I was perfectly positioned in Gen X for the original airing to be a weekly event.

IM OLD: the original airing was a LOT closer to 1968 that it is to today. And relevant to XO tropes, it's startling to see an entirely white, homogenous Southern California. Suburbs where every mom stayed home. Fathers struggled with making money, but everyone owned their four bedroom and had two cars. None of that shocked in the late 80s, early 90s either. The only lib propaganda was satirized in dreary public school teachers making dramatic pronouncements about environmental degradation, which apparently is as old as the 60s.

If you're open to sentimentality and nostalgia, and I fucking am, it's still an amazing show, with even more effect given the background of how completely we lost the suburbs.

The production values are the second biggest shock: the film looks terrible and there are long pauses between dialogue, with no music filler, that modern tv would never allow for.

And despite the boomer porn, it wasnt nearly celebratory or exclusionary to Gen-X. That would come later.

This is from an episode I don't remember from the first go-round, in which Kevin quits piano lessons out of laziness. It's one of the few that ends with a truly bleak note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbk4FrVf08A

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557447)

i dunno why they didnt just write it as californian, other than some jewish boomer indubitably insisted it mirror his NY childhood

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557517)

Not flame, the relative dates of the show are 2000-2005

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557626)

Her sister in real life is the girl who played Winnie Cooper

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558476)

https://people.com/human-interest/crystal-mckellar-peter-thiel-firm-lawsuit/

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558527)

and yes, the demographic and cultural change between 1970 and 2020 in america is nothing short of frightening.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557473)

https://youtu.be/r3kQlzOi27M

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#40569753)

remembering it makes me so angry at boomers i could spit

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557540)

he abandoned his father's family business in the end and dad dies

he chased other girls until winnie gives up, goes to study in france

I learned none of them

edit: even in the link above, just abandoning our heritage to fuck around, until no one can even play pachelbel -- but we remember we once could

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557567)

music lessons aren't free, but practicing is. foreign languages can be learned cheaply with textbooks from the library and duolingo and foreign radio stations. you can go on libgen for 5 minutes and have anything you want from world literature. you want to get good at math, you get some textbooks and annotate them and work through all the problems. adjusting for my local situation and the tech when i was a teenager, that's what i did, because i was sort of poor and extremely bored and i didn't want to be like the hicks and dorks i grew up around.

i think a big part of it is that doing this stuff doesn't actually make you prestigious; it won't directly help you to get a shiny resume for ivy UG or swing a swanky job after graduation. but the prestige ladder is leading more and more to bluecheck hellscapes and an elite that can't actually fucking do anything except status-jockey, spend down their trust funds and tweet about black trans lives.

maybe prestige is bullshit and we should just learn to do hard things. that's how you don't forget how to play pachelbel.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#40569785)

So many things in Wonder Years and Freaks and Geeks are now well-worn tropes that I'm sick of seeing.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557700)

https://youtu.be/brkOMhbY8rU

https://youtu.be/VOzuP_zjv7g

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557729)

The second episode I remember is the same theme, but they’re trying to recreate a fishing trip, and they drive up to some pond that has become littered with refuse and is now polluted and stagnant.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557808)

https://youtu.be/pwj7YgbIpKY?t=480

-------------------------------

Some heroes pass through your life and disappear in a flash.

You get over it. But the good ones, the real ones,

the ones who count - stay with you for the long haul.

The thing is, after all these years,

I couldn't tell you the score of that game.

What I remember is...sitting in that diner, up late...

being young... drinking coffee with the only real hero

I ever knew.

My Dad - Jack Arnold.

Number one.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558244)

this is a great clip from the show. one of its best scenes

https://youtu.be/aB-DwHMQE1w

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#40568993)

The quote from the beginning of the episode is something i think about a lot too:

When you're a little kid, you're a little bit of everything. Artist, scientist, athlete, scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is a process of giving those things up one by one. I guess we all have one thing that we regret giving up, one thing that we really miss, that we gave up because we were too lazy or we couldn't stick it out… or because we were afraid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjEGUMd-_Gs

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558589)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNb3U22y87I

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558628)

how Kevin, and us all really, didn’t see that and decide right away never to rely on cunts like that for work is beyond me

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#47906980)

kevin didn't get with the french babe madeline and went for winnie who consistently cheated on him and strung him along for years.

winnie was probably one of the biggest cunts on any tv show.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558708)

madeleine was great. i also really dug the chick from the lake, Cara. she was great

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39558819)

Can't imagine watching it now. Both because it's a kids show and boomer nostalgia that has little portability to the post-ITE world.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39559099)

First, that Savage brothers were responsible for the two definitive coming of age series' of the 80s and 90s, which is pretty incredible. Second, I don't think any show after Boy Meets World captured the level of magic it and the Wonder Years had, so younger millenials onward pretty much only had/have garbage TV with no appreciation for what it was like growing up in pre-9/11 America. Third, there is this sort of cliff of people born around 1993 and after where they don't know or care about nostalgic shit in the 80s and 90s - shows like Wonder Years and Boy Meets World, icons like Sylvestor Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme, etc.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39559731)