Maxxicus Callahan
kiwifarms.net
Had this thought talking with my gf the other day, we both grew up in the 90’s and we were noticing all these Nikolodian and Cartoon Network reboots of the shows we used to watch as kids and it sort of dawned on me, are they making these reboots for a millennial demographic also? It’s a bit of a scary thought that this would appeal to networks seeking to exploit a sentiment of lost futures in millennials or a future that never arrived. Are we being haunted by the ghosts of the late twentieth century on high definition screens? I felt that way seeing clips of the new Lion King with that same off putting feeling of witnessing a Chucky Cheese animatronic doll, reanimated not alive but pretending to be. (Edit: the “uncanny valley” feeling).
It’s sort of like how the shopping malls we used to frequent in our childhoods still exist but they are becoming more bare and empty with the lights still being kept on for spaces that have lost their purpose and social value. What were once the shining emblems of late eighties and nineties consumerism remain as spectres of a comfortable middle class optimism of the era. I feel culture on some level is experiencing this same phenomenon not to say that there are no new creations far from it but our scope of the possible of our imagined stories, visuals and sounds in wider popular culture are being limited in a technological future that should be by all definitions fostering the opposite approach rather than creating a world of ghosts in an infinite loop.
When you ask someone to put a name to the sound of 1955, 1964, 1975, 1986, 1994 you can think of a few things, 2005, 2015 or 2021 I can name certain artists but can’t put my finger on a defining characteristic to any sound of these more recent decades. Maybe I’m wrong and I just sound like a boomer but I really struggle to understand why the sound never seemed to change in the more radical ways it had in previous decades.
Animaniacs was a good reboot though and pretty self aware of it.
It’s sort of like how the shopping malls we used to frequent in our childhoods still exist but they are becoming more bare and empty with the lights still being kept on for spaces that have lost their purpose and social value. What were once the shining emblems of late eighties and nineties consumerism remain as spectres of a comfortable middle class optimism of the era. I feel culture on some level is experiencing this same phenomenon not to say that there are no new creations far from it but our scope of the possible of our imagined stories, visuals and sounds in wider popular culture are being limited in a technological future that should be by all definitions fostering the opposite approach rather than creating a world of ghosts in an infinite loop.
When you ask someone to put a name to the sound of 1955, 1964, 1975, 1986, 1994 you can think of a few things, 2005, 2015 or 2021 I can name certain artists but can’t put my finger on a defining characteristic to any sound of these more recent decades. Maybe I’m wrong and I just sound like a boomer but I really struggle to understand why the sound never seemed to change in the more radical ways it had in previous decades.
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