TVSquad

I spent about 15 minutes last night reading a ridiculously detailed summary of the 8(!?) separate timelines that spring into and out of existence throughout the course of the three Back To The Future movies. It just so happened that during my study of "timeline 1985(a)" that my wife happened into my office to ask me what I was up to. When I told her, she sorta sadly shook her head and left muttering something about me "having no life."

Okay, I admit, trolling Wikipedia for the latest breakdown of a 19-year-old movie franchise ain't exactly what Henry David Thoreau meant when he spoke about "sucking the marrow out of life", but there's at least one person in the world who has even less of a life than I do: the guy who wrote the friggin' article in the first place.

And you know what? Thank God for that guy...
The internet has created a lot of great things that we can all agree are great -- awesome blogs like this one, online shopping, and a literal avalanche of pornography. I would like to humbly suggest one more member to the pantheon of internet greatness: the obsessive internet fanboy.

Before the internet, geeky collectors of kitsch and useless information were relegated to underground freak status and this was detrimental to us all. For instance, let's say it's 20 years ago and for or some reason (drugs) you got a hankering for some information about the appropriately named 1983 TV show Manimal (about a man who could turn into animals). Where could you go? There's a chance that one of your neighbors might be a closet Manimal freak with a room full of pictures, videotapes, and quite possibly the head of Michael D. Roberts (who played Manimal's sassy friend Ty), but the odds are slim. Even slimmer are the odds that if you actually had a neighbor like that, he would be willing or socially able to tell you about his Manimal love. You, my mildly-interested-in-Manimal friend, would be out of luck.

Enter the internet! By providing obsessive fanboys with a comfortable interface (a not-judgmental-about-your too-tight-Wolverine-t-shirt computer keyboard) the internet gives fanboys the opportunity to finally share with the world all the hundreds of thousands of bits of useless information they've been collecting.

And we're the beneficiaries! Interested in Manimal? Thanks anonymous web-geek!

How about 600 screencaps from Alf? Right here.

Any questions about the kid who played the human brother to Vickie the robot in Small Wonder? Have fun!

Web 2.0 (a buzzword that I don't understand but thought would look good in this column) has allowed for even greater precision in the sifting of fanboy knowledge. JumpTheShark, IMDB, and especially Wikipedia have taken all this amazing, fetishist knowledge and made it possible for casual geeks and nostalgic normal people to quickly find whatever they're looking for.

Having worked for TV Squad these last few weeks, I've come to appreciate the online presence of obsessive fan boys. No matter how stupid the question -- what color is Bart's favorite hat (red) or how many doors does Maxwell Smart walk through during the credit sequence (7) -- I am never more than a few keywords away from finding an answer. They might still live in their mother's basement or own a Trapper Keeper covered in Happy Days stickers, but they are the guardians of pop ephemera and we all rely on them from time to time.

And they don't even charge for the service! Indeed, the only price that we have to pay for all this is the occasional silly flame-war. So what if TV sites have to deal with having their comments pages filled with a few hardcore fans arguing over which female lead on Knight Rider was better (it was Bonnie). So what if the prevailing fanboy winds sometimes declare certain shows great or sucky without actually having seen them. So what if forty years from now, the sons and daughters of today's fanboys will clog Web 4.0 with the same stupid statements about the 59th season of The Simpsons that their parents use today (the show sucks now, it was better before, blah blah blah). It's a minor vig on the ever-growing mountain of uselessness they contribute to every day.

Of course the Internet is also good at helping to distribute actual knowledge, but it already gets enough credit for that. I think it's about time we stood up and saluted the unsung hero of the internet: the obsessive fanboy!'

I will now open the comments up for all the obsessive fanboys to tell me how wrong I am about... well, everything.