What pop culture do you wish you had when you were a kid?
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This week’s question comes from a conversation our staff had in the office:
What pop culture do you wish you had when you were a kid?
Shannon Miller
Gravity Falls was the first animated series that made me seriously question whether or not I even grew up with good cartoons. (I did, ultimately. I can’t blatantly disrespect Recess, Pepper Ann, and The Weekenders like that.) It was so strange and devastatingly witty, and featured a loving sibling duo where the sister wasn’t a wet blanket, but a worthy accomplice (with a refined taste for fashionable sweaters). The episode that still makes me guffaw is “Sock Opera,” where Mabel Pines (Kristen Schaal) decides to impress a total snot of a puppet-loving hipster named Gabe with a sock-puppet opera. Mabel went after everything with such a go-getter attitude, and that included friendships (whether they were deserving of such kindness or not). I appreciate that she was never shamed for having crushes (even if some of them were dubious). Plus, it was a show that contained actual mysteries, right down to the coded closing credits. If Gravity Falls had been around when I was younger, maybe I’d be way better at developing fan theories than I am now. (Seriously, I’m so bad.)
Katie Rife
If I could go back in time, the biggest change I would make wouldn’t be adding something to my formative pop-cultural years, but taking something away. The slow decline in popularity of the terms “girl band,” “women in rock,” and all variations thereof has been one of the most welcome developments I’ve seen over my lifetime as a music fan, normalizing the sight of a non-cis-male person holding a guitar and de-segregating the music that they make with it. I understand that the term was useful for a while, when rock ’n’ roll was so male-dominated that everyone who wasn’t a man needed to stick together and lift each other up, much like what’s happening in the film industry today. But musicians, then and now, tended to hate being lumped in with other groups who might sound completely different from them simply based on their gender, and so while I appreciated the likes of Chicago’s now-defunct Venus Zine while they lasted, I wish I could go back in time, peer over the magazine at my teenage self, and tell her, “One day, we won’t need these labels anymore. Also, no one will read magazines.”
Nick Wanserski
When the She-Ra reboot first aired on Netflix, I was, despite all previous exposure to nerd culture, surprised by some of the negative reaction. People were waxing nostalgic about the original and how the new show could never come close to it. This astonished me because the original She-Ra, along with He-Man, Transformers, and all the animated staples of my youth were pretty much garbage: cynical and lazily-produced toy commercials presented under the thinnest veneer of entertainment. Even worse, for all of the wacky concepts and gonzo characters, they were repetitive and bland. Adventure Time took the unfulfilled promise and potential of those shows and finally delivered on them. Jake The Dog and Finn The human are always down for, well, adventure! They explore dungeons full of esoteric traps and strange treasures, confront all manner of inter-dimensional wizards, and travel to a seemingly endless series of inventive cities and locations. Adventure Time also builds up on the emotional intelligence of those ’80s cartoons with a cast of rich and multifaceted characters. The only thing better than extracting an enchanted blade from the body of an undead wizard is doing it with someone you care about.
Sam Barsanti
This wouldn’t have changed my life, but there’s something I wish I could’ve had that just wasn’t technologically possible when I was a kid: Lego Dimensions. Hitting pretty late in the “toys to life” trend, in which things could be unlocked in a video game by scanning in physical toys, Dimensions was a game where you built a Lego thing in real life, put it on a special pedestal, and then used that Lego thing in the game. You had to follow instructions to build specific objects (it wasn’t really magic), but it was still amazing to build a little Batmobile and then transport it into the game so a Lego figure of Homer Simpson could drive it around. Unfortunately, the actual game of Lego Dimensions was pretty boring, so the thrill of building an item out of Lego bricks before I could use it in the game was lost on grown-up me. If I were a less discriminating kid without better games to play, though, it would’ve absolutely blown my mind.
Gwen Ihnat
As a kid, I read A Wrinkle In Time until I knew it by heart, and tried to dive into the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis, but my middle-grade reading was primarily grounded in reality by way of Harriet The Spy and Judy Blume. I was an adult by the time Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone came out, and as I tore into the Harry Potter series I loved it immediately. I also could not help feeling pangs of envy toward the kids who got to grow up in a world where Hogwarts existed. The series combined so many of my favorite things—the U.K., fantasy, trains, and a boarding-school setting, which always fascinated me—that I immediately became immersed. I used to take a day off work when a new HP volume came out just to try to read as much of it as I could at once, as a grown-ass adult. My first date with my husband was to see the movie of that first Harry Potter book in 2001, and just the fact that he was also a big HP fan convinced me he was a keeper. When our kids were just about old enough, I started reading Harry Potter to them at bedtime, and I was soon informed that my English accent was, in a word, “awful.” Fortunately, by then they could read the volumes all on their own, as I still have them all in hardcover. Lucky kids.
