5 ms·
I too saw it in a theater when it came out and I recall thinking "who the fuck orders a tab? Have a Diet Coke" and that it was a pretty awkward way to make the
by gmarx 12y ago
I too saw it in a theater when it came out and I recall thinking "who the fuck orders a tab? Have a Diet Coke" and that it was a pretty awkward way to make the gag.
We knew about the 1950s from "Happy Days" which, in retrospect was analogous to "Freaks and Geeks" for my generation. The difference was that the media was obsessed with the baby boomers in a way that they never were about Gen X. The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.
I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign.
- kbutler 12y ago"I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign." That is purely a result of your experience. You were probably a teenager in the early 80s, so you began paying attention to popular culture when the 70s music was still frequently played on pop stations.
- gmarx 12y agoI saw a study online that showed music hadn't changed much since then. I suppose the test would be to ask the same question of a group of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s,50s, 60s etc. In contrast BTW, I think television from back then seems bizarre and old.
- ghaff 12y agoYou can certainly find TV shows for the 80s that would seem pretty normal today. http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/11/the-80-best-tv-shows-of-the-1980s.html?a=1 http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/11/the-80-best... There was a lot of crap but then there always is. But you go back to the 70s and with a few exceptions, e.g. MAS*H, they start to look considerably different and less watchable by a modern audience except as cultural artifacts.
- WalterBright 12y agoIt's strange to say, but TV has gotten a lot better decade by decade. There was simply nothing remotely like "Breaking Bad" in the 60's or 70's. I recently watched an episode of "Charlies Angels" and was surprised at how insipid and simply awful it was, and it was a hit show in its days. The proliferation of options for people to watch has forced an upgrade in the quality of the writing.
- ghaff 12y agoBreaking Bad is a high bar and Charlies Angels was always pretty low-brow fluff but I agree with your basic point. There were some good shows (Twilight Zone for example). But the list of shows from that era that are truly enjoyable today is pretty thin in a way that isn't true for movies. While a show like Breaking Bad isn't to everyone's taste--and arguably doesn't work without time shifting and even maybe the Internet--anyone who tries to argue that there's nothing good on TV any longer basically doesn't know what they're talking about.
- ForHackernews 12y agoTwilight Zone is an interesting case, because while it's still quite watchable today, it's very obviously a different style than anything on modern television. Watching Twilight Zone episodes feels like watching a video tape of a stage production. The acting is much broader, the sets are more suggestive than realistic. It's clear that they had good writers and performers, but they were still finding their feet in a totally new medium.
- WalterBright 12y agoSure, BB isn't for everyone. But there's Suits, and House of Cards and Sons of Anarchy, it goes on. The good stuff today far, far exceeds the best of the 70's. Of course, there's plenty of crap on TV today, but I'm talking about the good stuff from each era. Yes, Twilight Zone was good. I think it was quite an anomaly.
- buckbova 12y agoI think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something. It depends on your taste. There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today, in my opinion of course. See any Kardashian-esque reality TV program. I can't watch very popular programs like Big Bang Theory. I find the laugh tracks and lousy one liners unbearable. If something is funny I'll know it and laugh. I don't need a cue.
- sogen 12y agoLink to that study?
- WillNotDownvote 12y agoThere was a fundamental change in Hollywood in the late 60 early 70s, when a new generation of filmmakers came up through indie cinema and the studios. Those filmmakers changed the technique, style, and values of the studio system pretty dramatically. Many of those changes persist until today. Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies. There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept
- mason240 12y ago>The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them. This how I feel about millennials. Unfortunately, since I am one of them, I can't just wait for them to go away.
- delecti 12y agoThere are several more examples of "Happy Days"s, including That 70s Show, That 80s Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and Wonder Years. They all seem to happen about 20-30 years after the fact too, or roughly the length of a generation. Extra notable to the discussion is that both "That 80s Show" and "Freaks and Geeks" failed to catch on. I never saw any of either, so they might have just been bad (though at the very least Freaks and Geeks seems to have been looked upon positively), but I wonder if it wasn't representative of the fact that we still feel that the 80s are more or less the modern era, in a way that wasn't the case prior to that, and so there's less to have nostalgia about. Of course it could also just be that there were crappy examples of that kind of show throughout TV history that we just don't remember.
- gmarx 12y agoFreaks and Geeks was amazing. That 80s show was dumb but featured a super hot girl who sported an extremely punk spike hair-do which challenged the viewer to recognize her hotness. It was two levels of difficulty above the thick frame glasses previous shows have used