In the 1970s, fashions and music from the '50s were popular. In the 1980s, it was the '60s. In the '90s, it was the '70s. This decade, we’re remembering the '80s.
Was it always like this as people who spent their teenage years in a certain decade approached middle age and looked back on it? Were people in the 1930s listening to tunes from WWI? Was 1830s music popular in the 1850s? Or is this a more recent phenomenon that came about with the introduction of mass media?
In the early 90’s, WIPR in Ithaca had a yearly Early 80’s music weekend.
Well, yeah, there are always exceptions - VH-1 often does I Love the 90s specials - but more often than not, the nostalgia tends to be over a period of twenty years, from what I’ve seen.
Anyone else have Too Old for Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die in their heads now?
Ten to twenty years still overlaps with the current generation, so it’s not so much nostalgia as so ‘last year.’
There was no nostalgia for the 1940s in the 60s, I can assure you.
Happy Days premiered in 1974. That’s probably what started it.
Yes, and I have to thank you a million times over. I had “DON’T YOU WISH YOUR GIRLFRIEND WAS HOT LIKE ME? DONTCHA? DONTCHA?” stuck in there up until reading your post.
Well, 20 years later is about when people who were teenagers and 20somethings 20 years ago start entering the mid and upper levels of the entertainment industry. So they greenlight projects that remind them of their happy carefree youth. And so all the people who were teenagers when music was still on MTV are now in their 40s, and they enjoy looking back and saying “remember back when MTV played music?”
I dunno. I’m kinda with The Onion in feeling that the Retro Gap is narrowing at an alarming rate.
(ETA: boy, that piece of satire is over 10 years old. Does that count as retro-forward-retro?)
Sha Na Na got their start in 1969, and went on to appear in Grease in 1978. So Happy Days was probably not the leading edge but right in the middle of it.
I was around the whole time and Sha Na Na always appeared to me to be a lone oddity rather than part of a trend.
They were more like the brief fads for swing music that occur every few years. (Remember Cherry Popping Daddies?) There’s no carryover to the larger culture.
Anyone else remember the all those ‘70s Preservation Society’ commercials from the early '90s? Even being a kid at the time I remember thinking that was ridiculous and how long would it be until people were yearning for the '80s?
'90s nostalgia is coming. I already hear a lot of high school/college age kids talking about the shows from when they were small children like Saved by the Bell, Boy Meets World, and The Power Rangers.
But there was nostalgia for the 1930s in the '60s via Bonnie and Clyde. Also Gone With the Wind was re-released to theaters in 1968 and made a ton of money… this being more due to '30s nostalgia than 1860s nostalgia, I presume. Also the musical Cabaret, set in the '30s, was a smash hit in 1966.
Wasn’t Happy Days inspired by American Graffiti? I always saw the nostagia thing as stemming from that movie, and then carried forward by the TV show.
After we got the 60s nostagia in the 80s, I had the thought that when we got the 70s nostagia in the 90s, there would be an echo of the 50s nostagia then. Not sure if it happened or not since I’d stopped paying attention to such things by then.
I remember a lot of nostalgia for the 1900s in the early 1970s: Old San Francisco-themed restaurants, ragtime revival, and so on.
My parents said that in the 1940s and early 1950s, when they were in their culturally formative years, there really wasn’t any nostalgia to speak of. There really wasn’t any “Hey, remember the 1920s, with people gathering around the living room piano, Craftsman architecture, interurban trolleys, bobbed hair, flappers and telephones with no dials?” sentiment then. Maybe it was because parents and children were more likely to share a similar popular culture – tastes in music, styles of clothing, and so on – until the advent of rock-and-roll in the mid-1950s.
People are starting to use the term nostalgia for anything that was set in an earlier time. That’s not how it works. There are always movies, plays, and books set in the past, of every era in every era. Look around you right now. I’m sure you can find examples set in a hundred times. Are we in nostalgia for all of them?
Bonnie and Clyde may have influenced some fashions for a very limited time, in limited places, but it didn’t go much beyond that. I can’t imagine how you can argue that a re-release of Gone with the Wind was showing nostalgia for the 30s. People saw the movie and came home. That’s it.
And *Cabaret * is more like the anti-nostalgia. It’s set in Wiemar Germany before the coming of the Nazis (probably in 1929-1930, according to Wiki) but that’s not a period that anyone in America looked back upon with fond memories, either before, during, or after *Cabaret’s * run. Nostalgia for decadence is an oxymoron.
You can only talk about a nostalgic period when you can generally point to events throughout the culture that look back to a lost period of one’s innocence and happier times.
American Graffiti is a good example of this, but I’d argue that by itself it was just a movie set in the past and nothing more. It took Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley, and Joanie Loves Chachi to build on one another. We got a lot of rediscovery of 50s music and artists about then as well. Together that produced a small period of nostalgia. But even that was a small blip inside the larger 70s culture. That’s what makes it so hard to talk about nostalgic periods.
This I disagree with. As a New Yorker, I constantly hear people pine away for the days of the decadent & dangerous Times Square, or the drug-riddled yet artistically vibrant East Village. The widespread nostalgia for the 1970s surely is, to a great extent, a nostalgia for decadence (drugs, casual sex) - albeit a decadence that seems retrospectively innocent in the light of subsequent events (much like the Cabaret phenomenon).
It is a paradox of sorts, but best-sellers like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls bank on the nostalgia-tinged appeal of artistic achievement & out-of-control behavior in combination. (And before you say, “oh yes, but that’s just a few people in Hollywood,” I refer to the wider repercussions of Hollywood culture in mainstream American society). Whenever you see on “Behind the Music” one of the long parade of cleaned-up rock stars confess to being a hopeless degenerate back in their younger days, there is always that underlying sentiment of “but I had so much fun!”
Nostalgia for decadence isn’t nostalgia, it’s more decadence. 
Cecil addresses nostalgia while contemplating the question of whether Victorians had Christmases styled after earlier times.
Hmm…there was a certain amount of 1890s-period nostalgia (at least of a tongue-in-cheek kind) during the 1920s-early 30s. Think of some of the woodcuts by John Held, Jr., and even some of the work of S.J. Perelman.