (1977-1983) 115
Newcomb, Horace 141 prosthetic memory 122
Ng, Eve 29-30, 84 pseudonymity 13-14
Nine Inch Nails 124-125 psychoanalytic theory 88, 157
Nirvana in Fire (2015) 19 puppet work 200-201, 203
non-diegetic sound 200-201 Purse, Lisa 164
On the Prowl (2010) 55, 152, 157-160 qualitative approaches 56

One Way or Another (2010) 166, 169-171 quality television 33-34, 223
O’Neill, Stephen 30 Quantum Leap (1989-1993) 39
Opportunities (Let’s Male Lots of Money) queer-themed works 168
(2012) 19
Organization for Transformative Works race 13, 172
(OTW) 84 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 158-159
Railton, Diane 68, 203
Paget, Sidney 163 Rainbow Noise 28
palimpsestuous adaptations 194 Raney, Tracey 209

Palmer, R. Barton 165 Rawle, Steven 186
Parachute (2014) 18 real person fiction (RPF) 166
paratexts 56 real person vids 166-172
passage à l’acte (1993) 153 Rebick, Stephanie 77
patriarchal oppression 88 reboots 126-128, 161
Pearce, Susan 103 recruiter vids 20-21, 199
Pearson, Roberta 161 Reidy, Robin 87
peer-to-peer file-sharing 33, 35 remote controls 140
Penley, Constance Richards, Denzell 35
aesthetics of zines 113-114 Riptide (1983-1986) 141
distribution of vids 80-81, 100 Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) 73, 168
female fanworks subculture 220 Rogers, Holly 224
female representations 13 Rogue Archives (2016) 35
home video equipment 39, 82-83, 117 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 167
Star Trek franchise 102, 107, 109 Rose Hobart (1936) 70, 73, 77, 166-167
vid conventions 29, 227 Ross, Diana 225
Perkins, V.F. 51-52, 58, 220 Ross, Sharon Marie 13-14
Perry, Grayson 105 Russell, Catherine 146
personal computers 82-83 Russo, Julie Levin 18, 180, 195
Pet Shop Boys 19
Picasso, Pablo 77 Sackhoff, Katee 185, 190, 203
Piece of Me (2008) 168-169, 172 Saint-Saëns, Camille 196
pièce touchée (1989) 153 scholarly views 28-32, 222
Pigott, Michael 88 science fiction 143, 147, 157; see also Battlestar
Pink (Alecia Moore) 180-181, 187-188 Galactica (2004-2009); Star Trek (1966-1969);
Cuz I Can (2007) 204-207 Starships! (2012)
God Is A DJ (2006) 189-191, 193-194, 197, scratch video 70
202-203 segmentation (of television) 35-40, 140
I’m Not Dead (2009) 210 semiotic density 153, 160
276 Fanvids
Set Fire to the Rain (2011) 120 Strange Little Girl (2007) 170
Shapiro, Laura 20, 180 streaming 38, 81, 84
Sharp, Patrick B. 185, 188, 205 subcultural celebrities 169-172
Sheppard, Mark 166, 169-170, 171 subcultural contexts 30
Sherlock (2012-present) 163-164 subjective perception 52
Sherlock Holmes (2009) 18, 163-164 Sunshine (2007) 147
Sherlock Holmes storyworld 161 Superman storyworld 161-163
Sherlock Holmes storyworld 163-164, 165 Supernatural (2005-2020) 119, 171
Shimpach, Shawn 33, 186-187 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Shingler, Martin 189 (1987) 168
ship (relationship) vids 18, 182 Svegaard, Sebastian F.K. 71
Show Sold Separately (2010) 51 syndication 101-102
Shub, Esfir 70
Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 151 Take It Off (2009) 152
silent film 200-201, 203 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (1999) 196
Sirk, Douglas 146, 197 Tan, Fiona 105
Sitney, P. Adams 77 Tasker, Yvonne 205
slash vids 17-19, 69 technology
Bad Romance (2010) 162-163, 165 of control 35-40
Star Trek franchise 102, 107 distribution of vids 82-83
That’s What Friends Are For (1985) 141 and gender 32-33, 38
Whole New Way (2011) 163-165 home video 37-38, 97-99, 101-102, 141
You Can’t Hurry Love (1994) 115-116 see also digital technology
Smallville (2001-2011) 162-163, 165 Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
Smut (c.1985-1990) 152 (1978) 66, 72, 77, 86-89, 91-92, 140, 157
social media 78 television
Something To Talk About (c. 1990s) 77 afterlife of 220-221
Space Girl (2011) 150-152, 225 and gender 33-34, 101-102
Spaceballs (1987) 147, 149-150 music’s use in 195-203
Spears, Britney 168-169 quality television 33-34
Spigel, Lynn 57, 172 relationship with vids 14-15, 27-28, 223
Stacey, Jackie 87, 156 televisual bodies 159-160
star image 167-169, 172 televisual flow 35-40
Star Trek (1966-1969) textual analysis 10-11, 50, 52, 57
collections and archives 98-100, 105-110, viewing choices 140-141
121-125 and VCR 111
media fandom’s origins 11-12 Television: Technology and Cultural Form
in multifandom vids 144, 147, 149 (1974) 130
Star Trek (2009 film) 126-128 televisual bodies 159-160
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) 164 televisual flow 35-40
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) 106 Temper of Revenge (1984) 75
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) 106, 110 temporal flattening 107-108
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 107, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) 205
128-129 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) 143, (2008-2009) 196
164 Test, The (2010) 77, 121, 126-130
Star Trek: Tik Tok (2010) 121-124, 129-130 textual analysis 10-11, 50-52, 55-61, 164, 220
Star Trek transmedia storyworlds 161, 164-166 Textual Poachers (1992) 21
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) 164 textual productivity 31-32
Star Wars (1977) 147 That’s What Friends Are For (1985) 141-142
Stargate Atlantis (2004-2009) 201 Thor (2011) 119-120
Starships! (2012) 74, 77, 139, 146-151 Thousand Eyes (2018) 19
Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979) 12, 29, 84, 227 Thunderbirds (1965-1966) 200
Stravinsky, Igor 197 time-shifting 38, 101-102, 110, 118-119
Stay Awake (2010) 20, 180 Tincknell, Estella 197
Steedman, Carolyn 104-105, 108, 117, 121-122 Titanium (2012) 66, 86, 88-92, 157
Stein, Louisa Ellen 30, 163 Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, The
storyworlds 161-166 (2011) 105
Stoy, Jennifer 184, 192, 204 Toronto Public Library 227
Index 277
Torres, Gina 170-172 popular screenings 56, 76, 91

