Maybe there is some clear watershed between the 1983 and '84 cohorts. I remember when Power Rangers got really big in 1993 I wasn't really interested and most kids my age found them too corny. However, my younger cousins born from 1984 onward loved them while I was still a steadfast TMNT fan. Thats why I consider TMNT more of a Y cusper thing while Power Rangers was clearly intended for Millennials.Originally Posted by Felix5
Last edited by Wiz83; 07-24-2013 at 04:04 PM.
Maybe there is some clear watershed between the 1983 and '84 cohorts. I remember when Power Rangers got really big in 1993 I wasn't really interested and most kids my age found them too corny. However, my younger cousins born from 1984 onward loved them while I was still a steadfast TMNT fan. Thats why I consider TMNT more of a Y cusper thing while Power Rangers was clearly intended for Millennials.
Well we were huge fans of both, actually TMMT trumped out Power Rangers in our house. I mean...we found them pretty corny as kids but it was kind of like watching the old 60s Batman where corny was funny to us.
I can't think of anything we enjoyed more than TMMT, probably Ren and Stimpy.
Good breakdown, but you can't ignore the Y Cuspers and early wave millennials who are still a considerable demographic in the gaming industry. It's interesting that this demographic has become very nostalgic in recent years, and aren't as easily impressed by the latest technology as they used to be. Still, they are a target demographic. Video games aren't just for kids anymore. If you grew up playing video games, chances are you'll still play them as an adult. It's a pretty mainstream thing now.
'79 Xer, INTP
I'm sure many now grown-up Xers and Millennials are still gaming. The target audiences were based on the notion that most game programmers and marketers assume most video game fans are junior high age.
Ahh the nostalgia factor. Then there were a lot 1970s - 1980s re-runs playing about that time. I got to see The Bionic Woman, The Six-Million Dollar Man, Quantum Leap, and The Incredible Hulk.
I tried watching Beastmaster--it seemed to be a "poor man's Hercules".
Surreal sitcom fad sounds familiar...
Yep, it still is. Smile to your face while they stab you in the back. Brutus would feel right at home with them.I remember the 89+ cohort method of bullying tended to be ignoring and pretending you didn't exist. Or talking about you behind your back.
I remember getting into Napster (just to try it) just before it got shut down. And then I switched to Kazaa. You want to know what there was to do on the internet back then? What we're doing right now: post on message boards. Getting into random chat rooms and IMing was fun, I got into that for a little while, and ditto with posting to message boards. In fact I kinda come here for a bit of nostalgia, because talking on message boards nowadays seems extremely old-fashioned--oddly enough.Yeah I remember someone giving us a computer sometime in the mid 90s, but it didn't have the internet. I can remember my dad playing solitaire and the neat flying card thing he'd do when he'd win. I'd always have to see that before I went to bed. I actually learned to read with cassette tapes but I can remember our school first getting a computer room around 1993. We'd be able to play with them, change the font and background, after we finished our cassette tapes. I just don't remember there being much to do with computers, I found myself bored by them. I didn't have any understanding of what the internet was until sometime in the late 90s, early 00s and didn't find any use for it until I was in high school by the early 00s.
It wasn't until 1998 that we actually got a family computer and 40-60 hours of AOL a month. (God that's like how many hours people spend on the internet in a week these days..) I didn't spent much time using the internet for anything other than email. I used to play cheesy computer games like Dogz, Hellcab, cheesy interactive Disney games, and The Sims. My 84 cohort brother was more into Instant messaging and Napster.
Computer games--parents got me educational ones. They were always interested in getting those. Personally I like the Carmen Sandiego games as they were the educational games that didn't feel all that educational. Beyond that I remember there were the Arcade-like games for PC which I played a lot, like the Ski game--in which you're a skier trying to get down the mountain to finish a skiing course and at the end of the software the abominable snowman came out and ate you. Then there was Pac-man, that and a Pipes game were the two I played earliest on on a Win 3.62 system.
