I can still enjoy some of the old shows, but I recognize their flaws. Sometimes massive flaws - the original transformers show has some of the worst-quality animation I’ve ever seen - animation, coloring, and sound errors are a regular thing. He-man, on the other hand, has really good animation - repeated and recycled endlessly. Regarding Thundercats I don’t recall any glaring problems - I recall it having rather good animation for its time, actually, and rather ambitious worldbuilding too. It had really light continuity and the bad guys never won, but that was standard in an era when you couldn’t rely on the episodes being broadcast in the order they were produced.
These shows were a product of their time, and I recognize that when I watch them and give them leniency for it, for the most part. They were produced in a very different environment from today’s streaming services and it shows. That makes the shows different, but in my opinion that doesn’t make them bad. (G1 Transformers, on the other hand, is pretty bad even then. That franchise survived on the strength of its toyline.)
Um, at least four of the dozen+ Transformers sequel/reboot/spinoff serieses were anime. And some of those dozen+ shows were damn good, objectively speaking.
When I look back on 80’s and 90’s humor, things I thought were hilarious are now cringey as hell. Strange Brew did not age well. The Far Side is mostly annoying. Standup comedy from that whole general era feels like writers would just drop a celebrity name for a laugh. “Jimmy Hoffa, wow, amirite?”
Wow—me too. I lived through the 1980s but at the time I abhorred its popular music, preferring stuff from the 1960s and 1970s. But a couple years ago I got some strange craving for 1980s music and binged on a sampling of the decade’s biggest hits, most of which I vaguely knew at the time from the radio and from their use in films and TV. They’re now in regular rotation on my media player.
For a long time I had the stereotypical middle-aged dad obsession with classic rock, despite the fact that I was born in 1981 and my own dad was a blues fan. But recently I’ve found myself… underwhelmed by it to the point that I actively avoid listening to it.
The first CD I ever bought was this Fleetwood Mac album from a pawn shop. That was followed by several more FM albums, and several Bad Company albums, and and and… but now I can’t stand much of it. Someone once told me that Stevie Nick’s voice sounds like a goat braying and now I can’t not hear that. Janis Joplin sounds like someone running over a dog. So I don’t listen to it anymore – although I still have that first Fleetwood Mac CD in a CD case in my garage somewhere. Bad Company just sounds stupid, and The Beatles brings back bad memories, and… well, I could go on.
I had a long discussion with our wonderful ZipperJJ several months ago about music tastes and what’s good in modern music and I confess I don’t like much of it (or any of it, tbh). I’m deeply envious of her ability to find such simple enjoyment in modern music and television.
Yeah, TV is another thing. I’m not much of a TV watcher but when I was a kid I certainly was. Several years ago I picked up DVD copies of Animaniacs, Duck Tales, and Tale Spin because those were all shows fondly remembered from my childhood. I watched Animaniacs, but couldn’t really get into the others. They just weren’t interesting. The last TV show I watched with any serious interest was The Mentalist and I’ve seen some of Supernatural, but I wouldn’t’ call myself a fan: I never finished the series. The same goes for video games: I have a Switch, my kids have an Xbox and a Wii, and I just can’t get into them like I did when I was 17.
Part of all this is, obviously, simple maturity and growing up – fart jokes aren’t funny to me anymore and songs about teenage rebellion and lost loves don’t really speak to me like they did when I was 17: I have teenagers of my own, I hear that shit enough from them. I fully expected to be thrilled about re-watching my favorite childhood shows or listening to the music that defined my teenage years but the reality is that it all seems kind of stupid to me. As Tabco notes, none it appeals to my adult self.
The trouble is that nothing appeals to my adult self. I have nothing to replace it. I don’t watch TV, with my 45 minute commute to work I either listen to podcasts or nothing, and I have no hobbies to replace watching TV or playing video games. So, to some extent, I’m nostalgic for the nostalgia. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of pathetic.
For me, it was the rock band cartoon shows (even if it wasn’t featuring a band, one would show up; NOT ONCE did I ever see an authentic band depicted – always two guitars and a tambourine. Or one guitar and an organ with a Stray Cats-type drum set. Never a bass guitar!)
