Why has there been no widespread 90's revival?

part of it is I recently realized that the millennials weren't the first new generation they were the last old one

Oof, truth hurts, especially when I felt so disconnected from gen xers in my youth, but yeah: getting the internet at 12 vs getting it at 22 is not as big of a gap as having the internet from birth vs not.

getting the internet at 12 vs getting it at 22 is not as big of a gap as having the internet from birth vs not.

I think this is definitely true and I can see it with my 13 year old son. The way he experiences movies/tv/music is so completely different from what it was for me. Going from mostly "Tuning in" to mostly "On demand" changes a lot about what you're exposed to.

I feel similar about smartphones. I’m 37 and didn’t have a mobile until my mid-20s, and didn’t have a smart phone until about a decade ago. (My Catholic high school banned them with the reasoning that only drug dealers/scorers would need them, and we could just use the cafeteria payphone to call home for a ride. Not that I knew anyone who had a mobile phone). I regularly just leave it on a desk throughout a weekend and check it once or twice, or don’t even bother to take it to a restaurant or grocery store. Whereas younger people I know consider stepping out without their phone akin to leaving your keys at home. Can’t stand reading or writing on a small phone screen either.

The way he experiences movies/tv/music is so completely different from what it was for me. Going from mostly "Tuning in" to mostly "On demand" changes a lot about what you're exposed to.

I was thinking about that when I was watching an old MST3k episode a bit back. The whole premise of “forced to watch bad movies in space" is just a comic exaggeration of bored late nights when you’d settle for watching a dumb movie because there was nothing else on—but with streaming, you can download or stream nearly any movie or show you like, so boredom like that doesn’t really exist. Ditto dull Saturday afternoons when nothing was on but golf.

yeah my pet generational divide theory is likewise based on whether or not you grew up watching reruns. I spent a decent chunk of my childhood absorbing the mass culture of the 50s-70s (leading to confusions like not realizing stuff like Happy Days was made later), which seems really different from now for better and worse

And hearing "oldies" on the radio. Some ppl age 35+ seem to not believe that younger folks haven't heard certain songs (everyone knows that one!) but if you've never had older music passively fed to you via the radio, it's very possible to miss a lot of "classics". Seems that the on-demand generations only know old music if it was on the Shrek soundtrack or whatever.

On yeah radio too; in fifth grade my bus driver played the oldies station (meaning 1950s/early 60s at that time) every morning so at 10 I knew all kinds of girl group and doo wop and early rock songs by heart. So on the one hand, I grew up on a retrospectively bizarre cultural diet suffused with other people's nostalgia, but on the other hand, I picked up a ton of tacit historical & cultural knowledge that I still find useful.

yeah my pet generational divide theory is likewise based on whether or not you grew up watching reruns. I spent a decent chunk of my childhood absorbing the mass culture of the 50s-70s (leading to confusions like not realizing stuff like Happy Days was made later), which seems really different from now for better and worse

I found this last month and it sent me into a fit of nostalgia for that precise reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXTlC_IUHKE

Seems that the on-demand generations only know old music if it was on the Shrek Grand Theft Auto soundtrack or whatever.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, July 28, 2021 5:15 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know if this is entirely true. I think a lot of kids are learning about things through Spotify recommendations and stuff.

Yeah or parents/relatives. I mainly based what I said off of YouTube reaction vids.

For movie knowledge/awareness it seems to often come from memes

https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/my2pc9xvv7j.jpeg

Was watching a guy reacting to Raiders of the Lost Ark yesterday (he's been to film school so obv a film lover. Does boggle my mind he's never seen any Indiana Jones!) and he kept losing his shit over how much stuff Uncharted video games took from it

I envy blatherskite's relation to smartphones - I also hate reading the tiny text, writing on the touchpad, etc. but do it nonetheless. I kinda compartimentalise my relation to the internet that way - desktop is where I stream movies, edit my podcast, talk on ILX. Phone is where I doomscroll and get into dumb arguments because I'm bored.

