Star Wars v. Matrix, Santana v. Smash Mouth, and Y2K panic: 21 windows into 1999
Aux Features 1999 Week
1. The Sopranos gets in on the ground floor of a new TV age (January 10)
The HBO revolution was already underway in January of 1999, but the gulf between Sex And The City and Oz and earlier, cruder “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” originals like Arli$$ widened permanently when Tony Soprano met Dr. Jennifer Melfi. What followed challenged accepted wisdom about serialization, scale, and cinematic imagery on TV. David Bianculli called The Sopranos “The first gotta-watch, gotta-love, Gotti-like TV series of 1999,” while Matt Zoller-Seitz reported in the pages of Tony’s hometown newspaper that “it shouldn’t work, yet somehow it does.” Garnering the most nominations of any show at the 51st Primetime Emmys, The Sopranos notched wins for Edie Falco’s complicated, conflicted portrayal of mob wife Carmela, and James Manos Jr. and creator David Chase’s script for the brilliant “College.” One of the first things Tony tells Dr. Melfi is “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over,” but the wave of great TV kicked off by The Sopranos proved him wrong. [Erik Adams]
2. Jon Stewart takes over The Daily Show (January 11)
When the reins of Comedy Central’s then-frothy The Daily Show were handed over from Craig Kilborn to Jon Stewart beginning with the January 11, 1999 broadcast, few could have imagined the outsize impact on American politics (and American satire) the program would soon develop, thanks to Stewart’s push to harder-edged political comedy. By the time a 2007 study showed regular Daily Show viewers were better informed about national and international affairs (and viewers of Stewart’s most common target of scorn, Fox News, were among the least informed), it was already clear The Daily Show had reshaped the cultural landscape. The person most Americans trusted to give it to them straight wasn’t a politician, or even one of the mainstream journalists who often seemed unable to cut through the doublespeak of the officials they were covering: It was a late-night comic who had absolutely had it with hypocrisy. [Alex McLevy]
3. Family Guy and Futurama lead the new wave of primetime animation (January 31; March 28)
Futurama and Family Guy share a lot more than a medium—both animated series debuted in 1999 on Fox, and both would go through cancellations, appearances on other networks, and revivals in the following years. Both series emerged in the shadow of The Simpsons, though only Futurama shared a pedigree with that now classic animated sitcom. But in trying to break from the orbit of Fox’s previous cartoon hit, Futurama and Family Guy took very different paths: The former mixed sci-fi and workplace comedy with hilarious results, while the latter opted for non-stop gags and non sequiturs. We can debate their individual quality (though we think we’ve made our own preference clear), but there’s no denying that their overall success ushered in the next wave of primetime animated series, which would go on to take hold of Sunday nights on Fox under the programming banner of Animation Domination. [Danette Chavez]
4. The McMahon family establishes WWE dominance (January 24)
WWE had more or less won the Monday Night Wars by 1999, its feud between good ol’ boy Stone Cold Steve Austin and corporate menace Vince McMahon (a.k.a. Mr. McMahon) having swept viewers away from the tiresome shenanigans of an nWo-dominated WCW. For McMahon, the IRL WWE CEO, that meant more McMahon all the time. His son, Shane, took on a larger onscreen role, leading villainous stable the Corporation (and, eventually, the Corporate Ministry). His daughter, Stephanie, engaged in an onscreen romance with Test before turning heel to side with Triple H. Even McMahon’s wife, Linda, got in on the shenanigans, appointing Austin CEO to spite her husband. But it was McMahon himself who dominated the year’s programming, winning the Royal Rumble, headlining pay-per-views, interfering in title matches, and, in an egregiously illogical turn of events, revealing himself as the “Higher Power” behind the Corporate Ministry. It all worked, if only because McMahon’s shadow wasn’t yet long enough to obscure talent like Austin, The Rock, Chyna, Mankind, Kurt Angle, and Chris Jericho. It did, though, establish an unsustainable pattern of McMahon-dominated entertainment that’s grown increasingly tiresome over the years, especially over the last few years of Shane-centric storylines. [Randall Colburn]
5. Teen movies storm the multiplexes (ongoing throughout 1999)
Teen movies have been around as long as there have been teenagers. But 1999 saw a new wave of movies geared toward restless adolescents that were also—pretty good? Teens’ discretionary spending power was at an all-time high in 1999, and these newly empowered consumers flocked to see films from both established studios and newer imprints like MTV Films, which brought both Election and Varsity Blues to the screen that year. Perhaps the most dominant thread that year was the post-Clueless run of teen romances based on classics of Western literature: The sparkling, affectionate Shakespeare riff 10 Things I Hate About You is the best of the bunch, but She’s All That, based on Pygmalion, and Cruel Intentions, a modern update on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, also made an impact. But 1999 also saw the rebirth of the teen sex comedy in the form of American Pie, whose raunchy sense of humor reinvigorated the boobs ’n’ boners demographic so well served by Porky’s and its ilk back in the ’80s. [Katie Rife]
6. Lauryn Hill cleans up at the Grammys, TLC leads a top 20 takeover (February 24; yearlong)
In February of 1999, Lauryn Hill took a much-deserved victory lap for 1998’s The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, leaving the 41st Annual Grammy Awards with both arms full of gleaming gold gramophones, including the first-ever Album Of The Year trophy for a hip-hop record. (Mind-bogglingly, only one other has been awarded the top prize since.) But when Hill’s retro-soul sensation “Doo Wop (That Thing)” was named Best R&B Song that night, its successor was already climbing the charts, leading a wave of women in the genre who would dominate radio that year. “No Scrubs” ended a four-year hiatus for TLC during which countless vocal groups popped up to make a bid for the Atlanta trio’s title. In ’98, it looked like Destiny’s Child might have already succeeded, but with third LP FanMail, T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli re-asserted their supremacy and solidified their legacy as the reigning girl group of the decade—and so far, the bestselling in American history. In addition to “No Scrubs” (notably co-written by members of Xscape), the Billboard Top 20 that year includes 702’s “Where My Girls At?” (co-produced and co-written by Missy Elliott), as well as “Heartbreak Hotel,” a FanMail reject for which Whitney Houston assembled her own trio with Faith Evans and Kelly Price. Monica and Brandy both appear with individual hits, as do Deborah Cox and newcomer Jennifer Lopez. And that’s to say nothing of the R&B influence fueling the overnight success of pop singers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. [Kelsey J. Waite]
7. In Oscar upset, Shakespeare In Love wins Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan (March 21)
In the run-up to the 1999 Academy Awards, no bet seemed safer than Saving Private Ryan winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Steven Spielberg’s unprecedentedly violent World War II spectacle was both the critical and commercial favorite of the year, a true movie event so popular that it seemed to singlehandedly spark a mass resurgence of Greatest Generation nostalgia. It was, in other words, a no-brainer for the Academy’s top prize. But though Private Ryan mostly dominated the evening, right up through Spielberg’s expected Best Director win, its hot streak came to a halt when Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford, tore open the envelope and announced that the Academy had gone instead with Shakespeare In Love, about the (fabricated) romance behind Romeo & Juliet. Back then, the unexpected win was held up as proof that Harvey Weinstein, who ran a very expensive Miramax awards campaign for Shakespeare, could buy Oscar glory. Today it still looks like the most shocking upset in award-season history, regardless of why voters really chose to forsake the grim frontrunner for a frothier alternative. [A.A. Dowd]
8. The Matrix mows down conventional action cinema with the speed of a bullet (March 31)
The Wachowskis’ blockbuster spectacle The Matrix may not have invented the technique of “bullet time” filming (though studio Warner Bros. was quick to snap up the trademark after the film’s massive success), but it was the cinematic pioneer that forever changed the landscape of American action movies, and made bullet time a seemingly omnipresent facet of pop culture that year, be it serious or deeply stupid. The kinetic blend of Hong Kong wire fu, fresh cyberpunk storytelling, and inventive (and painstakingly executed) fight choreography provided audiences with a dizzying new kind of sci-fi action. (One particularly well-timed “whoa” from Keanu Reeves didn’t hurt, either.) And with its black-leather aesthetic, the film stole the zeitgeist thunder from the much-ballyhooed The Phantom Menace, with a digital world far more plausible and appealing than the one Lucas’ creations wandered through. [Alex McLevy]
