I had a hard time thinking of a good way to state my OP, but yesterday I heard Tom T Hall’s ‘Old Dogs, Children And Watermelon Wine’. The first few evocative lines are:
“How old do you think I am?” he said I said, “Well, I didn’t know” He said, “I turned 65 about 11 months ago”
I was sittin’ in Miami pourin’ blended whiskey down When this old gray black gentleman was cleanin’ up the lounge"
Back when I first heard this in the late 70s, I pictured some old guy on his last leg, and I thought how must if feel to be that old? I’m five years older than that “old gray black gentleman”, now, and I feel great!
Similarly, I was in high school when I first heard Don Williams’ ‘Amanda’. And these lines:
I got my first guitar When I was fourteen Now I’m crowding thirty And still wearin’ jeans.
How much longer, I thought back then, can I still wear jeans? Thirty seemed so old. What a rebel that guy must be to be wearting jean when you are thirty. I’m 40 years past 30 and, yep, still wearing jeans.
And then, of course, there’s ‘Escape From New York’. In 1980, 1997 seemed impossibly far off. That was almost 30 years ago. I made it to the future! Looking back at that ‘future’, it seems almost quaint.
My perception of history has changed a lot as I’ve gotten older. I grew up in the 80s, and in recent years, I’ve started to view the celebrities who were “old fogeys” back then in more of a contemporary light. Stars like Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Dean Martin: They feel like they were more part of my generation when looking at how the current generation compares to my generation. It’s weird because I’m not one of those “good ol’ days” kind of guys. I’ve just learned to really appreciate the stuff that I should have appreciated when I was younger.
I’m currently the same age that Pat Morita was when he played crusty old Mister Myagi in Karate Kid. 52. Pat Morita was 52. (Looked at least 15 years older by today’s standards.)
I have the perception that people who were in their late teens and 20s back when I as elementary school age (the late 80s) somehow seem more “adult” than people in their late teens and 20s do today. Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Ally Sheedy, etc., were all born in the early to mid 60s and thus in their early to mid 20s when they appeared in movies like Breakfast Club and Weekend at Bernie’s. The 8 to 12 year old me, and even the present day me, perceives them as being more “adult” than people today who were born around 2000.
The classic novel Cranford by Mary Gaskell is about a young woman staying with her elderly female relatives and describing their quirks and foibles. And by “elderly”, I mean they’re in their 50s!
I have a similar feeling about Back to the Future 2. When I first saw that as a young kid in… I guess it was 1989 when it came out, the 2015 in the film seemed all shiny and futuristic and impossibly far into the future. I remember when the exact day they travelled forward to rolled round in real life and laughing at how ridiculously far fetched a lot of it had been (Jaws 19?! No chance of even a fifth after the abomination of the fourth one. But I jest). And now… 2015 is TEN BLOODY YEARS AGO!!! I’m getting.. well, not old, but distinctly middle-aged.
“1985” by Wings (the b-side to “Band on the Run”) - seemed a ways off even though it was only ten years in the future. Then suddenly it was here, and now it was 40 years ago!
And then of course “When I’m Sixty-Four”. Jeez, that’s almost retirement age! Now I’m just a couple years away, and my wife has been there done that already.
Not quite movies or film, but for me, the television-age moment came when all the pro athletes’ ages that had been older than became younger than me. Especially when I realized that, at age 37, I was at or past the retirement age for nearly all NFL players like QBs.
I remember reading Arthur Clarke’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey in 1968 and doing a calculation in my head about how old I would be then. I realized I’d only be 54 and was pretty sure I could live that long if I could survive my impending tour in Vietnam. I was really looking forward to the exotic electronics and capabilities of that far-off time, which, while fairly astonishing, fell far short of my expectations.
It was only nine years between 2001 and Star Wars. In my life, it seemed like forever.
It was only 17 years between 2001 (1968) and 2010 (1985), which seemed like an even longer forever. But 2010 came out FORTY YEARS AGO!! – more than twice as long as the span between the two movies.
It’s a good thing that, in that time, we didn’t get a movie of 2061: Odyssey Three. or of 3001: The Final Odyssey
