If the ‘80s were directly transposed to the 2020s, the 2023 A Christmas Story would be set in 1980 and the 2026 Stand by Me would be set in 1999.
In 2025’s Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back to 1995.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there are persistent rumors floating around Hollywood that Universal wants to do a Back to the Future remake the instant Zemeckis is cold in the ground (he has it in his contract that they can’t do a remake as long as he’s alive), but multiple attempts at a screenplay have been aborted due to “the 9/11 problem”.
Even if you did write your way around the 9/11 issue, the general slowing of technological and social change in more recent decades means I don’t see how a BTTF remake could even function. It’s like, Marty travels back to 1995 and invents… what? The Backstreet Boys? It just doesn’t work.
Although if Trump wins in 2024 they’d pretty much have to do the remake, for no other reason than to do the “who’s the President” gag again.
Yeah, the fact that the 80s to 50s time travel story gives you dozens of opportunities for culture shock humor while the 20s to 90s story barely gives you anything is one of the strongest evidences for the stagnation of social change.
Though you know what would be hilarious? Completely reverse the dynamic of the first film by having Martine (in the remake it has to be a girl) be an uptight, judgemental puriteen who has to go back and time and learn from her parents how to let loose and chill out. Then she brings the secret of 90s cynical, disaffected adolescence forward to the 20s.
Now that I think of it, “time traveler teaches uptight modern feminist to chill out and have fun” is actually just the plot of *Austin Powers*, so maybe what we actually need is an *Austin Powers* remake.
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like “posts that a gnome would make” or like “are you a phone”
STOP REBLOGGING THIS if this gets notes op is going to post the leonardo dicaprio pointing image
Congratulations this post officially has more notes than the one in the screencap. like a torch at the worlds shittiest olympics.
tech columnists are the most gullible people on earth. the other night i had a disturbing two-hour conversation with a magic 8-ball. the other night i had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with a cootie catcher. the other night i had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with the characters in Façade (2005)
this is like astrology but for even more gullible people because at least with astrology there is someone involved in the process who is actively trying to make you believe things. this is like if you put on a finger puppet and did a silly voice of it reading you your horoscope and you believed That
You still pro-DeSantis after his attacks on the SAT and AP? Because while I am pro the 'stop attacking white heterosexual America' anti-woke, the 'attack America because it is suppressing white masculinity' guys are just as much a threat to electricity, water treatment, fertilisers + pesticides, etc as the wokes are
lol like one thing that might not be obvious re: Ron Moore is he’s a Cornellian, I was at one Cornell in Hollywood event with him circa neo-BSG where among other things he told us that Starbuck (03) was his take on Starbuck (78) on a “they’ll notice she’s an alcoholic gambling addict if she’s a girl” basis
of course i have a praise kink, i’m a burnt out former gifted child.
This is the most addition to this post but I also can’t fucking argue with it because it’s true.
I mostly avoided (or at least moderated) the classic “gifted kid burnout” arc only by virtue that when I got to the advanced levels I was still so far ahead of everyone else I could kick back and wipe the floor with them.
Also because I turned out to be a rich heir for whom the corruption of our socioeconomic structure away from the mid-20th century ideal of position in accordance with your native abilities doesn’t actually matter
turned out to be?
yeah, I came from people so invested in the midcentury Mass Middle Class thing it wasn’t obvious until surprisingly late
People talk about the superiority of home cooking but like, my mother’s mother learned cooking in the Betty Crocker era when people didn’t live on farms and cook all day over a solid-fuel fire anymore and that generation had to learn what to do with modern stuff from scratch
my mom ::waves hand eeeh:: picked up those recipes indifferently, and there are a few she can’t do anymore because they don’t still make food that processed, and with the exception of one Beef Stroganoff that takes her like 4 hours to make, Trader Joe’s heat-in-oven stuff reliably tops her
Reading back on this and realizing I have also used the “eeh” side-to-side hand flap in both “asi-asi” and 「ちょっと」 contexts
It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form
People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.
You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.
Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all
Reblogging at a more reasonable hour because I originally woke up and wrote it down in order to get it out of my head and fall back asleep
Oh, something else important on the way was thirtysomething, clear progenitor to relationship dramedies like This Is Us, that was basically a 1987 My So-Called Life for adults, or at least Boomer yuppies
Also interesting are the false starts - the miniseries boom after 1977’s Roots revealed an audience for multi-episode narratives; the 80s “prime-time soaps” Dallas and Dynasty that didn’t have much episodic drive aside from the overarching plots.
