Remember that new thing? Well it was nearly 20 or 30 years ago.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Shrek and The Phantom Menace are good milestones for me because they're both still 1990s postmodern cut n paste, full of references and general detachment, and they used the internet for absolutely smothering coverage and both turned initial hype into rolling success that didn't tie them to any particular moment or era, they just became part of the cultural landscape immediately.

Thinking of the Be Here Now thread, one memory I have of the early 00s is Channel 4 doing on a news report on Oasis being shit. They just put on the first single from the record after Be Here Now, and expectations/presales were low. It was really weird for a cultural event to make the news in that way, especially for that reason. It wasn't a famous person dying or anything. Just markedly low expectations for a famous band. It was a big deal that a rock band had got so big and important that the news was obliged to cover them. Ditto after Columbine when you'd have the Insane Clown Possee and Marilyn Manson on tv to give their thoughts on youth violence.

Then with the Star Wars prequels you'd go online and check the news pages and they'd be there directly in your face next to swine flu, George W Bush wanting them all bombed to death, Tony Blairs being insincere about faith schools. This was shocking to me at the time. Just next to a regular part of the news was this big old pile of shit that even its target audience didn't care about it. The cultural churn was part of the flow of information as if that was the normal thing in the world. The other thing with Shrek and the Star Wars prequels there was absolutely no sense whatsoever that the coverage was organic or reflective of a cultural moment, and the reception of the Phantom Menace was low enough that no one would believe that it was a huge cult hit - in the 90s with movies you'd get ads stressing good reviews, people going crazy for them, sometimes shots of people saying "its amazing!" coming out of a cinema. Its a moment you can't miss! I think what drove 90s pop culture was the tension between ironic/disaffected product and over the top sincerity and commitment from the audience and media. With Shrek/Prequels it was openly phony and fake, all that mattered was blanket coverage was maintained. Which is still the model now - just fucking drench everything in references, memes, reviews, remarks, hot takes, discourse, etc. It doesn't matter if it looks like a big pile of astroturf shit what matter is that you'll go on the news and see half the Amazon is burned down, tens of thousands died needlessly in India and Scarlett Johannson struck a blow for feminism because the buckle on her catsuit is in a different place this time. Of course its phony and shit, if it signified anything it wouldn't be serving its purpose.

[Captain Z]

Crazy to think 911 was just 20 years ago, couldn't get away with that nowadays.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Crazy to think 911 was just 20 years ago, couldn't get away with that nowadays.

Fuck's sake!  It WILL be the twentieth anniversary in seven weeks from yesterday!

[Psybro]

Spotting all the things in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that are now obviously problematic is a good way to remind myself that things have continued to move on since Season 8 of the Simpsons aired.

[JamesTC]

In Buffy they said that Red Dwarf isn't out on DVD. That is probably the most problematic thing in the whole show now.

[Thomas]

The internet has turned everything into a microgenre churn and rediscovering stuff is easier and more fractal. There are a few cultural touchstones like bebop, postpunk, house, golden age hiphop, nouvelle vague, etc that come back around every five years or so but there is less of a need for young people to rediscover one particular cultural moment and go all in emulating on it.

The only cultural touchstones now bound by release time and shared temporal experience are the John Lewis ads.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The only cultural touchstones now bound by release time and shared temporal experience are the John Lewis ads.

And this is part of their intended retro charm.

[mothman]

The Phantom Menace was the first trailer I ever viewed on the internet, circa 1998. I had to download it in sections as binaries from Usenet and then stitch them together (by '99 Outlook Express had this functionality but it hadn't always) using dial-up and it took at least an hour, and it was a cam-recorded version, but still, The Future!

Of course it's on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DqcrzE9pZOQ

The first trailer I can remember being properly released on the internet was for the first LotR movie in 2000 or 2001.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Tu'penny Wafers are THRU'PENNY now

[Retinend]

Just the other day I was just daydreaming about a docu I saw on the Beeb. It was one of the first things I ever saw that was totally shot on a GoPro type camera. So... 2000 and something? It followed him from one end of South America to the other. I was a gangly wannabe cyclist at that age and it really lit a fire under me to take cycling seriously. That's going on 20 years old now. Anyone remember the name of the cyclist?

[wrec]

I'm still having massive trouble accepting that the old Top of the Pops episodes currently showing on BBC4 are 30 years old. They're the same amount of time from now as the 60s were from then.
The look of things hasn't changed as much as it used to over the last few decades though. I just started watching Arrested Development and it was only when a child Michael Cera appeared that I realised it was made 18 years ago.

