Aah, being in the UK I thought she had disappeared completely.
Independence Day is still pretty loved by a lot of people. You just wouldn’t know it from reading the IMDB.
Every year or so, Roland Emmerich gives an interview where he mentions his plans for Independence Day 2. Then you see him look off into space and do the calculations in his head on just how fucking expensive it would be to top the first one. And remember, Will Smith was just a supporting character in the movie, now he’s WILL SMITH, MOVIE STAR. So nothing ever comes of it.
Of course they do: he’s a Geico pitchman.
Milli Vanilli. People might know what they did, but when’s the last time anyone played their music, even ironically?
Philip Michael Thomas, and arguably all of Miami Vice (given how huge it was at the time).
C&C Music Factory and that whole subgenre, though it’s hard for me to put a finger on exactly what it was. But that peppy light hip hop of the early 90s, I’d know it when I heard it (if I ever heard it, which I don’t)
Young MC.
There’s a lot of fluffy pop culture I associate with the Bush Sr. presidency that got thrown by the wayside.
Wiggum: Your mission is to find the fireworks smugglers, and get
them to say something incriminating on this tape. [holds
up a cassette tape]
Bart: [reading the tape label] “Hootie and the Blowfish”?
Wiggum: Yeah. It’s cheaper than blank tape.
So true. There was a lot of feelgood crap like Lisa & the Cult Jam and Miami Sound Machine or movies like Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood- Prince of Thieves
Oh yeah . . . and Wilson Philips, and Nenah Cherry, and Jody Watley . . . now you’re making me all nostalgic.
These are all awesome examples. Perhaps also, cold war informed stuff like Doctor Zhivago or Moscow on the Hudson.
If it weren’t for the Beatles and *Bye Bye Birdie, *who would remember Ed Sullivan?
That’s because the Ivy League now specializes in “rich white people sports” like hockey and lacrosse (and basketball to a degree, but that doesn’t fit in with the other two). They can’t compete in football because they can’t give athletic scholarships.
Manly tough-guy detective shows and movies. Ubiquitous for 3 decades, they have all but disappeared as a genre.
Mannix, McCloud, Rockford, Serpico, Magnum, Shaft, Ironsides, Mike Hammer, Riptide, Crockett and Tubbs…where have all of our 5-o’clock shadow heroes gone?
They’re all starring in The Expendables, which starts August 13. I can’t wait.
See also… Machete, starring Danny “They fucked with the wrong Mexican” Trejo.
Arthur Godfrey. He was huge in his day- an ancestor of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh in terms of radio following (not in terms of shock or politics) and then television. He was perhaps the father of product-placement: if he casually mentioned liking a product or enjoying a meal at a restaurant sales of the product would explode and that restaurant would be mobbed for months; if he said he didn’t like it then product sales would plummet and that restaurant might as well close.
Unfortunately he was also an obnoxious and thin skinned egomaniac and hated by most of the people who worked with him. When he left his show he thought it was temporary- he’d take a couple of years off and then come back and go right back to the top- but it didn’t work out. Nobody wanted to work with him again and the bosses didn’t decided they could make more money with somebody who was less popular but not a prima donna and didn’t demand a huge salary. He became a male Norma Desmond, a multimillionaire many times over who did penny-ante afternoon TV ads just to get in front of the camera again, but he kept his egomania: when he had a reunion with Julius LaRosa many years after firing him on air in a preliminary meeting for a big comeback special (which never happened) he was at the guy’s throat within minutes.
What about the Fairlight Synthesizer? I remember how it was hailed as being the instrument that would change modern music forever and take over the world, but the company went out of business only a few years after it debuted.
There’s no shortage of teen idols this could be true of. Leif Garrett, Shaun Cassidy, Andy Gibb- all enormous for a season or two but now forgotten musically. (Shaun Cassidy has a successful career in producing, but Garrett’s a train wreck for the last 30 years and Andy Gibb went from screaming fans and sold out stadiums to Punky Brewster guest shots in an amazingly short time).
I’m not sure some of the things listed here have been at the super-famous phenom level that I think the OP was looking for.
I would suggest The Valley of the Dolls. It supposedly sold more copies than TV Guide and the Bible put together. It was a cultural milestone of its day and today no one is remotely interested in it.
Oh, also You Light Up My Life.
That song was HUGE in the 70’s. It was nominated at the Grammies two years in a row. Now I never, ever hear it anywhere.
I heard this same joke by a standup comedian long before “The Simpsons”, and the butt of was it Paul Anka.
Which reminds me … Paul Anka.
In the 1950s, Gore Vidal actually warned that when and if an American Hitler came, he’d be a lot like Arthur Godfrey: charming, folksy and telegenic.
She would have except her book is taught in a lot of introducory highschool literature courses.