I think young people nowadays have better knowledge of older movies then we did back when I was young. I grew up in the pre-VCR era when you had no way of choosing to watch an old movie. Once a movie left the theater, you had to wait until a local television station chose to broadcast it. You made plans around the TV Guide: “Sorry, but can we schedule our poker game for another night? Channel 13 is broadcasting The Maltese Falcon on Friday and I’ve always wanted to see it.”
But have you experienced that special moment of being in the presence of a young person encountering this phenomena themselves for the first time? When you have somebody in their early twenties or so mention some hugely popular band or TV show from back when they were thirteen to a current thirteen year old and get a blank look in return? And realizing they’ve now become the older generation?
“Did you like Zootopia?”
“It was okay. For a kid’s movie.”
"Did you know the singer who played Gazelle was Shakira?
“Who’s Shakira?”
“You know. She’s the one who sings Whenever, Wherever and Hips Don’t Lie.”
“Never heard of them. I don’t listen to old music.”
As a father of a 14 year old girl I can safely say that, when it comes to music, timeliness isn’t really an issue nowadays. Taking her and her friends to various places at various times, they fully group sang songs from Queen, Frank Sinatra, and One Direction. (Boy bands like 1D and 5SOS are the exception that prove the rule in my daughter’s case.)
Video presentations, on the other hand, tend to get hit with a lot more discretion than music. Bad special effects from yesteryear are always a turn-off. Always.
YMMV, but that’s what I am seeing with a small group of girls here in San Antonio, Texas.
Yep, they come and go a lot faster these days than they used to. The publicity machine keeps churning them out one after another.
I agree with this part 100% there is just TOO much stuff to go through these days and going forward there’ll be even more.
BUT
The only time I get pissed when those younger then me will say they never heard of that movie, or song, or TV show, etc… is when they’ll re-watch and re-watch and re-watch the same stuff over and over again rather then try something different. I mean, I don’t care how much you like something but why waste time watching the same stuff when you can give something else a shot?
Seems kind of boring to me.
Stuff that is ten years old is always a laughingstock.
There is often a wave of nostalgia for stuff that is twenty years old.
Beyond that, the really big acts are remembered, everything else gets forgotten.
What’s strange about that is, even in groups that are interested in the same subjects you are, people can have odd blind spots. I’m in a band that does half originals, half covers. Most of the covers are obscure to me, and to most of the world. In addition, just about every cover is re-worked from the original as well. I’ve had people who were quite knowledgeable about music tell me they didn’t know what was a cover or not out of our set.
That always surprises me, because in the middle of our set, we do a pretty straightforward cover of Pink Floyd’s “Lucifer Sam”. The only real alteration is that we don’t have anyone playing keys, so we drop the organ part and it’s solo. People often come up and ask about the cool surf-y song with the lyrics about the cat, and if it’s an original or cover. These are often people who I know, and I know they have some knowledge of Pink Floyd. I was hesitant to even play the song because I assumed everyone knew it. :smack:
So yeah, nothing from the 20th seems to have had the penetration and durability that we assume from our upbringing. Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before.
Some kids just aren’t all that into music at all. Those kids will obviously not have heard of most artists, and those they have will mostly be the current ones.
But in my experience as a teacher, of those teens who are interested in music, it can be pretty much anything from the past 70 years or so. Some of those kids know more old music than I do.
There’s nothing new about it. In fact, people probably know more about earlier works than ever before, since they’re more easily available. Prior to 1960, except for a few notable exceptions, people knew nothing of movies from 20 years earlier.
For instance, James Agee wrote his article “Comedy’s Greatest Era” about Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon in 1949, about 25 years after their heyday. For many, it was their first introduction to them (well, probably not Chaplin, but he was still producing movies. Keaton was considered a washed up “waxwork” in 1950 – as forgotten as Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner 
).
When I was growing up in the 60s, it was hard to see something as important and Marx Brothers films – you had to live in a big city (or near a college) where there were revival theaters and independent TV stations, and you had to be lucky enough to find it. It took me years to see King Kong, for example: I had to wait until it was broadcast (and the films were broadcast at inconvenient times).
It’s the same for music. In the 60s, it was rare to hear songs of five years earlier on the radio. Now there are entire stations specializing in music from various eras.