Another thing I've noticed - a few decades ago, when a celebrity was old, their youth would often be captured in grainy black and white photos, dated-looking film footage etc. 80s / 90s images look relatively contemporary so it's disorienting when someone can be seen (or is remembered) in that context and is now decrepit as fuck.

The fact that sections of popular culture have slowed down and been replaced with nostalgia certainly confuses things. When I was in college I didn't expect Oasis and Pulp Fiction would be omnipresent ALMOST A DECADE later.

[dissolute ocelot]

Art historians claim Van Gogh was modern. Dude died in 1890.

Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is 49.

[Cold Meat Platter]

The girl from the Fist of Fun credits is now referred to as Mitochondrial Eve.

[Replies From View]

one memory I have of the early 00s is Channel 4 doing on a news report on Oasis being shit.

Love this, with the formal and factual nature of this concept.

[Icehaven]

Another thing I've noticed - a few decades ago, when a celebrity was old, their youth would often be captured in grainy black and white photos, dated-looking film footage etc. 80s / 90s images look relatively contemporary so it's disorienting when someone can be seen (or is remembered) in that context and is now decrepit as fuck.

Yes that's a good point. It helps your subconscious accept that time has passed when any evidence someone was once young is clearly decades old and from another era, but when it looks like it could have been taken yesterday it just fucks with your head.

[idunnosomename]

I downloaded The Phantom Menace (although, many forget it was marketed as "Episode I" mostly) trailer over dial-up in quicktime. and also the South Park scene for scene pastiche that came out before the movie did.

the thing is that trailer was fucking great, and it used the internet in a novel way to gain its maximum hype. shame the rest of the movie we didn't see in it was a bunch of wankers doddering about talking bullshit really.

although 1999 is a very interesting hingepoint between practical effects and CG. some of the effects in Star Wars I are genuinely revolutionary (the Pod Race) but there's a lot of practical stuff (the city of Theed is just a big miniature). Same with Lord of the Rings.

anyway let's have a look at the movies of 1999

Rank   Title   Distributor   Worldwide gross
1   Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace   Fox   $924,317,558
2   The Sixth Sense   Disney   $672,806,292
3   Toy Story 2   $487,059,677
4   The Matrix   Warner Bros.   $463,517,383
5   Tarzan   Disney   $448,191,819
6   The Mummy   Universal   $415,933,406
7   Notting Hill   $363,889,678
8   The World Is Not Enough   MGM / UIP   $361,832,400
9   American Beauty   DreamWorks   $356,296,601
10   Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me   New Line   $312,016,858

The Mummy has some really good effects actually. The opening of the pyramids is a model shot heavily processed. I really enjoyed this youtube vid from a few weeks ago with one of the original artists who worked on the film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lKBaK-Q40Y

[Blue Jam]

Remember that thing? That thing you love? Two tickets to that thing you love? The tickets are now diamonds and that ad is eleven years old.

Bet The Man Your Man Could Smell Like is too old to be on a horse now. The ad hasn't aged well either, now we have toxic masculinity and that. And I'd rather a man smelled of ladies' shower gel than Old Spice.

[shiftwork2]

I had difficulty separating the genuine slowdown of popular culture from my middle-aged perception of it.  My Dad was born in 1928 and by fuck did a lot change in his life, and the pace of it accelerated towards the end.   I was born in the 1970s and a lot changed until around 2000 since when the changes have been almost exclusively led by technology.  Perhaps that's why culture seems to have stood still - there's a hotline to the past that old bastards such as myself can choose to live inside and youngsters can pick and choose exactly what they like as there doesn't have to be a mainstream now.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

although 1999 is a very interesting hingepoint between practical effects and CG. some of the effects in Star Wars I are genuinely revolutionary (the Pod Race) but there's a lot of practical stuff (the city of Theed is just a big miniature). Same with Lord of the Rings.

The Pod Race was painful to watch in the cinema. It was spectacular but so hollow it felt like watching the reel for one of those virtual reality rides without the shaking. It is such an aggressively boring thing. Its throwing so much up that immersion is impossible but there is no time to enjoy the details either.

Ben Hur chariot race is one of the greatest action sequences ever because it takes the massive innovation and terrifying sight of all them horses and focuses down exactingly on the people involved and never lets you forget for a moment how fucking dangerous it is for them. Moments like drawing blood, the whip, the spike hitting the wheel really make you feel the fragility of the human body in the middle of it all.

