Dangerous Universe turns 20

I’ve been working on this for 20 years. Wait, that makes it seem like I’ve been working on that sentence for 20 years, lemme try that again.

I’ve been working on this site for 20 years. That’s better.

I can’t quite believe it myself but I originally launched the first version Dangerous Universe 20 years ago this month. Back then, I was a college kid who loved everything about movies who spent my free time scoured movie magazines and entertainment news shows for any information I could glean on then, which was never enough. Right around that time the internet was just becoming a thing and people began launching personal websites, and since I’ve always had the self-publishing bug I wanted to do the same so I spent the summer of 1998 trying to come up with an idea for a site.

My original concept for Dangerous Universe was nothing like what it would eventually become.

I thought about creating a Star Trek fan-site, then one for Aliens but those seemed limiting. I wanted to be able to write about anything sci-fi related so I came up with the idea of Dangerous Galaxy. That site would chronicle the most dangerous sci-fi creatures in the galaxy from the Predator to the Borg ending on the most dangerous creature in the galaxy which was… a virus. I went as far as to write up all the content for the site in a notebook, this was before I even had a my own computer, and started work on the site at school in my free time.

But as I worked on what would become Dangerous Universe I noticed other sites that were essentially proto-blogs that were really interesting and there were also sites covering upcoming movies like Dark Horizons and Ain’t it Cool News that I read religiously too. So I pivoted my site, retitled it as Dangerous Universe since I figured universe was bigger than a galaxy, and launched it on Geocities in November, 1998 and began writing about movies.

The very first thing I wrote for my site was a feature on, of all things, the website promoting the movie Starship Troopers and a review of the movie Ronin. This version of Dangerous Universe was simple and had one heck of a long domain name but I was off and running.

For a time every few months I’d launch a new design of the site since I was a college kid studying design in school and used to have a lot of time on my hands. As for content I would update Dangerous Universe at home and then on my lunch hour at my first office job every day.

I think I finally hit my stride in 2000 when I had a design for the site I really liked and was covering movies on a daily basis while also inserting some opinion into my writings too. I was also getting a decent amount of traffic to my site and since I finally had some money bought DangerousUniverse.com.

Since things were going well I, of course, pulled the plug and decided to pivot Dangerous Universe to a place where people could download icons I’d made from TV shows and movies. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I quickly went back to the way things were after a few months.

Things got even better when my friend Michael Summers, the publisher of the Fort Wayne Reader, loved what I was doing on my site and asked me to start writing for him. Which I’ve been doing twice a month for his paper since 2004.

Over the years many things have changed about Dangerous Universe but one thing that hasn’t changed is my love of movies and TV shows, of which I’ve spent the last 20 years chronicling to millions of visitors right here.

And here’s hoping there’ll be 20 more years of Dangerous Universe to come. Even if by then I’m sure the TV and movie landscape will be as unrecognizable today as it would have been 20 years ago when I was sitting in my bedroom writing about those same movies and TV shows.