~Chas'88
Edit: AHH, here's that skiing game:
Last edited by Chas'88; 07-24-2013 at 05:54 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
From a Narrative stance, there was a switchover in the early 90's. Normal kinda touched on it with referencing Ren & Stimpy as being an attept by Xers to corrupt Millennials, but that was one of the things that was just normal kids programming. 90's kids programming was very weird in comparison to 80's kids programming in that it was just quirky for the purpose of being quirky. Compare and contrast the Snorks or the Smurfs with something like Animaniacs or Tiny Toons.
The 80's kids programming was all about abnormal beings doing pretty normal stuff (all things considered). Speaking of Tiny Toons, that was probably the transition from still being semi-normal, to being more or less insane. The Nick cartoons were also really weird. Even Doug, which was probably the more normal of the 90's toons featured all the characters being more or less mystifyingly bizzare.
It wasn't just the cartoons, either. Shows like Clarissa Explains It All and The Adventures of Pete and Pete were just sureal. Sure, you had some shows in the 80's that were kinda weird like You Can't Do That On Television, but even those were more coherant than Pete and Pete. So where Gen X was raised more on "attitude" Millennials were more or less absorbing a steady diet of absolute madness.
I also think there was a value difference between 80's childrens programming and 90's in that 80's programming was very ethics driven, where the 90's programming was driven by a sense that while there is morality, one should do what one likes. The 80's treated life like an ethical minefield, but the 90's was very "anything goes".
Xers entered the scene in the 90s and were sick all of the ethical preachiness of 80s kids shows. John K. a late wave boomer who created Ren and Stimpy, and Mike Judge, an early wave Xer who created Beavis and Butthead, were all about rebelling against the ethical preachiness of the older Boomers and Silents kid shows.
'79 Xer, INTP
Agreed on the Headhunters section that was the part I remembered the most. The film tries to pay tribute to the surrealism of the original cartoons, but it does so in an extremely bad way. Here's a good skewering of the film for your enjoyment:Oh and Felix the Cat movie...oh my god...I love that. I watched it recently not too long ago and I don't know what I was thinking! It's so bad! And so 80s...I remember being terrified of the scene where they wandered through the headhunter's forest.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Nah, I didn't fly anywhere until I was like 19, and even then somebody else paid for it, not me. I just remember going to the airport a couple of times as a kid to see other people off on their trips, and how we could walk right up to the gate though we weren't getting on the plane.
Regarding computers, well they weren't in my room, it was in the family room, but let's not split hairs. We got the Internet in like 1997, and we were the first to have it. As for my background, we lived in a working class inner-city neighborhood until I was about 9 years old (1996), and during that time we literally dodged bullets and had gang bangers and drug dealers on our block. Emergency personnel practically lived in our block.
Then we moved to a much quieter, solidly middle class neighborhood that was still within the boundaries of the inner-city (just barely) at the age of 9, just as crime in inner city neighborhoods was beginning to wane from the crack era. So I've experienced both sides of the coin, so to speak. I have childhood friends and classmates who are in prison or got killed on the streets, and I have other childhood friends and classmates who went to Ivy League schools.
Anyway, I can't help but notice how you think 9/11 was an overreaction? Are you kidding me? I was 14 years old and I was scared shitless that I would be drafted WWII style. At 14 years of age, I honestly thought that we were going to enter into World War III. I was a class clown growing up, and I wanted to crack jokes in school so badly, but I just couldn't. Nobody wanted to laugh, nobody wanted to smile. It felt like if I even tried to make a joke, it was some sort of cardinal sin. You're only a year younger than me, and you don't remember that????
Oh man, I remember more than that. I had the action figures and everything. Just like Power Rangers, every kid had their favorite that they pretended to "be". Mine was Donatello (the one with the blue bandana). Actually, I also liked the nerdy blue Power Ranger (Billy, I think his name was).The funny thing about that... a 1981 cohort once did a test and found none of the 1970s cohorts of his acquaintance had ever watched or (at least admitted to) liking TMNTs, having considered it for "younger kids". My 1981 friend however could find tons of 1980s cohorts from the beginning to the end of the decade who were fans of this. So I think TMNT is a "Y cusp" thing ultimately as when you talk to 1990s cohorts, they look at you as though you've grown a second head when talking about TMNT. And as this thread is fast proving the year definition of the "Y cusp" should possibly be considered to be "extended" from its current 1985 end.