Danette Chavez
There’s been a bit of a role reversal in my relationship with my dad: I’m now the one who introduces him to pop culture, whether it’s One Day At A Time or new music from Rosalía. He continues to delight and surprise me with his insights; his big takeaway from The Witch was that life can be hard for teenage girls, especially ones with limited resources. We don’t see eye to eye on everything—he hasn’t been able to get into BoJack Horseman or Barry (although he still digs The Fonz). This isn’t to say that he hasn’t shaped my interests, because I still love boleros and films from Mexico’s Golden Age like nothing else, which is why I would have loved to have seen Coco with him when we were both younger. I can just imagine the conversation that would have been prompted by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich’s gorgeously rendered story about legacies, liminal states, and Mexican culture. It was no secret that my dad idolized Pedro Infante, the Mexican movie star who partially inspired the character of Ernesto de la Cruz, when he was a child. He even tried to make a guitar so he could learn to play like Infante, who was classically trained in multiple instruments. We had a wonderful time when we did see Coco in 2017, but I can’t help but think that such a movie would have opened up the kind of talks we have now about the role of pop culture in shaping our identities much sooner.
William Hughes
It’s actually probably for the best that escape rooms weren’t around when I was a kid, because I can only imagine how badly I would have annoyed the shit out of my mom by asking to be driven out to Indianapolis every weekend to do one. As a kid with a healthy (?) tendency toward magical thinking, I was always drawn to spaces where the normal rules of reality were suspended—laser-tag arenas, theme parks, and, of course, the vast and diverse world of video games. Escape rooms combine the allure of that kind of semi-magical space with the sorts of abstract logic puzzles my brain has always thrived on—to say nothing of my only-slightly-tamped-down-by-adulthood need to show off how “intelligent” I am, for a value of intelligence that’s more fixated on decoding obscure information in a disused strip-mall office space rather than, say, paying my taxes. In other words, I would have been completely insufferable with regular access to them as a kid. But since I was already pretty insufferable anyway, I’m going to say the joys of getting to play in them once a year on my birthday or whatever would have been well worth the risks. (My mom might disagree.)
232 Comments
Michael Bay’s Transformers, which would have blown my young, dumb mind. Plus, imagine it with Orson Welles!
More specifically, the recent Bumblebee film is my type of shit that I wanted as a teenager instead of the Bayformers films that gave me headaches for days.
I don’t mind the first Transformers movie, but I wish it had just been followed up by Bumblebee. The sequels we got are completely useless.
I can’t think of anything, I’m glad I had the shows I did as a kid, and glad I can appreciate what we have now as an adult. Which is a very boring response, but this is the first time I’ve seen a Q&A and didn’t have an answer.
I had this thought. Hell, most of the things I like now I appreciate for different reasons than I would have had as a kid. I can’t even say if a younger me would have even cared about them. But then someone else said “the internet” and I’m perfectly comfortable including the internet in the pop culture label. So that’s my answer.
I’m really glad I didn’t have the internet when younger, if I had I doubt I’d ever have left the house, plus I imagine I’d have posted things I’d deeply regret now.
Does the Internet count?We actually had to leave the house to talk to our friends about stuff.
We actually had to leave the house to talk to our friends about stuff.The horror, the horror!
Can we skip the days of dial-up?
I considered that making my choice, but with how poisonous the culture surrounding the internet has become, I kinda long for the days when we had to go to someone’s house across town first before calling them a dickhead.
The internet’s idea of enticing readership with clickbaity hyperbolic headlines is a bit much. It’s understandable, but annoying since it seems to bleed out into the real world. Everything being THE MOST EVER CAN’T EVEN BELIEVE SAVAGE annoys me. Growing up in the apathetic 90’s probably doesn’t help.
I kind of wish there was absolutely no way to make money with the internet. Because that’s really what’s ruined it. That’s what’s stripped any kind of journalistic integrity it might’ve had as a communicative tool – the ability to suck every last dollar out of whatever bullshit you throw online and call content.
What ruined it was its creation as a tool of the United States security state. Ruined from day one.
Oh, they did clickbait back then, even if they didn’t call it that.
Yeah, I mean, stuff was okay back then. Pretty much. Sorta.
It’s sure given you an opportunity to whine.
Honey, all you DO is whine. You offer nothing but whine. You should carry around a tray of cheese and fruit with you at all times. If I cracked your head open with a bottle opener (fingers crossed!), I’d be able to tell what year you were born just by sniffing your brain.