9. Future mega-memes “All Star” and “Smooth” top the charts (May 4 and July)
Somebody once told me, “Man, it’s a hot one.” With their triggering first lines, corny (yet catchy) music, and even cornier lyrics, it’s perhaps no surprise that Smash Mouth’s “All Star” and the Grammy Award-Winning 1999 Hit “Smooth” by Santana Feat. Rob Thomas Of Matchbox Twenty Off The Multiplatinum Album Supernatural (definitely its official title) spent some time at the top of the charts 20 years ago. What is surprising is the strange lives they’d live beyond their initial popularity. While “Smooth” would ultimately handily beat out “All Star” in the commercial and critical rankings, becoming, according to Billboard, the second-greatest hit of all time, both songs would, for better or worse, become dyed in a vat of the so-bad-it’s good irony/sincerity of Web 2.0 memeification, spawning endless disorienting remixes, T-shirts, and parody Twitter accounts in the years to come. [Laura Adamczyk]
10. Star Wars reinvades pop culture, but The Phantom Menace can’t live up to the hype (May 19)
Avengers: Endgame fever was a mere sneeze compared to the epidemic of hype that greeted the first episode of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy, which ended the Jedis’ 16-year absence from movie screens, give or take a wildly successful (and unfortunately augmented) re-release. Television and print media saturated the market with free publicity. Trailers were so hotly anticipated that they boosted the box office of the films to which they were attached, and even inspired parody campaigns. Fans camped out at theaters a full month before tickets went on sale (this was just before online tickets became widely available), while a reported 2 million people blew off work to catch the movie on opening day. Given how fully The Phantom Menace dominated the public imagination and conversation in the run-up to its record-breaking first weekend, it was perhaps inevitable that it would come to be generally (though not universally) regarded as the epitome of a crushing pop culture disappointment. No film, even one without Jar Jar Binks and tedious tariff disputes, could have lived up to that much hype. [A.A. Dowd]
11. A debut short story collection becomes a runaway literary success (June 1)
Every few years, a new collection of short stories—by either an established (George Saunders) or up-and-coming (Carmen Maria Machado) author—will be consumed with the same fervency that the reading public usually saves for popular novels. It’s unclear just what kind of literary magic must combine to make it happen: At one point, being endorsed by Oprah was the golden ticket; winning a major award or three certainly doesn’t hurt; or perhaps the stories in question need only be impeccably written, deeply felt, and speak to the richness of the American experience. Twenty years ago that collection was The Interpreter Of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 book concerning the lives of Indian immigrants in America. It would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other awards, be translated into over a dozen languages, sell upwards of 15 million copies, and help the canon become a little less monochromatic. Pretty impressive for a debut book. [Laura Adamczyk]
12. Napster launches (June 1)
When Napster launched in June, it wasn’t anything new: There had been peer-to-peer sharing sites before, including sections of IRC and Usenet. What Napster had, though, was a slightly more user-friendly interface and the admiration of millions of college-aged kids who’d just gotten access to their own computers and Ethernet cables. Quickly, the site become the darling of dorms and the scourge of colleges, who found their networks clogged by mislabeled covers of “All Along The Watchtower.” Labels and ISPs quickly caught wind of the illegal endeavor, and effectively shut down the service a couple of years later. The genie was out of the bottle, though: Napster had opened a generation’s eyes to the ease of file sharing, and the idea that anyone would have to pay to own a song—let alone an entire album—was damaged almost beyond repair. [Marah Eakin]
13. The Blair Witch Project finds sleeper success with a viral campaign, gets overshadowed by a bigger horror hit (July 16)
The Blair Witch Project was groundbreaking in multiple regards. The low-budget horror hit is generally cited as not just ground zero for the ongoing found-footage craze (despite a few mock-doc antecedents), but also cinema’s first true viral hit, thanks to an innovative online marketing strategy. The still-active Blair Witch website presented a carefully fabricated mythology, inspiring amateur detectives to share info and chase breadcrumbs; plenty of prospective moviegoers came to believe that the film’s horrors were authentic—a hoodwink perhaps only possible at this particular moment in internet history, when rumors could spread quickly across forums but before every available scrap of prerelease info on a movie was available at a mouse click. The campaign helped propel the film to big box office, and also to some major backlash from an unfazed peanut gallery. Two weeks after its release, The Sixth Sense opened wide and made an even bigger bundle on word-of-mouth, overshadowing Blair Witch’s success. [A.A. Dowd]
14. Latin pop storms the music charts (yearlong)
While there were definitely Latin-inspired moments in music prior to 1999, the pop culture landscape really experienced a seismic cross-cultural shift with Ricky Martin’s captivating 41st Grammy Awards performance of “La Copa De La Vida.” A month later Martin released the instant hit and TRL mainstay “Living La Vida Loca,” and what quickly followed was a wave of Latin artists who would take over the charts and forever shape the mainstream pop sound. Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, Marc Anthony, and Carlos Santana became ambassadors of an era in American music where salsa beats reigned supreme and non-Latin artists truly recognized their Latinx fans for, in many cases, the first time. Though some might consider the Latin pop explosion short-lived, it led to the installment of the Latin Grammys and became a serious entry point for future Latinx crossover artists. It also led to a few shaky Spanish versions of songs from non-Latinx artists, but we can certainly recognize the effort. [Shannon Miller]
15. Woodstock ’99 goes up in flames (July 25)
Heat, overpriced water, the irony of commemorating “three days of peace and music” on a former military post: Woodstock ’99 raised red flags throughout its run. On the final night, those flags burst into flames. While Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined the festival’s East Stage, bonfires sprung up across Griffiss Air Force Base. “Holy shit, it’s Apocalypse Now out there,” frontman Anthony Kiedis remarked—and faster than you could say, “The horror, the horror,” the festival descended into chaos. Forty-four arrests were made, rapes were reported, millions of dollars of damage was done, and fingers were quick to point in the direction of a lineup heavy in then-trendy nü-metal—particularly a rowdy set from Limp Bizkit. Those who were there spent months scratching their heads about what occurred: As MTV News reporter Serena Altschul said in a “Year In Rock” retrospective, “That’s the big question of the year: Why? And I haven’t seen anyone answer it, sufficiently.” [Erik Adams]
16. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? changes the game-show game (August 16)
On August 16, 1999, Regis Philbin bounded out onstage to introduce the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which was already a hit in the U.K. ABC then pushed the trivia show every night for two solid weeks, entering “phone a friend” and “life line” into the annals of U.S. catchphrases. Millionaire was not only the first to offer that seven-figure cash prize, but it also helped reestablish the game show in prime time, as it had been primarily limited to daytime or pre-prime time TV for several years before that. It took a few months (until November) for a contestant to actually become a millionaire, but the now-hooked audience didn’t seem to care. The American Millionaire endured, on the network and later in syndication, for the next 20 years, ending its run in May 2019 with Bachelor host Chris Harrison asking the all-important question: “Is that your final answer?” [Gwen Ihnat]
17. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise launches (August 31)
Skateboarding was always cool, but it became much more accessible in 1999 when Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the PlayStation—easily the greatest skateboarding game of all time (until its sequel) and featuring an excellent, era-defining soundtrack. The brilliance of THPS wasn’t that it perfectly captured the sport, though; it’s that it captured an unrealistic fantasy version of the sport where you could ollie a dozen feet into the air and move your body faster than any human possibly could. Its effect was felt immediately, with every other studio shoving knockoffs out the door as fast as possible, and it kicked off a decade-long trend of “extreme sports” video games (none of which were remotely as good as Tony Hawk). [Sam Barsanti]
18. Sega Dreamcast gets caught between console generations (September 9)