Personally, I remember three year old Chas really liking TMNT, but for the life of me I don't remember a damn thing about them beyond their constant use of the word "Cowabunga", a love for eating pizza, and the fact they lived in the sewers. Beyond that I have no memory of what they actually did. Three year old Chas is still very upset with me for not doing more to try and remember why three year old Chas liked it so much. As you can tell, three year old Chas feels very neglected as of late.
Couldn't have been me, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Never got into that stuff. A lot of changes happened in my personal / family life around 12-13 years of age, so I think that combined with the natural changes of going through puberty, killed my interest in anything childlike or targeted to children. At 13, I suddenly had very adult tastes in everything.
1989 cohorts never got a taste of what being a teenager was like before 9/11--and it showed the following year in how they acted and how the teachers interacted with them. They simply were just "different" and they were treated differently--everyone in my school commented on it. It also didn't help that 1989 cohorts a few years later in my school were the first cohorts in the contemporary history of the high school to not get some kind of hazing/bullying done to them--which was done for voluntary reasons by the older classes who had gotten a rather harsh "initiation to High school" when it did happen.
Looking back on my early teen years, I think we all basically tried to emulate Xers (of course we didn't know it at the time). We thought that the edgier and raunchier our jokes, the more demerits we got in school, etc., the cooler we were. Though to be fair, this kind of behavior may be reflected in teenagers of all generations at all points in history. After all, what 13 year old is a pleasant person to be around?
Now speaking of HS bullying (and I may have shared this with you before), but I remember in high school we got hazed / beaten hard. A couple of my classmates got sent to the hospital, they were beaten so bad. Kids were beaten with fists, stuffed into trash cans, pushed down stairs, and punched in the dark. But there were no knives and no guns, like there were at other inner-city schools in the same school district as mine. Because nobody ever pulled a knife or a gun, we were considered to be the "good school." Seriously........
Anyway, my point is - as freshmen, we were ruthlessly targeted by the seniors (class of 2002, 1983-1984 cohorts), but when we got to be seniors, we left the freshmen alone. Not because we were afraid of them or because we were afraid of the reprecussions, but we just didn't care. A lot of us skipped school to go smoke weed or drink anyway. We didn't harrass or haze the freshmen at all when we were seniors, so I guess we broke the cycle. Using this metric, maybe us 1986-1987 cohorts who finished high school in 2005 are the cusp between early-wavers and core Millennials? I don't know.
1995 was the breakout year for AOL IIRC, though you are correct it didn't really catch on until the year that "You've Got Mail" came out, which was somewhere in between 1997 & 1998. Getting CDs in the mail occurred relatively frequently. It was about that time that computer went from something "Dad had in the attic for work that was loud, hot, and noisy--with a few pretty colored games on it" to something that moved down into the living room and became a more interesting waste of time. Toddlerhood was without a computer. The computer came into the household somewhere between age three and four, I forget which. I know I was in preschool. Dad then started spending more time up in the attic and he had this weird printer with three moving parts that each had a different color that three/four year old Chas is struggling to describe well.
*researches*
Well, I know it definitely was Dot Matrix and we had to get special paper for the damn thing... a whole large stack of "Continuous Stationary" which had strips on the end of the paper full of holes, to move the paper through the machine that you then had to tear off after it came off. And of course Dad got a tremendous lot of that paper (some deal he got where he picked it up cheap for buying it in a LARGE bulk) so we were still finishing up using that paper in the early 2000s. I think somewhere about 2002 or so we finally ran out of that supply of paper.
Ahh did some more research found a printer much like the one I remember:
24 pin dot matrix printer that used continuous stationary ^^^
The reason I remember that damned paper so much is I'd bother Dad wanting to play with him and he'd instead get me to tear off the perforated strips from the continuous stationary... and wanting to spend time with Dad I did.
~Chas'88
Dude, I meet people sometime who say their families had the Internet in 1993 or 1994, and I'm like are you freaking kidding me???? Although I do remember there being computers even in my school around that time, and I went to (as I said before) poorly underfunded inner-city schools.
All I know is that for me, and the world I grew up in, the Internet basically didn't exist until about 1997 or so. I got to experience the first 10 years of my life as a kid in the pre-Internet days, the days when kids literally played outside all day long and we did plenty of kid stuff.
