where do little fanboys come from?

Reading an A.V. Club interview with Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost, I was reminded of just how knowledgeable and perceptive they are. It's always a joy to read what (famous) people say and find out that they're not idiots or assholes. Anyway, I think their comments on the origin of this strange and now popular species--the fanboy--are right on the money, and I've never seen anyone say this about him. (See this for another definition.)

From the A.V. Club interview, in response to a question about how pop culture is a generation's most prominent or only frame of reference (as opposed to real life experience):

Simon Pegg: The revolution of video had a massive [e]ffect. We grew up in a time where suddenly you could own films. Before, they had a theatrical run, and then perhaps they'd come back, or you'd catch them in a retro cinema. Generally, that was it. You never saw them until they were on TV. And you were on someone else's clock. The whole kind of notion of film belonging to you has also risen in the last 30 years or so. Less, probably.

Nick Frost: You'd have to wait so long for it to come out, too. It was a real treat to get a video.

Simon Pegg: I remember when Raiders Of The Lost Ark came out, it was the first sell-through video in the UK. It cost £19.99, and it was the first one you could buy and own. There was a rental period, where you could only rent them, you could get ex-rental, but they were always really expensive. This idea of popular culture became something that belonged to us rather than something that we looked at from far away. We realized we could be part of it and create it, instead of just being consumers only.

Reading this last bit of the interview, I felt nostalgic. I mean, I remember how we convinced our dad to buy a DVD player and DVDs when they were first actually affordable (what 1998? 1999?) by saying that when movies are released now, you can buy them straight away on this new format. Before, you'd wait months or even years to buy it once it was $19.99, after it finished its rental-only run. For instance, my sister and I rented Little Women (1994) almost every other week because we couldn't buy a copy (it was $100, and we were even thinking of keeping the rented one and paying for it once we'd claim it was lost). That's a fangirl obsession.