Moxie soda. Okay, it had an unusual taste and most people didn’t like it. But there are hundreds of sweet colas out there for people that want them. Why did Moxie think it should change its flavor and go after an already saturated market?
The most recent season of American Horror Story had that problem…so many scenes were clearly supposed to build tension or just plain freak you out, but it was so dark that you ended up just sitting there waiting for someone to turn on a light.
Back to the OP…how about album artwork? Even in the era of CDs, the jewel case would typically have a small booklet or brochure, and some thought was put into what was on the cover. In scrolling through iTunes yesterday, I noticed that most ‘album covers’ now appear to be minimally designed – makes them much easier to view as thumbnails on a phone or MP3 player.
One that just happened: Playboy. You’re not Maxim. You never will be Maxim. You’re leaving the niche you were secure in (the only semi-respectable magazine with nude women) and trying to move to a new niche where you will fail.
As a guy who grew up with Jimmy Olsen comics…no way. They’re light-years ahead of where they were in the 60s and 70s. “Jimmy Olsen is a Lobster!” “Jimmy Olsen is a Martian!” “Bizzarro Jimmy Olsen!” Pee-You! Also we got past the ghastly Liefeld/Lee years with hyper-distorted characters (early “Cable” comics from Marvel) with chests the size of refrigerators and little pointy feet that would fit in a Manchurian princess’s shoes.
Also, ads. Ads in those days were for shit. Johnson Smith pranks, or “Sell Grit” or other exploitive garbage. Now, they have real ads for real products: food, shoes, even cars.
Letter columns do seem to have mostly gone away; that’s a big step backward.
Tasty-Klairs. (Made by Tasty Bakeries, Mid-Atlantic regional brand.) They used to have a nice flaky crust and yummy pudding inside. Now they’re heavy, chewy, and sickeningly sweet. Actually, all snack cakes are way more sugary than they used to be. I mean, Little Debbies were always bad, but now they’re actually nauseating, they’re so sweet.
Strongly disagree. No matter how stupid a 60s comic was in concept (and some were pretty stupid), the hero used his brain to solve a problem. It showed smart people.
Comics now are about stupid people whose only response to a situation is to have a protracted fight. The characters can only solve problems by punching people, and the plots show no imagination at all – just interminable variations on the same tired theme.
I love Johnson Smith ads and all of it. Why do I care if comics advertise “real products” now? That’s a point of pride?
I read comics in the 60s and 70s and have a good grasp of 30s 40s and 50s. They were much better. They are way past their expiry date. Comics belong to another era.
I thought the art was considered worse now by most.
I remember Kirby, Adams, Romita Sr., Ditko, Steranko, Wally Wood, bill everett, barry smith, jack davis, mort drucker. How can it stack up today? Every time I look inside one of these overpriced rags it looks the same same same as all the others.
They changed from a donut place that sells coffee to a coffee shop that also sells donuts. It used to just be a thing that people knew that DD had good coffee, now it is the core of their business.
. . . and check and top off your oil and radiator, and check your tires. And you’d get free merchandise with your gas.
And then there’s Halloween. We used to go out on both the 30th and 31st, and wind up with four shopping bags filled with candy. And it was good stuff too.
But something that has improved: shoe laces. When I was a kid, laces invariably broke, and the aglets frayed. Now they last forever.
I can’t think of anything related to Café Society which has gotten worse. Just about everything entertainment related has gotten better IMHO.
Wendy’s hamburgers and fries. I lived in Columbus where that chain started, and it was so good back in the day.
Magazines. Along with the newspapers example given above, this makes me sad.
Hershey’s chocolate.
I think comic books are going through a transitional stage; since about 1983, we’ve had writers with something approaching literary merit (Alan Moore, Los Bros Hernandez, later Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman), kind of unprecedented. I remember the Englehart/Gerber/McGregor stuff with a lot more fondness than it deserves. There are more really good writers writing today, and more really good artists, than at any point in the medium’s history, though they’re still drowned out by crap. Better paper, better printing, better coloring, artists on the order of Frank Cho and Jim Cheung, writers like Bendis, Waid, Hickman and Buseik. You don’t always appreciate a golden age of comics while it’s going on.
I’m told that tomatoes used to taste a lot better than they do today, but mostly I’m told that by old geezers with false memories of a better time before the hippies and women’s libbers ruined everything. I think beer is better these days than when I was a teenager drinking it behind the 7-11.
Print magazines.
I came across an issue of *Time *the other day and it felt like it was 8 pages total. And 4 of those were fine print from a drug company ad.
mmm
“Time” is what “People” was a decade ago. For that matter, I had been a “People” subscriber from 1980, when I was in high school and my mother got me a subscription because I bought it every week at Target, until the Gosselins split up and it was either them or the Kardashians, at which I asked that it be cancelled.
Another thing that has declined in quality is advice columnists. They don’t make them like Ann Landers and Dear Abby any more, and I really think most of the letters are made up. The ones that aren’t seem to have one recurring theme, and that’s senior citizens who aren’t allowed to see their grandchildren. Hmmmm, you don’t think there may be some good reasons for that?
Nah. The art, today, is vastly better than the flat, exaggerating, same-same two dimensionality of the old days. A lot of comics today are painted. Many use 3-D graphics programs to make objects that are consistent when viewed from various angles.
An example of Wonder Woman art these days.
Seriously: the art today is vastly better than in the past.
I’ll debate with y’uns over the quality of the writing, but anyone who thinks 60’s art was better is just plain flat-out objectively wrong!
There’s a really great example! We live in a world that has, overall, made a lot of progress!
IIRC, those cellophane fish were some sort of fortune telling device. They could curl up different ways, each of which predicted a different future.
Simple drawing was why comics were a big thing for 40 years. What I have seen is no improvement. It’s gauche, overripe, and cluttered to me. Comics are in two dimensions anyway. They don’t need to be 3D now. Movies have taken their place completely.
Nobody has ever come within a mile of Jack Kirby and they try. He set the bar. Anyone you think came close?
BTW did you ever read Jimmy Olsen when Kirby had them as part of the Fourth world?
Talking on the phone. Remember how nice it was to use a landline and you could hear everything clearly? Cell phones are so much worse. Throw in Bluetooth headsets, dead zones, static, etc and it’s a garbled mess.
Minor quibble, it was never nice to talk on the phone. But yeah, its is worse now than ever.
Also, my fat gut is way worse than ever.
F. U. Shakespeare, I am in your debt. You rock!