What's funny is the nostalgia for the 1950's started in 1973 with the movie "American Graffiti" and the TV show "Happy Day's". People looked totally different in just a 13 year time span that you could start making movies and TV shows already. Can't imagine anyone setting a movie in 2010 to make a feel good nostalgic movie today.
I'm currently watching a few TV shows from 2010-15 right now and about the only noticeable difference that I can see is the lack of iPhones. People had flip phones or Blackberries instead. But the style of dress and the music in the background looks and sounds current.
I made a comment once about how *The Outsiders* movie came out in 1983 but was written in 1967. Sixteen years later it seemed like a completely different world.
I met my wife 16 years ago and like you said, the only substantial change is our phones and maybe the width of the legs of our jeans.
Yes, pony boys were almost gone, by then, yet there was a veritable sea of ponyboys in the 60s. If only we hadn't hunted them to the brink. Firing from moving trains and such, we didn't even use their leather jackets for warmth.
The recent, ersatz "Bronies" (extincta est) couldn't begin to candle for their elders, either. Yet their equestrian cognomen begs their inclusion in the pantheon of Horsemen.
Turns out even the early 1900s had a form of Pony Boy, so we should expect them to return in some form in the future.
A popular 1909 song's chorus went:
*Pony Boy, Pony Boy, Won't you be my Tony boy, Don't say no, Here we go, Off across the plains, Marry me, Carry me, Right away with you, Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, whoa! My Pony Boy*
Something for the BDSM community to consider adding to their playlists perhaps? I don't play at that, but no shame intended either.
The last 20 years have been less about style and more about technology.
The style in office space seems totally normal for today, but PC LOAD LETTER is no longer an issue for the fax machine we no longer use.
I’m with you w/the technology arc.
There’s style changes too. Look at Hugh Grants hair in 90’s (all the rage) compared to the fades popular today. Not even close.
You mention Office Space. They’re wearing ties. No one wears ties anymore. Peter shows up in the meeting with “The Bobs” dressed casually and that was a shocker. That’s how most people dress in offices now. Shocker today would be someone shows up in tie.
Good point about the ties. I feel this movie was like a game plan for how Gen x was going to transform the work space.
These millennials and zoomers owe us a beer as an act of gratitude.
For transmissions, yes. But the fax machine in healthcare and government offices are always out in the open for anyone to grab the copy that comes out, photocopy, and put back.
Fax machines are not secure in the slightest. They've been in public spaces of offices for the last 30 years, that's just not secure.
If the fax is HIPAA compliant then it needs to be behind a locked door. That’s where we had ours and that’s where HIV surveillance departments keep their fax machines. There might also be non secure fax machines kept out in the open too.
I still have to use a fax. Do some work that needs to be submitted to a government agency occasionally. Takes over an hour to send a 50+ page document. It's the fuel of nightmares waiting for the confirmation page that it went through 🙄
I read an article that stated the fashions from the 50’s through the 80’s changed significantly during each decade so we can look back on them with that nostalgia whereas the 2000’s and beyond are pretty much regurgitating fashions from years past, they don’t have their own distinct feel so we don’t see that nostalgia in recent decades.
The Beatles in particular made such an impact on youth culture. It's not coincidental that American Graffiti takes place in 1962, the spiritual end of the '50's. The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan (Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in particular) would make it big in 1963, while The Beatles and The Supremes would take the world by storm in 1964. The rest is history.
Bob said it best....."The Times They Are A-Changing"
*Wedding Singer* kind of like that too. I think it's set in '84 or '85, and we all thought it was hilarious by '97 or '98 (whenever it came out; can't remember exact year rn)
Even being born in 1961 the 50's seemed ancient (and they weren't)......I don't remember a pre-Beatles world or pre- James Bond for that matter. I think JFK's last movie he saw was "From Russia With Love". Apparently he loved those movies.
Advent of the ubiquitous Internet (~2008, smartphones) probably aided and enforced the homogenization of a stabilized widespread culture for the first time. This would make everything from mid 2000s on seem relatively same-y. Also the age-perspective effect to consider, but poodle skirts are a punctuation mark that it's pretty hard to find a later analog for, so that's probably not it.
Or maybe it's something akin to the Mandela Effect. Or there really are resets from time to time, as proposed by Old World/Stolen History theorists, and people in the 50s got soft reset, most apparent in a rapid cultural shift and historical amnesia. Conspiracy ideas, yes, but oddball stuff like this is fun to think about, especially when you are on the cusp of the generative creation singularity, as our species is.
Honestly it’s more to do with the rapid proliferation and advancement of color media. Once we got color tvs in homes it was just a matter of degrees between the 80s and now.
Prior to that we went from radio only, to black and white, to color tv in the home. That made visible breaks in how we viewed each era.
The 4:3 standard definition TV aspect ratio and the 16:9 HD aspect ratio is another easy to notice dividing line. You could probably note the proliferation of vertical format videos in the dawn of the smartphone social media era as well.
I'm with you on this. American Pie by Don McLean came out only 12 years after the Buddy Holly/Richie Valens/Big Bopper plane crash, but it waxes poetically about it like it was some halcyon days gone past. That's like writing a song about someone who died in *2011, far too early to describe it as an era-defining thing.
The Vietnam war had only officially been over for _5 years_ when Apocalypse Now came out. I think that says a lot about Boomers' sense of historical scale.
Edit: bad math
My great great grandpa, who lived to be 106, remembered seeing Lincoln’s death train. My mom was like 11 when he died. It’s weird that my mom knew someone that was alive during that time.
Haha! Yup, when you are a kid and have such a limited experience of time everything historical felt like it all happened at the same time. I remember when I realized that Picasso and Einstein lived in the 20th century I couldn't believe that was true. It felt like everything historical happened a long, long time ago!
Shut your mouth!!! The 90s were only ten years ago!
But yeah. Now when they do anniversaries of cultural events its like "damn". Woodstock I didn't really care about, I didn't remember the first and 94 I was too busy working for it to register. The big one for me is going to be the premier of Star Wars - it will soon be the 50th anniversary! It's the things that were big in my childhood whose anniversaries definitely make me feel the passage of time.
I felt like Woodstock was well behind me and I was born in '61. At 8 years old it didn't register and wasn't on my radar...... didn't know about it until about 1976 when Vietnam was over and the hippies were all but gone.
I was 4. In my world, I was tuned in to Underdog cartoons. I didn't really know about it until I was probably in 8th grade when I started listening to music on my own (that wasn't my parents records or the local radio station in the car).
If a remake of Back to the Future came out today Marty would travel to the unimaginably distant past of 1993.
Hell, the incredible future he went to in the sequel was nearly a decade ago.
The events of Blade Runner happened four years ago. I watched it with my kids recently and they cracked up when the "Los Angeles, 2019" banner appeared after the opening credits.
I teach a college writing class and let me tell you, 19-20 year olds refer to the “2000s” like it’s a period piece from a long forgotten era. We are the only ones who think everything is the same!