Re: youngster's tastes, the thing is I don't think it's about them getting less knowledge of the past so much as what they do get knowledge of being very random - like there was this young dude on youtube uploading City Pop mixes, and then some day out of nowhere he just posted a 50's Jump Blues mix.

Also at the Talking Pictures TV Podcast we've been doing these online quiz events and the audience of course tends towards older British ppl but there's this teen from Wisconsin who always joins. He has a collection of 40's British actrecesses' autorgraphs and a Carry On Camping mug.

Aware this is an outlier but would still struggle to imagine the kid developing these tastes pre-internet.

ime kids know way more about the pop culture of the past than i did because it’s accessible everywhere! Friends on Netflix ffs.

I wasn't really trying to say kids today are totally ignorant of past pop culture—the only kids I know well enough to anec-data about this are too young for it to apply to, though now that I'm thinking about it, they're not growing up watching Looney Tunes, Jetsons, Flintstones, Scooby Doo, etc. side by side with GI Joe and Transformers like I did.

I was mostly agreeing with this post:

Going from mostly "Tuning in" to mostly "On demand" changes a lot about what you're exposed to.

― silverfish, Wednesday, July 28, 2021 2:50 PM (three days ago)

I don't think Netflix having a handful of prominent older shows compares experientially to the bottomless well of rerun content on 80s basic cable. I could list lots of examples of old shows I saw as a kid that were relatively obscure—does Netflix have stuff like Wings, Caroline in the City, or Grace under Fire? Obviously if your media diet was different growing up this will all sound kind of nuts, but in my view there is far less content "accessible" and even then "accessible" is not the same as "omnipresent." I'm sure there are specialized streaming services that have, say, lots of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons but when I was watching Cartoon Express growing up I had no idea I was watching shows from multiple decades in a single afternoon.

Music I have much less idea about tbh and I think that ties more into the endless boomer nostalgia hangover that was the 80s (on that note, does Netflix have Wonder Years or China Beach? again, I'm not saying this is nec bad, just different)

kids not only have access to the entire recorded output of the 20th century they have access to reaction videos of people watching and listening to it. it’s way too much for anyone to completely take in so yes i think they would draw the line somewhere far in advance of lol china beach. keep in mind that professionally shot broadcast television is just one content type among many for them. the youtube algorithm exposes them to all kinds of things that they’re not intentionally seeking out.

that's a good point: a clear generational divide is I do not use YouTube the way young people do. I am somewhat incredulous that they're using it to watch That Girl, but I could be very wrong!

I'm not sure I ever saw more than a few minutes of lol China Beach, but good lord there was a lot of Vietnam War content growing up in the 80s

Yeah, rando old sitcoms you watch just because they're on seems low priority for the young'ns these days....

But if they want to, Caroline... is on Paramount+, Wings is on Paramount+ AND Hulu, and Grace... is on several services, most prominently Peacock.

Ah, sounds like being in Canada is making me misread the availability angle

I look back fondly on the melange of old and new TV that childhood broadcasting subjected me to, but if YouTube comments teach me anything it’s that people will look back fondly on any old shit so I don’t think I should worry too much about kids today being robbed of anything.

also like... many people still do have cable tv, and if my random channel surfing in hotel rooms is any indication, it's easy enough to find yourself at an episode of F Troop in 2021. inexplicable as that might seem in programming terms.

Yeah but I don’t think many kids are watching cable, are they?

they’re watching historical NBA games and full length t.i. concerts and mini-documentaries about the tallest people to have ever lived. if my house is any indication. it’s just a wealth of accumulated pop cult at their fingertips that would have blown my mind as a child.

kids not only have access to the entire recorded output of the 20th century

lol

why would kids watch bad TV that we only watched because it was the only thing on

It was bad because it was mind-numbing, but minds kind of like to be numb part of the time. And kids can't drink vodka.

XP They're watching Friends, aren't they?

