From a young age, I have been a consumer of old pop culture.
As a kid, I loved reading Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig series (This blog post covers other old works of fiction I enjoyed). Thanks to Dr. Demento’s radio show, I knew about Spike Jones and Noel Coward. As a voracious fan of the Looney Tunes cartoons, I absorbed all sorts of reference from the Forties.
Part of this was driven by instinct, but part of it was driven by the fact that so much older pop culture was readily available. I used to buy old paperback books by the stack, for maybe 50 cents each. Old movies and TV shows played all the time. I started going to used record stories in college.
In today’s digital age, more of that content is available and yet less of it seems to be consumed, at least by the generations that followed me. I don’t know if this is empirically true, but it feels like it is, particularly over the last decade.
Victor Morton recently wrote about a new list of top documentaries (purportedly of all time), which doesn’t contain a single one made before 1988. This recent piece by Bill Mesce goes into further details about why the focus seems to have shifted. Some of the changes in content distribution that he notes are:
- Today, movies spend less time playing in movie theaters. In the past, they were released in a smaller number of theaters at a given time, but over a much longer time period. They were also re-released periodically. Now, as we know, a movie can be gone from theaters in weeks and out on DVD in months.
- Starting in the mid Fifties, old movies became a major part of programming television stations. Mesce doesn’t get into television, but old TV shows got recycled too. I used to watch I Love Lucy and My Little Margie long after their original airings.
- Cable television was another form of distribution, but it’s become more specialized and divided into niches. Aside from TCM, when it comes to movies, cable channels want “titles they know are instantly recognizable to the mass audience.”
Those three points are quite clear and are demonstrably true. Now we get into the grey area of people’s appetite for old stuff.
Mesce has this quote:
A writer who’d worked for Saturday Night Live in the mid-90s tells me that even then writers were being instructed not to reference anything more than three years prior because “a lot of viewers won’t get it.” Compare that to SNLs from the show’s debut years in the 70s when the show riffed on decades of old TV shows and movies, its writers knowing that they and we all shared the same pop culture touchstones.
When I was a kid, you would see this play out on TV. For example, in 1976, The Carol Burnett Show did a parody of Gone with the Wind (1939) called “Went with the Wind.” This was a sketch that was easily understood by everybody, even though the movie was 37 years old. Carol Burnett was six when that movie came out, but she loved it as a classic and so did her viewers, young and old.
In the Eighties, I recall Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom (no relation) arguing for the importance of the Western canon, a common set of important works of art – books, plays, music, etc. – that represented the highest cultural achievements of Western civilization and that gave us a common experience to draw from. That importance of commonality has eroded, as has the existence of a kind of “pop canon.”
I would add two more factors: the shift towards a domination by young consumers and the rise of on-demand entertainment.
There was a time when old people ruled the world. They controlled everything. They controlled the entertainment world. Young people were supposed to be seen and not heard. (You can see some of this at work here and here.)
If you look at the Fifties, you see the importance of young people take off, especially as consumers. If you listen to changes over time in popular music or film or television, you can slowly see the media growing younger. TV networks are primarily interested in 18-24 year olds. A popular show that is popular with old people is not considered a good thing.
A media world that is interested in appealing to young consumers is not going to do Gone with the Wind parodies.
The other big factor is personalization thanks to media-on-demand. I wrote about the shift here in 2008, and the trend has only continued. (You’ll also want to read this post on the differences between “mass” and “niche.”)
There are two key effects I want to point out: 1) When things are made available on a “push” basis by appearing “on the airwaves, “people are more likely to consume them, than when they have to order them on a “pull” basis from a library; 2) Lots of old content is falling off the map as we shift into the new digital age (a point made at some length in this post).
I read all sort of anecdotes about how young people aren’t interested in old movies, let alone other older works. I’m not sure how you could prove this. But there are plenty of facts to suggest that this would be a natural result of changes in the media. And it certainly “feels” true, as an element of the current zeitgeist.
FOOTNOTE: It is possible to argue to this passing of the old, replaced by the new, is a natural phenomenon, as I once discussed here. I think I recall Jaime Weinman once arguing that having older stuff around to freely consume was the aberration. In addition to movies on TV, there was a period of movie revival houses and college campus screenings that may have extended the popularity of older movie stars, such as Humphrey Bogart, longer than it would have lasted otherwise.