Recycling the Decades
by Matt Worley
I had a dream last night. It scared me a little because I thought that this wholesale recycling of decades that has happened in the nineties was totally someone else's fault, but there it was buried in my subconscious. I was working at either a university or a very strange office building that had open showers for everyone. I was working some sort of computer design job, but basically fucking around most of the time. I was the same age I am now, but sprinkled among many of my coworkers and acquaintances were sex bombs from various times in the late 70s and 80s. Suzanne Summers (Three's Company timezone), Charlene Tipton (Dallas sexpot), Heather Locklear (Dynasty era) and others. They didn't look like they do today, but as they did during their stints on the aforementioned shows.
Now, having famous people in my dreams isn't unusual. I rarely dream about people I know, and when I do they usually scare the shit out of me. It's just that I usually dream about people as they are now, not in some kind of decade period piece. The interesting thing was that I knew the women were anachronisms, but they didn't. During the dream, the most surprising thing was how small Suzanne Summers breasts actually were.
But enough of my own neurosis, let's talk about America. Cable TV has totally obliterated the event-ness of television. Before now, syndication did this to an extent (I thought, as I watched the Brady Bunch in the afternoons during the late 70s, that it was a current show), but everything has become intensified. The easiest way to fill the 24 hours of programming on a new channel is to pull old shows from TV hell and resurrect them. Nickelodeon was so successful at it, they had to start a new channel for all those 'new' old shows. Cultural reference points have become blurred (everyone remembers Gilligan's Island, not just those watching when it first came out) so much that any TV reference is inserted into casual conversation and it's assumed that people know what they're talking about.
I have always been an Aaron Spelling child. When I was a kid, I watched Charlie's Angels, the Love Boat and Fantasy Island along with the Dukes of Hazzard and The Muppet Show. I know there were others, but these were things I had to watch. My must see TV. After school when I was in Kindergarten and first grade, one of the local stations showed old sci-fi and horror movies. They did weekly themes. One week was Godzilla. Another was Planet Of The Apes. They also ran a lot of stuff I didn't care about, but I remember there were certain weeks when I didn't want to go outside because of the cool movies on TV.
So I was partially recycled even back then. But now, thanks to cable TV, you can watch everything I did as a child along with everything my parents watched and everything we watched during the 80s. So how do we even know what's ours anymore?
Music does this to an extent (there is a lot of New Wave running through 90s music, along with the cheese of 70s supergroups), but the people buying the actual old music is usually the same people that bought it then and are just upgrading it all to CD. In music, we know what's ours 'cause we own it. TV isn't in our hands, we are guided by the forces of syndication giants and marketing fiends.
So what, you say. Why can't we watch all fifty years of television in one 24 hour block? Isn't that something we need to understand how it was back then? Maybe, except TV isn't a real history. Look at shows today‹do you live like any of these people? Are people in ten years gonna look at Friends and assume we lived this way? Maybe.
To totally switch subjects (slightly), lets look at fashion. If you've taken a look at the fall fashions that were run down the runway recently, you'll notice that there is a certain recycling going on. As one reporter put it, "These are the clothes I didn't buy in the 70s." And where do today's fashion designers getting their inspirations? Watch Unzipped about Isaac Mizrahi. He came up with that year's design while watching a rerun of an old cartoon. A bit of animation, a bit of melting ice and he thought, "Nanook!"
If I could pinpoint a time when all of this started in the 90s, I would say it was when Dazed And Confused came out. I love the movie (even with all the historical inaccuracies pointed out during one viewing with my dad), but it didn't make me want to dress that way, or talk that way. Suddenly, however, with that one semi-nostalgic movie (in which it is pointed out that the 70s suck), everyone started digging. Cheesy 80s synth-pop became fun again. 70s cheese rock ruled. Punk exploded and everyone decided it was okay to get really stoned and watch old TV.
Because of all of this, we have hardly anything from the 90s that is actually from the 90s. So when we do that big 90s flashback a few years into the new century, are we going to be recycling the 90s, or the 80s or the 70s‹or just a twisted version that balls all of the last thirty years into a nice 24 hour programming block and say, "This is my life, at least, this is the way the flashbacks look."