It's also funny to me to hear Boomers and Xers talk about how they played outside all day, drank from garden hoses, didn't wear bicycle helmets, etc. when they were children, while claiming that Millennials never did those things. They obviously didn't know me as a kid, we did all of those things and more. But the Internet did seem to change all of that. But once the Internet blew up, I was pretty much beginning the process of puberty anyway, so my childhood was nearly finished anyway. And of course once social networking was invented in the mid-2000s, I'm sure it was game over for childhood, but by then I was in college.
Last edited by Normal; 07-25-2013 at 12:15 AM.
As to when the Internet entered the general public's consciousness, here's some videos I found:
This video, from January 1994, demonstrated that even many news anchors weren't aware of the Internet.
Here's an AOL commercial from 1995, which is about the time I think the idea of the Internet began to enter the mainstream notion.
Donatello wore the purple mask and was the intellectual. Leonardo wore the blue mask.
Strictly speaking, all the turtles had intellectual sides, though Raphael rarely stuck around long enough to show his. Donatello was the tinkerer.
We are talking about Eastman/Laird's comics, right? Where the characters were rather more than one-dimensional?
---
-edit-
...maybe not. the turtles were only color-coded in the teevee cartoons...
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
I have action figures as well (well, had until I threw them out) but again, I know I liked them a lot, but memory completely has vanished with time. I don't worry about it much.
Someone around here was talking about Turnings in Japan, I thought it was you, but I might've mixed people up in my head. Maybe it was Kepi or Kinser... one of you "new" three.Couldn't have been me, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Umm, dude, the Hercules and Xena shows were ANYTHING but meant for kids. They were the edgy entertainment of their day. Nowadays Xer parents would be demanding censorship if their precious children even saw the intros. They were prime time television. Notorious for showing a lot of skin, fight scenes, and not too bad early CGI. Filmed in New Zealand--what I knew New Zealand for before Lord of the Rings. UPN at that time I think was trying to be the poor man's HBO.Never got into that stuff. A lot of changes happened in my personal / family life around 12-13 years of age, so I think that combined with the natural changes of going through puberty, killed my interest in anything childlike or targeted to children. At 13, I suddenly had very adult tastes in everything.
It'd be like sitting your kids down and letting them watch Game of Thrones today. Only, I will say that the shows had a bit of a more optimistic viewpoint than Game of Thrones does. About just as much blood, violence, and gore happens in both though.
I was out in the woods getting into trouble for MANY years, even after the computer got interesting. During school hours I'd chose the computer lab over going outside for recess because I didn't get along with the rest of the kids and they let me know it, so I retreated to the computer lab instead. My sixth grade teacher thought there was something wrong with this and talked to my parents about it--they said I was hardly on the computer at home and that he was describing a totally different person. I just don't think he realized I was that teased.Dude, I meet people sometime who say their families had the Internet in 1993 or 1994, and I'm like are you freaking kidding me???? Although I do remember there being computers even in my school around that time, and I went to (as I said before) poorly underfunded inner-city schools.
All I know is that for me, and the world I grew up in, the Internet basically didn't exist until about 1997 or so. I got to experience the first 10 years of my life as a kid in the pre-Internet days, the days when kids literally played outside all day long and we did plenty of kid stuff.
The only other time I spent large hours on the computer was in late junior high when I nearly severed a toe from mowing the lawn with a push mower (mowing down a hill--foot slipped)--I was out of school for nearly a month with nothing to do--crappy kiddie shows on TV--and that's when I found the internet could do other things besides be there just for forum posts, IMing, and chat rooms. I discovered fan fiction and I discovered Runescape. They held my attention and got me through being laid up with my foot for the month I was out of school.
Social networking didn't affect my life until I got to college either.It's also funny to me to hear Boomers and Xers talk about how they played outside all day, drank from garden hoses, didn't wear bicycle helmets, etc. when they were children, while claiming that Millennials never did those things. They obviously didn't know me as a kid, we did all of those things and more. But the Internet did seem to change all of that. But once the Internet blew up, I was pretty much beginning the process of puberty anyway, so my childhood was nearly finished anyway. And of course once social networking was invented in the mid-2000s, I'm sure it was game over for childhood, but by then I was in college.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Yeah, they all wore red in the comic... Well, when they weren't in varying shades of grey. Judging by my memories of the Palladium books TMNT RPG, which was based off the comics.