Pod Race takes everything visual and perfects it, makes it technologically amazing, fast, and has dozens of brilliant alien designs. The pods look scary and dangerous. But its a kid. And everyone is sealed away in little capsules that can't really be in the same shot as the pods without contrivance. Nothing that makes the Ben Hur scene actually work survives the transposition.

This is why its a transitional moment in pop culture - its extremely 90s because it exists mostly as a reference, one of the biggest movies EVER had a chariot race and so do we except ours is FASTER and BIGGER. Its unthinkingly kitsch because it exists only to put a genre spin on a famous scene from something else (which itself is an echo to how Star Wars itself was originally reliant on visual references to other movies).  It's an extreme example of the 90s tendency to recreate and revamp the past but bigger and louder, steamrolling the details in the process.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I'm no fan of the Lord of the Rings movies especially their action sequences but a large part of their success is how well they communicate the different degrees of danger everyone's in. Hobbits could get fucked up by a determined tramp, but the men can all fight. Then everyone else is either a superhero or a diety depending.

[Spudgun]

I've been a big fan of Madness since I was little, and was devastated when they broke up in 1986. It was an absolute eternity before their comeback album in 1999 - a full 13 years. That's now 22 years ago...

Speaking of music, everybody's been singing Three Lions again recently, and the "Thirty years of hurt" obviously refers to England winning the World Cup in 1966. Thirty years now isn't long enough to reach back to Italia '90.

[thecuriousorange]

Want to feel old? The Blair Witch Project seems recent, right, but it was released 22 years ago. An equal amount of time before that, Star Wars was released. One more equivalent time hop? The death of Albert Einstein in 1955.

Let that sink in.

[Icehaven]

Want to feel old? The Blair Witch Project seems recent, right, but it was released 22 years ago.

Bloody Nora, that's insane.

[gib]

Yep exactly. That combined with how some 80s and 90s fashions have been 'in' for a while now means it's all got a bit mixed up as well.

please provide a brief summary of fashions since 2000 with reference to borrowings from previous decades. All i know is the hipster thing came and mostly went to be replaced by a short back n sides in the style of Peaky Blinders. Also trousers hanging under your arse and skinny jeans, sometimes at the same time. Is it black puffa jackets?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Seapunk and other retro throwbacks to Y2K fashion is now older than a lot of its retro source material were at the time.

[Icehaven]

please provide a brief summary of fashions since 2000 with reference to borrowings from previous decades. All i know is the hipster thing came and mostly went to be replaced by a short back n sides in the style of Peaky Blinders. Also trousers hanging under your arse and skinny jeans, sometimes at the same time. Is it black puffa jackets?

There's loads, massive glasses, big hair, bowl haircuts, ugly knitwear, stonewash jeans, dungarees, bad patterned shirts. Loads more besides.

[Beagle 2]

Did people always do this? I feel like if I'd have said to my mum when I was a kid "remember that Billy Fury song you liked? That was 30 years ago!" she's have said "yes, I know".

[idunnosomename]

when sebulba's engines smash up just looks fucking ace though. yes in the context of the drama it's all a load of shit (oh I roll the dice if you win I take the boy, and the macguffin, but fuck his mom who cares) but a lot of it still looks really really good. a lot of people worked very hard on making an idiot's vision not look shit. and Ep 1 looks better than the other two, which are like watching someone else play a computer game.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I think that's why I find it visually exhausting. It's not just technical work on show, its the imagination and creativity of the process just all burned up right in front of you. It really seems like at no point did anyone in charge ask "how can we do justice to all this amazing work?" compared to the rest of the movie the stadium is mindblowing and full of life/detail but its all so fast you don't really get to absorb any of it.

I think in general Selbuba is one of the most impressive things about the film but its so strange no one was concerned about how weightless focusing on CGI characters and a kid would make it feel, especially with Ben Hur as its reference point. Its just fucking weird.

Definitely a fan of the idea of that Jar Jar Binks is "the phantom menace" and they had to walk it back. In the 90s the main thing everyone knew about Star Wars was that there was a big reveal and shocking twist. I don't think they would have made them prequels without planning something like that.

[idunnosomename]

Imagine if the Venerable Bede hadn't popularised the dating of AD and the millennium turned on 1991 where it belongs