In all seriousness, Rob's list makes me think about how some shows could coast into multiple seasons simply because they were on between Friends and Seinfeld, or Seinfeld and ER. Definitely a lost art of sorts.

Speaking of ER, are there <any> classic TV Dramas that Millennials Stan for? And by 'classic', I mean pre-Sopranos/prestige TV.

hmm. Twin Peaks for sure. and maybe more in the "genre" zone? ST:TNG and DS9, Buffy, etc....? a friend of mine got really into M*A*S*H a couple years ago.

but it's an interesting question. i'm struggling to even think of that many classic TV dramas to start with - they're not on the tip of my tongue like sitcoms. and especially ones with either ongoing storylines, or a manageable overall episode count... feels like those might be important prerequisites for reasons i can't quite spell out.

do mystery shows count as dramas? Murder She Wrote gets a lot of love out there. feel like i've encountered a few other Columbo lovers over the years....

west wing maybe but that’s proto-prestige

as far as dramas go

law and order?

Oh yeah, those mysteries are pretty big. I think Rockford has a growing following too.

And how could I forget the Star Treks and Buffy? Although genre fandom helps in those cases.

I was really thinking about something like ER, which was _HUGE_ in it's time, but seems like you never hear about anymore.

every six weeks another article runs about people discovering Columbo during lockdown #acabec

Writing a piece for NYT Sunday Styles on how people these days present on social media as Columbo (enigmatic, one step ahead, always nails the rich bastard) but live as Rockford (mobile home, broke, beaten up every week)

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) May 8, 2021

I think that people have easier access to all kinds of things and are exposed to more, thanks to the wonders of algorithmic recommendations and the preservation of everything that exists now. But they aren't forced to endure it the same way. If I leave YouTube to autoplay some music videos and something comes on I don't enjoy I simply skip to the next one. And if I don't like that either I can search for something I will enjoy. Whereas, when I was growing up, I only had The Chart Show and TOTP and occasional trips to someone's house where they had The Box. So if I wanted to see music videos I had to take them all as a bundle together - so I could see my then-favourites like Bjork and Garbage, but I also had to sit through dreck like Boyzone. So even though I don't like their music I had a familiarity with it and sense of them. Whereas now I can simply skip past an Ed Sheeran video and remain completely ignorant, beyond knowing I won't enjoy it.

this is very true.

I remember arguing with Ilxors way way back when Top of the Pops got cancelled, saying that TOTP was a communal after-tea experience where, for example, everyone from your Dad, your Nan, your baby brother, would all get a glimpse into what was happening in the current charts, and everyone would have an opinion on, say, Brian Molko whether they cared about the music or not, which I think ties in a bit with what boxedjoy is saying.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/djwp/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/19155915/web_bbdb_EH_DJ-Arts-Beabadoobee_091.jpg

beabadoobee is leading the ’90’s revival

Inspired by the sounds of the late ’80s and early ’90s, beabadoobee cites Elliot Smith, The Moldy Peaches, and The Cardigans as early influences.

https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/04/beabadoobee-is-leading-the-90s-revival/

Obviously there is no way a show like TOTP or The Pepsi Chart would have worked since the mid-00s. Why would you expect the whole family to gather round the TV and sit together when everyone has their own taste and their own device to explore it?

xp: lol.

beabadoobee is excellent and yes she sounds a bit 90's in the same way Wolf Alice sound a bit 90's .

Xp to boxedjoy - that's true but then you could make that case against all TV, not just TOTP

That said, the charts don't seem to mean half as much to people in general as they once did. Do people pay attention to who's number one any more?

the spotify charts are a lot of people’s default playlists

xp: lol.

― peace, man, Monday, August 2, 2021 7:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

beabadoobee is excellent and yes she sounds a bit 90's in the same way Wolf Alice sound a bit 90's .

― akm, Monday, August 2, 2021 7:22 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

My lol was more at describing "Elliot Smith, The Moldy Peaches, and The Cardigans" as " late ’80s and early ’90s". Nothing matters.