Where we come from
I went from trains to space ships right around five years old. I can't say I know when or why exactly, but I do remember watching The Six Million Dollar Man, Space 1999 and reruns of Star Trek right around that time so it would seem that somehow they caught my attention and were instrumental in the change in my interests. Of course when Star Wars came out when I was eight, with Galactica, Buck Rogers and so on hot on its heels, that pretty much cinched it permanently.
I actually have a drawing from that transition period. My parents found it in an old file folder a couple of years ago. It has drawings of trains on one side of the paper and on the other it has a very V2-like rocket that says "US ARMEE" - lol!
I was drawing space stuff all the time. I remember in school drawing intricately detailed drawings of Colonial Vipers flying across my class notes. I drew a big Galactica as well as a farewell gift for a friend that moved away too.
But certainly our stories aren't unique. Many of my friends have similar tales of growing up. A lot of people I work with in visual effects were inspired to get into this line of work by Star Wars.
We're really products of a relatively small window of time. One where space travel was still new and exciting - heck we had just landed on the moon and people were still wrapping their heads around the implications of that. Television shows and their audiences were just beginning to accept what sort of technologies would be possible, and believable, in the near and distant future. More realistic things that were a far cry from the rocket ships, flying saucers, and ray guns of previous generations.
And then there was us, with our young malleable minds, being bombarded with an amazing new future without the burden of disbelief. Imagining a future with fantastic technologies was no longer in the realm of a few visionaries. It also wasn't the head-in-the-clouds fantasy that was just too bizarre for those just a generation or two back. These things are tangible for us, they may be out of our reach but we as a collective whole had a vision of the future unlike any previous generation.
We were born right smack in the middle of this window and the first generation that, for as long as we can remember, have looked at the moon saying "oh yeah, we've been there."
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