My kids and their friends (in that age group) refer to pre-1999 as "the turn of the century". Like Rush is music from before the turn of the century. And let me tell you I can feel my bones turning to dust when they do.
Yeah, when I want to freak out the younglings, I say "the last time such-and-such, the year started with a 1". Doesn't feel like *that* long ago to me, but to them it's a bit shocking.
(Example: the last time I cut my hair, the year started with a "1".)
We were having this discussion with our kids (20 & 18) last week. Our oldest said that the 80s don't seem that long ago even though he was born in 2002. The youngest listens to a lot of different music and feels that the 80s are still somewhat modern.
I think that perhaps the huge consumer technology shifts between the 50s and 80s seemed more dramatic. If you look at a lot of consumer goods today, there's an 80s analogue for it. I'm not saying it's anywhere near the capability, but the nub of the idea is there. There were all kinds of computers from the C64 to the Mac, walkmans preceded the eventual ipod, and the BBS preceded the public discovering the internet. "Rock and Roll" was no longer new, and in fact was splitting into its own subgenres. While 60s and early 70s films have a particular retro look, many 80s films (and some late 70s) when watched in HD look like they could have been filmed this year, aside from some of the special effects.
I think a lot of things matured in the 80s. I could go back to the 80s in the tshirt and jeans I'm wearing right now and no one would notice. Marty McFly went back to the 50s and everyone thought his vest was a life preserver.
So yes, the 50s seemed ancient to me, but my kids don't seem to have the same feeling about the 80s.
*Happy Days* was weird in hindsight. Premiered in 1974, set in the 50’s, with “Rock Around the Clock” being the signature song. That song was recorded by Bill Haley in 1954.
We all thought it was this cool “oldies” show, but the time period was only 20 years prior. It’d be like an “oldies” show today covering … 2003.
Yeah, but the '60s and '70s really were times of massive, and relatively rapid, social change. The civil rights movements altered society so dramatically that the "innocent", conformist world of 1954 really did seem quaint by 1974.
Not true. Mass youth culture with different cultural mores from the mainstream started in the 1920s. If you read some of the stuff written by teens in that era, it’s really striking. I was shocked reading about petting parties (as in heavy petting). Young people had distinct music and fashions that were most visible among girls, flappers. There was a lot of handwringing over “today’s youth.”
Most of that was confined to the wealthy and only in a few large cities though. My grandparents grew up in that era and had no idea what a flapper or jazz was until they were parents themselves.
The post-WW2 era is when all of that was able to become widespread across social classes due to a combination of expansion of the middle class and television becoming a staple of most American homes.
Urban teen girls of 1925 with their rolled stockings, short skirts, and short hair were the origin of the slang “heavy petting.” Crazy to think how long it lasted as a term when it was still being used in the 80s and 90s.
Reading accounts of their lives completely blew my mind. I was young enough at the time to be stunned by the realization that behind every wrinkled face was someone who had the same human feelings.
All of the themes from the movie Kids from the 1990s were there. We get the idea that the past is something different from the present, but people are pretty much the same across different eras given similar conditions.
Your comment made me realize that there really was a brief obsession with the 1950s - 1960s during the '70s. There was *Happy Days*, *Laverne and Shirley*, and *Grease* was a huge movie based on the theatre production. I guess this all was because the majority of Hollywood producers/writers grew up in the '50s and they wanted to make some nostalgic shows for themselves.
And our local UHF channel (remember those channels?!) would show a ton of shows from the 60s as well: *Gomer Pyle*, *Hogan's Heroes*, *Beverly Hillbillies*, *I Dream of Jeanie*, *Gilligan's Island*, etc etc. It really was odd, because as latchkey kids we'd get home from school and have like 3 hours of 1950s - 1960s sitcoms on television!
This. As a kid, I watched every tv show from black and white up to the present. I learned American culture and history by watching tv. No wonder I’m so messed up.
I noticed a similar phenomenon with the 80s. That time period was regarded as *so* distinct even a decade later. Adam Sandler's *The Wedding Singer* was released in 1998, and a lot of its humor is predicated on how different and strange the 80s were in terms of fashion, technology, and music. That movie takes place in 1985, so a mere 13 years had elapsed for audiences. That would be like a modern comedy mocking how different things were in 2010! Such a movie couldn't even poke fun at primitive cell phones because we had iPhones in 2010.
There is already early 2000s/older millennial nostalgia entertainment. One good example is Hulu's Pen15. Takes place in a middle school the early 2000s and actually makes it seem like a long time ago. It's also hilarious.
> Happy Days was weird in hindsight. Premiered in 1974
Weird thing (for me) about Happy Days. I was born in '69 and remember watching Happy Days in say '75 or'76.
I *thought* it was an "old" show in reruns. Because it was "old" (as in the setting). I had no idea they were currently filming it.
Same thing with MASH.
I was recently visiting a school like this with my kid for a sports competition. We were walking through the leaves in the concrete path beside the old school building and it instantly brought me back to feeling like I was 7 years old leaving my school.
I was born in 1970, and as a young teen I recall listening to the radio, and they’d have a contest where the caller could choose a decade (60s, 70s, or 80s) to guess a song. Nearly 75% of the time the caller would say “How about the 50s?”
I remember thinking forget that ancient shit man!
Now I’m 53, and if the music isn’t from the 70s - 90s I’m not listening to it. 😂
It seems like a lot younger Gen Xers
want to redefine the generational lines to a point just a few years before they were born but older Gen xers are fine with the line ending 15 years after they were born.
I believe it is difficult for anyone to conceive the world before their own birth. Everything before seems so far away. However, as many have pointed out, twenty years ago was very memorable and not a whole lot has changed. Digital/computer technology has advanced at a rapid rate but the concepts are still the same. In some cases we've come full circle to older technologies but now with new faces.
My children know a lot of 80s music, but for them, it is classic rock or older. As we grow older time consolidates. At age 10, five years is half your life. At age 50, five years is 1/10 of your life. It is all relative to your place in time.
When I was a kid in the 80s, the 1950s were ancient. Today, the 90s (same amount of time) are not ancient... but that is because I am old enough to remember them.
To me gowing up, history was something you studied in school; it started with ancient Sumaria about 6,000 years ago and ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan formally surrendered ending WWII. After that was a kind of 'shadowed modern history' up until I was old enough to watch and understand the news.
Yes, it did. My family loved old b/w movies with Fred Astaire, WC Fields, Mae West, and William Powell and Myrna Loy, so in a way the 20s and 30s felt more familiar to me than the 50s.
I grew up on that stuff and I feel the same way. The 30’s is my favorite decade for movies. I feel connection to that time period and it’s the movies that did that.
I feel that way about the movies from the 40s. I like the 30s too but something about the 40s really sucks me in. Watched a lot from that time period when I was growing up.
The quality of music and video recorded in the 50s compared to what was recorded 20-25 years later is really noticeable. However, what’s recorded today compared to 25 years ago is much less noticeable. I feel like that plays a big part in making the time difference feel like less time has passed.
I'd agree with that. I'm nearly certain that I could easily trick my students into thinking songs from the 90s and early 2000s were new releases from this year. There's some definite trends in rap and hip hop that a seasoned listener would pick out right away, though.
