This is just… sad. Eleven or so years ago, I was still living in Seattle – it was a somewhat lonely existence, as pretty much my life revolved around a few favorite television shows, my cat Studebaker, and occasionally going out with friends to hear live music. As it happened, there were several shows that I was more or less obsessed with, number one being Highlander, which started in 1992 and usually aired on Saturday nights. In the fall of 1994, a new show was about to premiere, and I decided to buy a VCR so I could tape the first 2 hour episode. This was Earth2, which aired on Sunday evenings. And there were a couple of other shows that aired the fall and winter of 1994-1995, both on Saturday night: a bizarre SF/cop show by Gerry Anderson called Space Precinct, and a very good and smart cop show with Jeff Fahey called The Marshal.

Why, why did I have such a sad and narrow existence? I did travel, I did go on trips… I did have friends and occasionally got out of the house. But usually, a Saturday night found me at home, watching TV. Earlier in the evening, I generally always listened to Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio.

I was a single woman with cat. I had no social life, no prospects of one, and if I wanted to go out to one of several “nice” pubs or taverns in my funky Seattle neighborhood, I went out… alone. And came home alone, and watched my shows on tape. More often, though, I sat and watched as they taped, and actually paused the tape during commercials. Especially if it was a first-run Highlander episode, because I was picky about those. I was also fairly picky about Earth2, since that show was the impetus for getting the VCR in the first place.

I used to keep a cardfile on my original computer… which, truth be told, was originally bought purely so I could connect with Highlander fans online, because I knew they had to be there. Yes, all the technological and romantical advances in my life are generally because of some TV show or other. Anyway, I would number each videotape and note what shows and episodes were recorded on it, and in spite of my tendency toward complete and utter anarchy, I was pretty consistent about taping and notating for about a year or so, and then I lost my job and got a life.

Let’s see. I met David at a Highlander convention in Denver in the fall of 1994, and a few weeks later I bought the VCR and started taping Earth 2 and Highlander. All that year, I taped various shows. Also, David came for a visit over the Memorial Day weekend in 1995, and later that fall, my former employer gave me a month off unpaid to go visit with David in the Chicago area. While on this visit, I worked as a temp for the company that I’m now with, and when the happy month was over, I went back to Seattle in December 1995 a very grumpy girl. Not only did I miss my boyfriend, but I missed my temp job, and grumbled about how much better it was working there, and how I couldn’t wait to go on vacation again over Christmas to meet David in Colorado for a skiing trip.

As you might expect, I came back to find I’d been fired. Which I was actually really happy about. I hadn’t been getting along with my old employers and felt trapped, and also sometimes I felt like they really took advantage. They were also really trying to make me a part of their family, in some ways a little too much. Also, there were responsibilities they wanted to put on me that I wasn’t ready or willing to take on, and justifiably they thought I should have been. Whatever, I was out of there. And I was pretty happy about it.

I gleefully threw out all of the Christmas presents that they had given me before I left for vacation, when they must already have been planning to fire me. It made me laugh to see all the herbed vinegar that my employer had made by hand go gurgling happily down the drain, because I could see a large clump of dog hairs floating in it. It was funny to think of all the friends and family and important clients she was trying so hard to impress, and how they must also have gotten beautifully wrapped imported glass bottles of home-made herbed red wine vinegar… absolutely brimming with clumps of dog hair. Oh, funny. She always tried so hard to come across like she was cultured and tasteful and knew the right people and belonged to the right church, and her gifts were full of crap like that.

So the rest of that winter, I hunkered down in my little studio condo in Fremont, with the partial view of downtown Seattle, and worked on getting it ready to sell so I could pack up and move to Chicago to be with David. And I watched my little shows, and dreamed my dreams, schemed my schemes, and hoped my hopes.

After I moved here, we were living in David’s 2 bedroom condo in Palatine. The other bedroom was set up as a den with the computers in it, and we fell into the habit of watching certain shows, and I tried to maintain my old habit of at least taping Highlander. I was still very active in the fan community for Highlander, running a section of AOL (this was back in the day when fan-created sections of AOL still existed; we were an offshoot of the very popular Chicago Online subsection of AOL, which included a Doctor Who fan area. They pretty much invited us to create content off of their area, but we had our own keyword and everything. Then AOL shut down “member” content and went with ad revenue-generating commercial content. But it was fun while it lasted, hosting chats and trivia nights and things like that. I ended up getting some AOL “helper” gigs so that I had a free account, which helped after my firing. I continued volunteering and having a free AOL account for about a year after I moved here.

So I kept taping, but stopped numbering. We got kind of busy with making the wedding arrangements – that was all done long-distance, with one trip to Colorado to meet people like florists and cake-makers and whatnot. After a while, the taping petered out. When Highlander was in its death throes (I was never one of those that denied the sixth season ever happened), I finally stopped taping. What was the point? There were no newer shows that caught my attention to quite the same degree – I liked Babylon 5, but I never obsessed about it. Around that time we were interested in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and we really should have been taping that, because it was on at a really odd time. But we didn’t… we just caught it occasionally, casually.

