[Nostalgic Distortion?] The "I guess you had to be there" Thread

You know what I'm talking about.

There's a movie, a TV show, a band, or even a book, that it seems like EVERYONE your age grew up loving - and they continue to tout its greatness to this day. Whatever it is, somehow it managed to slip your radar, and you got through your formative years without experiencing or perhaps even hearing about it. But since everyone talks about how great it is, you finally tracked down a copy to see what all the fuss was about...

...and it just wasn't that good. You can see how it might have been fun as a kid, but for people to treat it as an enduring favorite alongside REAL classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Back to the Future? That's a little much.

This is a thread devoted to these puzzling works of art. This is not about senseless bashing; it's about saying, "I don't get it...is there anyone who likes it (and didn't grow up with it) who can explain it to me?"

To start off with a couple of my own:

The Goonies
Ferris Bueller's Day Off

 

The Princess Bride. I just don't get it. It's pleasant enough, but I just couldn't find anything truly remarkable about it. I can see it being great fun when you're a kid, I like its sense of humor, but I don't think it holds up that well, and I don't get its being an all-time classic.

 

This.

I also actively despise Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

When I'm asked which member of The Breakfast Club I identify with most, my answer is invariably "Paul Gleason."

Although I've got a huge amount of appreciation for ET and The Little Mermaid, I can't help but feel that those are two films I would really appreciate more if I saw them when I was a kid.

 

I have one - sort of - for video games. Back in the mid 90's, I was a wee lad, only about five, and one of my dad's favorite games to play was the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II - a sort of semi-2d colorful blend of strategy and role-playing where one built buildings in a home castle to produce multiples of various fantastic creatures like dragons and gargoyles, explore the map as a hero on horseback, and then entering a combat screen where monsters duked it out in a turn-based hex strategy field. In any case, it was quite fun and magical and age appropriate for the time. In later years the disc disappeared in the mass of other games we played, but I occasionally found myself longing for the simplicity of the gameplay - in retrospect, It was probably my subconscious longing for the simplicity of early youth. In any case, in the past year I repurchased the game off of Amazon and gave it a whirl. The effects were astounding - of course, I remembered everything, and the music was really what did me in - it was hearing sounds I hadn't heard for over a decade. I still play and enjoy the game to this day - it's not that bad after all as one might expect, and is still quite engaging a strategy experience - but ultimately I think it has taught me more about nostalgia in general and the power of influence on our early days as children. Had I never seen the game before now, I might enjoy it for a moment, but would feel no loyalty, no yearning for it. But since I watched, played and heard it as one of my first memorable experiences, it's veritably burned into my mind. Slightly creepy but quite enlightening when one comes to interacting with other children at that stage in their lives.

A couple clips of the music - the first 40 seconds or so of the first one really drives me nuts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g-qVAZ01Dw

 

The Breakfast Club and The Princess Bride. Two movies that I find ok, but not classic like so many other people. However, I have nothing against Ferris Bueller, really love that one actually.

 

The Princess Bride and Batman. I appreciate both to a certain extent but I definitely feel I saw a completely different film from everyone else.

 

It's an interesting point, there. Although I never really watched TOS until my late teens and I enjoy the heck out of it.

I don't think it's so much a "you had to be there" as a "to get the most out of it you have to understand certain things about the context of its creation," something that holds true for MOST works of art, from Twelfth Night to I Love Lucy.

 

This is also known as Zeitgeist

 

I wonder if perhaps there's a distinction worth making between (for example) "understanding that it's a 1960s TV show" and "putting yourself in the mindset of a 1960s TV audience".

I can deal with TOS's cardboard planets or B5's blocky CG ships, (though as cheap sets and primitive CGI go they're actually not too shabby), because they're actually pretty well-integrated into their shows' designs, and the stories themselves are told well more often than not.

Sure, TOS has its fair share of just plain bad clunker episodes throughout, but so has every Trek series (except the last five seasons of DS9, natch).

At the end of the day, it's a viewer's prerogative how much they want to take context into account. But if they can't tolerate things like bloodless gunshot wounds and laugh tracks (or to use a music example, mono audio), they're cutting themselves off from a lot of great art.

 

I had the experience with ET that Quest did. I saw it as a child and didn't really feel any particular way about it. I saw it again in college and it knocked my socks off.

I have to confess to Ferris Bueller. It's a movie that has soured like a lot of eighties stuff; watching it on television as a college student, I found Ferris absolutely insufferable. Now, Cameron I was pulling for, but Ferris needed to eat a bullet.

 

I saw some of the original "The Poseidon Adventure" and couldn't believe how cheesy the CGI stuff looked (the rest of it was cheesy on conception)