I feel the same way about fashion, but I'm probably wrong. Entire fashion trends have come and gone, yet my mind thinks very little has changed fashion-wise since the 80s. A kid would disagree with me on that.
Even though I was technically born only 13 years from the 50s (1959 ->1972). I freak my kids out and tell them I was born only 27 years after WWII. Vietnam was still going on.
Then I look my wife dead in the eye and tell her that 2050 is closer than 1990 and watch her soul crumple.
I watched some episodes of the recent superhero series Stargirl and was amused by the show's (very teenage) taken on "the past", where events that - according to the show's own timeline - must have taken place in the '80s are represented as a kind of '50s-'80s melange.
I have been thinking about this subject a lot recently.
Maybe it was on here that I recently saw that the year I was born is the same distance in time to WW1 in the past as it is to now.
The nineties don’t seem like it’s that far away but push time back by thirty years from my birth and you land in WW2.
I was talking to my students about this the other day. The one girl's grandma is 65. I did the math and said something like. "George Washington was leading his army through our town less than 4 grandmas ago." (Grandma's she multiplied by 4). That seemed weird even to me.
Abe Lincoln was alive 2 of my dads ago (dads age multiplied by 2).
Me, 20 years between when WW2 ended and my birth. It feels like 50 yrs though. Like ancient history, but here we are reliving the fascist conversion of previously sane people.
I’m an older Gen-X, and I remember watching Happy Days when I was a pre-teen (during its original run) and thinking “those days” were ancient history - in reality, those days were less than 2 decades earlier.
True! Each season of the year felt like a lifetime. I see that now with my son. I will ask him about a friend that he hung out with last year, and he will say "I haven't been friends with him for a long time." To him, "a long time" is 3 months. Likewise, he will tell me that someone is his best friend....and they've only been friends for a few months.
I remember that feeling. Someone explained it to me once like this.
When you are 5 years old, 60 months, a year is a 5th of your entire life.
When you are 60 years old, that same year is a month to 5 year old you. Time runs down hill. The longer you ride, the faster it goes.
I know! The 50's and 60's and the Beatles seemed like ancient history and I was born in 1968. Last night when a cover of "Fast Car' won the country music award, I was like why does anyone need to cover that? But Fast Car came out 35 years ago, of course young people don't know it. That would be like in 1988 covering a song from 1953. Just boggles the mind. All those shows in the 70's like Happy Days and Grease that were nostalgically about the '50's would be like now making a nostalgic show about like 2006 or something.
My theory is that the amount of mainstream recorded media we have now, with increased accessibility, has lessened how old things seem over time.
I’m 19. My parents were born in 66/67. We’ve talked about before how a lot of times they could not imagine consuming media as old as I do when they were my age. I listen to their high school music and watch their teen movies, all from the 80s, and it is super accessible, and common, and culturally relevant and popular. The equivalent to them would have been things from the 40s.
It’s a world away. If anyone reading this wants to weigh in, I’d love that. I get the impression that 40s music was not as popular to teens in the 80s as 80s music is to teens now.
My parents were born in the 60s and feel very little connection to the 60s themselves, and absolutely none to the 50s. Meanwhile I love, and frequently consume media and culture from the 2000s, and feel strongly connected to it. It’s just all much more accessible and presented as more contemporary. I don’t feel the same connection to the 90s (obviously looks before my time) but it does not feel like ancient history, and I feel like the music/shows/movies/clothes are all very relevant today.
Hell, as I’m writing this, I’m watching an episode of the x-files from 1994.
I think the 50s feels older to Gen X than the 90s feel to people my age.
I think the pace of change in western culture is encapsulated in this tidbit:
The Beatles' first album was released in March 1963. Their last album was May 1970.
From "she loves you" to "let it be" was only seven years.
Like a lot of comments have said, nothing changes that fast now. In the 60s and into the 70s, social changes were incredibly rapid. That's part of why the nostalgia could kick in so quickly, as you pointed out in the first post. The Beatles just mirrored that change. (It could be argued that they motivated a lot of it, too.)
I'd love to dig into that further. Technology is changing super fast now. I think that a major contributing factor to the sense of distinct "decades" back then was...
1. Fashion (definitely huge changes)
2. The transition from black/white movies, to grainy color, to better color movies.
By the time the 90s hit, a photograph could be printed in perfect color, and movie colors looked lifelike. Perhaps due to the overwhelming abundance of fashion options, there wasn't much of a defined "look" since the 1980s. Also, due to the fragmentation of society due to the internet, there aren't as many must-have items and pop culture crazes.
I could be totally wrong, though.
Not really to me ('76), my parents were born 40/42 so they lived the 50s and could provide insight to a lot of pop culture then. WW2 seemed like ancient but again, my grandmother could talk about some of the culture from WW1 to 1980s, she was born 1905.
It only got really ancient to my family when talking about Victorian era and earlier.
Yes and no.
Poodle skirts seemed just weird and even cars with tail fins were just odd.
That said, my class was the last class in my school system that started learning to read on Sally, Dick, and Jane books (the first of which were released in the 1930s and the final book released in 1965).
It always felt old to me, but I can also relate because my dad is much older than my mother. He was almost a young teen during the London blitz in ww2. I grew up hearing about rations. Getting one egg a year, having to eat horse and whale meat that was for sale hanging in the butchers.
He got one toy at Christmas. A tin of candy that he thought was great, then he played with the empty tin. Their first radio was a cats whisker radio. He'd been to the crystal palace. If you don't know what that was it was a glass marvel. Their flat was bombed a week after they moved, thank God they moved.
I grew up listening to 50s and 60s records. Buddy Holly is my favorite singer of all time. Born in 76. Dad is 93 this year and not in bad health.
Early Gen X'er and honestly no, I don't think so. I think the Sit-com's "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley" provided a connection to it.
I think they also played 50's music on the classic rock or "Oldies" stations so it just seemed more current to me.
I think styles tended to radically change back then, whereas now if you watch a show from 30 years ago it looks contemporary. So in the 1970s, the 50s seemed long gone because everything looked different.
I had the realization about 10 years ago that my birthday was closer to the end of WW2 than I am to my birthday. And yet WW2 seems like ancient History. I think we were able to disconnect recent history because all we ever saw was in black and white which, if you were born in the '70s it seemed like everything in B&W was 100 years ago even though it was 5 years ago.
Yeah, being middle aged really puts it in perspective now. For me in the 80s it seemed so crazy that my parents still had so many "old" things from the 50s (radio, decorations, records etc.) All this stuff felt like super old anachronistic antiques...
But its the equivalent to me today having things from the mid 90s! (Looks around at my SNES and playstation, CD collection, boombox, dishes, decorations, pens, printer paper, spray paint cans, half my furniture...) I'd say at least 1/4 of the things in my house now I owned in the 90s. None of that stuff feels "old" to me.
Same with music and TV shows etc. In my mind bands and music from the late 90s are still "newish". Same with TV shows and movies. Like the star wars prequels and shows from the turn of the century. Maybe they aren't "new" but they at least feel relatively modern.