Probably smells vinegary.
But you also used to have to go to a library to learn about anything and your options were often severely limited. I can quickly reach out to people who’ve had first hand experience with whatever problem I’m working on.What you’re pointing out in your other comment is true beyond online spaces. This is post neo-conservative liberalism. It’s very hard to avoid anything which isn’t commodified and/or valued more highly than people and community. You could apply this argument to anything if you dig into how it was produced. So I’m willing to ignore it for the sake of a frivolous question asked by an impersonal website trying to make a buck off of ad revenue by tapping into the positive feelings of nostalgia.
No shade, but I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.
I remember when I had to eavesdrop on my parents’ friends’ hushed cocktail party conversations before you I heard people being openly racist!
No, you didn’t, LOL.
YOU DIDN’T HAVE A PHONE?
Steven Universe is the kind of show I needed as a kid—bright, poppy, queer as hell, with tons of little details to keep obsessive track of and insights into my own development I wish I’d been capable of.Plus, the lead character is a guy, so little me would have desperately needed plausible deniability for watching a “girl’s show.”
As a Transformers fan, I wish that Bumblebee was released when I was a teenager. I was not really impressed with Bay’s first Transformers film when it came out when I was 16 so yeah, it took a decade until I start working for me to finally get a decent Transformers film. Plus, Hailee Steinfeld would’ve been the type of girl I’ve crushed on during my teenage years.Also, a lot of anime I enjoyed right now felt like stuff I’d have enjoyed as teenagers. I’d have loved My Hero Academia, Food Wars and One Punch Man back when I was 13 because it certainly ticked the things I like about shounen anime that Naruto didn’t provide for me. My teenage self would’ve also liked Isekai anime like Sword Art Online, Overlord and Re:Zero, whereas I FUCKING HATE Isekai anime right now and I want the genre to die a painful death. Also, The Persona Games would be a blast in my teenagers years. We were more into Final Fantasy rather than Persona back then, and I didn’t have a PS2 when Personas 3 and 4 came out, but something like Persona 5 fits in very well with my teenage years. I can relate to Joker and The Gang a lot and I felt like it was speaking to my 17 year old self which was my lowest point in life.
The term “women in rock” no longer applies because rock is dead.
Graduating high school in 1987. I wish we had more nerd culture. It was hard being a computer, LOTR, gamer, bookish science nerd. There was a time there was only 3 kids/school that had home computers. It was not easy.
I was thinking of pretty much anything with modern portrayals of queer characters, so yeah, DCTVU is a great pick.
Yeah. Definitely compared to the MCU… Who would have thought TV would be so ahead of cinema in that respect.
Eh, the DCTVU is miles ahead of Marvel’s tv shows too.
Adult me finds these shows tedious.Kid me would have swallowed them up even if I was more of a Marvel kid. It would be cool to send these back in time.
I do like some of them a lot, and other’s are still OK but as a kid I could have not seen some of the flaws and liked them even more.
Avatar: The Last Airbender aired when I was in high school/college and I didn’t watch it until well into adulthood, but man I wish I had grown up with it. It takes the stuff I would have found cool as a kid, like special powers and cool martial arts moves and a grand quest to save the world, and sneaks in stuff my Saturday morning cartoons never had, like nuance and humor and moral complexity and an overarching message of tolerance and pacifism. I also respect how committed they were to their world building, and how they refused to base a fantasy series off of tired medieval “castles+wizards” tropes, or felt the need to provide some sort of western European analogue character or setting. I’m looking forward to when my nephews and niece are old enough to introduce it to them.
I was lucky to have watched AtLA after having been invited to watch the godawful Shyamalan film.If anything, I really hate how Nickelodeon operates as a channel, a marketing entity and a place for animators. There are people out there who have yet to have watched AtLA while those same people have seen and rewatched Adventure Time and Gravity Falls countless times. People still associate AtLA with the Shyamalan film instead of the cartoons.In fact, when you look at how well-advertised Steven Universe and Adventure Time can get, I wished that The Legend of Korra had the same level of advertising that the two shows get. I mean, the popularity of My Hero Academia even amongst casual cartoon viewers shows that there is a market for TLK to be Nick’s own Adventure Time. What a shame.Also, fuck Nickelodeon for continuous hires of Dan Schneider and Chris Savino despite knowing their crimes.
Hard agree on marketing. I loved TLK when I finally watched it, but I didn’t know it existed until a few years after it wrapped up.