I'm sure many now grown-up Xers and Millennials are still gaming. The target audiences were based on the notion that most game programmers and marketers assume most video game fans are junior high age.
My brother still plays video games, but I've noticed he doesn't play the newest systems like Xbox or Wii. I personally feel too old for video games...not only that but I just can't get into those games with huge 80 hour storylines. I kind of liked Crash Bandicoot and Spryo the Dragon for playstation 1, but anything beyond that in terms of video game complexity is just too much for me. Someone I know once called them beat em up games, basically any game where you stomp on someone's head to beat them.
I find myself playing old SNES, Sega, and N64 games though.
My cousin oddly enough still keeps up with video games, I remember him telling me that he played the new wii shortly after it came out.
Ok....lol, it's funny i never actually saw an airport until I was 18 and went to Spain for a school trip. I had friends who would go to places like Disney world twice a year! That always baffled me.Nah, I didn't fly anywhere until I was like 19, and even then somebody else paid for it, not me. I just remember going to the airport a couple of times as a kid to see other people off on their trips, and how we could walk right up to the gate though we weren't getting on the plane.
Yeah that's the same with me. My dad had a computer around 94/95 but no one ever used it. We got a "family computer" which sat in our kitchen around 1998 I think. WE used to pay for hours by the month, so we'd get like 60 hours and that was it of AOL and that was it.Regarding computers, well they weren't in my room, it was in the family room, but let's not split hairs. We got the Internet in like 1997, and we were the first to have it. As for my background, we lived in a working class inner-city neighborhood until I was about 9 years old (1996), and during that time we literally dodged bullets and had gang bangers and drug dealers on our block. Emergency personnel practically lived in our block.
Wow, Me too....this is definitely my story, except we moved when I was 14. It's weird...I also have friends who went to jail, had records, or went into the shady underworld of crime. I also have friends who have gone to Stanford, Yale, NYU, and many other pretty good schools. I don't feel like I fit in with either, although getting into NYU has been a goal of mine. I kind of want to see if I can do it.Then we moved to a much quieter, solidly middle class neighborhood that was still within the boundaries of the inner-city (just barely) at the age of 9, just as crime in inner city neighborhoods was beginning to wane from the crack era. So I've experienced both sides of the coin, so to speak. I have childhood friends and classmates who are in prison or got killed on the streets, and I have other childhood friends and classmates who went to Ivy League schools.
Anyway, I can't help but notice how you think 9/11 was an overreaction? Are you kidding me? I was 14 years old and I was scared shitless that I would be drafted WWII style. At 14 years of age, I honestly thought that we were going to enter into World War III. I was a class clown growing up, and I wanted to crack jokes in school so badly, but I just couldn't. Nobody wanted to laugh, nobody wanted to smile. It felt like if I even tried to make a joke, it was some sort of cardinal sin. You're only a year younger than me, and you don't remember that????
Sorry being a woman I never had to worry about the draft....I didn't even think of that! I can remember my mother and I being worried that my brother might be drafted to either. He was 17 during 9/11 and in around 20 during the Iraq war.
Well it's not that I didn't think 9/11 itself wasn't horrifying, I was both fascinated and frightened as a child by the Triangle Shirt Factory disaster and it always kind of reminded me of that. Those poor people trapped in a building forced to either jump or burn to death...god how awful.
The reason I thought society overreacted had to do with the fact that people just went CRAZY. And I understood their fears and even felt them at times, anytime I saw a plane fly really low I would start hyperventilating. But then came the wars in Afghanastan (I kind of understood our rationale for going there at the time) and then....Iraq (I did NOT understand this war and never will....) And then of course you had airports freaking out and the 24/7 newsplay for like a year....and then the patriotism! Oh my god, this disgusted me. Nothing bothers me more than phony patriotism
All I know is that for me, and the world I grew up in, the Internet basically didn't exist until about 1997 or so. I got to experience the first 10 years of my life as a kid in the pre-Internet days, the days when kids literally played outside all day long and we did plenty of kid stuff.