I suppose we should also consider the soapy 90s youth dramas on Fox and the WB - 90210, Melrose Place, Dawson’s Creek. I’d say you really see some of the seeds of modern TV here – the shipping-bait plotting that seeped into action genres through things like Buffy, Smallville, and Supernatural; soliciting pop soundtracks from bands looking for breakthrough opportunities; The OC as a revival of the Dallas/Dynasty style prime time soap
I can’t believe I didn’t comment on this at the time. I agree with the thrust but would choose a slightly different set of things to focus on.
TV is heterogeneous, but the main thing that characterizes the “golden age” that is regarded as starting with the Sopranos is TV being able to beat “higher” narrative art forms (there’s a reason that the terms “novelic” and cinematic” were so often used in the 2000s) at their own game. In order to do this, the prestige show needed a way to handle theme that wasn’t “operative” theme implicit in the setting or drama (i.e. cop shows being about Law and Order) on an ongoing basis. The one neat trick is the development of a structure that allowed episodes to revolve around thematic cores where the threaded plots would weave in and out and characters (always the center of TV) could show the (mostly illusion of) progress necessary to support the “theme story.”
Obviously this is a dodge as the golden age contained lots of shows less focused on theme that nonetheless leaned on movie and book competitive elements like more elevated production, complex structures, metatextual elements, isolated episodes meant to function differently as a specific statement, and star performances. Remember, Supernatural is still on. But we are talking about this we tend to focus on the model of HBO, Lost and the ilk. The Petri dish experiment on this begins (as much as an ongoing process has a beginning) in the early 80s.
Swinging into the 80s, the nighttime soap format was the only serialized drama in existence. It contained threaded plotting but only bold genre based themes which weren’t exactly nuanced. Note: please take into account, as an influence, the idea that comic books at the time were getting pretty sophisticated at nurturing ongoing plot lines (see Claremont’s X-Men and Levtz’s Legion of Super-Heroes). There was also a 70′s TV, new-Hollywood influenced tradition at this time of “gritty” (scare quotes in this post means not really but trying to look like) procedurals. The first contributing recombination of the era was 1981′s Hill Street Blues followed quickly by 1982s St Elsewhere, both of which (HSB moreso) contained the differed plotting structure where elements would be introduced with less screen time, then nurtured into larger stories which could then become the A plot 2 months later. This is essentially the sentinel event for what would happen to TV over the next 20 odd years.
Miami Vice played with cinematic stylization as an addition to this formula, and several semi-serialized shows reverted back to more “standard” styles but at least tried to stay above the status level of nighttime soaps (most significantly LA Law, but you had your Thirtysomethings - tracing out all the recombining lines is beyond the scope, here). They were finding new formats, etc, but the airwaves were still dominated by well made episodic genre fluff (not a slam, Equalizer, sir, and Jessica Fletcher, mam).
There were several things that kicked things into the next developmental phase, the true pre-Golden, including Fox trying more daring counter programming and the opening up of syndicated markets with the increase of product hungry cable stations, but the biggest flashpoint was certainly when a guy who won an Emmy for his story work on Hill Street Blues met the man who is now the greatest living Film director to do a nighttime soap opera about the abject terror at the heart of America.
Twin Peaks is the clear breakpoint. The show was on for only 1.4 seasons, but it hit like an asteroid. Some of its impact was just opening up TV aesthetically and in terms of character type, tone, and subject matter, but the seismic shifts were in long game structure and robust subtext. It made a bunch of working TV writers realize they could do something like this and was a formative experience on the next generation. The X-Files is a significant mediator of this effect, but look at what happened to syndicated genre shows starting in 1993 or so - Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, even the Hercules affiliated shows. And there’s the lasting legacy of Homicide, maybe the first “novelic” approach to a TV procedural.
Buffy was crucial in learning how to Matryoshka-nest ongoing stories for periodic increasing payoff that matched the TV seasonal benchmarks. There was a lot going on rolling into 1999, even on HBO itself (we aren’t focusing on comedy, but as far as threaded stories/episodic thematics, Sex. and the City figured out how to upgrade the Dougie Howser model nicely). The Sopranos getting “credit” for starting the Golden Age is probably part Bloomian “strong misreading” (it simply hit people’s consciousness the hardest in therms of “this new thing is a thing”) and partly timing (the big eruption of good new network programming the rise of basic cable networks spending real money on original programming would start soon).