I’m the eldest of 5 kids and between me and the youngest there is a 16 year age difference. When I got back from my senior year college internship we would all wait each week and watch this together. It was great sitting around and talking about it from the different perspectives from 23 to 7 years old.
As far as I’m aware, AtLA isn’t available on any streaming service, which is ridiculous. Maybe now that Netflix is bankrolling the (sigh) live-action remake, the animated series will return there as well.
The series on Dvd shows up on sale a lot I think I grabbed it for like $5 a season during Christmas a few years back. I then proceeded to rip it all and put it on my Plex server for easy watching and the dvds stay in the car for the kids
I can’t wait to have grandkids so I can go through every episode all over again.
I was just a couple of years too old for AtLA when it first started airing (ie. I was desperately trying to shed my childish/nerd interests halfway through middle school) and I regret not watching it back then.
I like how consistent the rules of bending are. All Bending is an extension of manipulating one of the four elements. Swamp Bending is just the manipulation of water within plants and Metal Bending is just manipulating the impurities within metal.
I also like how the bending is reflective of real life martial arts and how they can be used for offense and defense and empowerment and increasing your health etc. As a kid I probably would have loved the martial arts cause I did Taekwondo but as an adult I can appreciate the distinctions between the forms and elements.
and how they refused to base a fantasy series off of tired medieval “castles+wizards” tropes
*The Dragon Prince turns away, disappointed.
Dragon Prince is good!…Just not as good as AtLA, mostly for that reason. Well, that and the animation. Okay, mostly the animation.
The Last Airbender came out on the tail-end of my young childhood (I think I was 11 when I first started watching it), but I am so grateful that it did. A genuinely perfect show, and definitely the only kids show I watched as a child that I can still go back to.
Came here to say this. You said it.
ATLA is the BEST television show of all time animated or not. FIGHT me! anything better with a complete satisfactory ending? nope. nothing.
I didn’t see it till I was almost 30 but it still one of best TV series I ever have watched(animated or otherwise). Every time a show ends badly I tell myself “At least Avatar was perfect” and it was. Ang sticking to his ethics and code and finding another way to win that not only fits the story but so encapsulates who he is, is just amazing. My 4 year old is still a bit young for the show but I can wait till he’s just a bit older and we can watch it again as a family(his older brother has already scene it)
and how they refused to base a fantasy series off of tired medieval “castles+wizards” tropes
It was, it was just Asian castles+wizards.
Same! I posted almost the exact same thing. I was introduced to it as an adult and would have loved it as a kid. Some of the stuff like how each nation has a distinct real life counterpart and martial art would have likely gone over my head, but the humor might have landed better. I mean, some of the stuff will always be funny (Toph) but I know young me would have appreciated it more. I really enjoy ALA as an adult though. Damn, now I’m going to have to rewatch it, and play pokemon at the same time, just for the double nostalgia.
Are you kidding? ALL of the streaming TV. When I was born my parents still had a black and white fat TV. The programming and commercials were just YIKES!
My grandparents’ TV was huge and had 13 channels, PBS being the only worthwhile one.
I can still remember commercials from 40 years ago , so annoying and pervasive were they. Can’t remember the last time I sat through one. Some things get better I guess.
Lol. That, at least, has gotten better. Streaming with no commercials.
Doctor Who. Kind of.See, I was too young for the show when it was still on in the 1980s, and by the time I came of age and discovered it, it had been off the air for years. So we still technically had it, but I had to console myself with out-of-order VHS tapes, spin-off novels that often weren’t quite as good as everyone claimed they were because they didn’t want to admit they were just settling (though, admittedly, there were some gems in there) and interminably complex fan theories about arcane points of continuity and lore, usually having something to with the Valeyard or something.I’d also probably love the modern series a lot more than I do if I came to it as a starry eyed young nerdy kid rather than a jaded and defensive nerdy adult.
Pornhub.com
This is really the only answer
Still. at least now you can have the joy of introducing your kids to PornHub.
Like a good parent should. In fact if you don’t introduce your kid to pornhub at an early age I question your parenting skills
Ugh yuck. I mean I know my sons will get their and I’ve given them the tools and skills they need to get around any parental blocks I put in place but I don’t want to know when they discover internet porn. I just hope they realize that’s why dad always makes sure they have tissue paper in their rooms because I don’t want to deal with crusty socks
You’re a good person lol
And if you want to go a nostalgic mile, hide some pornhub in the woods for kids to find.
Poor kids today will never know the thrill of finding a stash of woods porn. Actually living on a military base hundreds of miles away from any woods, the only stashes of porn my friends and I ever found was gay porn mags in the barracks bathroom.