We became aware that there was a Stargate series, but it was on Showtime at first, which we didn’t get. Eventually, reruns started showing up on the Sci-Fi channel. We got into Farscape when it came out, and I got pretty obessed with that show… but didn’t hook up with the fandom much, and didn’t tape. I just really liked it a lot, thought about it a lot, and was sad when it was cancelled.

And then, back in early 2001, we finally got serious about house-hunting, and about condo-selling. And to make David’s condo most attractive, we needed to de-clutter it in a big, big, big, BIG way, because it was basically two bedrooms at the end of a long narrow hallway, and the living/dining/kitchen at the far end. So it was like a long dark dumbbell, and it was full of stuff at either end. Most of my things from Seattle were boxed up in the garage the whole time, and so were my videos. We just packed everything non-essential away in boxes and put them in the garage for the month or so we were showing the condo. By the time moving day came around, everything we had was packed in a box, except for a few clothes, the minimum in cookware and dishes, and the cat.

Moving day was a snap. The moving truck backed up to the garage and sucked all the boxes in, and then they brought all the furniture (not all of it – some of it was handmedown that we threw out). Took about 90 minutes tops.

From that day to this, many of those boxes have been sitting unlooked at in the basement. Occasionally, I’d unpack one that had dishes or something sentimental in it, or I’d dig through looking for a particular book. But mostly, my stuff sat down there.

However, one of my old Highlander fan buddies has been bugging me for a list of my tape collection, because I happened to mention that I had a box of about 75 videotapes of various shows and oddities. And for a year or so I’ve been meaning to do it. Then suddenly, David had a pressing reason for cleaning out the basement: someone wants to photograph the Lair O’ Computers for an article in a trade magazine. Earlier today, we went out and bought a new office chair, because he decided he didn’t want to be photographed sitting on a folding chair – the guys on the mailing list he runs for computer professionals would probably think it was funny, though. And he said he wanted to either send off the tapes, or throw them out.

Clearly, it was time to catalogue them and see what I had.

What I have, is a whole bunch of weird shit, all mixed up, with fading labels in scribbly handwriting, occasional inconsistent notes, and several tapes appear to be missing. I have all but the very last episode ever aired of Earth 2, and I have about 2 season’s worth of Highlander (but they’re really good seasons, I swear), and I have most of the entire single season of Space Precinct, and a bunch of episodes of The Marshal. I must have loaned some of the numbered tapes to some fan or other in Seattle (I knew a few local HL fans) so there are gaps.

In any case, I sent the list off to my friend, and for the curious, it’s in the extended entry.

A couple of notes for the totally stumped… after I stopped numbering tapes, I just put show names and episode titles on. I added all the episode numbers for Highlander episodes to this database; I wasn’t always consistent about writing them on tape labels. For this database, I added letters A-T to the labels. This will totally confuse my friend, if she ends up asking for these tapes.

There’s one episode of Forever Knight in there labeled “Julie Beamer, Dead Hooker.” The episode was written by Gillian Horvath, who was also a Highlander writer. She had gotten involved with the fan community on HIGHLA-L, where a fan named Julie Beamer was one of her special friends. Hence, a hooker who gets killed right at the beginning of the Forever Knight episode was named in her honor, and her .sig file when she occasionally posts on the list says “Julie Beamer, Dead Hooker.” Even now, after all this time.

There are a couple of Earth 2 episodes with notations. The funniest one from an obsessed-fan standpoint is “After The Thaw,” tape 42. It’s labeled “Frozen Terrian – Kurgan.” This refers to the premise, which was that a dead Terrian was found frozen in ice one day. When it started to thaw, some infection it had made the John Danziger character, who was played by Clancy Brown, go berserk (he was the Kurgan in the original Highlander movie). Basically, he went nuts and went running around in a cave, chasing people and yelling in a very Kurganish voice. For some reason, this made Clancy Brown’s many fans very happy, this Kurganish voice (“Deeeevon! DEEEEEEEEVOOOOONN!!!”). It’s still funny to me, and its funny that I thought it was important enough to label the tape with it, all those years ago.

Speaking of the Kurgan, the final tape is from Clancy Brown’s appearance on the Jon Stewart talk show. This dates from around the time that Earth 2 was “on the bubble,” and he made a lot of appearances online and on talk shows trying to get word of mouth and fan interest up, trying to get the show renewed. When he came out from backstage, he had a small camera with him, and he was grinning madly. He proceeded to take photos of the audience, because this was the first time he’d appeared on a national television show and he wanted to remember the moment or prove it to his family or something. Jon apparently thought that was pretty dorky for they Kurgan, but laughed anyway. Then he hauled out a huge sword of some kind from under the coffee table, and pretty much acted like a big fanboy, trying to get Clancy to swing it around. Then they talked about Earth 2 and how crappy the network was (NBC) and how hard it was to keep quality shows on TV, when crap shows stayed on forever. That’s pretty much it.

Like I said, it’s a whole bunch of weird shit. Check out the extended entry and see what I mean.

iTunes: City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra: Highlander: Training Montage: The Fantasy Album: Adventure and Fantasy Film Themes [4:45]

Technorati Tags: Highlander, Earth2, Space Precinct, Videotapes