I was at ground zero of the child snatching hysteria in 1979 - I lived a couple of blocks away from Etan Patz, who was just two years older than me. While I don’t remember any of it myself, it had a big impact on my parents, and was one of the reasons they decided to leave New York (and the U.S.) in 1981.
I think I get it. My 8 year old daughter and I both enjoy watching Stranger Things or listening the music of Taylor Swift as people living in the 2020s. But generationally she is going to experience a different lifestyle than I did growing up in the 80s.
Case in point, AFAIK, my kids’ generation doesn’t experience the sort of Stranger Things / Stephen King / Stephen Spielberg story childhood of you and a bunch of your friends riding around the neighborhood on your bicycles unsupervised for most of the day. As I tell my daughter, “no, we didn’t actually have to look for dead bodies or fight Russian spies or interdimensional monsters. But I like to think that we could if we had to”.
Here’s a question. Why is it if if you made a film set in the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, etc you could immediately tell what decade the film was set in and someone appearing in the film from another decade would look like either a time traveler or someone in a Halloween costume, but any film made since 2000 you can only tell when it takes place based on the style of cell phones and TV screens?
Before digital media became a thing, the only music/movies that you could access was what your local store physically stocked. They’d obviously focus on the current popular things.
But with the rise of easy downloads of almost any media you’d want, you can find any album or movie, without regard to current popular tastes. Culture has been broadened and flattened, so all decades begin to look alike.
Well, any album, movie, or television episode that some people somewhere think would be nice to listen to or watch. There have been something like 600,000 movies every made, 200,000,000 television episodes ever made, and 12,000,000 albums ever made. (Yes, this is just the numbers I can find, but it’s impossible to know for sure.) There’s a vast number of each of those three you can’t find online, even if we don’t count the ones that are lost forever.
I just learned of another example of things that are kept somewhere but may never be shown at all. On YouTube, there are 130 SNL cut-for-time sketches available, all filmed since about 2010. Every week that a new SNL show is made, from 7 P.M. to 9 P.M. there is a dress rehearsal. The cast, the guests, and the crew film all the sketches they are considering using for the show that night in ways that make it difficult to distinguish the cut-for-time sketches from the ones that are shown. They often film sketches that they spent a long time writing but which they decided not to do in the real show.
I assumed that there were only about four or five hundred such sketches somewhere in the vaults of SNL. In fact, there are about two for every new show. So it’s probably at least two thousand sketches. I presume that a copy of each such cut-for-time sketch is kept somewhere.
Every now and then, Andrew Hickey’s 500 Songs podcast will reference a song that he says seems lost to time. It’s almost inevitable that someone will post that song on YouTube within a week.
Almost. Yes, but there are some albums, movies, and television episodes which, while not lost forever, exist only in the storage of the companies that produced them. They consider that they have better things to do with their time and money than re-organized all their storage and pick out particular albums, movies, or television episodes that somebody wants. Others are in storage in unexpected places that no one has thought to look through. And, as I said, this doesn’t count the ones that are truly lost forever.
Future archeologist will have an interesting job.