You can find almost anything on the internet. It’s a modern day cliché and like the rest of them, it tends to be true. The internet gained a couple of documents lately that make it more true. Am I referring to all the secrets divulged by WikiLeaks? No. I’m thinking of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica bible and Gene Roddenberry’s original 1964 pitch for Star Trek. The fangirl inside of me let loose the squee’ing equivalent of a barbaric yawp when I heard about each of these downloadable pdfs. The same fangirl devoured them with relish, slurping up all the secrets and details I could. But the part of me that forever regrets watching the television show that divulged the how-to of every magic trick was a little sad.
Where’s the mystery? Did I really need to know that Roddenberry’s original name for the captain was not James T. Kirk, but Robert April? The Galactica bible doesn’t give away specific secrets, but the pages are filled with background and tidbits like about how the checklist used by the Battlestar in during the FTL sequence was gleaned from an Apollo 15 lunar mission checklist. It’s fun to learn, but what does it add to my enjoyment of the series?
It’s almost too much. We’re peeking too far behind the curtains. We’re using laser vision to destroy them and look directly into the heart of the theater. Joss Whedon touches on this in a song he belts on Commentary! The Musical (the musical commentary for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog) called “Heart, Broken.” He explains how modern audiences expect making-ofs, deleted scenes, and all the extras. We will pick things apart until the mystery is gone, torn apart by our greedy claws.
I’m torn. I can relate to both perspectives. The fan in me wins though. I want to know all of it. It makes me the perfect fan. I am the person that will buy a fourth edition of a DVD if it has one extra hour of behinds the scenes footage. And I know I’m far from the only one.