Who killed the Dreamcast? Sega fans have been asking after the death of the company’s last (and pluckiest) console for a generation now, but it’s still unclear. Was it Sony, whose competing PlayStation 2 promised big but delivered late, grabbing consumer attention (and cash) in an increasingly crowded console market? Was it sports game mega-giant EA, which refused to furnish instant hits like the NFL Madden series, games that would have been obvious fits for the Dreamcast’s then-revolutionary built-in modem? Or was it Sega itself, which had spent the last five years burning bridges, pissing off partners, and insistently shooting itself in the foot with the ill-fated Sega Saturn? In any case, the Dreamcast—a budget-priced, online-enabled darling packed with games culled from Sega’s first-class arcade developers (and beyond)—probably never stood a chance; trapped between two generations of consoles, it died a few years later as a fondly remembered footnote, and marked the final retirement of one of the great early combatants in the console wars. [William Hughes]
19. Medal Of Honor kicks off an invasion of World War II-based shooters (October 31)
It’s strange to think now—after roughly a million virtual D-Days have pounded the digital sands of Northern France’s beaches in series ranging from Call Of Duty to Battlefield and beyond—that realistic depictions of World War II in video games were once solely the purview of strategy players, watching the action safely from afar. That changed with Medal Of Honor, which boasted a ridiculously over-qualified cast of creators—most notably a fresh-off Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg, but also Michael Giacchino, back in his pre-Oscar-winning composer days—to create the first real attempt at a first-person WWII that didn’t also feature a bunch of pixelated mecha-Hitlers running around. Amazingly, the first MoH didn’t include a Normandy scene (that wouldn’t show up in the series until 2002) but it set a template that dozens of like-minded games would follow, marking a milestone in gaming’s pretensions to verisimilitude in the process. [William Hughes]
20. Kevin Smith’s Catholic comedy Dogma ignites religious protests (November 12)
It’s wild to think that, once upon a time, a Kevin Smith movie could contain anything so relevant as to hit a genuine nerve in society, but such was the case with Dogma, a comedy starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as renegade fallen angels who exploit a biblical loophole to worm their way back into heaven. The Catholic League and the American Society For The Defense Of Tradition, Family And Property were apoplectic over the movie, shrieking in fliers that Dogma “mocks everything we hold sacred” and “condones what we condemn—murder, obscenity, violence, profanity, drugs, drunkenness and rebellion!’’ An outgrowth of the right wing’s moral grandstanding in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the protest could also be said to serve as a preamble of sorts for the bug-eyed evangelicalism of the George W. Bush era. Now, this kind of moral outrage looks as ridiculous as a 2019 Jay And Silent Bob reboot, what with these same protest-happy idiots now kissing the filthy feet of Donald Trump. [Randall Colburn]
21. The end of the year brings Y2K panic (December 31)
Was Y2K a disaster averted, or nothing but hype? Until the engineers who spent billions of dollars behind the scenes making sure that the world’s computer systems didn’t collectively freak out when the date changed from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 come forward, we may never know. One thing that is clear, though, is that whether or not the problem was real, it was certainly profitable for conspiracy-minded opportunists. That applies not only to the survivalists who turned their attentions toward writing quickie books about Y2K and selling Y2K survival kits, but also toward the 24-hour cable networks that blew up a relatively obscure (if menacing-sounding) computer glitch into a full-blown crisis. Soon, millions of people worldwide were convinced that airplanes would fall from the sky, pacemakers would stop working, prison doors would swing open, and the world’s entire stockpile of nuclear weapons would self-launch once the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. Of course, the American government didn’t help, as its Y2K For Kids and Year 2000 Rumors websites planted seeds in paranoid citizens’ imaginations under the pretense of answering questions. Some stubbornly continued to believe that Y2K was a crisis after January 1, 2000 came and went, with one Y2K “doomer” posting on a message board, “Please be reminded that there are still 12 months left in this year.” [Katie Rife]
177 Comments
22) MTV EMA 1999 The Offspring win Best Rock category. 12yo me celebrated big time.
They’re pretty fly, for white guys.
saw them playing last month. still good. a moment that is most pleasing to me and my career.
Was there a bet to see how many times you could sneak in the adjectives “frothy” & “frothier?”
This is four years too early for “santorum.”
Ah, the 20th anniversary of everyone forgetting that Saving Private Ryan isn’t as good as they remember.
Ok, I’ll defend Shakespeare In Love winning Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan: the beach landing scene is remarkable, and like nothing I’d seen before in a war movie, but the rest of the movie is sadly exactly like many war movies before it – remarkably cliched (the crew of the Dirty Dozen are more nuanced than Hanks bunch) and painfully sentimental. How many shots of sun-lit American flags where there, eventually? And by the time old Matt Damon was sobbing about if he was a good dad, I was in full 1999 eye-roll.Shakespeare In Love is great fun – light footed, witty, clever and with a great cast. Eff Harvey – a movie with Anthony Sher, Colin Firth, Geoffry Rush, Simon Callow, Tom Wilkinson, Judi Dench, Goop before she got annoying and Carson from Downton Abbey, all reading a Tom Stoppard script is worth an Oscar any year.
I have to agree with you here. Ryan is an exceptionally made conglomeration of nearly every WWII movie ever. Shakespeare is just pure fun.
Shakespeare is indeed pure fun, but being an enjoyably light and clever film doesn’t make it best picture.
But it’s a period piece. A PERIOD PIECE!
True, but being enjoyable, light, and clever puts it above 90 percent of best picture winners.
I’m not going to argue with you about which movie is better because that’s entirely subjective and you’re not wrong in your opinions, but if we’re talking about which movie was more influential, clearly Saving Private Ryan casts the longer shadow.
Ryan changed everything about how war movies were shot, and, even more influentially, sound designed. Shakespeare in Love changed how studios funded for your consideration campaigns.
If Best Picture is just an award about which movie we liked the best then sure, give it to Shakespeare. If it should be about which movie contributed to film as an art form, then there’s no question the Academy got it wrong, as they almost always do.
Shakespeare in Love changed how studios funded for your consideration campaigns. This. And considering how we now know how Weinstein got his way: by bullying, intimidation, harassment, threats, etc, it’s even less deserving than we thought.
Saving Private Ryan is weird because one overall impression is a very cold-blooded perspective on war — the random carnage, the scenes of surrendering Germans getting slaughtered — but it is framed with such a shameless flag waving container
As a result, I think the movie was very influential with two very different sets of watchers. It wasn’t the first movie to show random war horror that way, but Spielberg’s mastery of those scenes really raised the profile of that kind of movie. And it certainly wasn’t the first movie to pound on the idea of the debt owed for sacrifice, but again Spielberg really pulled at the heartstrings.The problem comes when anybody tries to reconcile the two. He doesn’t make a compelling argument for saving Ryan. He doesn’t give us any reason to accept that Ryan followed Captain Miller’s plea to “earn it” besides having a nice looking family by his side, and the final battle comes across as cynical staging for the sake of drama.Spielberg never seems all that interested in stitching together the two different pieces, and as a result it’s really two very influential movies that barely talk to each other at all.
I think a movie can both evoke patriotism and gratitude while emphasizing that this WAS still war, after all. Not everyone gets rescued and goes on to build a nice family, but this guy did.
No question, war can be terrible and necessary, or at least unavoidable. My point is that Spielberg most decidedly did not “earn it” at all. He just slapped the framing on top of the rest of it and called it a day.I think a big part of the problem is that the 1999 Normandy stuff is a waste of screen time, and if he wanted to switch between present and past, he should have chosen a better setting to show off who old Ryan was, instead of just telling us everyone loved him.
No argument here. The framing device was just a bad idea. Show the cemetery over the credits or something if you must, it really does have impact, but old Ryan in his windbreaker was unnecessary.
I would imagine he earned it by having that nice-looking family by his side. After all, Captain Miller and everyone else for that matter didn’t get to go and do that. In fact, Your first paragraph is right though and the problem with the film: it contradicts itself by ruining its anti-war message with the USA! USA! ending. Especially when it did a fine job with Upham which is actually the best, and most well written and realistic character in that movie and best characterization of any war movie.
