The title sounds stupid, but hear me out.
14 year old me just moved to Florida, I had very few friends, not much to do, but I did have well-to-do parents that gave me a tab at the local movie rental store, Prime Time Video. (See my rambling blog post about rental stores,
here.) At the time, I knew I liked fantasy and Sci-Fi movies, but being from a house of 7, I never really got too much of a choice of movies when we went to the threate or rental store. I had seen Goonies, Neverending Story and Labyrinth enough times to know those were my very favorite. I played a lot of Nintendo and Super Nintendo and loved the RPGs of the time. For the first time ever, I had an area to call my own I didn't have to share with anyone, my own TV, hell, my own living room! Our house had two of them. This is when I discovered Legend.
The frequent watch-a-thons
I was crazy about AOL during this time of my life. 1994 brought us a way to connect with people online VIA American Online which was just insane for my parents to fathom back them. My new step-mother supplied me with a top of the line Macintosh, dedicated phone line, printers, modem, a
Conneteix Quick Cam.. I even had an AV capture device which was most likely an expensive add-on for its day. Locked in my room with the power of the internet for the first time, I would get on AOL MTV chat rooms and troll people and try to get on TV when they had their AOL/Connect streams to live TV. For the uninitiated, the chat room talk was displayed on live TV on MTV alongside videos. Instead of commenting on the video, I would swear and say amazingly horrible things. VH1 had their own version as well, and it was easier to get on TV. Late one night in those very chat rooms, VH1 had an 80's movie marathon after midnight and the first movie playing: Legend.
Pop Up Video was huge at the time, and was on all the time. Old music videos would play, and these thought bubbles would pop up on the screen with little behind the scenes factoids. They applied this to the movies shown late at night, and I got to watch Legend for the first time, and it included these pop-ups. I was absolutely fascinated by the music and made notes on my computer. This was not that first time I've heard Tangerine Dream playing, but the first time it was explained to me, the viewer. The popups said who did the soundtrack, the directors.. the alternate score, multiple different versions.. So many cool inside facts about an obscure movie. I rented the movie that next day, and watched it day and night. I had to know more about this movie, I needed something.
The Discovery
I rollerbladed to the mall the next weekend, and went to Tape World as a part of my normal location. I searched the movie soundtracks and saw Legend, the Tangerine Dream Score on tape. It was super cheap, I want to say it was $5 on sale. They were closing out tapes and making room for CD's, and change the name of the store eventually to FYE. I listened to the tape over and over, pulling out sound bytes and converting them to System 7 Sounds on my Mac. Keyword Download on AOL allowed people like me to upload files to a database for everyone to enjoy, 2MB limit, but upload as many as you want. I used my capture device to snag all the quotes I loved from the movies, music from the tape.. maybe 50 uploads in total. It was a labor of love, I'll tell ya.. As the downloads of all these quotes and snips of the music gained some popularity, I was asked to upload the WAV versions for Windows, which I was happy to do. While this was going on, I was taking screen shots from the movie, grainy 320x240 grabs from the over watched VHS copy I perpetually rented. The video store allowed me to keep it after 5-6 rentals, they knew my parents and didn't miss it, so just told me to keep it. Uploading and editing, cleaning up photos, learning about sound and file conversation was amazing for me and kept me busy. People reached out to me and Instant Messaged me, and we would talk for hours about the movie Legend. I had a friend group and a custom chat room of about 15 people that would meet up and just chat about the movie. The notes I wrote down from the Pop-up video made me an instant expert on the subject of the movie. The screen shots and access to clips, sounds, and a pictures taken straight from the VHS copy that I could access at any time gave me a feeling of importance to this little community.
Someone pointed out there was 3-4 websites on the subject, small little websites with a few pictures and sometimes sounds and such. I loved reading why other people thought the movie was important to them and their little stories about how they discovered the movie. There was a website which is now considered the de-facto omnibus on the subject,
The Legend Faq @ Figment Fly. It had a few factoids and some limited information and links to other sites that had some information. Maybe three pages total. I talked with Sean Murphy and to a smaller degree Geoff Wright about the information I have and the technology I have access to. They mailed me a VHS copy of a Japanese rip of the European version of the movie, and with some help from their friend Dragonstarr from Drexel, I started my own small website using AOL's hosting and starting ripping straight video and screen shots, and even more sounds for download.