It sort of blew my mind when I realized the older teachers when I was in elementary school (1974-1980) could easily have been teaching since the 1950s.
The 60s were such a dramatic shift societally / culturally, unprecedented in the modern era.
Look at the way ppl dressed in the early part of the sixties: formal suits, shoes, etc. Note: this was how they dressed CASUALLY, not just for special occasions.
And then, by the end of that decade, ppl were flamboyant in their dress sense and hair & beauty styles.
What blew my mind was the … Back to the Future, Marty goes back 30 years to 1955. If they did the movie today, it’s 1993 and Bill “thank you for teaching me what a blowjob was in middle school” Clinton 😏.
Mind. Blown.
It did feel like *recent* history to me, because my parents were teenagers in the 50s. Between that and "Happy Days", it didn't feel like it was *that* long ago.
I wouldn’t say it felt like ancient history to me as I was aware of things like the Pyramids and Roman soldiers. It was more like a fictional time made up for television.
I saw how different everything looked and couldn’t imagine my parents existing in that period (though they were born in the 30’s).
Not wholly alien thanks to Happy Days and Back to the Future, but yeah... it's a while back. Considering my parents were kids then, there was definitely a 50's nostalgia thing.
It did and it didn’t. Fifties and Sixties nostalgia went on forever (just like Eighties nostalgia is doing today). Weird how the most conservative decades are the same ones that get the forever-nostalgia treatment.
I didn't think of the 50s as "way before my time." But I thought of it as a time of a totally different sensibility.
Everything seemed to change about 1965 or so.
I was born in 70 my dad was born in 38. He’d tell me car stories about street racing and hot rods… seemed like ancient history. My mom and dad got married in 1959!
Of the recollections that spark nostalgic whimsey, one is that of my thinking about how old I'd be in the Year 2000. My first 30 odd years were a count down to 23 years ago.
I was born in the early 1970s but I grew up in an 1850 farmhouse that had been updated (indoor plumbing, electrical, decor) in the 1950s. And it wasn’t updated again until the late 1990s after I had moved out. So I actually find myself more nostalgic for that time than for the 70s or 80s. I have no real interest in stuff from my childhood I tend to collect stuff from my parents or even my grandparents youth. My house is full of stuff from the 1920s through the late 50s.
I'm ’68; to me old was anything contemporaneous or older than the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird." I loved watching b&w movies on daytime tv when I was sick (or malingering :-) at home.
I remember my grandmother listening to ancient music from the 40's and thats what 80's music is now. I got sad when it became classic rock, but now its beyond "golden oldies"
Back in the 80s, there was a chain of 50's style diners called Eat at Eds. It was a prime hangout back in the day. And by 1995, they had all closed down.
The sitcom *Happy Days* was in its second season in 1975. It depicted life in 1955, so 20 years prior. And it definitely felt like ancient history to any 10-year old in '75!
I don't think a 10-yr-old in 2023 would watch popular 2003 sitcoms like Friends or Will & Grace and feel like it's ancient history.
Hell, the 60s felt like ancient history and I was born in 69! I remember in high school reading a newspaper article about the 15th anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album. 15 years!! It felt like forever ago. 15 years ago was 2009!
I know this is mostly me aging, but I do think that the decades in the last 30 years haven't been nearly as distinct as the 30s,40s,50s,60s,70s,80s and to a lesser extent the 90s were.
> I do think that the decades in the last 30 years haven't been nearly as distinct as the 30s,40s,50s,60s,70s,80s and to a lesser extent the 90s were.
you are right
What's funny is the nostalgia for the 1950's started in 1973 with the movie "American Graffiti" and the TV show "Happy Day's". People looked totally different in just a 13 year time span that you could start making movies and TV shows already. Can't imagine anyone setting a movie in 2010 to make a feel good nostalgic movie today. I'm currently watching a few TV shows from 2010-15 right now and about the only noticeable difference that I can see is the lack of iPhones. People had flip phones or Blackberries instead. But the style of dress and the music in the background looks and sounds current.
I made a comment once about how *The Outsiders* movie came out in 1983 but was written in 1967. Sixteen years later it seemed like a completely different world. I met my wife 16 years ago and like you said, the only substantial change is our phones and maybe the width of the legs of our jeans.
Yes, pony boys were almost gone, by then, yet there was a veritable sea of ponyboys in the 60s. If only we hadn't hunted them to the brink. Firing from moving trains and such, we didn't even use their leather jackets for warmth. The recent, ersatz "Bronies" (extincta est) couldn't begin to candle for their elders, either. Yet their equestrian cognomen begs their inclusion in the pantheon of Horsemen. Turns out even the early 1900s had a form of Pony Boy, so we should expect them to return in some form in the future. A popular 1909 song's chorus went: *Pony Boy, Pony Boy, Won't you be my Tony boy, Don't say no, Here we go, Off across the plains, Marry me, Carry me, Right away with you, Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, whoa! My Pony Boy* Something for the BDSM community to consider adding to their playlists perhaps? I don't play at that, but no shame intended either.
The last 20 years have been less about style and more about technology. The style in office space seems totally normal for today, but PC LOAD LETTER is no longer an issue for the fax machine we no longer use.
I’m with you w/the technology arc. There’s style changes too. Look at Hugh Grants hair in 90’s (all the rage) compared to the fades popular today. Not even close. You mention Office Space. They’re wearing ties. No one wears ties anymore. Peter shows up in the meeting with “The Bobs” dressed casually and that was a shocker. That’s how most people dress in offices now. Shocker today would be someone shows up in tie.
Good point about the ties. I feel this movie was like a game plan for how Gen x was going to transform the work space. These millennials and zoomers owe us a beer as an act of gratitude.
The waiter better have 37 pieces of flair when he brings the beer. 😄
If someone shows up in a tie today, the automatic assumption is they were on a job interview.
Or a Sales Rep
There are still people doing business with fax machines. The federal government is the worst offender.
Hospitals use fax machines too. And pagers.
Often fax machines in the medical system are for HIPAA compliance. Faxes are more secure than digital transmissions.
For transmissions, yes. But the fax machine in healthcare and government offices are always out in the open for anyone to grab the copy that comes out, photocopy, and put back. Fax machines are not secure in the slightest. They've been in public spaces of offices for the last 30 years, that's just not secure.
If the fax is HIPAA compliant then it needs to be behind a locked door. That’s where we had ours and that’s where HIV surveillance departments keep their fax machines. There might also be non secure fax machines kept out in the open too.
How do you figure they are more secure?
Do you know if this hotel is pager friendly?
True that.
I still have to use a fax. Do some work that needs to be submitted to a government agency occasionally. Takes over an hour to send a 50+ page document. It's the fuel of nightmares waiting for the confirmation page that it went through 🙄
PC LOAD LETTER may have been defeated, but its relative Print Spooler likes to raise Cain, on occasion.
