It’s the 20-30 year wave of advertisers pandering to the nostalgia of people who finally have their own money to spend on dumb shit. It’s going to be very weird to see the 00s kids nostalgia of the next few years. every decade has insufferable nostalgia. We were just too young to see it happening for anything before the 80s The 80s aesthetic is also objectively more interesting than the haze of the 70s marketing, so it can be replicated more easily. Bright colors, synth etc.
What will be the nostalgic stuff for kids in the ‘10s? Obviously MCU, but in terms of franchises I don’t see the Star Wars sequels (specifically, rather than Star Wars stuff generally which is clearly never going to die) or Hunger Games even having much staying power now, let alone in a decade or two
The rise of readily available home video and cheaper equipment to make movies makes the 80s a very important decade in terms of the medium. The problem is most of the films were only released on vhs and have probably deteriorated if not properly stored. We are quickly approaching a time when a whole subgenre of films will be inaccessible forever. Thank god for Vinegar Syndrome
I feel like it’s equally likely that I see people my parents age - who in the 80s were in their 20s and already had their own money to spend - who are hypernostalgic about the 80s. All the cultural stuff, even things that are more kid/friendly oriented, sticks with them just as much if not more than people who were actually kids during that time.
The other day I saw a video of a parent asking their toddler to pretend like they’re on the phone, and they made a claw shape as if they were holding a smartphone, rather than a Y shape like a landline. It was disgusting.
It is pretty phone that people use the thing we call a phone to actually make phone calls maybe 1 percent of the time. I don't even have the phone app on my front page.
There will likely be far more tv shows that movies. Weirdly I feel like The Office and P&R have only become bigger phenomenons after they finished. I guess the same possibly happened with Friends/Seinfeld too but idk. Game of Thrones tripped up inches before the finish line and is already a distant memory.
Seinfeld was huge when it was airing, but what happened with The Office is different. It was a pretty modest success when it aired. A lot of the people who are obsessed with it now came later, and a lot of them were too young to enjoy it when it was first airing.
Game of Thrones is the last time I remember co-workers treating a show like a water cooler moment, but it feels like it will have a negligible legacy.
True, The Office and Friends are big I started my new semester yesterday and have the kids do an interest collage so I’ll see what comes up a lot
The kids asked me to put on The Office but they were bored because they said the first few seasons were "the bad ones". That was the end of their Office privileges.
Lol yeah what made The Office unique was the exact thing they had to shed to become as big as it is now. Everyone’s a normal human except for the two office weirdos? Boring. Gotta turn everyone into a zany character so there are no dull moments
Referencing even popular shows like Breaking Bad (as it aired!) is a stretch for teenagers. I’ll get 4-5 kids a year that understand modern pop culture references. Shows like I Love the 80s truly built my pop culture lexicon. Plus, the fact that media was relatively limited so I’d just watch what my parents or older family members watched.
It has been talked about to death before, but the evolution of Kevin's character is the clearest example of the show's decline. The episode where they all were playing Call of Duty was the sign that it was time to jump ship. Beyond being a shameless use of product placement, it goes completely against the idea that the Stamford branch was the competent one that followed the rules. Then they throw in Jerome Bettis (who just happened to be starting a career as an NBC sports anchor) and it was clear why the British version ended after 12 episodes.