Tuesday, July 9, 2019

What will this Decade be remembered for?

As far as Hollywood movies go mainly the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It started in the prior Decade but it was this Decade we had at least one MCU film every year and then in the last year of the Decade it reached it's "Endgame".

On American TV mainly Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Pretty Little Liars.  Though for Kid's TV My Little Pony and Steven Universe.

On a Multimedia level Disney Star Wars has made an Impact, the Sequel Trilogy will be the first Star Wars Trilogy to come out entirely within the same Gregorian Calendar Decade.  But it's also been a Decade of revivals for Sailor Moon and Pokemon and Power Rangers and Harry Potter, and three highly popular incarnations of Sherlock Holmes.

And in Anime it's been the rise of modern Isekai, Dark Magical Girl shows and Attack on Titan, and 3 new Ikuhara shows, as well as revivals of stuff Otaku are Nostalgic for from prior decades.

And then what's difficult to even quantify is the Internet Cultural influence.

People have commented on how Ready Player One is set in 2044 and yet people seem to be Nostalgic for the 80s when they should be nostalgic for, well, Now.  But people also like to look very cynically on an alleged lack of creativity in modern media and feel like maybe future Nostalgia for Now will be vicarious Nostalgia for the 70s-90s.

But when you really think about it doesn't the stuff we're Nostalgic for from the 80s reflect the Nostalgia 80s adults had for the 50s? (and adjacent 40s and 60s Nostalgia?)  The Christopher Reeve Superman Movies were made because of Nostalgia people had for the George Reeves TV show and the Fleischer Shorts.  It's not a coincidence that the first true Batman Movie and Star Trek The Next Generation entered production at about the same time.  Star Wars and Indiana Jones both come from George Lucas love of old 40s Saturday Matinee Serials, and there was an actual Flash Gordon movie made at the same time that became a cult classic.  Alien was a gritty re-imagining of a lot of 50s and 60s SciFi B movie premises.  Stuff like Blade Runner, Body Heat and Basic Instinct came from Nostalgia for old Film Noirs.  Ghostbusters was inspired by old Abbot and Costello movies where they encountered Ghosts and Universal Monsters.  I could go on and on.

Just as all that repackaging of what people liked in the past created new versions that could stand on their own and help define their own time, the same is true for what we've been making.  Game of Thrones and most MCU franchises may be based on decades old source material but it's clear most people are going to remember these new versions the most going forward.  Maybe most of the new Sailor Moon material might not be remembered as fondly as the 90s and early 2000s stuff, but plenty of the new additions to it's Genre inspired by the same Nostalgia are absolutely standing on their own.

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