Everything Old

The last decade or so in pop culture has really been a nostalgia treat for folks around my age. Our sentimentality for intellectual properties such as Batman, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Transformers,The Conners, Will & Grace, etc. has been indulged to the nth degree. That's a positive, I suppose, though there is a downside: what will the youth of today have to look back on 20-30 years from now for their own nostalgia? The mining of past content to satiate the appetites of people longing to look back really does create a vacuum.

Yesterday, we started not only a new year but a new decade, the 2020s. This is a point in time we have never experienced, yet you wouldn't know that from the jovial posts people were making to social media. Indeed, there were references to "the roaring '20s," which evokes the nickname given the 1920s, now a century in the past. Some folks even dressed-up in the garb that was popular from that 100-year-old decade. Granted, much of this was in fun, but it's a symptom of the all-too-common issue that we truly can't come up with something new when it comes to pop culture.

The imagination malaise even extends to politics. 2019 saw some Democratic pols unveil an environmental plan that they dubbed The Green New Deal. The last two words are a clear reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's once-popular New Deal program originally put into place in 1933. Now, on the one hand, that makes sense. Many Democrats idolize FDR, a man elected four times to the presidency, and whose New Deal program helped citizens during an economic depression. But, it's a nearly 90-year-old program. It would have been like FDR naming something in 1933 after a program from 1847. It would have left some people scratching their heads (or shaking them).

It really does seem as if we are bereft of ideas. Not everywhere, of course. Things like the Internet, smartphones, virtual reality, and most technology-related inventions and advancements are unheralded in human history, and are certainly not reheated ideas from long ago. Still, when it comes to a lot of cultural touchstones, we've pretty much mined things to the point of depletion. Heck, just last month Xfinity (of all things) managed to shoehorn its way into making a four-minute commercial that attempted to evoke nostalgia for E.T., a movie nearly four decades old. That one didn't quite work, in my humble opinion.

Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which some in the younger generation have said is their cultural standard, seems like a rehash to me (though a very good one). You've gotta remember -- I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, when there were live-action Wonder Woman, Incredible Hulk, and Spider-Man TV shows, television movie adaptations of Thor and Captain America, and the Batman big screen blockbuster. Plus, I read a lot of the comic books which the MCU (and DC) stuff is based upon. So, not even the comic book movies (as excellent as they are) are really new.

I dunno. I suppose it can be argued that there haven't really been any new story ideas since Shakespeare pretty much covered them all some 400-plus years ago, but still.... can we at least try to be original? The sweet, sugary rush of nostalgia for people my age has been indulged to a nauseating degree. No doubt, once the vultures have picked us dry, they'll likely move on to stuff from the late '90s and '00s to resurrect for those younger than myself. But a big part of me wishes that we'd see content and ideas that would be fresh and new for the current generation, though that's probably too much to ask.

And it's unlikely that folks ringing-in the new year in 1920 exclaimed, 'We're going to party like it's the 1820s!'  Just saying.