This week on Geekstorians, we’re boldly going into one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture: Star Trek, the franchise that has been cancelled, revived, mismanaged, overextended, rebooted, and pushed through nearly every major shift in modern entertainment.

Born in 1966, cancelled in 1969, and kept alive by fans who refused to accept that decision, Star Trek became something far bigger than a struggling network sci-fi show. It became a constituency. A culture. A future people wanted to believe in.

Dave traces the franchise from NBC’s infamous letter-writing campaign and the death-slot third season, through Lucille Ball’s unexpected role in getting the original series made, the rise of conventions and syndication, the expensive chaos of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the leaner, sharper rescue mission of The Wrath of Khan.

Then it’s into The Next Generation, first-run syndication, Roddenberry’s complicated legacy, the rocky early years, the franchise boom of Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, the Kelvin timeline films, and the streaming era of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy and Strange New Worlds.

Because Star Trek doesn’t survive because it is well run.

It survives because the idea underneath it is too good to kill.

Geekstorians is the Webby-nominated documentary-style podcast from Geektown, exploring the strange, messy, brilliant history of geek culture.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Geekstorians, we’re looking at the leak that punched a hole through Hollywood’s gates.

For years, Fox had Deadpool sitting in development limbo. Ryan Reynolds wanted to make the film properly. Director Tim Miller had test footage. The fans knew exactly what they wanted. The studio, however, remained unconvinced.

Then, in July 2014, fifty-two seconds of Deadpool test footage appeared online.

It wasn’t a trailer. It wasn’t part of a polished marketing campaign. It wasn’t even supposed to be public. But once the footage hit the internet, the reaction was immediate, loud, and impossible for Fox to ignore.

In this episode, Dave traces the long road to Deadpool, from Hollywood’s old gatekeeping model and the internet’s war with studio control, through the disastrous version of Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to the leaked footage that helped turn an unlikely R-rated superhero comedy into a box-office monster.

Along the way, we look at how the success of Deadpool changed the conversation around R-rated comic book films, helped open the door for projects like Logan and Joker, and proved that audiences were no longer just waiting outside the studio gates. Sometimes, they could force the gates open.

This is the story of Ryan Reynolds, Tim Miller, Fox, fandom, the internet, and a red-suited menace who refused to stay in development hell.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Season 2 Episode 6 of Geekstorians, Dave digs into one of the strangest turnarounds in blockbuster history.

After Tim Burton redefined Batman for the big screen, Warner Bros. slowly pushed the franchise away from gothic weirdness and towards something brighter, louder, more commercial, and far more toy-friendly. The result was 1997’s Batman & Robin — a film so spectacularly misjudged it didn’t just flop, it effectively shut Batman down for years.

But that failure turned out to be the point.

This episode explores how the collapse of Batman & Robin gave Warner Bros. the one thing it didn’t realise it needed: a blank canvas. With the franchise too damaged to continue as it was, the studio eventually handed Batman to Christopher Nolan, first with Batman Begins, then with The Dark Knight — a film that didn’t just restore the character, but changed how Hollywood looked at superhero cinema.

It’s a story about studio panic, merchandising logic, franchise collapse, and the uncomfortable truth that sometimes the best version of something only exists because the previous version failed hard enough to clear the ground.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with the moment virtual worlds stopped being just games and started becoming laboratories.

In ‘Virtual Worlds, Real Consequences’, Dave looks at three very different digital worlds — World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Second Life — and the very real human behaviour they exposed once thousands of people were let loose inside them.

It starts with World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood incident, when a raid debuff escaped into the wider game and created a plague across major cities. What looked like a game bug became something stranger: an accidental model of how people behave during an epidemic, later cited in real-world pandemic research.

From there, the episode moves into EVE Online, where CCP built a universe with minimal intervention and players responded by creating their own politics, economies, infiltrations, betrayals and wars. This is the world of the Guiding Hand Social Club heist, the Band of Brothers collapse, the Council of Stellar Management, and the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, a battle so vast it was covered like a real military event.

Then comes Second Life, the platform that looked, for a while, like the future of the internet. A world built around ownership, virtual land, and real-money exchange, it drew in businesses, media companies and futurists who thought the metaverse had arrived. What followed was less a clean technological revolution than a reminder that the internet always brings people with it, and people tend to arrive carrying chaos.

