[Thor Joachim Haga]

I like how these posts remind me of other things typical of the era we’re talking about.

I’ll save any musings on TV watching and themes for the TV theme thread, but two cents on magazine subscriptions:

As I said earlier, I started subscribing to the FSM magazine in 1995, after having seen an ad on the then pretty bare-bones filmmusic.com. Very old-school, there was no Paypal then. I went to the bank, took out 20 dollars from my puny teenage account, and sent them in a letter to Lukas. A couple of years later, I bought ALL preceding issues from an early subscriber, back to the one-page, xeroxed newsletter Lukas sent out in 1990. So I have a complete set of FSM magazines, from 1990 to 2005 (the first part of my own Danny Elfman Buyer’s Guide was in the very last issue, as it happens, the second part in the inaugural online issue).

But in the big box of FSM magazines sent to me from the US (I can only imagine what this would have cost to send today!) were also a number of other film score magazines — Legend, Cinemascore, Music from the Movies, Soundtrack!, Reel Music, The Film Music Notebook, The Cue Sheet and several others. I remember pouring over these that summer (could have been in 1999 or 2000 or something). I have ALL of them still, filling up a cupboard!

This was a great gateway to information before the complete information unload on the internet shortly thereafter, and corresponded neatly with the building of a music collection as well. It really was an explosion of discovery in those years.