My timeline is 1981-90 - the classic network twilight years, with experimentation in mainstream channels forming interesting strains, but safe shows still dominant; 1990-9 - the pre-golden age, with explosive proliferation of ideas with a severe Darwinian load; 1999-2010 - the high Golden age dominated by the main networks, HBO, and individual basic cable shows (the Shield, BSG), ends with the last episode of Lost; 2010-2019 - the “prestige” era, dominated by a few big shows, and destruction of the monoculture, ends with the end of Game of Thrones; 2019-present - peak TV, characterized by glut and increased experimentation/niche servicing as a knockoff effect of the rise of streaming services needing content.
Went by Strawberry Ridge and someone had dumped some big branches on it, dragged them back to start rotting as the wood component of next year’s compost, I think 2 more years at the very least
of course i have a praise kink, i’m a burnt out former gifted child.
This is the most addition to this post but I also can’t fucking argue with it because it’s true.
I mostly avoided (or at least moderated) the classic “gifted kid burnout” arc only by virtue that when I got to the advanced levels I was still so far ahead of everyone else I could kick back and wipe the floor with them.
Also because I turned out to be a rich heir for whom the corruption of our socioeconomic structure away from the mid-20th century ideal of position in accordance with your native abilities doesn’t actually matter
People talk about the superiority of home cooking but like, my mother’s mother learned cooking in the Betty Crocker era when people didn’t live on farms and cook all day over a solid-fuel fire anymore and that generation had to learn what to do with modern stuff from scratch
my mom ::waves hand eeeh:: picked up those recipes indifferently, and there are a few she can’t do anymore because they don’t still make food that processed, and with the exception of one Beef Stroganoff that takes her like 4 hours to make, Trader Joe’s heat-in-oven stuff reliably tops her
people in my parents’ generation typically despise all traditional mid-atlantic food. i assume some of that is late-modern homogenization, like the destruction of the traditional american dialects, but some of it is that their parents never knew what to do with okra or scrapple, both of which are much harder to cook than anything in the Home Cooking Revival genre of “bung meat in contraption, add vegetables chopped with capital-investment-ass knives and throw half your affordable-global-supply-chain-ass spice rack at it”
and that’s without getting into how everyone in the 28-45 demographic owns an instant pot and a toaster oven and knows someone who has a air fryer, a sous vide machine, a dehydrator…
“Knew what to do”. I mean the thing with any “traditional cuisine” is it isn’t really aimed towards creating tasty meals so much as nutritionally sufficient meals within a particular ecology and economy, and only really goes for “tasty” as a secondary goal within those constraints
People talk about the superiority of home cooking but like, my mother’s mother learned cooking in the Betty Crocker era when people didn’t live on farms and cook all day over a solid-fuel fire anymore and that generation had to learn what to do with modern stuff from scratch
my mom ::waves hand eeeh:: picked up those recipes indifferently, and there are a few she can’t do anymore because they don’t still make food that processed, and with the exception of one Beef Stroganoff that takes her like 4 hours to make, Trader Joe’s heat-in-oven stuff reliably tops her
All the parents walking around my neighborhood with 3-year-olds are suburban office park types but all the ones with 12-year-olds are like, AutoZone workers
At this point I would be satisfied with either a Biden or DeSantis win in 2024 as a positive consequence of the subplot that began in 2015
@centrally-unplanned said: While i don’t view DeSantis as a disaster or anything I find it hard to think what he would improve over Biden, curios what positives you think he has?
I think he would complete the culture war project Trump started, putting the 2010s to bed without supper.
Trump connected with that popular impulse but didn’t really implement it with any consequence while being shit at placeholder stuff, so “more of this but harder” was an easy nah, DeSantis has proven baseline competence to run a government, and to leverage the actual powers of office to put that government to service of particular ends
Biden represents a steady hand on government operations, with a Democratic instinct to rebalance the socioeconomy back towards something like the industrial unionism Golden Age if you squint, a spell of that is appealing right now. He seems quite unlikely to take up with wild-eyed factions or give them free reign, but doesn’t seem positioned to do a 90s Clinton-style purging of paraparty culture that would render the Democrats safe going forward in his absence.
It’s not clear what course yields what outcome. If DeSantis wins pitching “anti-wokeness” does that give Dem centrists a Mondale-like mandate to purge the party, or does it renew efforts to tie together a pussy-hatted #Resistance in opposition?
Of course, a DeSantis administration crackdown would have real costs! It might go too far! It might hurt people!
Yes, these things concern me. I am also concerned that a lame-duck Biden administration might not go far enough with calling an end to silly season out of concern for the sensibilities of Democratic stakeholders.
But as with DeSantis, I do not expect he would err so far as to be uncorrectable under future administrations. I would be satisfied with either.