It's also funny to me to hear Boomers and Xers talk about how they played outside all day, drank from garden hoses, didn't wear bicycle helmets, etc. when they were children, while claiming that Millennials never did those things. They obviously didn't know me as a kid, we did all of those things and more. But the Internet did seem to change all of that. But once the Internet blew up, I was pretty much beginning the process of puberty anyway, so my childhood was nearly finished anyway. And of course once social networking was invented in the mid-2000s, I'm sure it was game over for childhood, but by then I was in college.
This was my experience too, although I didn't get into the internet until the early 00s. I discovered fanfiction when I was about 15/16. I'm not sure why it took my that long, but from what I can recall there were many of my peers who didn't spend that much time on the internet. I also discovered file sharing, but since I had a windows 2000 and dial up internet, it took my 20 minutes to download 1 4 minute song. I don't remember having an ipod until 05/06 anyway.
And social media is something I got right before leaving for college. I thought it would be a good way to keep in touch with my friends....yeah never heard from them again! I've since deleted my twitter, facebook, and myspace profiles.
It's funny that people always talked about how we were raised with technology and social media, but we really weren't at all. The age I really felt disinterested in going outside was sometime around the early 00s and mainly because I had moved (none of the kids ever seemed to come out of their house!) and because I was 14 years old at that point. Even most of my high school days were devoid of technology with the exception of a cell phone. Boy look at how tech savvy I was! I think my cell phone always ended up buried somewhere at the bottom of my book bag...my parents got it for me because I had band competitions that would come back at like midnight.
I remember getting into Napster (just to try it) just before it got shut down. And then I switched to Kazaa. You want to know what there was to do on the internet back then? What we're doing right now: post on message boards. Getting into random chat rooms and IMing was fun, I got into that for a little while, and ditto with posting to message boards. In fact I kinda come here for a bit of nostalgia, because talking on message boards nowadays seems extremely old-fashioned--oddly enough.
Oh me too I used to LOVE Quantum Leap, I had a thing for 80s shows and movies. That's kind of when I started getting into cinema, I'd usually end up watching 80s urban thrillers on TNT or TBS or something. Before they started playing shows and their own programming.Ahh the nostalgia factor. Then there were a lot 1970s - 1980s re-runs playing about that time. I got to see The Bionic Woman, The Six-Million Dollar Man, Quantum Leap, and The Incredible Hulk.
HA that's exactly what I thought at the time! But it was pretty popularI tried watching Beastmaster--it seemed to be a "poor man's Hercules".
Oh sure, I used to go on a few message boards, I never posted though! I was too scared! I remember playing games on some online websites a couple times. As for instant messaging, I didn't really start doing that until the early 00s, none of my classmates seemed to be too aware of it. I do remember chat rooms! I think we had a class chat room one time...which was a bad idea!
Ah I remember you Can't do it on Television. I always thought Roundhouse was a very confusing show...there was always a lot of madness going on there. Then Wild n Crazy Kids, Double Dare, What would you Do. And the slime and pies, it was just about nonsensical pure play. That tended to change in the late 90s, the slime and pies in Nickelodeon started to go away, now the entire concept of mess and slime and disorder are seen as unappealing. Although...I was watching Abc Family the other day and they were showing previews for this Nickelodeon-like game show.It wasn't just the cartoons, either. Shows like Clarissa Explains It All and The Adventures of Pete and Pete were just sureal. Sure, you had some shows in the 80's that were kinda weird like You Can't Do That On Television, but even those were more coherant than Pete and Pete. So where Gen X was raised more on "attitude" Millennials were more or less absorbing a steady diet of absolute madness.
Very true, my brother and I were huge fans of both Clarissa and Pete and Pete and mainly because it made no sense. We also loved scatological humor, our pretend super heroes were often inspired by nauseating bodily fluids. I'm not sure why really....but I think the cartoons we watched when we were kids helped. I also it was because we kind of emulated the older Xers who were still teens and young adults when were little kids. I was fascinated by the grunge movement, all of these kids in black with long hair and chains....I was scared and fascinated by them at the same time.
I also think there was a value difference between 80's childrens programming and 90's in that 80's programming was very ethics driven, where the 90's programming was driven by a sense that while there is morality, one should do what one likes. The 80's treated life like an ethical minefield, but the 90's was very "anything goes".
