MovieChat Forums > Ready Player One (2018) Discussion > Kind of feel like my teen years are bein...

Kind of feel like my teen years are being sold to Millennials so they can claim them for their own...


Too bad you Millennials never had a pop-culture of your own. Just remember the one you get in Ready Player One is previously owned.

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There was no pop culture in the 90s? Cool story bro.

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Furbys? Rugrats? How is that culture? Only thing 90s that comes close to enduring pop culture is Ren & Stimpy and they were funny, but degenerate.

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Seinfeld. Friends. Jurassic Park. TITANIC. Nothing from the 80's even comes close in terms of enduring cultural impact.

Don't get me started on 80s music, which was notoriously shallow and gimmicky. Even those who came of age during that decade admit it was a shitfest.

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“Don't get me started on 80s music, which was notoriously shallow and gimmicky.”

(Gazes nostalgically into the distance) Yeah...it was the best...

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"(Gazes nostalgically into the distance) Yeah...it was the best..."

Word, bro.

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Word WORD bro. Love me some of that shallow and gimmicky 80's music.

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Those 90s things you listed have not really become cultural icons in the way things from the 80s did. People don't set them as high in the pantheon of pop-culture icons as 80s material like first trilogy Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones and even the Freddy and Jason horror flicks. How can you imagine Titanic is more enduring than Star Wars? Last I looked there has been no recent Titanic revival. Friends? Seinfeld? Mostly forgotten.

I admit I didn't like much 80s music. 90s Grunge was much better. In the 80s my friends and I were listening to 60s and 70s hard rock bands like The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix when everyone else was listening to Culture Club, Madonna, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson. Most of us didn't even like 80s Hair Metal.

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Sabbath, Zep, and Hendrix are great but you are forgetting the good music that came out of the 80's that was not New Wave. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Slayer, The Cult, Anthrax, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, INXS, White Snake, Dio & Ozzy's solo stuff. And dude, Huey Lewis and the News! Listen to Sports and tell me every song doesn't groove and trigger memories. Not to mention bands that kept up the good works into the decade like Queen, Judas Priest, ACDC, Kinks, Phil Collins/Genesis, Yes, and Heart.

Then there were the non rock bands that were pretty good that I can't deny enjoying like Micheal Jackson, Hall & Oats, Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Blondie, and Berlin.

Hell, I even liked some of the typical stuff like Gary Numan and Madness.

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Goddang, just reading your response gave me some 80's nostalgia chills. I got "Sports" for my 12th birthday and had my first experience of enjoying every song on an album.
Def Leppard's Hysteria was the second, I believe. Anyway, great list...forgot about some of these guys. Devil worshippers, a lot of them? SURE, but...I played Dungeons and Dragons aso was ripe for recruitment into the occult.
Lol

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It's not unreasonable to say the western world has lost its sense of identity over the years. It's hard to believe 2000 was nearly twenty years ago! We've become so obsessed with paying homage to long-gone eras that we've forgotten to focus on building our own.

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Oh, fuck off.

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^moron

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How shall we fuck off O lord?
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...and who were you talking to?

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I was telling ThreeTenToYuma to fuck off, he was implying that the 90s was a better decade than the 80s! What poppycock!

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Star Wars was a great movie and a cultural milestone. It was released in 1977. The 80's sequels were nothing to write home about, although the 90's prequels were admittedly dogshit.

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Wow, did you really try to hold up the 80's as some great decade for rock and roll? What a joke. Many great bands from the 70's (including some of the ones you mentioned) turned to shit when they tried to keep up with 80's musical trends. My parents listened to Motown and Elvis Presley. They wouldn't be caught dead listening to 80's trash.

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ThreeTenToYuma, you left out The Matrix

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It's culture even if you don't care for it.

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But it's not enduring culture.

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That's for history to decide.

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I think it's been decided already. It's almost 20 years since the end of the 90s and 30 years since the end of the 80s.

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I dunno. They're still making Ninja Turtle and Power Rangers stuff, there are still a ton of Saved By the Bell memes, and as mentioned above, Jurassic Park, Friends, and Seinfeld are massively popular. That's before we get into 90's music. Pop culture did not stop in the 80's.

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And I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Stockholm, Sweden, high school girls dress just like they did when I was in high school.

No, I don't perv on teen girls thank you very much. But we all see people when we venture outside.

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Yeah, the 90's are gradually making a comeback the same way the 80's did. For comparison, there was a lot of 50's nostalgia in the 80's (Back to the Future being a blatant example) and the 90's had some 60's nostalgia (they had another Woodstock, bell bottoms were popular for about a month, etc.), and the 00's were into the 70's (That 70's Show). Now that the 10's are here, the 80's are big. The 90's will have a turn soon.

