But anyone who has ever seen a middle-aged man demand that his entire family watch and appreciate the brilliance of the original Charlie's Angels TV series or a senior citizen get giddy over the vintage toy selection at the Cracker Barrel knows that millennials didn't invent nostalgia. Nostalgia for the '90s is an omnipresent force on the internet, yet another thing Gen-Xers and their predecessors can use to mock millennials. I know which Hey Arnold! cast members grew up to be hot and that Ryan Goslings' first post- M ickey Mouse Club role was in an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? But with each mid-2000s post I see on BuzzFeed, I get the same feeling I had when I'd finally nailed my MySpace Top Eight and my friends came home from college talking about this new thing called Facebook. ![]() ![]() It would come up in job interviews, somewhere after education and well before references: "You've really got a handle on the '90s." And I do. My career in web writing has been, at least partially, built on capturing the feeling of, say, opening a white plastic Disney VHS case for "Remember the '90s?" lists. Which means that the echo of my childhood, the time when my current 25-year-old self can count on stumbling upon an ode to the tamagotchi or Gushers on a daily basis, could be coming to an end.Īnd because of this, I fear that I am becoming less employable. I can sing "Breaking Free," but I'll never really be a Wildcat. But I'll never truly be able to understand it and share in the wistfulness with younger millennials. This is mid-2000s nostalgia, which I can certainly learn about. But the next generation was watching, absorbing inside jokes and catchphrases, leading them to include that GIF I stumbled upon in a Tumblr post dedicated to remembering the "good old days of Disney." By 2005, I was 15, and the Disney Channel had become just a number I flipped through on the way to MTV. I know all these facts about the show, but I don't have any warm memories of watching the Sprouses dodge trouble and learn important lessons. It also starred Ashley Tisdale (who played Sharpay in High School Musical), and Brenda Song, she of the brief engagement to Miley Cyrus' brother. They spend each episode getting in the kind of brightly colored mischief kids tend to get into on Disney shows. Twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse (also known for sharing the role of Ross Geller's son on Friends and that of Adam Sandler's ward in Big Daddy) starred as siblings who live in a hotel. In and of itself, the Disney Channel original show that ran from 2005 to 2008 isn't particularly scary. And that’s not including the increasingly easy access to international material like City of God and Let the Right One In.Īnd we still haven’t touched upon Pixar’s golden age ( WALL-E, Finding Nemo), Hollywood finding the formula for comedies perfectly balanced between smart and dumb ( The Hangover, The 40-Year Old Virgin), or that the Fast & Furious series got its humble beginnings here.Seeing a Suite Life of Zack and Cody GIF while scrolling through Tumblr at work recently filled me with both a practical and existential feeling of dread. Meanwhile, under-served voices started to make some noise in the mainstream with films led by females ( Mean Girls, Whale Rider, Bend It Like Beckham, Twilight), made African-American filmmakers ( Love & Basketball, Barbershop), and featuring Asian-American stars ( Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Better Luck Tomorrow). Fanboy culture, the internet, and sites like the one you’re reading now helped bring “genre” movies to the cultural forefront: zombies ( 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead), sci-fi ( Avatar, Serenity), horror ( The Descent, Saw), and fantasy ( Pan’s Labyrinth). And it wasn’t just superheroes making the leap to the mainstream. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Spider-Man 2 opened up new ways of connected storytelling (and money making). And speaking of those series, we didn’t want their installments taking up all the spots on this list, so one movie representing the whole franchise was chosen for those worthy.Īnd your vast comic-book trivia knowledge became a social asset, not a bullseye for beatings. We escaped into magic and wonder in the months after 9/11 with Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, while we celebrated the end of the Great Recession by getting the hell off this planet with Avatar. Movies were also used to absorb our collective trauma. ![]() Sofia Coppola ( Lost in Translation) and Neill Blomkamp ( District 9) certainly benefited from the new technology. Without digital cameras, zombies would’ve stayed dead 28 Days Later was only possible with how quick and easy it is to set up with them. Film cameras were the standard way to shoot a movie for over a century, and now they to had to make space for upstart digital.
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