If what you get out of that ending is USA! USA! then I don’t know what to tell you. Upham is the United States in that movie, the guy who cowers in a corner while in the next room Mellish, standing in for Europe’s Jews, gets slowly stabbed through the heart by a German soldier. He only takes up arms after it’s too late to save anyone and the battle is basically won. Not sure what’s so rah-rah pro-American from that point of view.
Honestly that interpretation is one of the most ignorant things I’ve read.USA joined the war in 1941 and spent way more money than anyone else. They also lost around 400’000 soldiers.I’d imagine that you are trying to be smart because the US has been guilty of playing down the role of Russia, but you just ended up looking dumber. Have a word with yourself lad
Get over yourself, laddie. This interpretation has nothing to do with the Russians and everything to do with the Europe’s Jews. Even after the U.S. entered World War II, we were still turning back refugees trying to escape the Holocaust. For the millions who were exterminated, U.S. intervention was too little, too late. Unlike yours, most people’s minds are able to hold more than one thought at a time. SPR is largely a celebration of American heroism and sacrifice in liberating Europe, but it can also accommodate this relatively mild rebuke on behalf of people who might’ve survived if the U.S. had done more and sooner.
I’m not denying any of that, I was just taking issue with the stupid idea that the US was ‘cowering in the corner until the last 5 minutes’They should have entered the war sooner of course, but same as with Britain and France they really really didn’t want to because they knew it was going to last for years and sentence crazy amounts of their people to death.
Please don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t write what you’re quoting.I get what you’re saying, but it’s a view you’d have to take up with Spielberg (who put that in the movie), not me. Yes, there were good reasons not to enter the war until we did, and yes, entering earlier would likely have cost thousands of American lives. However, taken together with the US turning away Jewish refugees, I don’t think the extremely unflattering portrayal Upham gets in the film is entirely unfair.
Yeah, I’m not sure I totally buy it, but there’s Chris Hayes’ essay “The Good War” that even blames Saving Private Ryan for the Iraq War. The intent of SPR may have been to show how war wasn’t glamorous, but it made it seem so goddamn noble rather than sordid as Vietnam War movies did.
Hayes could probably blame 90s institution Stephen Ambrose for that as well. Ambrose wrote the books these 90s/00s films/TV works were based on.
Oh yes, he does bring up Ambrose’s Band of Brothers as well as other bits of 1990s WWII nostalgia like Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. SPR was part of that whole trend around the 50th anniversary of 1945.
Also, very appropos of this here AV Club article on the 90s…
Just read it. I see that he did blame all that stuff. Great read. thanks for that…
good point, well made. Ryan almost created a sub-genre of war (and action) moves, didn’t it?
a performance from Afleck before he got a bump to starring roles and proceeded to be a shitty A lister and part of Benifer. But a solid performance from a guy I still consider a A list support player and vastly over rated at everything else.
Let it be noted that after Benifer he eventually had a renaissance. I actually really like Ben Affleck. He’s a quality workaday actor. Should he have been Batman…ehhh, maybe not. But he should be working.
right after posting, I realised I’d forgetten Afleck – he was excellent. His reading of “Staffordshire shit pot” is so funny. And with just the right amount of resentment.
Not only was Saving Private Ryan not the best movie of 1998, it wasn’t even the best war movie of 1998! Malick should have won best director
Malick should have won best director I remember the criticism, or at least befuddlement, from a lot of quarters about Thin Red Line -that Clooney and some other “stars” were relegated to cameos. They miss, in my opinion, Malick’s skill here: he hires actors, not stars. If the part he’s got for them doesn’t work in the movie as a long showy turn (even if it was initially a lot more screen time) he edits (sometimes cuts completely) a scene or performance so that it works for the movie. You could argue that he’s wrong, or that it’s jarring to see someone you expect to carry a movie show up and then be gone, but — he’s a director. He’s making a whole movie, not a showcase.[That said, as much as I love Days of Heaven, Badlands, and (most of) The New World, I had a hard time with Tree of Life although it was gorgeous. Still – well directed by a guy who knows what he wants to put on the screen. Same with the others of his later movies I’ve seen.]
oh, good shout.
I was afraid anti-SiL fervor would immediately overtake the comments, but happily yours is the first comment I saw. And I agree completely, the storming the beach opening was visually impressive, but everything after that felt like manipulative schmaltz (which I feel is Spielberg’s hallmark, though I recognize I am in the minority with that opinion.) I haven’t watched it again since I saw it in the theater. I have, however, watched Shakespeare in Love many times over the years. Probably my favorite romantic comedy after When Harry Met Sally.
I’m with you among the minority. Melodrama and sentimentality is Spielberg’s go-to. He’s a genius in many ways, but creates moments inorganically often, and I roll my eyes while watching even his best movies.
they’re probably inorganic to you because you have no soul.
I actually can’t even watch the storming beach scene, or the scene where Giovanni Ribisi dies, or pretty much the whole last battle. I don’t watch that movie, is what I’m saying. Too much graphic death that basically really happened (not to those exact people, obviously, but you know what I mean). But I’m super squeamish that way.
manipulative schmaltz (which I feel is Spielberg’s hallmark, though I recognize I am in the minority with that opinion.) Aw, it’s okay to be in the minority…! I try not to completely dismiss Spielberg because of things like Munich and Bridge of Spies. That is, he periodically surprises me by leaving the wind machines and giant lighting rigs at home. But I consider most of his stuff to be manipulative schmaltz. Not always a bad thing (E.T.), but it can really screw up an otherwise potentially intriguing story (Schindler, Hook, AI, War Horse, etc).
Ah, the 20th anniversary of everyone forgetting that Saving Private Ryan isn’t as good as they remember. You have a poorly developed theory of mind.
God dammit. I hate when I agree with Squamate Primate
How many shots of sun-lit American flags where there, eventually?
I haven’t seen the movie in ages, but pretty sure the answer is “one.”
It is a good movie, but it didn’t deserve Oscar based on all the evil that went on behind the scenes between Weinstein, Paltrow, and everyone in between. It wouldn’t have won on its own merits if it weren’t pushed by that corrupt asshole.
Funny, I said pretty much the same thing about Saving Private Ryan in the AVClub article about The Longest Day and was widely criticized for it. I stand by my comments that the beach landing was a great sequence but the rest of the movie was pure schmaltz.That’s not to say I think Shakespeare in Love was any better. Like most Oscar winners, it didn’t age well, and was massively overrated at the time. And didn’t Judi Dench win a best supporting award for about 5 minutes of screen time in that movie? Just goes to show what a bandwagon it was.
Shakespeare in Love is thoroughly middlebrow, containing nothing remarkable at all. It’s “The King’s Speech” of the late 90s.
Are you implying that The King’s Speech contained nothing remarkable? To this day I still consider it one of the best explorations of a healthy, emotionally open friendship between two men. I haven’t seen Shakespeare in Love, but I loved The King’s Speech. To each their own, though.
It’s more of a student-teacher relationship than a friendship.
I’d say by the end of the film it’s both. What I was generally trying to get at is that there are so many movies out there (and media in general) where men aren’t open and honest with their feelings, and I appreciate that The King’s Speech was able to push past that gender role a bit. I like that it’s an interesting movie without the need for violence or over-the-top masculinity.
I think Good Will Hunting already did something like that earlier.
Oh, totally agree. I’m just saying it doesn’t happen often enough. But you’re right. Good Will Hunting is another great example of that.
ouch. Nah, Kings Speech wasn’t my thing and Shakespeare in Love may appear middlebrow, but it’s Tom Stoppard punching down, and there’s some really clever stuff in there, that only comes from someone who really knows the material.
Weirdly enough, when I think of 1999 Shakespeare in love doesn’t ring a bell in my collective memory. At this point in life I’d have to be physically restrained like Alex in Clockwork Orange to watch it.
shut up, you bought into the hype train of a human pig. stop trying to justify yourself and your shitty attitude.