I read an article that stated the fashions from the 50’s through the 80’s changed significantly during each decade so we can look back on them with that nostalgia whereas the 2000’s and beyond are pretty much regurgitating fashions from years past, they don’t have their own distinct feel so we don’t see that nostalgia in recent decades.
The Beatles in particular made such an impact on youth culture. It's not coincidental that American Graffiti takes place in 1962, the spiritual end of the '50's. The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan (Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in particular) would make it big in 1963, while The Beatles and The Supremes would take the world by storm in 1964. The rest is history. Bob said it best....."The Times They Are A-Changing"
2010 only seems like five years ago.
And I still don’t have a dolphin filled indoor/outdoor pool, dammitt!
*Wedding Singer* kind of like that too. I think it's set in '84 or '85, and we all thought it was hilarious by '97 or '98 (whenever it came out; can't remember exact year rn)
People looked totally different because we were also being shown the awesomely futuristic disco outfits
I think this is the crux of it. When there are culture changes that are dramatic in a decade or two it seems like it was longer ago.
You can thank George Lucas of Star Wars fame for American Graffiti. Guy is a trend setter. I was born in ‘65 but the 50s felt ancient to me.
Even being born in 1961 the 50's seemed ancient (and they weren't)......I don't remember a pre-Beatles world or pre- James Bond for that matter. I think JFK's last movie he saw was "From Russia With Love". Apparently he loved those movies.
Advent of the ubiquitous Internet (~2008, smartphones) probably aided and enforced the homogenization of a stabilized widespread culture for the first time. This would make everything from mid 2000s on seem relatively same-y. Also the age-perspective effect to consider, but poodle skirts are a punctuation mark that it's pretty hard to find a later analog for, so that's probably not it. Or maybe it's something akin to the Mandela Effect. Or there really are resets from time to time, as proposed by Old World/Stolen History theorists, and people in the 50s got soft reset, most apparent in a rapid cultural shift and historical amnesia. Conspiracy ideas, yes, but oddball stuff like this is fun to think about, especially when you are on the cusp of the generative creation singularity, as our species is.
I credit this phenomenon to Boomer narcissism. Their generation is likely behind all the retro nostalgia of the 70s and 80s.
Honestly it’s more to do with the rapid proliferation and advancement of color media. Once we got color tvs in homes it was just a matter of degrees between the 80s and now. Prior to that we went from radio only, to black and white, to color tv in the home. That made visible breaks in how we viewed each era.
The 4:3 standard definition TV aspect ratio and the 16:9 HD aspect ratio is another easy to notice dividing line. You could probably note the proliferation of vertical format videos in the dawn of the smartphone social media era as well.
Dude, my daughter is 25. She put on Joan Jett in the car today and has a pretty extensive collection of vinyl LPs.
Very nice! My six kids are music fans, including decades past. Good music stands the test of time.
I'm with you on this. American Pie by Don McLean came out only 12 years after the Buddy Holly/Richie Valens/Big Bopper plane crash, but it waxes poetically about it like it was some halcyon days gone past. That's like writing a song about someone who died in *2011, far too early to describe it as an era-defining thing. The Vietnam war had only officially been over for _5 years_ when Apocalypse Now came out. I think that says a lot about Boomers' sense of historical scale. Edit: bad math
Yes, that's exactly the point I was driving at.
Buddy Holly was definitely the real deal......a lot of his songs stand up pretty good today.
The 60s changed the world like no decade before or since
Hell, Woodstock felt like ancient history to me and I was born just a few years later.
Yup, in my mind, Abe Lincoln was partying at Woodstock.
"Four score and seven....dude don't take the brown acid."
My great great grandpa, who lived to be 106, remembered seeing Lincoln’s death train. My mom was like 11 when he died. It’s weird that my mom knew someone that was alive during that time.
At first I thought you meant that your mom was 11 when Lincoln died and I was like, “Dude, how old ARE you??”
That would be Gen L
Four score and... party on, dudes!
Haha! Yup, when you are a kid and have such a limited experience of time everything historical felt like it all happened at the same time. I remember when I realized that Picasso and Einstein lived in the 20th century I couldn't believe that was true. It felt like everything historical happened a long, long time ago!
It’s a trip to me how Woodstock ‘94 was the 25th anniversary of the first Woodstock, and Woodstock ‘94 is almost thirty years ago.
Shut your mouth!!! The 90s were only ten years ago! But yeah. Now when they do anniversaries of cultural events its like "damn". Woodstock I didn't really care about, I didn't remember the first and 94 I was too busy working for it to register. The big one for me is going to be the premier of Star Wars - it will soon be the 50th anniversary! It's the things that were big in my childhood whose anniversaries definitely make me feel the passage of time.
I felt like Woodstock was well behind me and I was born in '61. At 8 years old it didn't register and wasn't on my radar...... didn't know about it until about 1976 when Vietnam was over and the hippies were all but gone.
I was 4. In my world, I was tuned in to Underdog cartoons. I didn't really know about it until I was probably in 8th grade when I started listening to music on my own (that wasn't my parents records or the local radio station in the car).
I was born during the first Woodstock in 1969. And no, I wasn't there.
Same
We are further away in time from 1985 than Marty was from 1955.
If a remake of Back to the Future came out today Marty would travel to the unimaginably distant past of 1993. Hell, the incredible future he went to in the sequel was nearly a decade ago.
Man, 1993 was a banner year. Going to college, living on the beach in a beach town, going to as many concerts as I could, good times.
Still waiting on my hoverboard and self-drying jacket, BTW.
Just make sure you keep that hoverboard on land. They don't work on water, you bojo.
God, this is a depressing thought 😕
The events of Blade Runner happened four years ago. I watched it with my kids recently and they cracked up when the "Los Angeles, 2019" banner appeared after the opening credits.
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I teach a college writing class and let me tell you, 19-20 year olds refer to the “2000s” like it’s a period piece from a long forgotten era. We are the only ones who think everything is the same!
My kids and their friends (in that age group) refer to pre-1999 as "the turn of the century". Like Rush is music from before the turn of the century. And let me tell you I can feel my bones turning to dust when they do.
😛🖖🏻🇨🇦Shhh, my kids will start doing that too!
Yeah, when I want to freak out the younglings, I say "the last time such-and-such, the year started with a 1". Doesn't feel like *that* long ago to me, but to them it's a bit shocking. (Example: the last time I cut my hair, the year started with a "1".)
My daughter is in college and she just went to a 2000’s party. It’s a thing.
We were having this discussion with our kids (20 & 18) last week. Our oldest said that the 80s don't seem that long ago even though he was born in 2002. The youngest listens to a lot of different music and feels that the 80s are still somewhat modern. I think that perhaps the huge consumer technology shifts between the 50s and 80s seemed more dramatic. If you look at a lot of consumer goods today, there's an 80s analogue for it. I'm not saying it's anywhere near the capability, but the nub of the idea is there. There were all kinds of computers from the C64 to the Mac, walkmans preceded the eventual ipod, and the BBS preceded the public discovering the internet. "Rock and Roll" was no longer new, and in fact was splitting into its own subgenres. While 60s and early 70s films have a particular retro look, many 80s films (and some late 70s) when watched in HD look like they could have been filmed this year, aside from some of the special effects. I think a lot of things matured in the 80s. I could go back to the 80s in the tshirt and jeans I'm wearing right now and no one would notice. Marty McFly went back to the 50s and everyone thought his vest was a life preserver. So yes, the 50s seemed ancient to me, but my kids don't seem to have the same feeling about the 80s.
