The 80s were fucking awesome. I wish all the girls fashions of the 80s would come back. The hair, the clothes, the makeup…nothing hotter than an 80s chick and if you don’t think so, you’re a dope.
The 90s gave us both a Senfeld episode and a Simpsons episode where the characters get an illegal cable hook up.
Its quite interesting just how worried and guilty the characters feel about stealing tv. I mean, watching tv without paying for it? The nerve! I’m sure glad that never took off…
The 80s were such an awesome time, the 90s just cant compare. Every decade since then has sucked hard.
As I get older and older I keep waiting for an awesome decade like the 80s to come along. Maybe it will before I run out of decades I’m alive for, but I’m starting to doubt it. Oh well, only 2 more years before the next decade starts. Maybe…!
This thread reminded me of an episode of Dragnet (“The Kidnapping”, Season 1, Episode 3) where a cosmetics entrepreneur named Adele Vincent had been kidnapped. A woman who worked for Vincent had come to the police to report the crime. In setting up the rescue operation, Friday and Gannon were getting descriptions of Miss Vincent and the man who’d kidnapped her.
I (correctly) remembered the woman describing Miss Vincent as “lovely, …” I had thought this was a sign of the sexism of the times.
But when I went back to view the episode, I learned that the woman also included in her detailed description of the kidnapper’s looks and clothing that he was “not bad looking”.
Maybe it’s not just sexism that people’s hotness was included in their descriptions. Maybe it was also a reflection of the fact that TV in that era was a mostly white world? And that with a more uniform standard of beauty in place, it made practical sense for police to note how attractive someone was in describing them?
Either way, it seems very dated.
Heroin isn’t a brand name…(neither is granola).
Well fuck me sideways!
We are currently watching an episode a night of Mad About You. The one last night was based on Jaimie and Paul using some non-refundable tickets Paul’s father bought. So they had to pretend to be Burt and Sylvania 
Buchman. The starting point was at the airport.
The airport. They were using someone else’s tickets to get on a plane. How does that work? Doesn’t the TSA check these things?
Really takes you out of the show for a bit.
Also, the resort they went to had no phones or TV. But I bet they had WiFi or no one would go there.
People watch Mad About You? By choice??
I envision a world a hundred years from now, civilization has collapsed–the sporadic survivors are mostly Thunderdoming each other, but a few wisps of the old Web remain, almost entirely forgotten. Then, one day, Alfishius makes his next reply to this thread (probably a “lol”.)
Alfishius, do you ever make any post without waiting at least three weeks, first?
Even this thread is dated!
I think it was the first episode of St Elsewhere where in the first five minutes someone was performing CPR incorrectly. Wife was medical and was incensed they would show it because viewers might try it and people would die. Medical dramas were off the menu until House.
I thought Chin meant, “I’ll show you my fucking abacus, Roundeyes.”
Honestly, I think anything that wouldn’t appear “dated” if you were doing it as a modern period piece shouldn’t count. Not having cell phones is not “dated”, it would an anachronism.
I hope to god this whole thread is one big whoosh. Seriously, all those movies set in the Roman empire are stupid. Why use those chariots when they could use a hemi-engined SUV? Get places much faster. And those dumb doctors in the 1880’s, sitting around watching people die of tuberculosis. Give the poor schmucks some antibiotics already…
It seems like nearly everyone in this thread can’t bear to watch anything set in the past because duh we have better technology and different social views.
I think you’ve missed the point. It’s just a look at films and TV shows that were ostensibly modern when they were made but now are amusingly relics of their time.
I’ve posted this one elsewhere, but why not: the “let’s all learn how to use a fax machine” scene in Die Hard 2. Pretty silly by today’s standards. Plus, a fax machine isn’t the greatest way to send an image of a fingerprint, and a 1990s fax machine would probably just turn it into a smudge. If you have a really clear print, it’ll work, but it’ll have scan lines; even an amateur can spot a faxed print.
I don’t think so…
Yeah, I doubt there’s any financial incentive to re-CGI it. The CGI at the beginning and end of “Labyrinth” likewise looks terrible (not to mention Bowie’s tights).
Funnily enough, B5 deliberately put a dated reference into the show. The bar had a prominent “ZIMA” sign, which IIRC JMS stuck in as a joke, knowing full well that Zima was in no way going to be the drink of the future.
I remember the 80’s, and if you think shoulder pads and puffball skirts are “hot”, well…it’s debatable which one of us is a “dope”.
ISWYDT.
Harryhausen was well aware of the “strobing” effect his animation had, and thought it was an acceptable part of the experience. I wouldn’t like to see it blurred out, either.
For what it’s worth, people have been blurring away the animation strobing well before there was “full” CGI. In the 1920s animator Ladisls Starevich moved his model during film exposure. Animator Jim Danforth used a movement mechanism to move wings and such on his animation models so that they would photograph as a blur*. In the 1980s Phil Tippett at Industrial Light and Magic came up with his own version – “Go Motion” – that was used in several films, like Dragonslayer. Since the early 1990s it’s been easier to simply use CGI to cause blurring.
*The Wikipedia article on Go-Motion claims that Danforth used a petroleum-jelly method to create the blur, but contemporary sources said that he actually moved the winds during exposure.