A couple of years ago I sat and watched The Breakfast Club with my teenaged daughter. She could relate to it just fine. I’ll have to try it again in a year or 2 with my other daughter who’s now 14.
Back in 1985, there’s no way I would have been able to relate to a movie about high school from 1955.
Interesting post, VernW.
Anyway, I had the same idea as the OP last week when watching The Sting, which was made 37 years ago and set (I think) 36 years before that. And while the distance back to 1973 isn’t peanuts, it’s still something like what I think of as the modern world. They just had to have considered the '30’s farther away than I thin of the '70’s being.
–Cliffy
In 1973, the country had been transformed twice since the 30s–first by the depression and WWII, then the by 60s. So the 30s were in the very far past by the 70s. But the 70s aren’t that alien in 2011, because we haven’t had even one social revolution since then, let alone two.
I’m thinking of some “silly” thinks that 1980s Marty did in the 1950s (like trying to screw off the top of a coke bottle, asking for a Tab and a Pepsi-Free, and talking about reruns and two televisions.) I’m trying to think of some things that our 2011 counterpart would do in 1981. Only a couple of things come to mind.
Trying to make a phone call and reaching for a cell phone, or asking someone to borrow their phone, leading to a zinger about how “his” phone is all the way back at his house.
Looking incredulously at someone smoking in an office environment and the smoker looking just as incredulous about being asked to smoke outside.
That’s about all I can come up with…
ETA: or asking what a Tab or a Pepsi-Free was 
Oh my god, same for me. That is truly insane. :eek:
The more I think about it, the wrenching social transformations from the 30s to the 40s to the 50s to the 60s explain a lot of science-fictional expectations of further wrenching social transformation. People expected that in 2011 we’d be living in underground domes and wearing jumpsuits and worshiping nuclear missiles and committing suicide at age 30 because after the tumultuous middle of the 20th century they couldn’t imagine multiple decades of social continuity and muddling through.
Telling somebody to “Google it”.
I think about this kind of stuff all the time. I think back to, say, 1965, when I was 12 and starting to be a little aware of the world outside my neighborhood. The people across the street had a 1949 Ford sedan. This was incredibly old to us kids. Imagine, a 16-year old car!
And my mother’s experiences in high school, just over 30 years prior, might as well have occurred in the stone age. Thirty years before 1965 was a completely different time in my young mind, with absolutely no relevance to life today.
From my standpoint now, 30 years is not that long at all. I remember things that happened in 1981, some things quite vividly. Life was pretty similar to now at least on the surface. It seems, not like yesterday, but not that far off. I remember the friends I hung around with and my boyfriend at the time. Just like my mother remembered back in 1965 - but different somehow.
It seems that it’s all the point of view of the observer.
Ditto. I was born in '53, and I never saw that in real life–only in movies.
The 50’s were a great time to be a little kid, but the 60’s were a great time to be a teenager.
I’d say the 50’s were further removed from the 80’s than the 80’s from today.
How old are you? You’re either very mistaken or you spent the Eighties in Iowa.
Whitney Houston’s first album was released in 1985 and it became the best seller in 1986. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was top seller in 1983 and 1984. Disco had just finished its cycle. Motown was still a prominent part of people’s musical frame of reference. Lionel Richie, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were at the top of the charts in 1985. Prince had been around for eight years and Purple Rain was released in 1984. Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” was released in 1984. Ska and reggae received wide exposure during the new wave era. Bob Marley didn’t die until 1981.
The first rap single to chart was six years previous in 1979. Grandmaster Flash released “The Message” in 1982. Not only was rap music well known to every teen, 1985 was only a year away from the emergence of The Beastie Boys.
Shall I go on? You still had Top 40 radio in 1985. If anything, he would be amazed how homogeneous the music scene was in 1985 as opposed to 2011.
Here’s a somewhat related thread I started a while back regarding the changes people see around them throughout in an 80 year lifetime. I started wondering about what changes a person must have seen in the US in an 80 year window from 1848 to 1929. Other people chimed in about different periods.
