“It’s amazing for me to see that a little website I started from my apartment in Calgary, Canada has continued to flourish and grow... and great to see that Dolph’s popularity is greater than ever. I MUST BREAK YOU indeed!”
- Message from Blaine,
founder of the original site, DOLPH: the definitive guide
On May 23 1998, a well-advised Canadian fellow named Blaine Wasylkiw launched the first and only full on website dedicated to Dolph Lundgren.
It was a time of slow, basic internet, which I had to connect to for a limited time at a specific library or web cafes which charged you about 1 franc (0,15€) per minute so like 60 FRF roughly $10 or 10€ an hour!
And of course one of the things I looked where informations on Dolph, his IMDB page, his upcoming movies (THE MINION, SWEEPERS, BLACKJACK, even SILENT TRIGGER and THE PEACEKEEPER which had not come out in France)... Any little page, tiny JPEG thumbnail artwork or cover was enough to give me thrills.
So very shortly after, I discovered this new site and boy did that make my day!
There were misc scattered pages on Dolph but not an entire site, AND I was not the only one acknowledging that Dolph was highly underrated and overlooked.
And in those days, off-internet, Dolph had surely disappeared from where I was living since, you could see it coming already in the years 1993-1995, with the discreet theatrical releases of JOSHUA TREE, MEN OF WAR two years later, and PENTATHLON straight to video (the second time after SHOWDOWN). Then the final straw was with the tiny tiny release of THE SHOOTER, disastrous reviews, and then nothing until the rental release of BLACKJACK later that year of 1998, followed by THE PEACEKEEPER (and TRIGGER would be missing until the summer 2000, while THE MINION and SWEEPERS and not come out anywhere even though they were completed).
To make the story short, Blaine and I corresponded and I would email him infos I found (from the UK mag Impact notably since they broke news on new projects such as STORM CATCHER, BRIDGE OF DRAGONS etc).
In 2002, I had started my own site DOLPH-IN: The Unknown Dolph Lundgren dedicated to the unproduced projects of Dolph, deleted scenes, alternate versions etc. That same year, I passed my master's degree with a 134 pages thesis on the films of Dolph Lundgren (which I would eventually send to his office in Spain a couple years later, thanks the director of RETROGRADE, Christopher Kulikowski)
In late 2003, it had been a while since he had updated the site and out of the blue asked me if I wanted to take it over.
So I jumped on the occasion to merge both sites and call it the ultimate guide, while Mosquito and Dawn came in to help with the forum and moderation... The new version was launched in January 2004, and as the trailers say, "it was only the beginning"...