In any case, people always gravitate toward newer works.
Boggles my mind to realize Nirvana is now classic rock.
For a while, it seemed that a good bit of classic rock and “oldies” was getting heard by a new generation via Rock Band/Guitar Hero. Though I think the popularity of that game genre has crested.
I’ve had my teenage son also recognize older songs from the in-game radio stations in game titles like Grand Theft Auto.
I see it completely differently than most here do, I guess. I see Classic Rock as a huge Black Hole, that once you get sucked into, you don’t escape. It had an absolutely huge natural audience (Baby Boomers) and bled over into my generation as the younger siblings of Boomers. Now there are several “Classic Rock” stations in every large radio market devoted exclusively to that genre. Maybe the death of radio has something to do with the young losing interest in Classic Rock. They listen to their own music streaming from their personal devices.
<Personal anecdote alert> I was on a business trip last fall and went to see “Straight Outta Compton” and I was the only white person over 30 in the theater. I’d bet the vast majority of Classic Rock fans couldn’t tell you a thing about the time the movie represented, what band it was named after, or any of the leading players represented. And yet it spawned a music movement that has lasted twice as long as Classic Rock and is still going strong. Same with Punk, which happened right alongside Pink Floyd. Maybe they can identify The Ramones (yay!!) or The Sex Pistols, who were almost a parody of the genre and had more influence on style and fashion than on the music.
My bet is that the average music fan who came of age in the 80’s and later knows more about Classic Rock than the average Pink Floyd fan knows about other genres.
Well, sure. Lots of people aspire to be great chefs but why would a Michelin-rated chef need to know about cooking McDonald’s?
Oh my god this is exactly what my 60-something parents do! No lie! 
I know plenty of young people who are hardcore only in to classic rock and eschew anything new because it’s “stupid.” I also know plenty of people who are the “right age” to know Logan’s Run and “Another Brick in the Wall” who would not know the movie or the “pudding” line.
After all my years on the SDMB I am just not surprised by anyone’s lack of pop culture knowledge, at any age. It’s me who’s the anomaly, not them!
I think many younger folks these days have some knowledge of older movies, books, songs, etc. because they have seen and heard references and parodies in shows such as The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. This kind of thing isn’t new; when I was a youngster in the 1950s, I picked up a lot of info about my parents’ generation by watching Warner Brothers cartoons. I was familiar with parody versions of many movies and actors of the '40s long before I saw the movie and actors that were being spoofed. In 1952, four-year-old me became enamored of the Warner Brothers version of Katharine Hepburn, and I went around the house saying “Realllly I do.” I didn’t see Alice Adams until I was in college.
This is a good point. I listened to a lot of classic rock in high school because my first car didn’t have a CD player, and listening to the classic rock station was better than the top 40, country, or Tejano stations. But today most people can listen to stuff from their iPod or phone.
Not exactly on point, but in a college class in the early 1980s, the prof mentioned Bloomsbury, and a debate among the students broke out over whether she meant Doonesbury or Bloom County. So 30+ years ago, there was a culture gap…and in 1980, in my early 20s) I took a date to see Casablanca (in an actual theatre!). When I asked what she thought, her reply was “no one has ever taken me on a date to a black and white movie before.” I’d seen it a few times already. Point being, it’s hard to generalize about who knows and cares about what re pop culture.
About a century ago, Charlie Chaplin was the most famous person on earth. Multiple pundits wrote that he would be the figure from the 20th century remembered when all else was forgotten.
A generation later Mickey Mouse wasn’t just a corporate logo but the next iteration of the most famous person on earth, with cartoons appearing every month, a daily comic strip, and a million pieces of memorabilia when that was an unusual thing.
A generation after that, Elvis Presley changed the entire world of music. He’s in my lifetime but I was a bit too young to be affected, so he’s basically pre-baby boomer. My impression is that he’s fading out of memory. Nobody plays his music or watches his movies or references him the way they do 60s rock.
It all goes, no matter how famous you once were.
For older movies, if it’s not on the IMDB top 250 or doesn’t have some meme attached to it don’t expect anyone outside of cinephiles to have seen it. If this depresses you just remember one billion Chinese people couldn’t care less and that one day the Earth will be swallowed by the sun.
snerk
I like that line.