1996 Star Trek Merch

[lennymacb]

Howdy! My screenplay takes place in rural North Dakota in November 1996, and two teenage characters are fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know the bat'leth as a weapon was introduced in the show long ago, but when did replicas and toys become widely sold? Would it be realistic for a working-class young woman to have a mini bat'leth she could use as a knife in that year? I also read that the mek'leth (smaller Klingon scimitar) was introduced in DS9 and also appeared in First Contact. How early were replicas of those available to fans?
Thanks a million to you all! Would also love to hear any other miscellaneous stories or details of the TNG+DS9 fandom of the 90s, to give some extra oomph and care to an underrepresented community :)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

There were definitely no licensed replicas at the time that were actually sharp unless you made one yourself.

Star Trek merchandise was much more geared towards kids, though there was a huge con scene which people did make weapons for, and carrying actual weapons was much less regulated than it became later. All you'd see in stores - even comics shops - were action figures and appropriately sized accessories. Costume shops had Starfleet uniforms with phasers, but I was active in Trek fandom at the time and don't remember any commercially available Klingon weapons, even plastic ones. There was a huge DIY scene, though - I was in Melbourne, Australia at the time and there were so many cosplayers (not that we called it cosplay then!)

So yes, she could have one but she would have had to have bought it at a con from someone who made it, and it would not be cheap or easily available. It would be much more likely that she would construct her own from whatever she had available and call it a bat'leth. I grew up in a rural area and knives were pretty common tools and it wouldn't be weird for a teenage girl to have one or several.

[winterbird]

Ooo yeah the Con scene, replica weapons of real metal from memory were not allowed to be sharp by law, at least here, and they could easily fetch around $150-upper-4 figures AUD because they were often being made by real metalworkers/smiths.

But there also had to be demand, which there would have been in some places in the world, and less so others. Like, rural North Dakota 1996 would have to have the conventions + access + metalsmiths + fandom to sustain an exchange like that in the first place. I know Melbourne could. But Western Australia couldn't in that time period (because we had such a small pop. the number of fandom replica metalsmiths we had was *incredibly* low in number. I remember because I got a replica knife from one (v small, cost me like $270 on lay-by lol)). Melbourne had a higher and more fandom-focused pop. and could do it.

So I imagine regional variations impact this a lot too! (And yeah fully agree that the character would most likely have a regular knife that she'd call it a bat'leth, that's the kind of thing we would've done. :D )

[antimonyschnuck]

Seconding what everyone else is saying - except that I'd have said there was LOTS and lots of plastic merch - but maybe not compared to what's available now.
It was rare to find even good jewelry that wasn't plastic, though (I had a metal Bajoran earring and com badge, acquired ca 96)
But there've always been cheese knives! (Not at cons :D) Some looked very Klingon (wavey with pointy holes) and we pointed that out in front of shop windows. So one could have one of those and call it a Klingon dagger.

[lennymacb]

I've never paid much attention to cheese knives so I didn't have a mental picture of one but I just looked it up and OMG, some of these look SO Klingon! How fun!!

[antimonyschnuck]

Yay :D and Qapla'!

[dsrtao]

Possibly useful:
https://fancons.com/events/schedule.php?year=1996
The list of SF conventions happening in 1996. One of your characters might have gone to one of these, or had a friend who did. Note that while there wasn't anything close, many of these cons happened in college towns, so a slightly older friend might have brought something back over the summer break.

[jadelennox]

Would it be realistic for a working-class young woman to have a mini bat'leth she could use as a knife in that year?

I believe it would have to be homemade (or made by another fan).

Merch used to be way more expensive, and there was less of it. There were action figures, of course. And I remember that around 1994 our local Comic Book Store Guy had a TNG communicator pin that he embarrassingly used to attempt to flirt, and in 1996 we had a life sized cardboard cutout of Riker—how? I can't remember!—that we brought to a friend's wedding. More rare stuff was often limited edition and pricey, and an actual edged bat'leth would have fallen into that bucket, I think.

