DWQ: I want to talk about your Mister Sci-Fi videos. These are amazing videos that you put on your YouTube channel. They’re all fascinating. Some of them you seem to just record them when you’re walking around.
MSZ: The genesis of Mister Sci-Fi was… I was having lunch a couple years ago with my friend Glenn Mazzara. He was the showrunner on The Walking Dead and he was the Executive Producer on The Shield. We’re friends. He said; “You know. You’re such an expert on Science Fiction. You should have your own YouTube channel and just talk about Science Fiction. I thought; well, that would be fun. But I wanted to make it really easy because Space Command is such a huge project, such a huge undertaking that I didn’t want to do anything that was going to be time-consuming.
I wanted it to be easy and fun for me. So I got a YouTube channel and I shoot videos. I’ll shoot them in my office or wherever. I’ll drop in a visual of some kind but more often or not what I do in the morning is I get up and I walk the dog for an hour. So I’ll just be walking the dog in my neighborhood and I’ll just put the camera on me and I’ll just talk about whatever I want to talk about. It might be a Science Fiction novel or a Science Fiction movie or a TV show. I just talk off the top of my head.
DWQ: So you just walk around the neighborhood talking to your phone? I was going to ask if people look at you funny while you’re doing that, but I guess a lot of people are doing that now, particularly in L.A.
MSZ: Well, it’s usually very early in the morning. It’s usually like 7:00 a.m. or earlier, so there’s not a lot of people out on the street. It’s funny because in the video you’ll see me talking and then you see me, for seemingly no reason at all, make a complete circle. The reason for that is because I’m going where the dog goes.* But, again, for me it’s about my long… long knowledge of Science Fiction. I know the history of the genre and in many cases I’ve known the major people doing the writing and producing and directing of these shows.
It’s fun to tell everyone stories that I know and that no one knows but me. Like how Doug Hayes, who was a director for The Twilight Zone, when he was directing an episode realized they were going to run short when they were doing “Eye of the Beholder”. Rod wasn’t around so he wrote a theme for that episode. No one knew that he wrote it. Well, it’s fun to be able to tell that story. I really enjoy that. They’re fun to do.
You can find Marc Zicree’s Mister Sci-Fi Youtube Channel here
* Sadly, since this interview was conducted, Marc’s dog, Squirrel, died of cancer.
There is much. much more to this interview. Marc talks about the recently released new edition of The Twilight Zone Companion and some of the exciting new developments with that book. He also talks about his series of Magic Time novels and the audio adaptation as well as the potential television series. He also talks about the Star Trek: Phase II episode “World Enough and Time” which he wrote with Michael Reaves and for which he was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Marc also has a lot to say about Star Trek and other science fiction shows, books, movies and writers.
The full interview can be found in Dark Worlds Quarterly issue # 3 which is a free download. Simply click on the Current Issue box at the top of this page or click on the box below: