Work/Text: Investigating the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

In the mid 1960s, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was the coolest show on television. It was cool in the way media theorist Marshall McLuhan used the term. Debuting the same year that McLuhan's groundbreaking book, Understanding Media, appeared, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. presented a universe in which fantasy and reality collided, interacted, and blended together. It invited audiences to participate and the fans responded, embracing the show as their own. A few years later, some of the same fans, now older, would bring these practices to Star Trek and other favorites, giving birth to a larger, more complex worldwide community that has become Media Fandom. Employing a new methodological approach that considers the creative as well as the economic, the producer as well as the consumer, this book explores how cultural work/text like the Man from U.N.C.L.E. developes through the many dialogues occurring, often simultaneously, between and among various collective partiesm growing from the first spark of an idea into a complex multileveled media ecosystem of multiple relationships, collaborations, interpretations, and communities Read more