The low end merch wasn't too expensive for a working class woman to own, but you definitely had to be a more hard-core fan to justify it. The relative prices were higher, and it was way less normal. I was in a social group that was as Trekkie and nerdy as you could be without being con-goers or zine subscribers, and I legit can't think of anyone who owned merch besides action figures or posters.

I've skimmed through the ads in old issues of Starlog magazine I can see online, and I don't see much besides action figures.

[winterbird]

I started working in Toys R Us in 1997, and I can say we had no Star Trek action figures at all. (Let alone merch or anything else). We had a TON of Star Wars, and I'm certain that larger TRUs might have had some toys, but as another commenter said, merch/toys used to be far rarer and often (not always) more expensive. Some were collectibles only found at specialty comic book stores (which I don't have as much knowledge of, sorry!).

This is actually one of the reasons why historical toys/collectibles are worth so much more from that era for shows like this. There was just fewer of them overall. Smaller and more limited manufacture runs when they happened, and often zero global reach (because this was an era where even pirating online was not really happening unless it was a single MP3 that took the whole night, so you couldn't guarantee selling your toy line throughout the world, and you often had to wait however many year/s it took for another country to buy your season of a show, and air it. Back then it wasn't abnormal to wait 1-4 years for countries like Australia and the UK to view US seasons of something, because there was no fear of being spoilered globally, except on Usenet groups.

That profoundly altered the way action figures, merch, and collectibles overall were made (if they were at all), and distributed.

Making stuff yourself was far far more common (it wasn't like you could look online when image files could take a very long time to download on dial up internet and e-commerce was not really a thing and certainly not trusted by parents). Your teens are far more likely to be making their own versions of toys out of cardboard etc. or fake swords from a toy store, than they are to be finding anything real. This is also why games of imagination were so huge. It was a lot easier to just 'play pretend' in that sense. Your working-class young woman is FAR more likely to have a real knife that she's pretended was a mini bat'leth for so long she actually forgot it was just a regular knife.

It's possible your guys might have gotten their hands on the 1996 Tribble release though! Afaik there were collectible promo tribbles in different colours, as well as a DS9 action figure range (though we didn't carry it) that was pretty cheap, and there was a digital watch/clock set. I don't recall any replica weapons or anything even at the comic book stores I used to go to back then. But I'm in Australia and like I said, back then, we weren't getting 1996 Star Trek in 1996 unless we had friends in the USA who were recording it onto VHS and then shipping it to us for a LOT of money via pen-palling or Usenet / Yahoo groups back in the day (like how I got my X-Phile merch back in the 1990s sadklfjsa where I had to go to the shops to pay to convert the Australian dollar into USD get a paper money order in USD and put that money order in an envelope and send it to the USA and hope that a person just hadn't fleeced me, only to get - three months later - a little pin and a zine and some fanfiction - which was how we did things back then! Lmao)

[harpers_child]

The comic book store closest to my southern United States college in the early 2000s had a case with keyrings of various nerdy stuff. I know there was a communicator and a phaser, but can't remember if there was a bat'leth. I have no idea if it was officially licensed or bootleg merch. The store carried both kinds of items.

I wasn't in Trek, but in general late 90s fandom mostly got posters and calendars with the occasional action figure. I did a lot of cutting things out of magazines and the TV guide and making collages. (I was also in high school at the time so couldn't afford much.) Maybe a t-shirt at Hot Topic. Certainly not at other stores. Graphic tees were just becoming a thing.

What is your character using her knife for? If it's opening mail, one made out of scrap metal sheeting like from air duct might work. I knew a couple of guys who "made knives" from stuff like that in high school. With layers of cardboard and duct tape for handles.

[lennymacb]

She's slashing a bully's tire, lol. From all these comments, it sounds like she's either gonna have to shell out some serious money and effort, or DIY it out of something heavy-duty!

[hitokage]

an option to consider: the SCA

You wouldn't be able to buy a recreation blade AT an event, but could meet a working blacksmith with the skill to make a replica blade. A full-size bat'leth or even a replica dagger might be out of her price range, but something scaled down to the size of a couple inches might not be so out of the realm of possibility.

