"Stupid under-40s with their respect for human rights. Time to demonize them!"

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    The nostalgia of Ready Player One never hit me because I haven't stopped hearing about 80s movies since the day I was born. Was the idea to scramble a bunch of stuff that most people haven't thought about in decades? How do they avoid that? I turn on any TV in the last 20 years and it's a barrage of the same 80s and 90s movies, or references to them. There's a whole scene in Ready Player One where they mess around in The Shining hotel, and that's one of my favorite movies, but it felt so empty. I've already seen endless riffs and gags on The Shining. Like Freakazoid or the Animaniacs already made the references, we don't need to make more in 2018.

    the worst part about all this rehashing? All of this feels so late. I would have exploded in excitement at 9 years old if you told me there was gonna be a movie about a guy with a virtual reality DeLorean who fights a mecha godzilla. I would have shit myself if I had known there would be 5 Marvel movies every year. And yet here we are and it's the worst possible version of what I thought I wanted as a kid.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      That's quite an insight you have there: how can some of us miss something if it never really went away?

      There was a time period from the late 90s to the early 2000s where a lot of my internet browsing was looking for nostalgia references and jokes and fan edits of 80s media, and I even got into a weird habit of watching cartoon intro compilations (some of them were really awesome, like for Wheeled Warriors, Thundercats, and Silverhawks, and of course Ulysses31).

      That said, even then, I had a deeper and more intersectional grasp of the material than the steaming pile of blue curtained bazinga trash that Ernest Cline pushed out. RPO was recommended to my by several people, including family members, because they thought I'd instantly love it. I hated it before I even know how big it'd blow up . Anything related to that garbage fire became a sort of litmus test for whether I'd get along with a fellow fan of something.

      "The Iron Giant was pretty cool, huh?" only-good-gamer

      "YEAH AND IT WAS SO EPIC IN THE READYPLAYERONERINOS WHEN THE IRON GIANT WAS USED AS A WEAPON ALONGSIDE A CATEGORICAL LIST OF OTHER TREATS POURED INTO SPIELBURG'S SLOP TROUGH AMIRITE" so-true