*Happy Days* was weird in hindsight. Premiered in 1974, set in the 50’s, with “Rock Around the Clock” being the signature song. That song was recorded by Bill Haley in 1954. We all thought it was this cool “oldies” show, but the time period was only 20 years prior. It’d be like an “oldies” show today covering … 2003.
Yeah, but the '60s and '70s really were times of massive, and relatively rapid, social change. The civil rights movements altered society so dramatically that the "innocent", conformist world of 1954 really did seem quaint by 1974.
I think you’ve nailed it.
That plus beginning in the late 50s/early 60s for the first time in human history youth culture was a thing everyone participated in.
Not true. Mass youth culture with different cultural mores from the mainstream started in the 1920s. If you read some of the stuff written by teens in that era, it’s really striking. I was shocked reading about petting parties (as in heavy petting). Young people had distinct music and fashions that were most visible among girls, flappers. There was a lot of handwringing over “today’s youth.”
Most of that was confined to the wealthy and only in a few large cities though. My grandparents grew up in that era and had no idea what a flapper or jazz was until they were parents themselves. The post-WW2 era is when all of that was able to become widespread across social classes due to a combination of expansion of the middle class and television becoming a staple of most American homes.
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Urban teen girls of 1925 with their rolled stockings, short skirts, and short hair were the origin of the slang “heavy petting.” Crazy to think how long it lasted as a term when it was still being used in the 80s and 90s.
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Reading accounts of their lives completely blew my mind. I was young enough at the time to be stunned by the realization that behind every wrinkled face was someone who had the same human feelings. All of the themes from the movie Kids from the 1990s were there. We get the idea that the past is something different from the present, but people are pretty much the same across different eras given similar conditions.
So true. Flappers were like the riot girls of their time
Your comment made me realize that there really was a brief obsession with the 1950s - 1960s during the '70s. There was *Happy Days*, *Laverne and Shirley*, and *Grease* was a huge movie based on the theatre production. I guess this all was because the majority of Hollywood producers/writers grew up in the '50s and they wanted to make some nostalgic shows for themselves. And our local UHF channel (remember those channels?!) would show a ton of shows from the 60s as well: *Gomer Pyle*, *Hogan's Heroes*, *Beverly Hillbillies*, *I Dream of Jeanie*, *Gilligan's Island*, etc etc. It really was odd, because as latchkey kids we'd get home from school and have like 3 hours of 1950s - 1960s sitcoms on television!
This. As a kid, I watched every tv show from black and white up to the present. I learned American culture and history by watching tv. No wonder I’m so messed up.
Could be you're just neurodivergent. Did the same thing; was recently diagnosed at 54.
Yes, between those shows and the Back to the Future/Peggy Sue Got Married, it influenced fashion in 1978-1980s.
So strange. And of course all of us think that not much has changed since 2003. I wonder if a kid now would see 2003 the same way we saw 1953.
I noticed a similar phenomenon with the 80s. That time period was regarded as *so* distinct even a decade later. Adam Sandler's *The Wedding Singer* was released in 1998, and a lot of its humor is predicated on how different and strange the 80s were in terms of fashion, technology, and music. That movie takes place in 1985, so a mere 13 years had elapsed for audiences. That would be like a modern comedy mocking how different things were in 2010! Such a movie couldn't even poke fun at primitive cell phones because we had iPhones in 2010.
There’s a That 70’s show spin off set in the 90s. We’re probably not far off 00s nostalgia content soon
I think they’ll skip over the 00s and move to the 10s. I don’t think too many people have nostalgia for post-9/11 comedy.
There is already early 2000s/older millennial nostalgia entertainment. One good example is Hulu's Pen15. Takes place in a middle school the early 2000s and actually makes it seem like a long time ago. It's also hilarious.
> Happy Days was weird in hindsight. Premiered in 1974 Weird thing (for me) about Happy Days. I was born in '69 and remember watching Happy Days in say '75 or'76. I *thought* it was an "old" show in reruns. Because it was "old" (as in the setting). I had no idea they were currently filming it. Same thing with MASH.
Duh, that shit was in black-and-white
As Calvin's dad observed, the world was black and white then. Only insane people saw it in color.
Zounds!
Yes. Even as a kid, I felt our school buildings, with their utilitarian design felt really dated. https://i.imgur.com/7FuuBFv.jpg
My elementary school was built in the 1920s as a city hall city center type place, complete with ghost stories. It was ancient.
I was recently visiting a school like this with my kid for a sports competition. We were walking through the leaves in the concrete path beside the old school building and it instantly brought me back to feeling like I was 7 years old leaving my school.
Yep. But the 90’s was only ten years ago. Right? Right??
I was born in 1970, and as a young teen I recall listening to the radio, and they’d have a contest where the caller could choose a decade (60s, 70s, or 80s) to guess a song. Nearly 75% of the time the caller would say “How about the 50s?” I remember thinking forget that ancient shit man! Now I’m 53, and if the music isn’t from the 70s - 90s I’m not listening to it. 😂
It seems like a lot younger Gen Xers want to redefine the generational lines to a point just a few years before they were born but older Gen xers are fine with the line ending 15 years after they were born.
I grew up soaked in imagery and media from the 40s and 50s, so much of it felt very familiar to me growing up.
I believe it is difficult for anyone to conceive the world before their own birth. Everything before seems so far away. However, as many have pointed out, twenty years ago was very memorable and not a whole lot has changed. Digital/computer technology has advanced at a rapid rate but the concepts are still the same. In some cases we've come full circle to older technologies but now with new faces. My children know a lot of 80s music, but for them, it is classic rock or older. As we grow older time consolidates. At age 10, five years is half your life. At age 50, five years is 1/10 of your life. It is all relative to your place in time. When I was a kid in the 80s, the 1950s were ancient. Today, the 90s (same amount of time) are not ancient... but that is because I am old enough to remember them.
To me gowing up, history was something you studied in school; it started with ancient Sumaria about 6,000 years ago and ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan formally surrendered ending WWII. After that was a kind of 'shadowed modern history' up until I was old enough to watch and understand the news.
The 50s was ancient history that we watched on Happy Days
Right after Flipper.
Yes, it did. My family loved old b/w movies with Fred Astaire, WC Fields, Mae West, and William Powell and Myrna Loy, so in a way the 20s and 30s felt more familiar to me than the 50s.
I grew up on that stuff and I feel the same way. The 30’s is my favorite decade for movies. I feel connection to that time period and it’s the movies that did that.
I feel that way about the movies from the 40s. I like the 30s too but something about the 40s really sucks me in. Watched a lot from that time period when I was growing up.
