After this thread on twelvestone, I got into this really hysterical IM conversation with rypunked. We started posting links to old television shows and movies we remembered, and it sort of went like that for a good long while. Anything from Pinwheel to Captain Caveman to The Shirt Tales to Count Duckula to Lode Runner to Jason and the Argonauts to Spiderman and His Amazing Friends to V: The Final Battle
Ahahhahahahah! What a fun evening!
We talked a bit about how interesting popular culture is, and how it serves as one big communal memory pool. Everyone who references the same shows/ideas/concepts draws on shared experiences, but those experiences aren’t necessarily, truly "shared."
But they sure do feel like it.
I guess nostalgia and popular culture prove to us that, no matter how advanced we get or how much we change… empathy is still a remarkably strong component of our lives. Much like the references themselves, the ability to draw upon these kinds of cultural signifiers is sorta cool and sorta spooky, all at the same time. Many of them are incredibly dated, almost embarassingly so, but that’s also part of the draw…