I still think it’s weird to see Civil War soldiers at an FDR event and also to see a witness to the Abe Lincoln assassination on a 1950s game show.
Jet magazine pointed out before that before the Billie Jean video hit MTV’s airwaves in March 2003:
Eddy Grant, Musical Youth and Joan Armatrading were some of the Black artists whose videos were shown during MTV’s inception. Tina Turner, Jon Butcher Axis, The Bus Boys and Donna Summer were some of the other Black artists whose videos were shown because their music fit the format. Then there was Prince, who was featured in MTV’s own yearbook from 1982. Look further down the page and you’ll find The Pointer Sisters.
=======
People use the myth that Michael Jackson was the breakthrough artist on MTV to illustrate how much more enlightened they were than the generation before. Since 1955, a virtual requirement to being a teenager in America is to listen to black music. I’d venture that for those Caucasians that don’t take up an interest in jazz or blues, it will be be the time in their lives that they hear the most music by African-Americans. Even going back to the Twenties and Thirties, when you had artists like Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
Before rock & roll, youngsters may not have listened primarily to black bands, but they listened to a few prominent and respected ones. nearly every “white” big band they listened to had stars often were black.
Given that jazz, rock and country music all had roots in the blues, I don’t think anyone born in America since the Civil War has experienced a lack of “black music”.
Anyone with a 16 year old car was VERY rare, and of course , the driver of such an old car was necessarily eccentric and wierd.
Even a 10 year old car was pretty unusual, even for teenagers. None of the kids in my high school would buy a car that was 10 years old.
…of course, back then, it was easy( for me anyways) to identify a 10 year old car a mile away, and I could also tell you the make an year of most any car from 1/2 mile away. It was not hard for “me” from 1/2 mile away to identify, and distinguish a 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960 etc. Ford or Chevy or Plymouth from each other.
That is my point.
Nothing much has really changed since the 1950’s, back then we had cars, planes, computers, radio and television, telephones, etc. and today we still have them and not much else.
OTOH, my grandparents saw BIG changes in nearly everything : the invention of the cars/trucks/motorcycles/highways, invention of the plane, invention of the telephone, invention of the radio and television, invention of computers, etc.
There were big and significant NEW changes to everyday living from BTTF3/1885.
Meanwhile, the “changes” (non-changes) of ordinary people’s lives from 1955 to 1985 to 2010 are more like the “changes/non-changes” from 1355 to 1385 to 1410.
Snopes says Coca-Cola was cocaine free by 1929. Is that wrong?
The Internet and everything on it are at least as big a change as any of those older inventions. And the computers of the 50s were so much more primitive that they don’t belong in the same class as anything remotely modern, any more than cars would if they had developed the ability to fly between planets since the 50s.
I think you missed the very important point that, socially, things changed enormously in the 60s.
When I was a kid in the 70s and a teenager in the 80s, there were plenty of WWI vets around. Whole platoons marching in parades. And now they are gone. All but one–one–is dead, and that one is 110 years old. And now WWII vets are dying off, and fast. And Vietnam vets are getting old.
<obligatory>
They didn’t have zombies in the 1950s </obligatory>
For most people, computers today are a lot different from those in the 1980s because of the net - though I did most of the net things we do today on PLATO in the 1970s.
The biggest difference is sex. In terms of sexual morality, we are not that much different today than we were 30 years ago, a bit more prudish if anything. The 1980s were radically different from the 1950s. Only bohemians and French people would live together without marriage back then - now it is not even a concern. And, as said, the '60s were the dividing line.
(I pointed this in another thread.)
I remember watching I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and the Dick Van Dyke Show (etc) in the mid 70s. Those show appeared to be ancient.
Now, in 2011, I catch repeats of Cheers and Roseanne occasionally. Those shows are as old in 2011 as ILL, TAGS, and DVDS were in the mid 70’s. except they seem to be more timely. more current.
Maybe it is the Black/White difference. But wouldn’t high def vs regular def’n be just as much as a technological breakthrough?