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Father Time
Watching Star Wars today is like watching It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1977.
Here are more such comparisons.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 15, 2008 at 06:07 PM in History | Permalink
Comments
I'd agree with some of the comments on the linked page. Though the timeframes may be equivalent, the artistic gulf (for lack of a better term, or perhaps the artistic evolution) in many instances seems to have grown smaller, and certainly more homogenized with increased access to creation and distribution. Technological change has also impacted perception. When I was growing up part of the reason "ancient" things seemed ancient was that they seemed less robust. Old music sounded grainy. Old movies and television shows were often black-and-whites, and took place in settings that were almost a different country. Today and for some time we've been able to watch things that though clearly dated are still robust in presentation, and people seem more likely to notice the youth of an actor or the cheesy fashion styles of the time than think they're looking at something from a different era altogether.
Posted by: MM at Nov 15, 2008 6:28:37 PM
It came to me as an example of the cultural power of the Baby Boomers.
Having the Rolling Stones play at half-time of the Super Bowl a few years ago, given how long the Stones have been around, would have been like Super Bowl I's halftime entertainment being provided by the Clicquot Club Eskimos, first heard in 1923.
That Boomer power.
Posted by: The Owners Manual at Nov 15, 2008 6:36:15 PM
It is important to remember that culture (especially youth culture) has subdivided.
Because of limitations of media (the expense of recording and manufacturing music, the handful of TV and radio stations, no internet), there was really a limited choice of culture that you had. Cable television, cassette tapes, and VHS in the 1980s, and then CDs and the internet in the 1990s, MP3s in the 2000s make music a lot cheaper to produce (and hence be more niche) and offered a much broader access to various movies/tv.
A mega-group like the Rolling Stones would not be possible today, because today you have about 40 distinct musical subcultures instead of everyone listening to the same local radio station. Nowadays you have too many subgroups and subcultures for any specific generation to identify with their peers, where as baby boomers are one big dull mono-culture.
So, what you see instead of one constantly changing youth mono-culture, is 40 different youth subcultures that are relatively stable... if a youth culture begins to have too much change, it splits off into a separate sub-culture... which is why music isn't that different between today and the early 1990s, but the early 1990s was drastically different that the late 1970s. Instead of seeing a genre like rock music for example drastically change, we are instead seeing a proliferation of sub-genres of rock.
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Nov 16, 2008 1:34:45 AM
I second MM's comments. My kids do not find music and film from the 70s that irrelevant. My sons -- thanks to Guitar Hero -- think the Who or Clapton or Led Zeppelin -- are the greatest thing since sliced bread. In contrast, no one of my generation would have found the music of the 1930s anything but weird and dated.
Ditto for movies. Although some stuff seems dated, the boys respond very positively to both The Godfather and Star Wars.
Posted by: jjn at Nov 16, 2008 7:44:07 AM
Can't remember which college did this, but there was a professor who circulated events that coincided with the incoming freshman class's birth year. Thus the incoming class of '12 were born circa Gulf War I, have no memory of Clinton's inauguration (or the Soviet Union or East Germany), "thirtysomething," Paula Abdul singing, an un-united Europe, and are roughly as old as the Internet(depending on your start date.)
Posted by: TD at Nov 16, 2008 9:20:54 PM
Don't quite agree with the comparison. As far as movies go, I think the transformational decade was the sixties. Movies became leaner and meaner as that decade wore on, what with the emergence of counterculture, revocation of Hays code and the increased popularity of Method acting.
Since 1967 (the year Bonnie and Clyde was released), movies have remained more or less the same in their tone and texture. So Star Wars in 2008 is more aligned with contemporary culture than It's a Wonderful Life was in 1977.
Ofcourse, one cannot imply that movies have gotten better or worse over the years. The finest movies of the 30s and 40s are every bit as good as anything that comes out today. It's just that they play as great period films.
Posted by: shrikanthk at Nov 16, 2008 9:35:55 PM
Don't quite agree with the comparison. As far as movies go, I think the transformational decade was the sixties. Movies became leaner and meaner as that decade wore on, what with the emergence of counterculture, revocation of Hays code and the increased popularity of Method acting.
Since 1967 (the year Bonnie and Clyde was released), movies have remained more or less the same in their tone and texture. So Star Wars in 2008 is more aligned with contemporary culture than It's a Wonderful Life was in 1977.
Ofcourse, one cannot imply that movies have gotten better or worse over the years. The finest movies of the 30s and 40s are every bit as good as anything that comes out today. It's just that they play as great period films.
Posted by: shrikanthk at Nov 16, 2008 9:37:32 PM
Don't quite agree with the comparison. As far as movies go, I think the transformational decade was the sixties. Movies became leaner and meaner as that decade wore on, what with the emergence of counterculture, revocation of Hays code and the increased popularity of Method acting.
Since 1967 (the year Bonnie and Clyde was released), movies have remained more or less the same in their tone and texture. So Star Wars in 2008 is more aligned with contemporary culture than It's a Wonderful Life was in 1977.
Ofcourse, one cannot imply that movies have gotten better or worse over the years. The finest movies of the 30s and 40s are every bit as good as anything that comes out today. It's just that they play as great period films.
Posted by: shrikanthk at Nov 16, 2008 9:38:16 PM
Sorry for the multiple comments. I swear I clicked on 'post' just once :|
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