I wonder if it was because Boomers were mostly creating shows for kids in the 70s and 80s, so you have a lot of "values" and "let's talk about our feelings" shows. Whereas in the 90s, that was starting to become a parody and what was good v bad was kind of a complicated gray area. Plus Xers didn't care to discuss those things, they made edgy, funny shows, that were often baffling and absurd.
Agreed on the Headhunters section that was the part I remembered the most. The film tries to pay tribute to the surrealism of the original cartoons, but it does so in an extremely bad way. Here's a good skewering of the film for your enjoyment:
lmfao! Aww....you know as bad as this movie is, I just can't seem to bash it. It didn't really make much of an impact, did it even have a theater release?
Have you seen his review of Milk Money btw? Boy he tears that film apart.
Yah. E/L did a lot of the Palladium drawings, too. But you can see the all-red on the covers (the only non-B/W drawings) of quite a few of the TMNT comics.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Actually that was the Silent hallmark on entertainment--especially the "let's talk about our feelings". The drama film "Ordinary People", was as Silent as you could get (original book written by a Silent, screenplay by a Silent, and Directed by a Silent) and has all of the classic hallmarks of 70s and 80s entertainment that was dominated primarially by Silents.
The whole 1980s "values and morals" programming and pop culture was a reaction to the freewheeling loose morals of the 1970s. It was participated in by both Boomers and Silents--with mostly Silents setting the tone or running the show and deciding what to put on or put out.
The Silent generation when it came to entertainment were mostly concerned with matters of the heart and I don't just mean romance, I mean Silent media had heart and soul to it. It could be extremely well developed and highly intelligent, or silly and playful, but the one thing that centered it was a very big, warm, and caring heart. That was the 1980s on steroids. Silents liked melodrama, they were and continue to be its primary consumers.
Boomer made media has always been about sex, ideas, sex, ideologies, sex, commercialism, sex, naughtiness, sex, and making money. While the goal of every entertainment form is to make some kind of money, the Boomers really took it to the max. Oh and they like to focus a lot on sex and naughtiness. If one compares Boomer 1980s entertainment with Silent 1980s entertainment, one quickly sees the difference. Compare Mr. Mom (clearly a Boomer viewpoint), with Nine to Five (clearly a Silent viewpoint--even with the inclusion of Boomer Dolly Parton)--both are early 80s comedies but they clearly display the difference that comes between Silent and Boomer made media real well IMO. There's a tiny sliver of naughtiness in 9 to 5 (mostly referenced but never seen--that was how Silents dealt with "naughty", talk about it, but never see it. Boomers wanted to see it, not talk about it), but nothing compared to the outright naughtiness dripping from Mr. Mom.
I once had a 1959 boomer try and claim "Free to be you... and me" as Boomer made media--but then I put the credits on and the only reason he said that was because Michael Jackson was in amongst a large group of Silent entertainers. Hell, the program was even advertised as being originated by the Silent Marlo Thomas and her "friends". So Boomers trying to take credit for Silent art and achievements? Typical.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, a lot of that scatalogical stuff was made by... duh duh duh... Boomers.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 07-25-2013 at 03:00 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Real quick, I wanted to talk about some of the things we've kinda been dancing around, but haven't quite hit head on. So we have these media inputs and they've changed rather drastically over the years. So how has that affected us as people? Well, I like looking at it through the lense of skateboarding, because skateboarding is a sport that is exclusively this saeculum.
It started out as a means of land surfing, and that's specifically what it did. The style is now called "freestyle" or "flatland" and it was very different from what we call skateboarding today. The primary influences at this stage were all based on physical structures. Usually all you had were some flat pavement or later you had some poorly designed but solid skateparks which were designed to simulate surfing conditions.