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Yeah, the cycle is somewhere around 20-30 years.

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Funny enough, the dresses with boots or spaghetti straps with a shirt underneath has sure made a comeback and that's very 90s.

Also there's the following 90s films:


Terminator 2
Bill & Ted 2
True Lies
Schindler's List
The Lion King
Beauty and the Beast
Dances With Wolves
Good fellas
The Unforgiven

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Ninja turtles is 80s. And besides Jurassic Park, the rest hasn't endured.

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Ninja Turtles premiered in the 80s but their heyday was in the early 90s. And the others have endured. That is why they are still around as opposed to fading into obscurity.

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The TMNT comic and toys were introduced in 1984, the cartoon in 1987,and they started making the first movie in 1989. I have to respectfully disagree that the 80s weren't the heyday for ninja turtles, although they did remain popular through the 90s. As for the rest, besides Jurassic Park, I'm not sure why you think they have endured, unless Netflix reruns count. No reboots, reunion shows,movie adaptations, etc.

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The original underground comic was 1984, but few people knew it existed. The cartoon and toys didn't pop up until 1988, two years before the 80's ended. The original cartoon then lasted until 1996, as did the toys, meaning they spent more years in the 90's than the 80's. Meanwhile, the first live action movie premiered in 1990 and the following sequels were also in the 90's. That's before we get into other 90's TMNT lore such as the Archie comic, the live action show, the music videos, etc. So yes, the turtles were a product of the 90's.

By comparison, the original Star Wars trilogy is associated with the 80's, even though the first movie came out at the tail-end of the 70's.

Led Zepplin is associated with the 70's, even though the first two albums came out at the tail-end of the 60's.

The original Matrix trilogy is associated with the 00's, even though the first movie came out at the tail-end of the 90's.

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As for the other things I mentioned, they still make Power Rangers shows and recently had a movie reboot. Friends and Seinfeld are still running in syndication and there are a ton of entertainment websites still making articles/videos about them such as Cracked, Watchmojo, Buzzfeed, etc. You can shout "No soup for you" or "We were on a break" and most people will know exactly what shows they were from. Saved By The Bell exists entirely as internet memes at this point and it was responsible for the kid-centered sitcoms that are now on Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, etc.

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Yo know what the 90s had that the 80s didnt - the internet. Now thats enduring pop culture that'll never go away.

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Widespread cellphones as well as MS Office

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Kind of feel sorry for them.Millenials have to get their 80s pop culture second hand from homages like this and terrible remakes.Are generation got to experience it brand new.

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I was thinking about this the other day. One of my friends is a younger dude and he's just like reliving all my old memories. It's pretty weird. I told him I kinda felt bad about that but he thinks it's great. So who knows.

I remember it pissed off all the old hippies that us young kids were adopting the peace n love rock lifestyle. We wern't true fans, we wern't there, that kind of thing. Old Led Zeppelin fans were the worst!

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Classic rock still lives on, it's more than a pop culture movement. Go to any city and they will have a classic rock radio station. Try to find a classic rap station in most cities and you'll most likely strike out.

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We don't have any classic rock stations. It's the only place i've ever lived without one. There's two different stations that mix modern pop with easy listening from the 80s and 90s and every now and then they'll play some Bon Jovi. There's six hip hop stations and the rest is Christian radio.

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Lol, let me guess. You live in the south? I just travels to Florida and hit some places that had more gospel than anything. Definitely not the norm,but certainly places like that are out there.

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Ding ding ding. lol There's lots that's great about the South but not the music scene.

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The strange thing is people literally had to sell their social status and were the subject of ridicule for liking half of these things on a hardcore level back in the day. Videogames, Star Wars etc = nerdville and some copped it very hard.

Millennials don't get to just come in at the 11th hour and pretend that they are into it because they think it makes them unique or 'retro' in their carefully coordinated Instagram selfies.

Love hearing about all the youngens who are superfan experts on Star Wars after watching them for the first time in 2015...

I guess the worst thing is that they don't even know that all of this, the entirety of modern 'pop culture' is really them being marketed to...

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Culture Is a shared property by definition.

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'Pop culture' - is a reference to a specific period in time.

I'm not really sure what it is you are trying to say exactly?

I wonder if teens a generation from now will get a TFA remake?

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"Videogames, Star Wars etc = nerdville and some copped it very hard."

Arcades in the '80s had no association with nerds. Arcades were where a lot of small-time drug deals and fights happened (I'm talking about real arcades, not e.g., Chuck E. Cheese's). They were a common hangout for the "druggie", "slacker", and troublemaker crowds after school. Them being dimly lit and not well-supervised was conducive to this. Plus, the style of games back then didn't appeal to nerds, as they had no depth. The same goes for the home consoles of the day (pre-NES); the games for those were mostly arcade style. The Legend of Zelda (NES, 1986) was probably the first true "nerd game" for a home console that was a major hit.