Popularity and Limitations
AOL was at the time limited to 2MB per screen name. I was not able to upload my vast archive of media, and they did not allow links to other places to play media directly through HTML. I taught myself how to make a website using Adobe Sitemill, the precursor to Dreamweaver with help from some friends in the Legend community, and my new tech friends I met at school. I learned Adobe Photoshop and got a free copy from school, and became adept at converting images to GIF, and cutting them down to the smallest size possible to have a presentable website. I abused the loop hole of having a max of 5 screen names, so I had a total of 10MB of website space to play with, Advertisement free. At the time if you had a site and could afford hosting, it was super rare. Most fan-sites of the day had a few horrible backgrounds, a handful of low res pictures taken from someone else and that was it. When I rolled out my site, it looked professional and polished and offered new information and high-res custom art that some sites did not have the space to host. Behold,
Demon's Page of Legend:
I offered two versions of the site, one text only and one that was full color with Adobe Photshop textures. Links, images that I could downscale enough, sounds and even a few very very limited low quality video clips were available. I converted all the characters from the movie in to character sheets for various roleplaying systems. I organized and moderated a chat room, bulletin board and RPG. I met some really great lifelong friends (Oona/Kali) and together we found out lots more about the movie, (Daven Blix/Stepahnie?) found and typed up scripts bought out of magazines and Ebay, and provided a wealth of information to the Legend Faq to complete everything we knew about the movie. After a year of having the website open, it amassed 47,000 unique visitors, and I joined various webrings, including the Legend Ring, below.
There was such a firm limitation on the space allowed on the internet for webhosting, I was looking for a way to upload more information, and I met another college student from Drexel that Dragonstarr introduced me to. He, like Dragonstarr, had unlimited access to Drexel.edu and could host thousands of megabytes of information for free, just for being a student. We worked out a deal with Umbriel? that I would upload all the stuff to him and he would host it. His site was the first flash site I've ever seen, and so professional and was a repository for all the 640x480 scans, videos and high quality MP3 sounds from the movie. I was overly protective, and would often call out people by name and site that used the images and sounds that we worked so hard to preserve on our own web spaces. I did eventually find a way around the 2MB limit on space and released my own cut down site with just clips from the movie and rips from the soundtrack, and released my vice-like grip on the community. After all, I was stealing myself. Yes, I did the work, but anyone could do it with the right PC and equipment. Right around 1997-1998, I moved, met some new online Legend friends who were starting their own sites, and I helped lots of people join the ring and find their little niche on the web. I loved helping, and I didn't have to do big updates to my site anymore. Figment Fly took a new approach with their site and stop crediting people for getting information or working on certain projects. There
was a specific thank you on their page to me for helping for so many years, and it was removed, but I said nothing, as I had not talked to those guys in years. Our information was near complete, the scripts were typed up from hard copies and 3 different versions of the movie were picked apart and documented. One of my friends Daven Blix who had a really great site with Fan Fiction, typed the March 10th script by hand and offered free printed copies, who was very instrumental in attracting people to cosplaying the movie, was no longer credited by the site that we idolized and help get all the information they needed. Artist friends of mine who made sculptures and props for the movie that got me in tough with people to get a Convention started, all lost interest, and by 1999, my senior year in high school, I added my Fan Fiction to my page, and announced this would be my last update. On May 4th 2000, I accessed my site for the last time, downloaded all the files and HTML and announced I would be leaving the page up mirrored on a friends site for archive purposes.
I learned so Much.
I learned HTML, sound and video editing, how to write, basic Adobe Photoshop skills, and so much more. I won two awards for my site in national design competitions. Mind you, this was the mid-90's and there was not many sites out there. I met some really great people that had a huge impact on my life. The journey was insane, and to be at the beginning of a cult awakening for a film at such a pivotal time... its crazy to think about. The things myself and others put in place in the mid-90's built the foundation to encourage people to fan-out about a movie, gain access to the music and information they wanted after the movie was over. Don't tell me you never watched a movie and said to yourself, "Do you think there is more? There has to be more." Even googling the script seems so trivial now-a-days, but then, if you had access to the internet and used a search engine to find who was in the movie, your only outlet for information was one of these fan-sites. There was no IMDB, no google, just some limited Yahoo and Webcrawler. You relied on these fan sites to point you in the direction of people that had the information you were looking for. Link portals like the one on my site would have descriptions of the sites in question. Want to learn more about the ring Lili wore in the movie and where to get your own? Go to this page, this guy will make them custom for you for a price. Looking for poems and stories? Right here. And so on, and so on. We all loved and promoted each other and made it as easy as possible for visitors to find the information they were looking for. It was such an innocent time, so free to say and do what you wanted, and so much fun.
The End?
I was listening to a podcast while driving to Miami for work, which I often do to kill time, and the next recommended podcast was about Legend. They talked about the different scores, the cult status of the movie, and talked little factoids and information about the cast. I listened to this podcast until the very end, and almost cried when it was over. They did mock some parts, but they did a great job encapsulating what people like about it, the magic of it all, and how timeless it looks on that massive sound stage. Oh the glitter! Tom Cruises naked legs everywhere, creepy butchers from Hell and the majesty of Tim Curry. The community lives on in these pod casts and youtube reviews. The sites are all but gone, the only way you can get to them would be on archive.org. Anything made on Geocities or Yahoo or Tripod is gone. Gone, to the ether. It's a shame, but I'm happy how it all happened. When someone says a movie is a "Cult classic", I now know how these things come to be, what started it all, and who was there at the beginning.
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Update 8/29/21 - If you were part of this Legend community way back when and want to reconnect, we made a discord to join for some of the people who have read this and reached out: https://discord.gg/fE3RvWTZ