The only thing I think Saving Private Ryan did exceptionally well – revolutionarily well – was that during the opening beach assault, it clearly showed what war really is without the dramatic stylishness that hangs over most movies about war. It’s fear, it’s random luck, it’s rolling a guy over and finding a hole where his face used to be, it’s trying to make sense of pure sensory overload in the middle of constant, ear-splitting noise, it’s blood and gore everywhere with no time to pause for a dramatic line reading.
That Spielberg crafted this scene with an ulterior motive of putting the “Greatest Generation” on a pedestal doesn’t change the fact that he pulled it off better than anyone I’ve ever seen. The movie that follows that 17 minutes almost has to be a disappointment, because no conventional tropes can stand up against that level of verisimilitude.
The beach scene is amazing but the street to street fighting at the end is also really well done and shows a different aspect of the war in a way that had seldom been done well before. Saving Private Ryan is a great movie
perhaps, but I’d like to see him try a bit harder.
One thing that I feel bad about: Hanks performance is brilliant, and often gets lumped in with the “rest of the movie is too conventional” criticism.
Oh, for sure. He plays the balance of terror and leadership so well.
Agree. 19 year old me really enjoyed Shakespeare in Love. It was sweet and fun, and frankly, well-acted. I wasn’t disappointed in the Academy’s take that time.
Ok, I’ll defend Shakespeare In Love winning Best Picture over Saving Private RyanSo will I. I always do. Ryan is just a war movie; the D-Day landing is great but after that it’s both unremarkable because we’ve seen dozens of WW2 movies just like it, and because we’ve seen all those Spielberg lighting tricks and heard all those music cues already. Shakespeare in Love has a much better script, a story to get involved with (sorry, WW2, we know how you end and who to root for) and the acting is wonderful – including Ben Affleck doing what I consider his best work.And – if the Oscar had to go to a war movie, why the holy hell wasn’t it Thin Red Line…?
YESSSSSS. I never forgot “Saving Private Ryan” wasn’t that good. I watched in in 1999 convinced that Spielberg had hoodwinked most of the public this admittedly well-directed mediocrity.
Totally disagree about Saving Private Ryan. All of the performances are amazing throughout, I don’t think that anyone isn’t great in it.‘The only bit that holds up is the landing’ is just wrong, wrong, wrong. What about the scene where they are fighting over whether to execute the POW, or the way the sniper scenes were shot, or scene with the knife through the heart, and many more.The plot is also good. You have it backwards mate, yes there are a few bits where Spielberg indulges his love of cheese, but he more than earns it.
TPM, as I said yesterday, had the potential to tell an interesting story. Maybe if they had someone other than Lucas write another couple drafts of the script.
It was interesting to read that Lucas wanted Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Ron Howard to direct the prequels. I wonder how they would have turned out with those three each taking one. Or Kershner saying in hindsight that he would have liked to direct one of them.
zemeckis would have been great for the first two. idk if anyone else should have done revenge of the sith
…sigh…
I don’t think it would have ever worked as he planned. The problem is Lucas seemed to misunderstand(or not care) what the fans wanted to see. And also sorta took a shit on what was already implied in the first films. Like the fact that Anakin was already a great pilot when Obi-Wan met him. While technically true in the prequels, I doubt the original line meant he was good at driving racing cars as a 9 year old
I think it can’t be underestimated just how much, for Lucas, the original trilogy at the time was a project compromised by the fact that it was funding what he saw as his real legacy in Skywalker Ranch. As he saw it, Star Wars became what it was in no small part because he had a collection of brilliant filmmakers in their own right, including such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma, to help him out and bounce ideas off of. And his hope was that Skywalker Ranch would be the place where, generations from now, other filmmakers would be able to meet other filmmakers and get that same collaborative experience. And the compromises that he made on Star Wars were compromises made for the commercial sake of financing Skywalker Ranch.And then his wife Marcia Lucas divorced him. After having an affair with the guy who helped design Skywalker Ranch.You can see why that story might lead the man to be so damn insistent on fixing things that he saw as flawed, and being so unwilling to look at choices that might make the prequels more commercially palatable, and making his story even if others like Timothy Zahn had already made really smart artistic choices themselves that might nevertheless limit him. I’m not defending or justifying Lucas’ actions or his filmmaking choices. But I’m saying that once you know that fact, it becomes a lot easier to explain why he was so darn stubborn about certain things, and why he made some of the choices he did.
Like the fact that Anakin was already a great pilot when Obi-Wan met him. While technically true in the prequels, I doubt the original line meant he was good at driving racing cars as a 9 year old.So what he said was true, from a certain point of view…
Fucking Obi-Wan gas lighting us!
Coulda cut out the whole pod race. That goes on for fucking ever.
I commend the AV Club for endorsing my campaign to ban the number 16 from all lists having more than 15 components, and encourage the rest of the world to follow suit.
* Please note the preceding message was much funnier before someone edited the article and corrected the fact that there were two #15s.
One piece of 1999 pop culture I’d like to mention here is the computer game Homeworld. I’m not a big gamer, but I love sci-fi, and I think Homeworld’s story, visuals, and music make it a brilliant sci-fi experience.
Any RTS that can make me forget about Starcraft even for a few minutes deserves all the praise it can get.
Homeworld was great but let’s not forget that 1999 also brought us MECH WARRIOR 3! Which is arguably one of the worst in the series but mech warrior 4 was only a year away
I vastly prefer MW3 to 4. I only wish I could still play it.
Let’s not forget what I consider to be the GREATEST Final Fantasy game ever made besides FFVII: Final Fantasy VIII.Also, Quistis is literally best girl. My problem with FFVII is that there’s no Quistis, and I think that if Quistis was in FFVII then I’d have liked FFVII more than FFVIII.
Do you have a case to make here beyond your twenty-year-long crush on a video game character? If not, I admire you choosing honesty over dignity.
Yes, i’ll elaborate further:FFVIII has one of the best soundtracks for a PS1 game. No game has a song as beautiful as “Breezy” by Nobuo Uematsu:FFVIII also has some of the best pre-rendered JRPG backgrounds for a PS1 game:It might be my nostalgia clouding my judgement of PS1 JRPGs, but FFVIII really outdid FFVII in terms of style and presentation. The only avenue that FFVII does better than FFVIII is the storyline, and even then FFVIII doesn’t have the baggage of having so many mediocre spin offs like what FFVII had.
I got FFVIII for Christmas that year and played all the way through until the final bit where you lose all of your skills and have to fight bosses to get them back. Foolishly, the first skill I chose to win back was to save my game. After that I couldn’t beat the other bosses because all I could do was attack. Eventually, 11 year old me just gave up. 2 years ago I bought the game on Steam and finally beat the whole thing, 18 years later!
Yes to all. Especially the music! I confess to some bias because FF8 was actually my first Final Fantasy game (I missed 7, but after all the hype, I promised myself I’d be first in line for the next one). The opening cinematic made my jaw drop, and even though the Playstation was cemented as my system of choice years ago, I still didn’t think it was capable of cinematics that amazing.
But not only does the game have brilliant art design, as you mentioned, but I was totally a fan of the story and setting; with Squall and SeeD Academy commissioned to assassinate an Empress. Admitedly it gets pretty crazy and hard to follow in the later discs (including time travel, and even going to space?) But I’m a sucker for the the graduating cadets premise, (a big reason why I like Star Trek 2009) and students who defect to the enemy ( a big reason why I like Attack on Titan.)
Speaking of FFVII, I remember borrowing a copy of that game, which had 3 discs, and never getting past disc 1. I suck and thus hate RPG’s
You didn’t miss anything. It’s a 20 hour game inexplicably stretched out for three discs.
I’d argue Futurama is superior to Family Guy partly because the former knew how to make you cry. I’d show the ending to Jurassic Bark as an example but I’m not a monster.
Is it dusty in here all of a sudden?
Futurama is FAR superior to Family Guy, and I don’t even dislike FG.
I didn’t bother posting about Futurama being superior to Family Guy, because it’s so obviously true that it doesn’t need to be said.
Fry unmasking Leela’s parents is an underrated onions in the room moment, too.
