Back in the day (60s-70s) what pieces of media were at the bottom of the fandom hierarchy? What books, comics or tv shows were looked down upon or seen as lesser/rip-offs/not very good, and have any of those opinions shifted over the decades?
What today we call “furry fandom” was surprisingly very, very normal for the first decade of its’ existence, from the mid-1970s on.
It looked like any other fandom until the mid-1980s., when it took an interesting turn into being “the fandom everyone looks down on,” rightly or wrongly (and I think, for the most part, wrongly – furries, don’t get mad at me for this, I’m on your side here, nobody should be looked down on for enjoying something, or for the guilt-by-association due to scofflaws and rascals in your group).
The beginning of “funny animal fandom” (furry’s original name) was the fanzine Vootie in 1976 which was dedicated to fans of Pogo, Uncle Scrooge, Warner Bros cartoons, Disney/Dell comics, etc., and the key thing is, it didn’t look all that different at all from any of the other comic book fandom fanzines like Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego, or Batmania….except from the beginning, there was a strange kind of angry defensiveness about it all that reminds me of video gamers today, since by that point, funny animal comics had gone out of style and replaced by superheroes and scifi. That pissed off defensiveness would intensify and become a dominant trait of furry fandom that has only recently started to let up.
So, for a while, “funny animal fandom” was very similar to other comic fandoms…but there were signs even from the beginning that it was going to go in a very different direction. An early issue of Vootie had an article entitled “Why is there no sex in funny animal fandom?” One of the early famous artifacts of furry fandom was “Omaha, the Cat Dancer” about a sexy cat girl, which set the tone for a lot of the projects that followed. Imagine if the first superhero comic book ever made had tons and tons of sex scenes, and see how different that genre would become.
Also, I’ve spoken to a lot of people active in fandom in the mid-eighties, and they told me that they remember hearing a story that the earliest furry conventions in the early 1980s like AnthroCon scared away the normies and animation/comic geeks who liked Pogo and Uncle Scrooge comics, because the man who ran the conventions had close contacts to the correctional system, and so a lot of the people who worked at these early events were considered, in their words, “scary jailhouse gay.” I’ve heard that from two different people. Whether it was true or not, by the mid-1980s, furry was established in the minds of people as being sexually deviant.
Also, the reputation of furry fandom got a big hit in the early internet age as being one of the earliest groups that we’d call today a “toxic fandom,” with a lot of high visibility bad behavior. In 1994, the producers of Tiny Toon Adventures, a cartoon made for children, got a lot of unwelcome stalker fans who sent the creators and voice actors perpetually creepy messages. To this day, a lot of the people involved in that series are wary of attending conventions.
The high point (or rather, low point) of this was in 1994, when two men named Dennis Falk and Alan Fishbeck, who had a fixation on the actress Tress MacNeil, sent her various explicit and threatening messages, which forced her to cancel a lot of public appearances. The animators were so incensed that they even included an animated slam to their more aggressively harassing furry fans in the series itself, and eventually, the animators got so sick of it all that they figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. Harassing fans were a major factor in the decision to end the series.
Let me repeat that so this isn’t lost in the tldr of this response:
Tiny Toon Adventures was canceled because of furry stalkers harassing the animators and cast.
Because of this reputation for bad behavior in the early internet, and their tone of angry defensiveness, furries were a favorite target of “Web 1.0” web forum groups like SomethingAwful goons and the gone and forgotten Portal of Evil, who were the ancestors of a lot of modern internet communities like 4chan, which was founded by SA goons (personally I was never a goon myself, but I was a lurker on Portal of Evil). Which brings us to today.
Sandra Soapbox Cosplay 