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Retro pop culture 'of your youth' is more to do with the age you were at the time rather than how good the movies, TV, and films were.

My 'era' was mid-80s to mid/late-90s, so I got to see the slasher movie revival, where people older than me complained like mad that the new films were rubbish, and people a little younger than me held up Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer etc as iconic cinema of their era, and thought the old Friday, Elm Streets, Halloweens, and Prom Nights were cheesy and stupid, whereas the age I was allowed me to enjoy it all.

It really comes down to what YOU and YOUR FRIENDS were into at the time, i.e. your point about 80s music being inferior to grunge - LOADS of people would contest that, not necessarily from a perspective of actual musical appreciation, but being the right age to consume it there and then; the first horror movies I saw as a kid hold a special place, but my parents thought they were awful, and in turn when my 12-year-old nephew tells me Saw XVIII is better than Friday the 13th I grimace - but it's about that first experience before you the shine wears off with time. I know most of the music that was popular with 10-12 year olds in 1989 was likely objectively without merit, but it doesn't detract from the nostalgia it conjures. People get too hung up on this stuff.

The kids in the theater watching this seemed strangely baffled by much of it, but I doubt they'll lap it up as their own, there's no present Back to the Future reboot/remake/reimagining for them to make that connection with, so they'll either forget that or get into 'old' movies.

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I loved grunge,but I don't think it will hold up very well.

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While i am technically GenX, I am now referred to as an Xennial, now I guess.... But I have to stick up for some 90s culture here, as the 80s was pretty terrible (with the exception of punk and hip hop)... First and foremost, The Simpsons... Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Friends... Harry Potter, Gangster Rap, Grunge, Nirvana, 2Pac and Biggie. Jurassic Park was pretty damn big and help change the way movies were made. And since I have other shit to do than argue on the internet, I will end with the biggest pop culture game changer, possibly in the history of time... The fucking INTERNET

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Compuserve. The Source. internet existed in the 80's. I was there and doing it.

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I'm sure you were there doing the internet but only like 4 people besides you and David Lightman were... Its explosion of use and social relevance was definitely in the 90s

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OK 90's. Take as much as you can carry.

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I'm just saying that everyone trash talks the new generations, since the dawn of time, and its a stupid argument. I wish we could get a 90 year old to talk shit about how all star wars is is a cheap rip off of John Carter and Buck Rogers, and Indiana Jones was a blatant rip off of some other 1950s movie. And then someone who is like 110 comes on here to complain about all the remakes being made like the Bogart Maltese Falcon being like the 3rd or 4th version of that to be made. Every generation has culture that builds and steals from the previous generation

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That's a fair point. I personally loved the 90's as well. I just think that the 80's were more distinct (mostly due to its weirdness and lack of self-awareness) than the decades before and after. I'm not bashing X'ers. I could do a little bit of Millennial bashing but generalizations of entire generations are not accurate enough to avoid innocent casualties.

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Thats fair. i think a lot of stuff was kind of birthed in the late 70s/early 80s and that lead to a lot of the crazy and uniqueness to it, but then it was honed in and refined by the 90s

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Aye. The 90's were definitely less embarrassing. "Honed in and refined" is a good description.

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The internet is a technological advancement,not pop culture. Almost all technology endures until it is replaced/obselete. Airplanes,cameras,etc...

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This stuff was mostly for nerds anyway...

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Millenials have been claiming the 80’s since I can remember - particularly Nintendo. Anyway, the beginning of every decade has a pop-culture hold-over of about 2-3 years. The spirit of the 70’s hung out till about 1983 and the spirit of the 80’s hung out till around 1994. I always consider true 90’s being 1995 - 2003 or so. Early 90’s is still just the dying breath of the 80’s.

90’s has some cool shit for sure. But most of that stuff was generated by the 80’s zeitgeist.

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Really? When I watch films from 73 or 83, that feel very much part of their decade, 70s and 80s respectively.

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I respectfully disagree. Any movie from 83 will most definitely be 70's tinged. Same with a 73 movie being late 60's tinged.

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Did The Godfather and Serpico feel like a 1960s film to you? They're very 70s for me.

And what about Christine, War Games, and Risky Business? They don't come across as 70s films at all.

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You can't pick on Millennials for us leaving them with nothing.

It's our fault, not theirs.

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The Greatest Generation set everything up to be utopia. Baby Boomers absolutely shit all over it. Gen Xr's were lucky enough to still be able to squeak through the impending doom. Then it went to hell when Boomers took most offices. Gen Xr's are just now starting to take government offices. When you guys are old enough to overtake government jobs I think we will see a rebirth of America.

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