There’s always going to be holes in people’s pop culture consumption. I’ve never watched the Godfather movies, for example. But this was spoken like he’d never heard of it himself until the day he stumbled upon it on Netflix, and the others looked similar. I’d forgive them if they were talking about Dune or even Highlander, but there are some things that at least should be instantly recognisable from name alone.
I remember watching “Married With Children” fly off the rails, and the writers seemed to forget that the show was supposed to take place in Chicago. It was mostly little things, like using “San Quentin” as a generic term for prison, or jokes referencing In-N-Out Burger, which was probably unknown to most Chicagoans, at least back then.
This is a recurring irritation for me in what is otherwise a good book. The obvious conflict between the interests, understandings and attitudes of a person born in about 1973 living among people born in 1923 is not well explored. King has his protagonist like many things about living in 1959-1963, but fail to notice a dozen or more things he’d have found strange, angering, or vile.
That said, this is an ancient problem in movies, books, and TVs. How many movies have shown a happy family, children included, singing along to some Motown or classic rock song the children would not know or have any interest in knowing?
Name/content mismatch, O God of Time.
I recall an early Simpsons episode where Bart riffed on In-A-Godda-Da-Vida (“In the Garden of Eden”) on the church organ. Forget Bart knowing it, how many non-Boomers would have gotten the reference?
Captain Kirk as written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
All of them with any musical taste? It’s not exactly an obscure song. And even if you don’t know it, all you need to get the joke is to recognize it as heavy metal.