For cartoons and TV shows, yes. My prime Saturday morning cartoon viewing years were from the late 70s to the mid 80’s and a watched a lot of them as well as reruns from earlier years and I have been repeatedly brutally disappointedly almost every time. Some of the shows might have some good bits that stick in the memory, usually a theme song or opening sequence, or maybe some good character designs, but as a whole, they really don’t stand up.
The only things from that era that really hold up for me are Schoolhouse Rock and Watership Down. Ducktales to an extant, but the new Ducktales is much better.
The past decade or two of animation has been MUCH better than anything around than I was a kid and I scratch my head at people who are nostalgic for 70s and 80s cartoons and complain about what is on now.
I also had a great fondness for the kid-oriented prime time action shows of that era. Think the A-Team but even worse. I used to get very excited to watch shows like Knight Rider, Airwolf, Tales of the Gold Monkey, The Powers of Matthew Star, The Master, etc. I can find these on YouTube now and they are pretty awful.
That was my point. People complain about reboots and reimaginings of the source material as some sort of sacrilege when the source material generally sucked anyway (I think you’re being generous in your “for its time” assessment but to each their own) so you might as well play with it rather than worry about “ruining” it.
There’s a lot of video games I remember fondly that I can’t stand to play any longer. The Legend of Zelda being a prime example. But more recent classics like Fallout and Fallout 2 are unplayable to me now. Back in 1999 or 2000, the Cartoon Network started showing the original Thundercats series. In 4th grade I ran home from school every day so I could watch this show. But I tried watching it as an adult and discovered the Thundercats was a terrible show. No wonder my mother hated it.
I wonder if we liked them because we were easily amused kids or just didn’t know there was better out there. There are quite a few shows and movies targeted at adults that haven’t aged well yet people still watched them. E.g.: I rewatched Van Damme’s Lionheart recently and couldn’t make it thru much of it, I limited myself to the fight scenes and, while alright, they’re not anywhere near as good as I remember them. Did I like it because I was 8 or because that’s about as good as action movies got in that time period? Other action movies, like Predator and Die Hard, still hold up today. I guess that’s what makes them classics.
What is it you can’t stand about Zelda and the old Fallouts?
In some of them, I get further than I did as a kid because I understand the mechanics better. But in others, I don’t do as well. Maybe it’s a function of using a keyboard or an emulator or maybe I’m just slower than I used to be.
What I’ve noticed about older tv shows is that there’s so much aimless talking. I assume it’s because they produced a lot more episodes and really had to stretch the budget. And, while there were summer reruns, that was designed more to fill airtime and not really as a revenue source.
And comedy just doesn’t age well. Especially the 70s/80s era of every episode having a message that had to hit you over the head with the preachiness
I played Elder Scrolls: Morrowind for many, many hours when I first bought it. I tried replaying it last year and I didn’t like it at all: I thought the graphics were ugly and the gameplay was tedious.
Yeah there are definitely silly, simplistic, even offensively and crassly sexist elements to Anthony’s works like Xanth, but works like his original Phaze trilogy, or the first few books in his Incarnations of Immortality series like the aforementioned On A Pale Horse, have nuggets of real cleverness in worldbuilding basis.
I haven’t re-read them in a while and I’m sure they don’t age well on the basis of those particular elements especially, but the memory of things like how the Incarnation of Death “worked” and The Game on Proton have real staying power.
I also remember being impressed with his treatment of alien intelligence and a multiverse mechanism in his early SF trilogy, Of Man and Manta (Omnivore, Orn, and Ox); it also contains some pretty standard for Anthony type “objectification of women” stuff, but again, the SF core of it was and I presume still would be quite good.
The go-to example for me of “work I liked on first read through as a young teenager and can’t stand to re-read now” would be The Belgariad five-book series by David Eddings.
Zork isn’t quite as riveting as it was in 1981. It’s boring to me now.
We’re on a 60s-70s TV drama kick, and some shows hold up well. Others not so much.
Hart to Hart and McMillan and Wife are just annoying, and we never got through the first season(s). Columbo and Mannix are still surprisingly good, although few episodes would work in today’s cellphone equipped world. It’s surprising how many plots depend on characters not knowing where the others are at various times.