transmedia storytelling 10, 31, 160-166, 182 vid music 196
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America vid premieres 53
(1991) 140 Vogue (2007) 75, 77
tropes 148, 155-156; see also genres
Turk, Tisha 9, 31, 67, 160-161, 181, 183, 195, 224 Wall-E (2008) 148
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The (2009) 159 Warhol, Andy 77
watermarks 85, 119
Us (2007) 20 Watson, Paul 68, 203
USB drives 81, 83 Weapon of Choice (2015) 153, 156-157
user flows 36-37 Wees, William 70, 72-73
Welcome to Night Vale (2012-present) 19-20
Vancouver Art Gallery 74, 77-78, 87, 146 What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan?
Vanilla Sky (2001) 198-199 (1975) 12
VCR 34, 37-38, 82-83, 102, 111 Wheatley, Helen 51, 138, 152
Vernallis, Carol 67-68, 71, 77 Who Can It Be Now? (1981-1985) 84, 114, 118
vid production 53 Whole New Way (2011) 163-165
videotapes Williams, Raymond 36-37, 130-131
archives and collections 98-99, 101-102, Wind Beneath My Wings (1983-1985) 109
108-111, 112-118 Wingfield, Peter 170
convention screenings 12 Winters, Sarah Fiona 126
origins of vidding 28, 37 Wire, The (2002-2008) 55-56
production and distribution 80, 83 Wiscon 81
vids, introduction to see fanvids, introduc- women see female representations; gender
tion to Wonder Woman (1977-1979) 66, 72, 86-92
VidUKon 53-54, 80-81, 91, 226 Wood, Helen 36-39
Vimeo 77-78, 111
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) 171
(2010) 57, 152, 225 X-Files, The (1993-2002) 20, 151, 171
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
(1975) 87, 153 Yankovic, ‘Weird Al’ 144
Vitamin String Quartet 196 You Can’t Hurry Love (1994) 115-116, 225
VividCon 12, 27 YouTube 77-78, 80, 131, 219, 226
Battlestar Galactica vids 181, 189 Yuletide 91
Club Vivid 60, 91, 189
curation and distribution 80-81 zines 113-114, 227-228
discontinuation of 79, 226 Zyrd, Michael 73