The internet in 1996 was a wild and crazy place, but dedicated fans had little trouble finding each other once they had access to a computer (personal/home computers were still a bit of a luxury, but this was prime AOL CDs in EVERYTHING era). Forums sprung up like mushrooms and there were so many of them because discovery was sometimes a mess. If she was really serious about her fandomness in this way and really, really wanted to get into replica blades, leads to makers could be found. On the other hand, she'd probably have a completely separate online persona to protect herself - she might have one handle for general fandom spaces, something completely different for fanfic spaces (if she visited such sites at all), and neither would be connected to her real name or specific location.

[full_metal_ox]

This is a big If, since she’d have to learn of its existence, but there was the Bud K catalog (AKA the Mall Ninja Wishbook) which I can attest was around in the mid-90’s; their wares were known to show up in flea markets. I unfortunately don’t recall exactly when he began, but by 2003, a gentleman named Robert Shiflett was sure making copyright-circumventing bat’leth-adjacent objects that could put somebody’s eye out.

From the Summer 2004 catalog:



And a 2003 Shiflett bladed fantasy weapon: https://tiny.cc/455x001

[lennymacb]

Whoaaa, how cool! Thanks for the resource!

[full_metal_ox]

I see that your account is newly created; welcome to Dreamwidth!

[lennymacb]

Thank you! It's been a very lovely time so far!

[full_metal_ox]

Here’s an item that a poster on r/mallninjashit reports having been gifted in the 90’s; warning for derisive commentary: https://www.reddit.com/r/mallninjashit/comments/1q3d9ql/from_the_90s/

[beatrice_otter]

I grew up in a decent sized town in the Pacific Northwest. I loved Star Trek from the time I was a small child; we watched it as a family, religiously every week. My parents loved science fiction and we had copies of classic SF/F books in the house.

The only piece of merch we had was a child's halloween costume I wore one year.

I had almost no contact with any SF/F fan outside my family. There were other geeks in my high school class, but not many of them, and I wasn't friends with any of them. This was back when being a geek was a real oddity. It was not a good thing to be.

There were fan groups online, and I knew they existed. But I could not find them. For Star Trek, Usenet was the biggie; arts.startrek was the general one, and arts.startrek.creative and arts.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated (ascem) were the two that hosted fanfic, fanfic discussion, costume creation, prop creation, and everything else creative.

In my senior year in high school (1999-2000), I learned that the school librarian was a SF/F fan, but he was a terrible snob who thought that no tv show or movie was actually "real" science fiction; just crap for the masses. Books were the only true science fiction, in his eyes. That year I also attended my first convention. It was really disappointing; it billed itself as a convention, but was really just a one-day event for Jimmy Doohan to sign autographs. I went hoping to make friends, and didn't actually get to talk to anybody.

In college, I found other people who were into SF/F, and also found online communities of fans, and things grew from there.

I spent several years in rural North Dakota in the 2010s, and to the best of my knowledge I was the only SF/F fan in the area.

So as for what it was like to be a teenage SF/F fan in the 90s ... the answer is, it was very lonely.

[coyotegestalt]

Rural nerdy 90s kid here (PA not ND): Seconding a lot of the above, fandom existed but would have been hard to have a lot of contact with, and there was not much merch but making your own blade out of whatever you had around is very plausible (an old leaf spring or mower blade and an auto-shop grinder doesn't make a good knife, but that certainly didn't stop us from trying).

Fandom existed in places online more than it did in person in most rural areas (I hit college in the mid-90s and my universe seriously expanded when I jumped from the local BBS with mail forwarding to the college servers with Gopher and Usenet and IRC and webrings); but from my own experiences, remember that even dialup internet in rural areas at this point is slow, unreliable, and expensive, if it's available at all. Many rural areas just didn't have the phone wiring that could handle a stable modem connection, and "the internet" was a thing you had to go to the library in town for, to use one of their computers for maybe 30min/day. So not great for a frustrated young person looking for connection!

