Notes on Invention: (1) Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

December 18th, 2007 Posted in Invention

Buck appears to have been made-up by writer Philip Francis Nowlan in 1928 in two short novels published by Amazing Stories. Rogers’ original first name was Anthony. He has appeared in a variety of media since–newspaper comic strips, radio fiction, television, movies. He is one of a line of imaginary space cadets. In somber circus trapeze uniform, with neither buttons or tie, these people travel in fat torpedo shaped space ships out beyond the daily cycle of earth to explore and to encounter good and bad fantastic creatures, all with basically human shapes. Buck had two constant companions: the beautiful space girl, Wilma, and the bald-headed, glasses wearing academic, the dotty professor, Dr. Huer.

A line of space equipment was issued for the kids, including an oversize zap gun. It seems that a business corporation got control of Buck’s persona and destiny. He became the construct of a coordinated group of industrial workers–writers, artists, actors, and assorted technicians–sweating out in the 20th century the story of a 25th century fantasy.

The audience has been segmented by the need for this  particular style of adventure and by when and how the character was introduced. He has been around for over 75 years, filtered through multiple makers and media, and finally hidden behind more successful and later entries into the genre. Buck Rogers now is so fractured as a cultural image that a unified idea of him in our cultural consensus does not exist. The unity supplied by the need and imagination of the original artist is missing.

When the actual leap into space occurred its managers seemed to refuse all references to its imaginary past. Armstrong and company went beyond the clouds and left old Buck and all of his cultural associates behind as sloughed off texts and pictures.

I am troubled and I am not sure why. It may be the democratic disconnect–the actual space cadets and their managers and engineers are not one with the rest of us. Maybe a segmented cultural gap separates them out. They and their vehicles are alien to us in themselves, acting as substitutes for the long anticipated Martians. A few multimillionaire space tourists are supposed to represent the rest of us.

A similar failure of cultural recall when the first non-stop, non-refueled airplane went around the world and failed to commemorate its imaginary precursor in James Thurber’s short story “The Greatest Man in the World.” The pilots took off, flew their daunting course, and returned and neither they nor any of the public commentators (that I could tell) gave a though to Thurber. His character Smurch was left back in the dusty archives.

More abstractly note the panel of writers, philosophers, and ordinary people concerned with man’s escape from earth, up and out. A member of this panel makes up a character who expresses this challenge/mystery in what will become a formulaic way–what I am calling the space cadet aboard his space ship. Very quickly this character and his tall tale are captured by commercial interests and the continued development of the story becomes industrial factory-like work. It is co-opted (or even possibly invented within) the dominant socio-economic form. The number of media of transmission and the associated manufacturing of tools and toys increases and over time the shared cultural image wains (if it ever existed). The public is segmented–a spreading variety of ideas and images. The concept, Buck Rogers, becomes less and less precise and more and more fuzzy until it eventually approaches extinction.

Meanwhile our comments here, shared with so few, in calling attention to the process has the possibility of contradicting it. Yeah, right!

Blast off.