A funny part of The Phantom Menace’s legacy is how it’s come to define the way some people simply cannot accept that a movie (or whatever) they enjoyed as a kid is objectively bad, and instead, just freak out. As though that’s not part of the story of life.
Which movie is bad? The original Star Wars still holds up as a solid movie. Phantom Menace, I think, actually has aged into a mediocre film. Its not the worst thing in human history or anything.
Phantom Menace is my favorite of the prequel trilogy. It’s the only one of the three that relies on practical effects to any extent, and I’ll give it credit for at least trying to depart from the Star Wars formula. I mean, it’s still a bad movie, but it’s still the best of the trilogy.
I want to counter and save Revenge of the Sith is better but it’s not. I think we can all agree Attack of the Clones is the worst.
Plus it has the pod race.
Yes, but… DOUBLE LIGHTSABER
It came out on my birthday and I loved it. When I go back and watch it now, it’s clearly not as good as I remembered it being in 1999 but, it’s still an okay movie.
Half in agreement; what it really defined was the way people can’t accept when something doesn’t meet their expectations – and that they’re in the habit of building up said expectations to be akin to a religious revelation.
At least TPM had some kind of auteur’s vision, although badly written. The sequels are… just awful.
How could you not mention that December of 1999 saw the beginning of the epic X-Men: The Twelve, revealing that the long running tease about the 12 most important mutants in history was revealed to be….a plot between Apocalypse and the Skrulls to build a machine to occupy Cable’s body. People bitch about the 90s X-Men, but for me the comics were mostly readable up until 1998 or so, when promising runs by Joe Kelly and Steven Seagle were cut short by editorial meddling, then everything got really, really incoherent with the weird replacement X-Men/Cerebro goes rogue arc, the Magneto Wars, the whole “Wolverine is Death” non-story and the godawful The Twelve. I finally tapped out after The Twelve until the Morrison years. Which unfortunately ended up running parallel with the Austen years.
Apparently Austen has actually failed upward because nowadays he’s a producer on Steven Universe. And I’ll be fair to Austen on one thing, Marvel should never have put him on the X-Men book in the first place. The only things he was known for at the time was a Marvel MAX War Machine book and some porno comics. They should have given him some smaller titles so he could improve his writing and work his way up to the bigger titles.
I remember Marvel kept putting Austen on stuff to fill-in for other writers. I think Exiles, Captain America, Avengers. They needed fill-in and just accepted Chuck’s terrible scripts he made up on the spot.
I remember how Austen’s run on Captian America ends with it being revealed that Bucky was killed by the US Government and we’re the ones who froze Cap because, IIRC, Cap wouldn’t support the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The funniest part was that once Austen left, Ed Brubaker took over the book and did his Winter Soldier arc, effectively rendering Austen’s last Cap arc as non-canonical.
Here’s a line of dialogue written by Austen from this run of Captain America. The character Inali Redpath says this to Cap;“You exposed yourself like a five dollar stripper without so much as a ‘tickle and tease’ during prime time news hour on every TV in America.”
Crazy to think they wasted John Cassaday’s art on Austen’s scripts. At least Cassaday got to do Astonishing X-Men a few years later.
This is as good a spot as any to remind people that Chuck Austen is immortalized on the X2 DVD smirking his way through the revelation that he believes Nightcrawler has two dicks.
No he said he had three dicks because he had three fingers on each hand. By this logic, I think this implies that Chuck Austen has five dicks.
Ah, yes, so it is. Clearly my Chuck Austen scholarship needs work.
I feel like Austen was mainly hired to implement the X-editorial team’s dumbass ideas, and that’s why he’s really maligned.
His Ultimate X-Men annual with Gambit was excellent.
But then that wouldn’t explain how awful his Superman stuff was.Way I see it Marvel thought he had potential and threw him into the proverbial deep end when all he knew was to tread water.And from what I’ve heard his Exiles run was ok. He probably would be looked on more favorably if Marvel gave him some smaller titles to work on before giving him the bigger ones.
His porn comics aren’t bad as porn comics go…
Admittedly, Ultimate Gambit was pretty good. But I think it’s the other way around. The Ultimate editorial staff were very specific on how they wanted that Gambit issue, while the main X-lines gave Austen free rein.
Oh man now everything about Steven Universe makes sense.
I also think he has a producer credit on the Netflix She-Ra series.
*guiltily raises hand* Despite throwing out years of characterization, I actually enjoyed the concept of taking established characters and making them into the Horsemen. Hulk as War was a bit of a game-changer for me; never forget that the original War (on that goofy flying robot horse) was kind of lame. The Twelve was fucking nonsense though.Also, I can’t believe we’re only seeing an appreciation for Morrison’s iconic X-men run now that Remender’s taken over. Morrison was the first to really establish mutants as being a minority, with their own subculture, and humans infringing on it. He was the first one to really think about mutants in a societal way, and while the Whedon/Cassaday run was enjoyable as superhero action, the fact that it walked back almost everything Morrison did will never stop being annoying to me
?? Marvel/other writers had already done all the walking back of Morrison’s ideas (which I agree was the wrong/stupid thing to do, especially the idiotic Decimation/198 event thing) well before Whedon ever so much as touched the X-Men.
Joe Kelly and Steven Seagle were friggen robbed. Such good runs, especially the “Operation: Zero Tolerance” story line and the fallout from said story line. I don’t remember which characters this actually happened with, but I can’t forget the scene in Austin’s run where Angel (I think) and Paige Guthrie (I think) fuck in the air in front of her parents. And remember that relaunch that Marvel did of the X-Men comics right when the movie came out? Those awful AWFUL costumes… fuck… it was bad….
WWE really hasn’t moved past the McMahons as onscreen characters or the format they’ve used since the 90’s. Now that ratings are slipping they don’t seem to know what to do to fix them outside of cycling through their old tricks.
I have to think if someone really dug through archive.org, it would be possible to come up with more phenomena that were purely (or mostly) online than Napster. It’s definitely true that a lot of major internet things affecting pop culture started earlier than 1999 (Amazon, Ebay) or later (Facebook, Youtube). But there must be online things that took off in 1999 that made a big impact, right?
The biggest Oscar shocker of all time is almost certainly Marisa Tomei winning Best Actress for My Cousin Vinny. She’s great in it, but that’s the only Oscar given out that I can think of that spawned conspiracy theories and jokes on TV shows.
I caught that on TV a couple of months ago for the first time in years. She really is perfection, it’s just that you almost never see that kind of role seriously considered for awards. No hysterics or playing ugly, just nailing the part.
Fun fact, My Cousin Vinny is actually one of the most accurate portrayals of a criminal trial. IIRC, it’s actually shown in Law Schools.
Specifically the ‘positraction’ scene is used as a model for how to question an expert witness.
There is a good YouTube about it here
A friend of mine was amazed that I picked The Matrix to win all the visual SFX awards it did at the Academy Awards over Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and wanted to know how I did it. I just went with which film I thought looked better at the time.
All Star memes seem far more prevalent than Smooth memes. Which is fine by me, as I’d prefer for Santana to be remembered for his good music.
Damn. Burn. Sometimes I forget how much his 70’s stuff jams.
On Futurama/Family Guy, you forgot to mention that Fox being the geniuses they are, cancelled the series early on, only to renew it once Cartoon Network aired the re-runs that had a cult following.I still remember family guy and futurama debuting when I was in (can’t believe I’m that old) middle school. It really was the passing of the torch from the simpsons to the era we have now.
Those were more innocent times. 20 years ago Family guy’s ‘ironic bigotry’ was seen as ‘nostalgia’ for the worst aspects of the American working class culture that we thought was destined to soon fade away.
Whats your take on South Park?
Even better, there’s the whole swapping Futurama for Family Guy in the post-Super Bowl time slot. Yeah, Space Pilot 3000 would have been an interesting jolt for most of America, especially the suicide booths, but man Fox’s resentment of how much it relied on The Simpsons really shines in the ways it screwed over Futurama.