Two fans who managed to find each other in this place and time might end up huddling together around a CRT monitor finding and printing out fan-created commentary and resources about the show to tide themselves over between episodes. They might also share my frustration at the time that the (very distant and static-y) "local" channel didn't reliably show the episodes in order.

Also, speaking of merch, around that time I remember how delighted I was to get this as a (birthday, I think?) present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_U.S.S._Enterprise_NCC-1701-D_Blueprints

[coyotegestalt]

(Sorry, had to go do something work-related, continuing that thought...)

That's the kind of thing I recall being the main non-child-focused "merch" at the time - books, posters, art collections. I had at least a half a dozen of this sort of thing from TNG and TOS, and even as I moved into the more fic-focused side of fandom, I remember discussions of "well, where would they fit" and similar.

I don't know if any of that reminiscence is helpful (and kinda depends on whether your protagonists' nearest town has a Walden with a tall enough bottom shelf for oversize SF :) ).

[lennymacb]

Those blueprints are so cool 🤩🤩 Thanks for the link!! If it ends up not being relevant to my writing, at the very least it's something to put on my own birthday wishlist 😍

[full_metal_ox]

Here’s an old Google Groups USENET post from alt.fandom.misc, listing science-fiction and fantasy conventions scheduled in 1996. None are mentioned for either Dakota; your character’s nearest options that year would’ve been in Winnipeg and St. Paul/Minneapolis.

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fandom.misc/c/hUFQ3DcsiUs

The likeliest source of U.S.-based Fandom Elders who’d be able to fill you in on Klingon fandom history (and its artifacts) would be the Klingon Assault Group, a club originating in the Great Lakes area in 1989; they provide security at cons and perform charity work.

https://www.kag.org/

https://www.facebook.com/KlingonAssaultGroup/

https://klingon.wiki/En/KlingonAssaultGroup

[full_metal_ox]

A couple personal experiences of mine from the time involving the Klingon Assault Group:

1. My duties in my old anime club included sending notices to the local papers and distributing flyers at local libraries, bookstores, and comic shops. One member at the time was also a Grande Dame of southern Ohio Trek fandom; although Trek was never a primary interest of mine, this degree of connection was the reason I found myself handing out business cards for the Klingon Assault Group.

Remember how extremely niche and marginalized fandom culture was back then (anime fans were commuting from out of state to attend our meetings), and remember the tendency of a lot of otherwise undersocialized genre fans to jump in and assume the other person knows what they’re talking about.

The wording of those cards neglected to specify exactly what the Klingon Assault Group was; I had to go and hand-letter “STAR TREK FAN CLUB” on each card to counter the impression that I was publicizing some sort of militia.

2. When the first (and what would turn out to be the only) Third Rock took place 30 August-1 September 1996 at the Dayton, Ohio International Airport Inn, Klingons were very much the flavor of the year, running the charity Jail-n-Bail, posing for the news media, and monopolizing the masquerade (I seem to recall that all eight stage participants were portraying Klingons.)

The standout was a baby-faced little Cabbage Patch doll of a woman who won on the novel twist of her character: amidst all the gruff warrior posturing, she was a Klingon tailor, and her presentation was her sales pitch, cheerily touting the battle-worthiness of her leather bracers and bustiers. (On a Doylist level, darned if similar leather goods weren’t conveniently for sale at her and her husband’s stall in the Dealers’ Room.)

(As for your $64,000 question: were there bat’leths, and if so, what was their provenance? Unfortunately, I’m not the person to answer that; this is the province of Storyland where I was living at the time:

)

[akinoame]

So I can't speak to any weapon replicas, but I can say that there were action figures and ships during that time.

My brother (read: my father) had a sizeable collection of TNG action figures. I'm not sure who the maker was, if it was Mattel or anyone. But they had probably the whole cast.

One thing I definitely remember was the ships. Dad had the Playmates battle-damaged Enterprise-D displayed prominently in our living room when I was in elementary school. And for reasons I still do not understand, I was terrified of it and refused to go in the living room. I don't know how much it would have cost back then, but considering we were a 5-person family on a single income, it might be doable for your teens, if they save enough for it.