# What's with the decline of popularity of Urban Legends?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [June 4, 2011, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289 "2011-06-04T05:04:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Tarwater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tarwater)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/1 "2011-06-04T05:04:21Z")
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](http://www.snopes.com/rumors/warning.asp) 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?
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### Author:  [@Erdosain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Erdosain)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/2 "2011-06-04T05:12:16Z")
> [@Tarwater](#):
>
> 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](http://www.snopes.com/rumors/warning.asp) 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?
The internet killed the Urban Legend. However, it has been replaced by the Conspiracy Theory.
Stupidity, like the poor, shall always be with us.
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### Author:  [@Otara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Otara)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/3 "2011-06-04T05:15:35Z")
I think the internet briefly hugely expanded urban legends with email, then killed it with snopes etc.
Thats why it feels like a 90’s thing because they exploded then collapsed during the same decade or so.
Otara
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### Author:  [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/4 "2011-06-04T12:23:47Z")
> [@Tarwater](#):
>
> 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…
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.
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### Author:  [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/5 "2011-06-04T13:25:52Z")
> [@Otara](#):
>
> I think the internet briefly hugely expanded urban legends with email, then killed it with snopes etc.
>
> Thats why it feels like a 90’s thing because they exploded then collapsed during the same decade or so.
>
> Otara
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.
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### Author:  [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/6 "2011-06-04T13:37:45Z")
I think the foregoing comments are on target and also believe there are at least three other reasons UL’s are dwindling:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
You might even toss in Wikipedia. 😃
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### Author:  [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2011, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-with-the-decline-of-popularity-of-urban-legends/584289/7 "2011-06-04T13:55:45Z")
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](http://www.janbrunvand.com/faq.html)
> [@](#):
>
> Q: How many urban legends are there?
> A: I’ve cataloged about 250 distinct stories, mostly American, but new ones keep appearing. I would guess that this number could be multiplied four times over if we could inventory every country’s modern folklore. The number of re-tellings and variations of these stories is beyond anyone’s ability to count.
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.