You say that like it’s a bad thing!
P.G. Wodehouse. Loved him when I was a teenager, but when I tried to reread him a few years ago, I discovered not only that he just wrote the same book over and over and over again, but he was so unbearably twee and self-consciously adorable he set my teeth on edge.
The Doors.
When I was 18, I thought they were incredible. Jim Morrison was Deep, man, and there music rocked.
Now Morrison just seems like an embarrasingly bad poet. The End is just horrible, a long drunken rambling with incredibly cheesy sub-Freudian imagery. The music is just blah.
Most of the other bands I was into–Sabbath, Led Zep, Bowie, The Ramones–still sound good to me. But not the Doors.
Of course, bad as he was, Morrison probably knew the difference between “there” and “their.” :smack:
Books: The author Poppy Z. Brite, especially her novels Lost Souls and Drawing Blood, which were my bibles as a teenager. She was kind of the Anne Rice for the nineties goth teen, writing about hip, sexy vampires who quoted Baudelaire and listened to the Cocteau Twins while skulking around New Orleans. I recently re-read her stuff on a nostalgic trip, and it was so embarrassingly bad that I literally blushed while reading it.
Music: John Zorn, the “experimental” jazz musician. In college, I thought his stuff was just the epitome of avant garde expression - challenging the conventions of not just jazz but all music. In retrospect, his music is such self-important “weird for the sake of being weird” tripe, and nothing more.
Speaking of sci-fi from yesteryear…I thought that Dr. Who rocked when I was a kid. I still get a kick out of Star Trek (which out-cheeses Dr. Who in certain ways), but Dr. Who is completely unwatchable for me now…don’t understand how I ever had the patience and interest to sit there watching it on PBS for 3-4 hours at a whack…
In an entirely different genre, every fighting video game that came out before Streetfighter II now seems unplayable. In particular, Karate Champ, Kung Fu Master and Yie Ar Kung Fu are just awful. As is Streetfighter I, for that matter.
And speaking of martial arts, I used to think that Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid was awesome. Now that I’m familiar with the works of Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan… not so much.
On the other hand, some of the things that were my absolute faves in Jr. High/High School are still things I quite enjoy at the ripe old age of 31, such as:
-Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern (the more recent ones have kind of lost my interest, but the first 7 or so are quality storytelling)
-The works of “Weird Al” Yankovic
-Back to the Future
-Elevator Action and Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts
-The symphonies of Mahler, and many other pieces of lound bangy dramatic classical music
I loved Pump Up the Volume when I was 13 or so, and loved that Christian Slater’s character called the suburbs on all their fuckin’ bullshit, man! I saw part of it again a few months ago, and just wanted to tell him to shut the hell up and go do something about his life rather than bitch about it.
Well, for one thing, it was originally multiple different episodes. It only got compressed into epic movies when it was sent over here. Also, there was 40+ years of history to deal with. Perhaps you haven’t seen the right episode yet.
On the other side, the vast majority of fans start young. Practically no one just restarts as an adult.
Once upon a time, I came closer to worshipping Natalie Merchant than I have anything else in my life. While I still enjoy her voice, I’m not the young man I once was, and Natalie is just another singer to me now.
Same here. I think I was just so happy to see something
different coming out of Hollywood. But then I saw Todd Solondz’s Happiness and realized that American Beauty had tricked me into thinking it was saying something important through soundtrack and cinematography (hmm, could that be it? Pretty to look at but not much there? I can’t believe Alan Ball was really working on that level).
I was a huge Dawson’s Creek fan when it first came out. Once again, because it was so different than everything else out there (it was the first big teen show to come around in a while). Now my eyes water whenever I catch it in passing. It is absolutely horrid! Like nails on blackboard. And who the hell let Katie Holmes not sink into obscurity (oh, right, Tom Cruise)? The girl can’t even use both sides of her mouth!
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. For a seriously angsty 15 year old trying to be a free spirit, great stuff. I reread it a few years ago and found it nearly unreadable. What was I thinking?
The Moody Blues. I thought they were great as a teen – oh, so poetic and profound. Now, they sound like pretentious poseurs. Gaw.
The original Star Wars. I saw it in the theater a jillion times and thought it was great, best movie ever. I still enjoy it, but it (and its sequels) are just not all that.
The TV show that hasn’t held up for me is All in the Family. I loved it for years, and now watching it on TVLand, it’s just Archie screaming all the time.
Oh, the predictable list, in increading order of pretention: High school: Heinlein, the Doors, Sid and Nancy, Salvador Dali. College: Ayn Rand, Psychic TV, Until the End of the World, Andre Breton. To-be-eventually embarassed of from grad school: Italo Calvino, Nick Cave, Last Temptation of Christ, Rogier van der Weyden. The last batch I’m still deluded about.
Er, Marley23, old chap–wasn’t it YOU who raked me over the coals when I several months ago described AB as sophomoric, pretentious, and overreaching? 
Ayn Rand was the first person to pop into my head, upon reading the OP. I can’t fathom how this third-class hack retains iconic–almost cult–status, but the dollar bill $ign engraved on her headstone is priceless. The more you know about Ayn Rand the person, the creepier her writing reads.
For me it was musicians like Triumph and Yngwie Malmstein…
I’ve come to realize, of course, that technical proficiency does not lead to listenable music.
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. The first three were the bee’s knees waaaaay back, but when I re-read them (along with Wizard and Glass) to prepare myself for the final three, they were…meh.
Now I’m just aiming to finish the darned thing. I’m in too deep now–I can only imagine the effort it would take to finally finish WoT (if Jordan ever finishes it at all!)
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, both trilogies- yeah, I"ll go see any movies that are made & I’ll never actually get rid of my books, but I’ll probably never read them again.
I’ve had to re-adjust my appreciation of Hammer Films (I still like them but more as visual works than dramatic- Chris Lee is a great presence as Dracula & while he has a great voice NEVER HAS ANY GOOD LINES unlike Peter Cushing who is usually the actual star of most Hammer Dracula’s.)
And while I recognize how iconoclastic it was at the time- the original movie Mel Brooks THE PRODUCERS. It’s main value is in what it became the grounds for.
I wouldn’t bet the farm on that one:
“If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar.”
Antoine Doinel as tragically misunderstood teenaged hero in The 400 Blows, whose parents were not interested in him. Or that’s how I saw it as a teenager.
Some years–many years–later I had a teenager, and he was into films and the French language, so we rented 400 Blows. And, glory be–what an insufferable selfish prat that Antoine Doinel was. If I’d been one of his poor parents I’d have been thinking “military school.” My teenager’s other parent, who’d had the same initial reaction to the film as I did, felt the same.
Damn–can’t believe I failed to use some phrase about sending his credentials to the house of detention in my previous post…wish we had edit…
The Power Rangers have lost all of their appeal to me.
Seriously, I thought Blink 182 was the definition of punk. Boy was I surprised when I finally decided to listen, to find out what all the fuss was about, to some old 70’s band called The Sex Pistols.
I also don’t understand what I thought was so good about Boy Meets World, Family Matters, Full House, Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Saved By The Bell.