I had fond memories of watching Magnum PI and bought the entire box set. What a waste. From today’s POV he appears as a selfish, grifting loser who should be jettisoned by all his friends. We joked that in a modern setting, T.C. would have shoved him out of the helicopter by the second episode.
I saw Lionheart as a teenager shortly after it was released on video. The general consensus among my friends and I was that it was no Bloodsport.
I find both games to be rather tedious to play. For Zelda, the lack of anything in the game telling me where I needed to go was a bit frustrating. The game play itself is entertaining enough though. For Fallout, the whole game is just so slow. The writing is great, it’s superior to the Bethesda games, but the game play is dull as dishwater.
But I can still play some Super Mario Bros. for a while and be entertained.
The weakness of the original Zork, looking back, was that it still had some roots in “adventure gaming” and thus some random elements that could be infuriating, like having to fight the troll or the thief, which were not purely puzzle solving.
Once you get past that, I find that the Infocom text games stand up quite well - I have no problems dealing with text based puzzles versus ones with graphical components. I suspect Planetfall and of course, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (as it was based on a book and partially written by Douglas Adams) would stand up quite well in particular.
And of course, once you’ve solved the puzzles, revisiting them is never as interesting or exciting. It took me a LONG time to figure out about “Flood Control Dam #2” or whatever it was called in Zork; while I don’t remember the details now, it involved a raft and other stuff, having to go through the puzzle again would be a combination of “yeah I have seen this already” and the frustration of “dammit, I can’t remember this any more!”
[quote=“pullin, post:34, topic:930769, full:true”]
Columbo and Mannix are still surprisingly good, although few episodes would work in today’s cellphone equipped world. It’s surprising how many plots depend on characters not knowing where the others are at various times. [/quote]
Ha, this reminds me of something I commented on while watching a much more recent show on Netflix with my wife: shows set in the “modern era” still need ways to generate dramatic tension for this type of thing, but run into the “why wouldn’t they just use their smartphone?” objection.
They deal with it in a few different ways, usually coming up with ways for the people to lose the use of their devices, or for why they didn’t have them with them in the first place. Or simply setting them in an alternate reality where some elements of current modern tech exists, and not others (e.g., the worlds of John Wick or The Umbrella Academy).
Then there was the show we were just watching: the Turkish show “Love Me As I Am” (originally Beni Böyle Sev), created from 2013-15. The characters are seen using iPhones to text and to call each other, and yet they are often frustrated/stymied by not knowing or being misled as to where their family and closest friends are, despite being able to call them. Istanbul? Akçaabat? At the university, hospital, uncle’s house, police station, somewhere in between, where? Um… What happened to “Find My Friends”?
Yeah - though this has less to do with the thing being worse than you remember than it does with the fact that the initial experience can’t be recaptured. The first time you play through you’re solving the puzzles, and the game can live on the puzzles alone; on subsequent playthroughs the puzzling element partially or completely vanishes and the game has to stand on story alone - which most of them weren’t designed to do.
I don’t know that this is an example of reverse nostalgia, but I wouldn’t want to play through the original EGA King’s Quest again. No, not because of the graphics - that game has awesome graphics. The problem is that I’ve become old and spoiled, and have grown accustomed to having games hold my hand more than that. I don’t even want to have to draw my own maps anymore, so just forget having to deal with the game quietly becoming unwinnable and letting you play for hours in a doomed state.
My kid (7) was really into Transformers Prime, Rescue Bots, the new Netflix Transformers, and some of the other shows. She wanted to watch the originals, but even she could only get through a few episodes before giving up.
The same thing happened with Voltron. She loved the modern Netflix series, but no more than an episode or two of the (US) original.
I’m just a bit too old to have been in the target market for either of those shows. I was aware of them, but never watched them the first time around.
For me I get a bit of the opposite effect of what the OP talks about. Music from the 80s, which I hated at the time, doesn’t seem too bad now. Of course taking a 3+ decade break from hearing a song twice an hour helps dull some of the irritation it caused. Usually about half way through the song I remember why I hated it.