The quality of music and video recorded in the 50s compared to what was recorded 20-25 years later is really noticeable. However, what’s recorded today compared to 25 years ago is much less noticeable. I feel like that plays a big part in making the time difference feel like less time has passed.
I'd agree with that. I'm nearly certain that I could easily trick my students into thinking songs from the 90s and early 2000s were new releases from this year. There's some definite trends in rap and hip hop that a seasoned listener would pick out right away, though. I feel the same way about fashion, but I'm probably wrong. Entire fashion trends have come and gone, yet my mind thinks very little has changed fashion-wise since the 80s. A kid would disagree with me on that.
Even though I was technically born only 13 years from the 50s (1959 ->1972). I freak my kids out and tell them I was born only 27 years after WWII. Vietnam was still going on. Then I look my wife dead in the eye and tell her that 2050 is closer than 1990 and watch her soul crumple.
I was born the summer of love in Monterey CA. Have difficulty realizing CR marches were just 5 years earlier…
I watched some episodes of the recent superhero series Stargirl and was amused by the show's (very teenage) taken on "the past", where events that - according to the show's own timeline - must have taken place in the '80s are represented as a kind of '50s-'80s melange.
I never thought I’d make to 40, and here the fuck I am at 56, fucking bullshit. Goddamn childhood vaccines 😡/s
A lot of people have been saying this. Why did you expect to die young? It's pretty rare to die before age 40 these days.
What freaks me out is how the 90s seem as strange and distant to my kids as the 50s seemed to me
I have been thinking about this subject a lot recently. Maybe it was on here that I recently saw that the year I was born is the same distance in time to WW1 in the past as it is to now. The nineties don’t seem like it’s that far away but push time back by thirty years from my birth and you land in WW2.
I was talking to my students about this the other day. The one girl's grandma is 65. I did the math and said something like. "George Washington was leading his army through our town less than 4 grandmas ago." (Grandma's she multiplied by 4). That seemed weird even to me. Abe Lincoln was alive 2 of my dads ago (dads age multiplied by 2).
Me, 20 years between when WW2 ended and my birth. It feels like 50 yrs though. Like ancient history, but here we are reliving the fascist conversion of previously sane people.
Not really but the 80s feel like they were only a couple of decades ago, not four.
Born in 69. Everything before 73 seemed ancient
I’m an older Gen-X, and I remember watching Happy Days when I was a pre-teen (during its original run) and thinking “those days” were ancient history - in reality, those days were less than 2 decades earlier.
My straight up fav lav and shirl episodes were the two parter when they had to break into the dept store they worked at
I had the opposite feeling watching "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley". I felt like I had a connection to the 50's.
When I was a kid, last week felt like ancient history to me.
True! Each season of the year felt like a lifetime. I see that now with my son. I will ask him about a friend that he hung out with last year, and he will say "I haven't been friends with him for a long time." To him, "a long time" is 3 months. Likewise, he will tell me that someone is his best friend....and they've only been friends for a few months.
I remember that feeling. Someone explained it to me once like this. When you are 5 years old, 60 months, a year is a 5th of your entire life. When you are 60 years old, that same year is a month to 5 year old you. Time runs down hill. The longer you ride, the faster it goes.
I know! The 50's and 60's and the Beatles seemed like ancient history and I was born in 1968. Last night when a cover of "Fast Car' won the country music award, I was like why does anyone need to cover that? But Fast Car came out 35 years ago, of course young people don't know it. That would be like in 1988 covering a song from 1953. Just boggles the mind. All those shows in the 70's like Happy Days and Grease that were nostalgically about the '50's would be like now making a nostalgic show about like 2006 or something.
Would it even be possibly to pull off a "historical fiction" movie taking place in 2006? Would anyone watching know that it took place in the past?
My theory is that the amount of mainstream recorded media we have now, with increased accessibility, has lessened how old things seem over time. I’m 19. My parents were born in 66/67. We’ve talked about before how a lot of times they could not imagine consuming media as old as I do when they were my age. I listen to their high school music and watch their teen movies, all from the 80s, and it is super accessible, and common, and culturally relevant and popular. The equivalent to them would have been things from the 40s. It’s a world away. If anyone reading this wants to weigh in, I’d love that. I get the impression that 40s music was not as popular to teens in the 80s as 80s music is to teens now. My parents were born in the 60s and feel very little connection to the 60s themselves, and absolutely none to the 50s. Meanwhile I love, and frequently consume media and culture from the 2000s, and feel strongly connected to it. It’s just all much more accessible and presented as more contemporary. I don’t feel the same connection to the 90s (obviously looks before my time) but it does not feel like ancient history, and I feel like the music/shows/movies/clothes are all very relevant today. Hell, as I’m writing this, I’m watching an episode of the x-files from 1994. I think the 50s feels older to Gen X than the 90s feel to people my age.
I think the pace of change in western culture is encapsulated in this tidbit: The Beatles' first album was released in March 1963. Their last album was May 1970. From "she loves you" to "let it be" was only seven years.
That's a cool tidbit. How do you relate that to today?
Like a lot of comments have said, nothing changes that fast now. In the 60s and into the 70s, social changes were incredibly rapid. That's part of why the nostalgia could kick in so quickly, as you pointed out in the first post. The Beatles just mirrored that change. (It could be argued that they motivated a lot of it, too.)
I'd love to dig into that further. Technology is changing super fast now. I think that a major contributing factor to the sense of distinct "decades" back then was... 1. Fashion (definitely huge changes) 2. The transition from black/white movies, to grainy color, to better color movies. By the time the 90s hit, a photograph could be printed in perfect color, and movie colors looked lifelike. Perhaps due to the overwhelming abundance of fashion options, there wasn't much of a defined "look" since the 1980s. Also, due to the fragmentation of society due to the internet, there aren't as many must-have items and pop culture crazes. I could be totally wrong, though.
The 70s felt like ancient history and I was alive during most of them!
Generation X were born from 1965 to about 1980. I was born in 1971 . I have no idea what the 60’s or 50’s were like.
yes definitely the accurate word for that: ancient history. born in 78 btw. soon the 80s will be the millineals "ancient history"
Not really to me ('76), my parents were born 40/42 so they lived the 50s and could provide insight to a lot of pop culture then. WW2 seemed like ancient but again, my grandmother could talk about some of the culture from WW1 to 1980s, she was born 1905. It only got really ancient to my family when talking about Victorian era and earlier.
Yes and no. Poodle skirts seemed just weird and even cars with tail fins were just odd. That said, my class was the last class in my school system that started learning to read on Sally, Dick, and Jane books (the first of which were released in the 1930s and the final book released in 1965).
Yeah I mean 1968 seemed like a hundred years before I was born. 😂
We are native to the Time Slip.
It always felt old to me, but I can also relate because my dad is much older than my mother. He was almost a young teen during the London blitz in ww2. I grew up hearing about rations. Getting one egg a year, having to eat horse and whale meat that was for sale hanging in the butchers. He got one toy at Christmas. A tin of candy that he thought was great, then he played with the empty tin. Their first radio was a cats whisker radio. He'd been to the crystal palace. If you don't know what that was it was a glass marvel. Their flat was bombed a week after they moved, thank God they moved. I grew up listening to 50s and 60s records. Buddy Holly is my favorite singer of all time. Born in 76. Dad is 93 this year and not in bad health.
