I was discussing organ transplants with a friend of mine. Of course, eventually, the conversation came around to the old urban legend about the man who wakes up in a bathtub of ice to find that one of his kidneys has been stolen. My friend remarked that urban legends seemed like such a 90s thing. I agreed. Maybe because I’m too young to remember them from an earlier era, but for me they seem to resonate most strongly with a kind of attitude and perception of the world that I associate with the 90s. I can’t fully explain why. Taking a cursory glance at the “What’s New” page of Snopes, I notice that most of the stories can be distinguished from their earlier, pre-millennial brethren by their focus and content. They don’t feel like an “Urban Legend,” if that makes sense. Am I missing something? If not, what accounts for the sudden shift away from the more grisly, you’re-going-to-be-murdered-or-abducted kind of stories? There’s still stuff like this story about a terrorist who warns a helpful woman to stay away from a certain area on a certain day, but that’s sort of an outlier, at least as far as I can tell.
Follow-Up question: Does this decline coincide with the popularity of sites like Rotten? Are they actually less popular? Is it the same thing?
Yep, I recall plenty of classic legends from the '70s and '80s. Previous comments are on point; the maturing net changed the character of the kinds of bullshit stories that people pass around.
I agree with this. back when I was a kid, ULs were these scary things that had us really believing that flashing your lights at a car driving with its headlights off was a good way to get yourself killed.
I first heard about urban legends in the early 80s from a weekly column written in the local Salt Lake City newspaper by University of Utah professor Jan harold Brunvand, the first folklorist to popularize the term. Previous to that, I had had not idea that these legends weren’t true.
One reason that they’re losing popularity is that there aren’t that many. According to Brunvand
Since the number of distinct ones is limited, as people become more aware that they are legends, then the interest goes away in the variation.