Here's Stacy Peralta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntcu...e_gdata_player
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u495...e_gdata_player
Tony Alva:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfdH...e_gdata_player
Now, Freestyle stuck around a little bit in the 80's, here's the only guy to beat Rodney Mullen in comp:
Per Welinder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH4Y...e_gdata_player
But mostly it had switched over to vert. Why? Really simple, because skateboarding was now big enough that you could get your picture in magazines and on posters in skateshops. Vert is perfect for posting and performing a move, and dropping and setting up for the next move. Cameras were common and innovating moves meant that you were likely to be seen and recognized. This is when Tony Hawk really got his name out, here's classic footage of the only skateboarder you know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQH...e_gdata_player
But as the 80's wore into the 90's, video became more common. The Vert started to fade in popularity for street skating, which was more about setting up in a natural or naturalish environment and using tricks to traverse it.
Here's my all time favorite skater, Jamie Thomas and the bail that made him famous is at the end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj6G...e_gdata_player
See, but it's still just one trick at a time. Jamie Thomas was, at this point in time one of the very best and he really pushed the limits, but he was still popping and posting one trick at a time. So what happened next?
Well, most of the people who saw Rodney Mullen's blending of street and freestyle were Ycuspers and early core Millennials. This was a big deal, because it approached skateboarding as a series of motions, as opposed to a single move at a time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr8Z...e_gdata_player
This is a very rudimentary change, but fliping in and out of grinds was something extremely new and was considered to be inaccessible to most skaters at the time. So what changed that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fs6...e_gdata_player
Tony Hawk's pro skater with it's cartoonish physics had kids flipping in and out of tricks easily and in rapid succession. And you had to if you wanted to post real scores. You'd do a 15 grind combo with 17 fliptricks to begin and end and inbetween each grind. Now, that's impossible, but while core Xers either didn't play it or disregarded it, some Y-cuspers gave it a swing, and thus tech was born, and it forced the remaining Xers and early Millies to follow suit.
Here's Chris Haslam at the advent of tech skateboarding:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c78I...e_gdata_player
Here's Chris Cole around the same time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTUJ...e_gdata_player
You start seeing little elements in there where they're starting to chain in a few tricks together and even the film approach is different, where they're getting multiple lines together.
Which takes us to now, where that's just the norm:
Jerry Hsu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5S4...e_gdata_player
Upon further research, it turns our Jerry Hsu is my age, so here's Tom Asta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78QvOOcZVGQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Last edited by Kepi; 07-25-2013 at 08:20 PM.
Here's how each Xer cohort experienced gaming eras:
1961
Pong: elementary school to high school
Atari: high school/college
1962
Pong: elementary school to high school
Atari: high school/college
1963
Pong: elementary school/junior high
Atari: high school/college
1964
Pong: elementary school/junior high
Atari: junior high to college
8-bit: college
1965
Pong: elementary school
Atari: junior high to college
8-bit: college
1966
Pong: elementary school
Atari: elementary school to college
8-bit: college
1967
Pong: elementary school
Atari: elementary school to high school
8-bit: college
1968
Pong: pre-school/elementary school
Atari: elementary school to high school
8-bit: high school/college
1969
Pong: toddlerhood to elementary school
Atari: elementary school to high school
8-bit: high school/college
1970
Pong: toddlerhood to elementary school
Atari: elementary school to high school
8-bit: high school/college
16-bit: college
1971
Pong: toddlerhood to elementary school
Atari: elementary school/junior high
8-bit: high school/college
16-bit: college
1972
Pong: toddlerhood/pre-school
Atari: elementary school/junior high
8-bit: junior high to college
16-bit: college
1973
Pong: toddlerhood
Atari: pre-school/elementary school
8-bit: junior high/high school
16-bit: college
1974
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school to high school
16-bit: high school/college
PS/N64: college
1975
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school to high school
16-bit: high school/college
PS/N64: college
1976
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school to high school
16-bit: high school/college
PS/N64: college
1977
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school/junior high
16-bit: high school
PS/N64: college
1978
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school/junior high
16-bit: junior high/high school
PS/N64: high school/college
1979
Atari: toddlerhood to elementary school
8-bit: elementary school
16-bit: junior high/high school
PS/N64: high school/college
PS2/Xbox/GC: college
1980
Atari: toddlerhood/pre-school
8-bit: elementary school
16-bit: elementary school to high school
PS/N64: high school/college
PS2/Xbox/GC: college
1981
Atari: toddlerhood
8-bit: pre-school/elementary school
16-bit: elementary school/junior high
PS/N64: high school/college
PS2/Xbox/GC: college