#7. In retrospect ‘Shakespeare in love’ holds up as a better film, overall, than ‘Saving Private Ryan’. Not that SIL’s reputation has grown over the years but SPR’s reputation has diminished. Its now seen as one of a string of cloyingly manipulative Spielberg vehicles that we now cringe to think we likes so much when we were younger.
Two items on this list had major, permanent consequences:John Stewart is basically responsible for the current state of late night outside the major networks (and some within, i.e. Colbert). Former cast members and imitators fill just about every chair.Napster permanently fucked the music industry. Studios already were having a tough time figuring out how to monetize content online, and then Napster (followed by Limewire and Kazaa) came along and effectively just gave that content away for free. I still have old CD cases full of albums I downloaded, burned and slapped a round sticker with the CD art onto. The market never recovered and acts now make most of their money touring, thus the huge increases in ticket prices.
Napster hit the music industry hard, but I’d argue that they screwed up a lot themselves. It was around that time that people were paying a dollar for ringtones and the industry was making billions from them, but the music industry made a concious decision to keep their catalogs locked down in $15+ CDs (which typically only had one or two or three songs people really liked) instead of selling singles.What that meant is that for a few more years they could mostly keep making ridiculous profits, but they lost the opportunity to get people in the mindset of buying music singles in the same way they bought ringtones. Equally important, the lost the chance to make a play for controlling the distribution channels for their own music. And they also spent multimillions on locking up warhorses like U2 and Madonna who could sell CDs instead of trying to be a lot more nimble in signing cheaper promising bands.
Napster didn’t come out of the blue, and the music companies knew that individual music files were the wave of the coming decade. But they made no effort to adjust, and they have suffered as a result.
There’s no question the industry made it harder on itself that it needed to be. Apple should not have been the company to pioneer selling music online. But the labels got crushed by both the lost revenue from songs being legitimately purchased online at lower price points AND lost CD sales from everyone just jumping on Napster.
I’ve always thought the lost CD sales due to Napster was a bit overstated. I realize this is anecdotal, but the music industry lost little to no money from me and my friends using Napster. The stuff we downloaded tended to fall into one of three categories: 1.) Stuff we would still go out and buy anyway, 2.) Stuff we couldn’t buy (out of print or bootlegs), 3.) Stuff we would never spend money on. I’m sure the majority of users downloaded lots of songs that they were never going to buy. So while there was a significant amount of lost sales, I doubt it reached anywhere as much as the number of downloads would suggest.
See I was the exact opposite. I downloaded dozens of full albums from bands whose stuff I would normally buy. Dick move in hindsight, but who’s going to turn down free music?
I guess I’ve just always been (and still am) a sucker for physical media. There’s something about flipping through a CD booklet that can’t be replicated through mp3s. Plus I could play CDs in my car and Discman, so anything I wanted to listen to often, I was going to buy.
I badly miss it now. At the time it was all about $$$.
Also remember, the music industry had promised for years that CD prices would drop below cassette tapes and LPs due to ease of storage and production when adoption picked up. That did not happen. CDs were still selling for 16.99 while tapes were under 10 bucks. I never see this argument get mentioned anymore.Even U2 was on Napster’s (the consumer’s) side, while Metallica was crying because Lars might have to ask Daddy for a loan if he wanted to buy an island. U2 may have done a lot of doofy shit with Apple, but I will never give them shit for standing with the consumers when the RIAA was attacking college kids.
Big labels lied to and took advantage of consumers for decades. I think the reason for the uptick in pirating we are seeing now is that consumers can now be proactive rather than reactive when we see we are about to get screwed on entertainment costs.
While the labels certainly made mistakes, I don’t think anything they could have done would have altered the fact that large numbers of consumers were ready to illegally download rather than pay for product.
Counter point, without the push from Napster the music industry would have never moved to a digital distribution model. I know not everyone likes that idea but its far better environmentally then printing CDs and it has proven to be a viable long term solution for music ownership. I have music I bought on iTunes nearly 20 years ago that I can still pull up and play from any device. A lot of my 20 year old CDs have started to not work though and I have long lost the hardrives full of MP3 backups I did myself.
I agree that Napster pushed the industry into digital distribution and that cd’s are much less environmentally friendly. However, I will say that I still have 17 year old mp3 files that have simply hopped from harddrive to harddrive to more recently, cloud storage. I used to have iTunes for playing those, but since Apple has been slowly screwing up the possibility of playing files bought from another source than Apple, I’ve actually had to abandon that ship.
‘without the push from Napster the music industry would have never moved to a digital distribution model’This isn’t quite true. Record labels were experimenting with digital distribution before Napster took off. The early issue was that most labels imagined selling only their own music from their own sites, which proved to be impractical (who knew that most listeners don’t know what record label their favorite songs are on?). I think it’s fair to say that Napster was the push that got the labels to essentially work together and allow Apple to be their primary digital distributor. But a switch to digital was inevitable. FWIW I’m not sure how to take care of your CDs but I have 1000s dating back to the late 80s and I’ve only had one fail due to anything other than abuse, and that one was manufactured at a plant with known pressing issues.
But musicians primarily making their money through touring is a good thing! I don’t know if you were old enough to go to shows in the 90s, but since you could make so much fucking money from overpriced CDs, so many acts basically never toured, or only hit up like 4-6 major markets. Shows are way more accessible now to those of us who don’t live in NYC or LA.
I turned 18 in 1999, and not coincidentally, it is my favorite year in history, so I came with stones…But this list is legit. Good goin.’
I was a 10-year old boy in 1999, and like most 10-year old boys that year I was obsessed with Pokemon, video games, Star Wars, and of course Dragon Ball Z. After years of Cartoon Network running the same 80+ episodes of DBZ over and over we finally got new content, including the famous episode where Goku goes Super Saiyan for the first time. Even now it gives me some nostalgia shivers:
I get it, Dragon Ball is for kids, the ‘fights’ take forever, there’s a lot of screaming and standing around. But I can’t think of another time watching a TV or movie where I’ve experienced that combination of complete shock that turns into utter amazement that I experienced that day sitting in my parent’s basement (and, judging by the reactions at school the next day, what every other 10-year old boy felt). The only comparable thing I can think of is that scene in Endgame, but even that doesn’t compare to having your childhood mind well and truly blown open.
It’s funny, we’re about the same age but for some reason I never got into DBZ like most kids our age. I occasionally watched it, and can name most of the main characters, but past that, I got nothing. Some of my friends are still obsessed with it to this day.I’ve realized I’m this way with a lot of 90’s cartoons. Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch a lot of TV?
Oh, it was just as effective for us 23 year old watching!
Inventory is definitely how to kick off these Nostalgia Weeks. First one this week that really immersed me in 1999.
‘Today it still looks like the most shocking upset in award-season history, regardless of why voters really chose to forsake the grim frontrunner for a frothier alternative.’A reminder that Forrest Gump won best picture over Pulp Fiction.
I love both films but I have to say Forrest Gump earned it.
The difference is that Gump winning wasn’t a shock.
Well it rarely was shocking that the Boomers won over the youth. That was the other part of SIL winning that stuck in so many craws. It was the start of the young eating the old.
Except Forrest Gump was the front-runner that year. A Pulp Fiction win would have been the upset.
Another key moment in 1999 pop culture: the way the music waves seemed to be dominated by ABBA Gold for months on end, and the only other media that existed was Driver and Dino Crisis on the PS1…. Or this might have just been me. End-of-school exams drove me a little crazy for a while there.
If AVC covers 1994 for a 25-year retrospective, they would be right to cover the 4CD ABBA box set Thank You For the Music as a key pop cultural moment. It came out right at the moment when Generation X was really into 70s kitsch and I think it’s responsible for a critical reappraisal of the band (at least in the US).
I had somehow missed the memification of Smooth, but now I’ve spent several minutes looking at them and my day is made. Thank you.