If the earlier episodes in Season 2 were about collapse, bankruptcy and institutional failure, this one is about something more revealing: what happens when designers build systems, step back, and let human beings do the rest.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with the corporate disaster that accidentally redrew modern pop culture.

In ‘The Fire Sale Blueprint’, Dave looks at how Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s led to one of the strangest and most important chain reactions in film history. As the company collapsed under debt, many of its biggest characters were licensed or sold off in deals that looked sensible at the time and faintly insane in hindsight.

Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and others ended up in other studios’ hands. What Marvel was left with looked, at the time, like the second-string cupboard. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, The Avengers. Characters with history, but not the kind of obvious Hollywood heat attached to Spider-Man or the X-Men.

That bad hand turned out to be the hand that changed everything.

This episode follows the path from Ronald Perelman’s debt-loaded takeover of Marvel, through the bankruptcy fight involving Carl Icahn, Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad, to the strange reality in which the company’s most famous heroes became someone else’s blockbuster and the leftovers became the foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It is also the story of how Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man proved the value of Marvel characters on screen, while Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. helped turn the characters nobody wanted into the centre of the biggest shared universe in film history.

If the earlier episodes in Season 2 were about collapse and survival, this one is about something slightly stranger: how a financial disaster became a design document.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with one of the strangest survival stories in geek culture.

In ‘The Wilderness Years’, Dave looks at what happened after Doctor Who disappeared from television in 1989. No big finale. No proper ending. Just a show the BBC quietly stopped making, and an audience that refused to accept that as the end of the story.

This episode follows the long years when Doctor Who survived off screen through novels, audio dramas, conventions, magazines and the sort of organised fan determination Britain tends to produce whenever an institution behaves like it has misplaced its own brain.

It is also the story of how the people keeping Doctor Who alive during those years turned out to be the people who would eventually bring it back. Writers such as Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell all emerge from the wider culture that kept the show going while the BBC was looking the other way.

From the BBC’s attempts to sideline the series, to the 1996 TV movie, to Big Finish giving the Doctor a life beyond the screen, this is an episode about what happens when a show stops being just a programme and becomes something its audience is not prepared to lose.

If the first two episodes of Season 2 were about collapse and near-disaster, this one is about survival through absence. About what lives on when the official version disappears.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with a story about collapse.

In ‘When Giants Fall’, Dave looks at three companies that once seemed unstoppable — Atari, Sega, and Blockbuster — and how each of them, in very different ways, lost their grip on the future.

From Atari’s collapse after the video game crash of the early 1980s, to Sega’s spectacular inability to get out of its own way during the console wars, to Blockbuster staring straight at the future and somehow deciding it probably wasn’t important, this is an episode about what happens when success turns into inertia.

It is also a story about what comes after.

Because these collapses did not just leave wreckage behind. They reshaped the industries around them. Atari’s fall cleared the way for Nintendo. Sega lost the hardware war but survived as a games company. And Blockbuster became the monument everyone points to when talking about businesses that had every chance to adapt and somehow talked themselves out of it.

If last week’s episode was about a film nearly vanishing, this one is about something bigger: the moment giants stop noticing the ground moving underneath them.

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

If you’d like to support Geekstorians in the Webby People’s Voice Awards, you can vote here:

https://wbby.co/57464N

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 of Geekstorians begins with one of the great near-disasters in modern geek history.

This episode tells the story of how Toy Story 2 nearly disappeared during production, not because of a studio fight or some dramatic Hollywood scandal, but because of a routine command, a failing backup system, and the sort of technical catastrophe that still makes creative people wince.

But this is not just a story about Pixar nearly losing a film.

It is also the perfect starting point for a season about how geek culture survives when everything goes wrong. The glitches, collapses, bad calls, money problems and moments of blind panic behind the films, games and franchises that now feel untouchable.

If Season 1 was about how fandom built itself, Season 2 is about how geek culture kept going when it should probably have fallen apart.

If you'd like to support Geekstorians in the Webby People’s Voice Awards, you can vote here:

https://wbby.co/57464N

Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.