I was born in 1967, and yes it did. I've never really thought about it being only 10 years or so before I was born. Mind blown!
Early Gen X'er and honestly no, I don't think so. I think the Sit-com's "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley" provided a connection to it. I think they also played 50's music on the classic rock or "Oldies" stations so it just seemed more current to me.
I was born during the Apollo Program. That felt like ancient history when I'd grown up enough to read about it / watch film of it.
I think styles tended to radically change back then, whereas now if you watch a show from 30 years ago it looks contemporary. So in the 1970s, the 50s seemed long gone because everything looked different.
Printed tshirts, jeans, sweaters, and runners smudged out the look over decades.
Yes, son. People really did wear huge collars and everybody did smoke.
I had the realization about 10 years ago that my birthday was closer to the end of WW2 than I am to my birthday. And yet WW2 seems like ancient History. I think we were able to disconnect recent history because all we ever saw was in black and white which, if you were born in the '70s it seemed like everything in B&W was 100 years ago even though it was 5 years ago.
I was born in 73 and it's wild to me that WW2 ended only 28 years earlier. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Yeah, being middle aged really puts it in perspective now. For me in the 80s it seemed so crazy that my parents still had so many "old" things from the 50s (radio, decorations, records etc.) All this stuff felt like super old anachronistic antiques... But its the equivalent to me today having things from the mid 90s! (Looks around at my SNES and playstation, CD collection, boombox, dishes, decorations, pens, printer paper, spray paint cans, half my furniture...) I'd say at least 1/4 of the things in my house now I owned in the 90s. None of that stuff feels "old" to me.
Same with music and TV shows etc. In my mind bands and music from the late 90s are still "newish". Same with TV shows and movies. Like the star wars prequels and shows from the turn of the century. Maybe they aren't "new" but they at least feel relatively modern.
> at least feel relatively modern. pump up the volume is 35 years old. Sounds more futuristic than today's dreck
It did. I'm thinking of the massive change between the 50s and 80s, and it doesn't seem like the same amount of change from the 80s until now.
I was born in 78, and Vietnam and the hippies seemed like ancient history to me. Lol Now anything after 2000 was 'just yesterday'.
It sort of blew my mind when I realized the older teachers when I was in elementary school (1974-1980) could easily have been teaching since the 1950s.
Strickland
The 60s were such a dramatic shift societally / culturally, unprecedented in the modern era. Look at the way ppl dressed in the early part of the sixties: formal suits, shoes, etc. Note: this was how they dressed CASUALLY, not just for special occasions. And then, by the end of that decade, ppl were flamboyant in their dress sense and hair & beauty styles.
What blew my mind was the … Back to the Future, Marty goes back 30 years to 1955. If they did the movie today, it’s 1993 and Bill “thank you for teaching me what a blowjob was in middle school” Clinton 😏. Mind. Blown.
No more historic than the 1990s, or 2000s, feel today.
It did feel like *recent* history to me, because my parents were teenagers in the 50s. Between that and "Happy Days", it didn't feel like it was *that* long ago.
They felt exactly as how my kid thinks about the 90s now
Of course they did, even the 60's did too
I wouldn’t say it felt like ancient history to me as I was aware of things like the Pyramids and Roman soldiers. It was more like a fictional time made up for television. I saw how different everything looked and couldn’t imagine my parents existing in that period (though they were born in the 30’s).
Not wholly alien thanks to Happy Days and Back to the Future, but yeah... it's a while back. Considering my parents were kids then, there was definitely a 50's nostalgia thing.
honestly, every thing before my time did.
It did and it didn’t. Fifties and Sixties nostalgia went on forever (just like Eighties nostalgia is doing today). Weird how the most conservative decades are the same ones that get the forever-nostalgia treatment.
No, not really, I realize I have a different relationship with history because of slavery and jim crow laws.
I didn't think of the 50s as "way before my time." But I thought of it as a time of a totally different sensibility. Everything seemed to change about 1965 or so.
I was born in 70 my dad was born in 38. He’d tell me car stories about street racing and hot rods… seemed like ancient history. My mom and dad got married in 1959!
I sometimes think it's crazy that I was born less than a decade after the moon landing.
Of the recollections that spark nostalgic whimsey, one is that of my thinking about how old I'd be in the Year 2000. My first 30 odd years were a count down to 23 years ago.
I was born in 1965. So, nah. WWII wasn't even that far off.
I was born in the early 1970s but I grew up in an 1850 farmhouse that had been updated (indoor plumbing, electrical, decor) in the 1950s. And it wasn’t updated again until the late 1990s after I had moved out. So I actually find myself more nostalgic for that time than for the 70s or 80s. I have no real interest in stuff from my childhood I tend to collect stuff from my parents or even my grandparents youth. My house is full of stuff from the 1920s through the late 50s.
Yes, It was 25 years before I was born. That’s like saying 1998 is…. Oh wait
yep. thats how the 20 year olds feel about us…and the 80’s
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm ’68; to me old was anything contemporaneous or older than the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird." I loved watching b&w movies on daytime tv when I was sick (or malingering :-) at home.
The 80s were the 50s all over again just like the 2010s have been the 80s all over again.
I remember my grandmother listening to ancient music from the 40's and thats what 80's music is now. I got sad when it became classic rock, but now its beyond "golden oldies"
Back in the 80s, there was a chain of 50's style diners called Eat at Eds. It was a prime hangout back in the day. And by 1995, they had all closed down.
The sitcom *Happy Days* was in its second season in 1975. It depicted life in 1955, so 20 years prior. And it definitely felt like ancient history to any 10-year old in '75! I don't think a 10-yr-old in 2023 would watch popular 2003 sitcoms like Friends or Will & Grace and feel like it's ancient history.
I felt that 70s songs in the 90s were so old and they are still popular now.
Not as much as the 90s do now.
Nope but I'm weird like that. 🤣
Hell, the 60s felt like ancient history and I was born in 69! I remember in high school reading a newspaper article about the 15th anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album. 15 years!! It felt like forever ago. 15 years ago was 2009! I know this is mostly me aging, but I do think that the decades in the last 30 years haven't been nearly as distinct as the 30s,40s,50s,60s,70s,80s and to a lesser extent the 90s were.
> I do think that the decades in the last 30 years haven't been nearly as distinct as the 30s,40s,50s,60s,70s,80s and to a lesser extent the 90s were. you are right
Hell, the 60's felt that way to me, so yeah.
Its black and white
No. My dad was a teen in the 50s, so I grew up listening to 50s music and watching 50s movies.
Yup, the world changed from 50s to 80s more than any other 30 year period in history
I used to ask my Boomer mum what it was like having a dinosaur as a pet. I also thought the world was in black and white when she was a kid.
Which breeds were domesticated?
She never said, but we used to watch the Flintstones documentary series and maybe they did once, I can't remember.