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Published by Amsterdam University Press

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[128.32.10.230] Project MUSE (2024-06-24 10:58 GMT) University of California, Berkeley

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

isbn 978 94 6298 586 5

© E. Charlotte Stevens / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020

1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and

2 Approach: How to Study a Vid 49

3 Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video and

4 Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular

6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy 179

Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding genres

What is a vid? Also known as a fanvid, it has its origins in videotape-related

and television as separate media is eliminated in vids, as both were treated

Brief Introduction to Media Fandom and a History of Vids

The vid is a product of media fandom. As a subset of media audiences, fan

message boards, blogging communities, in conversation, and other social

and this circulation of media has been accelerated by digital file-sharing

appreciative of online anonymity. This freedom to explore one’s private

Structure and Aims

This study seeks to analyse how meaning is constructed in vids: as dialogues

networks of videotape and the practice of returning to favourite scenes that

Fannish Genres and the Vid

Throughout this book, I use the terminology of fandom instead of adopting

of romance without gender hierarchies (Penley 1991; Busse and Hellekson

5 Including contributing programming to VidUKon (see Stevens 2017a).

Character study vids are focused on examining a single character’s motiva-

to create vids of this audio-only source. One particularly well-executed and

the songs used in vids because instrumentation, vocal performance, and

List of Works Cited

Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. <https://journal.trans-

Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding, television studies,

those of the vid. Therefore, this chapter focuses on vidding’s relationship

Scholarly Views of Vids and Vidding

in her essay on femslash vids about characters in All My Children (ABC,

Gender, ‘Quality’ Television, and Digital Technology

As suggested by the title of this book, an awareness of gender underpins

competence in relation to media technologies as seen in interactions with

flattering to television (Mittell 2010: 369). This characterization of ‘good’

that has broadened beyond specialized tape collectors with digitization

Televisual Flow, Segmentation, and Technologies of Control

punctuated by ads and bracketed with station idents or a single episode

concept of ‘user flows’, noting that developments in television technology

12 This echoes Newcomb and Hirsch’s description of audiences’ navigation of television

Gray describes fanworks’ non-linear re-presentation of their source texts

List of Works Cited

Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of

Robinson, M.J., Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation

Turk, Tisha, ‘“Your Own Imagination”: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative

Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, methodology

or as an entry point to a discussion of the works’ context in a particular

production contexts (Casey et al. 2008) in understanding the complexities

As mentioned earlier, I have watched hundreds of vids over the course of

knew these events would be my best chance of seeing a substantial number

Canon Formation in a Marginal Practice

One particular challenge of the academic study of marginal forms is being

How to Study a Vid

In practice, the textual analysis of vids is similar to other qualitative ap-

in wider cultural conversations but also structured by the song’s lyrics.

However, as Bailey (2005) notes, textual analysis can be effective in

mimics the physical relationship of audience to screen in a cinema. Indeed,

Therefore, my approach to the vid form is grounded in textual analysis, with

2 Approach: How to Study a Vid 49

6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy 179