Come on. It’s been twenty years! That’s time enough for nostalgia to set in, right?
I mean, American Graffiti came out in 1973, and it was set in 1962. That’s only an 11-year turnaround on nostalgia!
And all through the 70s we were knee-deep in 50s nostalgia, with Happy Days and Sha Na Na and Grease.
So where are the peppy musicals with people tromping around a stage in Doc Martens, with their long hair and their grunge and their heroin chic and their obsessive Quentin Tarantino adoration? So much material…
Have their been any 90s nostalgia pieces yet? What would our stock characters be?
I don’t know if there’s that much to be nostalgic about, to be honest.
The early part of the 90s were more 80s-ish than anything else, and the latter half of the decade, at least for me, was dominated by the Internet- the rise of the Web as a major social and commercial medium, and by the tech bubble that was on the way up starting in the early-mid 1990s.
I think the other thing is that the 90s weren’t really a time of excess when it came to style or music; grunge wasn’t really that out there- flannel shirts, jeans, boots and long shaggy hair were just… grungy looking, without having any “cool” factor to look back on. And the non-grunge people wore pretty standard stuff- maybe brighter colors were popular, but after about 1992 or so, the trailing edge of the weird 1980s fashions had gone away.
I mean, go watch some movie from the mid-late 1990s. There’s really not much in the way of fashion that sets anyone apart from the present day, other than really tiny things, none of which are really iconic or nostalgic in the way that 80s big hair, or 70s style leisure suits were.
This. There are some minor differences, but the biggest difference from the previous decade, tattoos and piercings, is even more popular now.
Maybe you could have a lot of controversy about tattoos and piercings, and everyone’s home always made the “modem connect” noise whenever they go online.
The Nostalgia Critic, an online reviewer, reviews 90’s stuff quite a bit. There is nostalgia for it and there is always nostalgia for the past, no matter what.
The movies and plays, etc? I have no idea where those are.
Of course not! It’s been 22 years since Nevermind was released.
By 1975, 50s nostalgia was in full swing. So I’m thinking 20 years is the marker. It’s the time when people in their 40s are looking back fondly on their youth, and people in their 20s get to experience the novelty of that decade’s fashions and quirks for the first time.
By the way, go watch Singles now. It’s like a 90s nostalgia movie made while the 90s were happening.
This pretty much sums up the musical “American Idiot,” which is based on the Green Day album of the same name.
I think we’ll see 90’s nostalgia when the kids who grew up in that time period gain some power in Hollywood. Films/tv shows like that tend to be influenced by childhood/teenage events.
By the way, while I agree that some things haven’t changed that much since the 90s, some have.
Air travel was much easier then. And using the internet was much harder. You could have some fun with both of those things. Any other 90s quirks we could poke a stick at?
Well, it’s kind of hard to get nostalgic for something that doesn’t go away. I can’t think of many cultural things that started in the '90s that have completely petered out. Grunge, maybe. Yarbling isn’t the mainstream vocal style anymore, at least. But even those bands are mostly back together, and I don’t remember a period where they weren’t played regularly. The Simpsons are still chugging along. There’s more stuff piled upon the '90s core of stuff, but American culture hasn’t had a sea change since then.
Yeah, I get that there are at least some aspects in which it’s a case of “How can I miss you if you won’t go away,” but I still think there are enough things that are different to trigger nostalgia and/or allow for poking some gentle fun.
It’s just a question of finding the things that a 20-ish person might find odd or different from their own experience.
You could easily mock the fashions - not only grunge flannels, but dark pantyhose with short skirts, that dark lipstick everybody wore, sun dresses over excercise tights, girls that wore those baby clothes like the Spice Girls, Boys 2 Men style clothes like in the SNL “Dick In a Box” video, denim all over the place, that Caesar haircut that Kevin Costner and George Clooney had, the Jennifer Aniston haircut, etc.
The film version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (not sure about the book) takes place in the early 90s, though I don’t believe they ever specify an exact year.
I think one huge difference between now and in the 70’s and 80’s when there was a lot of 50’s and 60’s nostalgia is that since the home video era it’s been much easier to have access to those things that make us nostalgic. There doesn’t necessarily need to be films made today that are set in the late 70’s or 80’s, since I can watch The Bad News Bears, My Bodyguard, Over the Edge, Gloria, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or Meatballs any time I want and I’m right back to being a 10-year-old spending the day watching HBO. Mid-80’s is all about The Goonies, Lucas, or any John Hughes film.
It’s like what was mentioned about Singles; there are already movies with the feeling of 90’s nostalgia, they just happened to be made in the 90’s.
ETA - this is basically what Kamino Neko was getting at.