Wow 1999 is so burned into who and what I am. It is really the last year of my life where I considered myself a child. I turned 21 in 1999. I went away to college and lived outside my parents influence for the first time(I did two years of community college before and took a year off to work full time to pay for college).I was blown away by the Matrix. I don’t think people understand what the Matrix did to action cinema in 1999. It was an unknown film, coming out during the time of the year where they use to drop shitty movies(Back in the old days, January through April was usually a no mans land for decent films….The Matrix was actually one of those movies that changed that). I remember seeing Phantom Menace and being so confused by it in my mind. It was FUCKING STAR WARS…but it was also bad….or was it….Was Star Wars always bad(the answer is no but I wrestled with it). The Dreamcast is still my favorite game console. It had a great library and since college was the first time in my life I had broadband internet and was also really broke. The fact that it was a system that was easily hacked to play bootlegs meant I got years of enjoyment out of it(even if it died quickly in the states)The whole idea that it was all 20 years ago make me feel way to old
Wow 1999 is so burned into who and what I am. It is really the last year of my life where I considered myself a child.I still was a child at the time and it had a huge effect on me too.
This article missed the constant media drumbeat of Internet 1.0 entrepreneurs making millions off of dubious websites like Pets.com.
The Phantoms Menace is arguably a good movie if you remove the pandering to younger audiences with comic relief characters and add in another hour of trade negotiations that don’t really make economic sense on a galactic level.
Wow, what a year!I’m surprised that for the Dreamcast entry there’s no mention of the right-on-the-nose marketing of the release date: 9/9/99.
The same release day for Final Fantasy 8 as well.
I never really liked WWTBAM? too much, even in its heyday–I just end up yelling at the stupid contestant endless deliberating–but the real damage it did to game-shows was in set-design and lighting. Nearly all new prime-time game-shows now have the same damn look: minimalist stage furnishing and a dimly-lit studio.
Not to mention incessant, droning music.
The dramatic lighting, music, and pausing definitely had an impact on TV production. You can see it on shows like Shark Tank.
My best friend and I are re-watching every Star Wars film before Rise of the Skywalker comes out, and we finally hit The Phantom Menace recently.Yeah, yeah, Jar Jar, midichlorians, Mr. Plinkett, blah blah blah, we all know that. I hadn’t seen it in years and speaking just from my viewing experience? I just felt nothing. I didn’t care about anyone or what was going on. I almost had to keep reminding myself I was watching a Star Wars movie. “Oh right, that’s supposed to be Obi-Wan Kenobi and that little blonde kid eventually becomes Darth Vader.”
Say what you will about the sequels or even the other prequels, at least I felt something watching that. Phantom Menace is just a big ole ball of nothing, sound and fury signifying nothing.
I’m leaving TPM out of my rewatch. Fuck that goddamn thing. Machete Order FTW.
The Phantom Menace and the prequel trilogy revealed Lucas’ weaknesses to the whole world. Weirdly enough, it’s the new sequel trilogy, done without him, that revealed what made him so unique.
I really wish he had found somebody to write the scripts for him, but I do genuinely miss the ambition he brought. For him, it never was about what Star Wars was, it was about what it could be.
Despite the shameless campaigning by human shitstain Harvey Weinstein, “Shakespeare in Love” is the better film. “Saving Private Ryan” is overrated. It absolutely deserved the Best Director Oscar, but that’s it. A mediocre script even with crackerjack directing will never make a great movie.
This game show offered a $1,000,000 prize 13 years before “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, and it was also on ABC. I believe at least 1 person won the grand prize. I loved this show, as I was a word nerd and it featured what looked like a giant 1980s PC:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_$1,000,000_Chance_of_a_Lifetime
God, so much in one year.My friend and I waited in line in not-ideal weather to get our TPM tickets for a good half a day. You can make all the comments you like about how dumb that seems now, but we also didn’t really have comic-cons to the same extent as these days, so it was a nice time to just socialize with other fans. We were comfortable with chairs and ponchos, had plenty to eat, no complaints. We even liked the movie enough to justify it. It’s the worst entry in the franchise, yes, but Liam Neeson is great, and yeah double-bladed lightsaber.Futurama is leaps and bounds ahead of Family Guy, and I used to really like both until I realized I didn’t care for FG nearly as much after its revival as before. Futurama kept its quality, but if I’m honest I prefer the pre-cancellation episodes. I still can’t believe I didn’t tell Matt Groening how much I loved that show when I met him. I so rarely get star struck, but in that moment I was a little off my game.I hate that I didn’t see Dogma in theaters. I hated Alanis Morrisette, so at the time that was enough to keep me away. When I finally saw it, I loved it. It’s still my fave Smith film. And the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, etc.? Dafuq? What a sack of assholes.I was a big fan of the Kilborn Daily Show, but when Stewart took over, I instantly saw the uptick in quality. I got away from watching it a few years later, but as unfortunate and foolish as Kilborn’s departure was, it was truly a blessing in disguise. Stewart begetting Colbert was the best thing that could have happened.Part of me still, to an extent, prefers Matrix Reloaded to the original, as the original does have a few reused old tropes throughout. But there’s no denying those bullet time moments and that first moment when Morpheus reveals all to the bewildered Neo. “Whoa” is the right word.
Sopranos still awesome. John Stewart was a breath of Fresh Air, and deserves The Medal of Freedom for his work on behalf of First Responders. Shakespeare is still the greatest upset in the history of Anything. Matrix still a great movie.The Phantom Menace-Around the release of Jedi the comic strip “Bloom County” did a series to celebrate the release. In one strip they had Lucas show up saying there would be no more Star Wars until 1999, and he is killed with a Light Saber. They then make a joke about how Jedis don’t wait 16 years for sequels. It was never going to win or live up to the hype.
I skated for a solid decade before blowing out my knee and making it impossible to continue, but I really dislike the Tony Hawk games. I don’t think I’ve ever played any of them for more than ten minutes. The Skate games from EA/Black Box that were released near the end of the decade were light years better in every way, and I’d really appreciate it if the world could stop sucking for five minutes so a fourth one can be released. Pick it up, EA.
The West Wing debuted, too.
If The Sopranos was the harbinger of the premium cable revolution in dramatic storytelling, The West Wing is the counterpoint from the traditional TV primetime drama establishment. I think it may be the last such network drama to really hold sway over what was seen as quality TV, even as it co-existed with The Sopranos.
It really is impossible to imagine what The West Wing would look like today. 23 episode seasons of that quality just don’t exist anymore. By today’s standards, it ran for 7ish tremendous seasons, and 5ish mediocre seasons after Sorkin left.
.tWhat did NOT happen…But on the indicated date, I turned 40. Sometimes it felt like a spinning spacecraft ‘sloded and caused everything to fly off into the night. But it didn’
“You’re welcome, Televison.” -The Sopranos
Say what you will about the McMahons, but it’s kind of a minor miracle that the owners of the company turned out to be pretty entertaining actors on camera.The best thing about the boom of teen comedies is it begat Not Another Teen Movie, a few years later; One of the genuinely funnier spoofs in a subgenre that is super hit-or-miss.
“…countless vocal
groups popped up to make a bid for [TLC]’s title. In ’98, it
looked like Destiny’s Child might have already succeeded” – They did. 1999’s The Writings on the Wall is better than FanMail.
Ah, Shakespeare in Love. A voting constituency made up mostly of actors picked the actors’ movie. Surprise surprise. Time period be damned, Shakespeare’s win was more of the Academy being in love with itself and what they do, but its still nothing more than another ‘mistaken identity’ romcom. “Earn this.”“Smooth” is a great song. Nowhere near as corny as “All Star”. Livin La Vida Loca, if listened in a vacuum, is…somewhere in between?
Woodstock 99 has a lot we can complain about. But the heat and overpriced water? That could be your typical Summer at Six Flags.
In Tony Hawk and Steven Spielberg, it was great to see big media names lending their talents to creating new videogames. (Does Shakespeare in Love have a videogame? I thinketh not! Sorry. Focus, Rob.) Anyway, it was a good year for gaming (Syphon Filter!) and I wish the Dreamcast could have stayed competitive.
I remember the Y2K scare vividly, but I’ve never seen that commercial before. Lol WOW