How Friendships Onscreen and Off Fueled Half a Century of Fandom
For the admins of the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive, preserving fanworks and fannish community go hand in hand.
Flamingo only saw one episode of Starsky & Hutch during its original run on TV in the 1970s. “I remember seeing the episode ‘Gillian’ with a friend of mine,” she says. In it, the titular pair of detectives hug, and Starsky tells Hutch, “You're the best friend I got in the whole world.” Flamingo and her friend looked at each other. “Our friendship was new, and we burst into tears,” she says. “We’re still friends today.”
It was that onscreen friendship that she credits with sustaining a fandom that’s now been running for 50 years. “You just don’t see that level of closeness [in most media],” she says. “And don’t we all long for that? Isn’t that a human need?”
When the Starsky & Hutch pilot aired in 1975, fandom in its modern iteration was just beginning to grow, centered on shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and, of course, Star Trek. S&H developed a small following, and fans were producing zines as early as 1977, when issue #1 of Zebra Three was released.
As with many fandoms, though, it was widespread internet adoption in the ’90s that led the S&H fandom to grow exponentially. This was amplified many times over by a coinciding rerun of the show on TNT, which led a fresh wave of viewers towards its central characters.
At the time, Flamingo was involved in the Miami Vice fandom, but wasn’t a particularly devoted fan until she was “pulled into” Starsky & Hutch by friends who considered it a “nicer, kinder place.” She met many other fic writers there—and one of them, Alexis Rogers, decided that she wanted to put her fic online.
“The rest of us were still like, what’s the internet?” says Flamingo. “Why would you want that?” But Rodgers, “wanted her stories where people could get to them.” Flamingo was keen to keep the fandom alive—which meant new people had to get involved, made more difficult since the show had finished airing. Thinking the internet might be a new way to do that, she and several of her friends established the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive, and it’s been running ever since.
The Archive hosts thousands of stories from all eras of the fandom, divided into gen and slash; it can be further broken down into length, related season, and genre (hurt/comfort is massively popular, for example). It also hosts videos, art, zines, and even themed nonograms and wordsearches.