When my older brother was off at college and I was a teenage boy, one day I figured, “Gee, there’s no WAY my brother doesn’t have a stash of porn up in his room somewhere…”And it took me about 45 seconds to find it. Thanks, bro!
double post
jerking off to static images has to be the weirdest thing now. generations before us did it and the kids today will never know that feeling.
I still believe that a magic perverted hobo visits all the forest preserves, Boy Scout camps and rail road tracks of the world leaving water damaged porno mags for all the horny teens of the world to find
Johnny Applecock, American folk hero.
Not just American, The hobo travels to any place where young people need porn. He has many names, like Santa Claus!
I dunno, I lived on a military base in the middle of Saskatchewan as a kid, there were no woods anywhere nearby, but there WAS a ring of trees planted around the field behind my school, and there were occasional hunts for woods porn. They were rarely successful, but rarely is not never.
False. Few things have taught me so much patience and attention to detail as late nights spent trying to make out scrambled Spice Channel at low volumes.
True.But there is the unfortunate side effect that anytime I see a random noise distribution I get extremely turned on.
Hey, growing up without internet porn made me super into foreign films.
“That’s an elbow, son!”
In my case we’re talking the Brazilian satellite channel or the Argentine art movie channel that occasionally showed some fun, if artsy, stuff after midnight.
Considering how much time I spent jackin’ it to non-porn magazines and catalogues, tv shows with T & A, and softcore porn I taped off of Cinemax, I can’t even imagine the effect modern internet porn access would have had on me as a youth. I was already socially awkward and often isolated myself, infinite free porn would have probably made me a shut-in.
It’s made me a shut-in now, so I’m making up for lost time.
I had that when I was 13 fool lol
Some will never know the pain of downloading an image file from a bbs for hours with a vague name on a 2800 baud modem hoping it wasn’t surprise beastality porn
Rright? That: “oh shit. I’m a felon” thing.
Haha take that people born at a different period of time than you!
Yeah take that!
I come from that generation that was lucky enough to go through puberty when Internet porn was starting to become freer and more widely available to the masses.
Looking back, I often wonder how things might have been different growing up if I’d had Glee to help me define my sexuality – instead of my parents’ copy of Fellini Satyricon.
For me it’s Splatoon. Those games are just so delightful and cool. I would love them even more as a kid
Studio Ghibli, without a doubt. Sure I had Kimba reruns on TV, which shaped me more than I knew at the time, but what delight it would have been to be able to graduate straight from Tezuka to Miyazaki. I would have been a very happy child, at least while I was watching them.
I would have had all the best nightmares from Ghibli. Their stuff isn’t really scary as an adult, but it can challenge your imagination and as a kid I probably would have been fantastically freaked out.
As a kid in the 70’s and 80’s, I would have loved for my Batman to have been on the big screen. As it was, my childhood Batman was Adam West. And while I loved the TV Batman, I was always disappointed that there was no bigscreen Batman to go along with Christopher Reeve’s Superman. By the time the Dark Knight showed up at the multi-plex, I was 19. And while that is a good age to enjoy it, it simply is not the same as if he came around when I was 9.
The Dark Knight came out in 2008. Do you have either the movie or your age wrong?
he potentially just means the first batman movie, not the movie the dark knight, but either way i laughed at this comment
Yeah, I assume he means Batman (1989) but the capitalization of the “Dark Knight” as something that played at a theater threw me.
My use of the Dark Knight was not in reference to the 2008 film, but as one of Batman’s various nicknames. I guess I should have said the Caped Crusader to avoid the confusion.
Batman 89 turned me into a comic book collector. 11 year old me was so hyped for the movie that I wanted to know anything and everything about the Caped Crusader and that led me to blowing my allowance on comics week after week for years and years after
I wish The Force Awakens had come out when I was a kid. My sibling and I played Star Wars and Lord of the Rings constantly, and there’s a grand total of one good sword/lightsaber fight scene featuring a girl between both franchises (Eowyn vs the Witch King of Agmar). Seeing Rey as an adult was such a beautiful thing and I wish we’d had her back then.Steven Universe would have also been a great thing to have when we were kids. It probably would’ve been huge for my queer NB sibling – you don’t get a lot of LGBTQ role models in Texas, even in liberal places like Austin.
I think my answer is just More Girls. I distinctly remember “playing” Thundercats and being stuck with Wiley Kit because Cheetara was already taken. And even as a kid, I knew Wiley Kit was lame. We had She-Ra and Jem and stuff and I liked them, but just having more women characters that were not in strictly “girl” cartoons would have made an impact I think. I also remember gravitating towards the villains, like Evil-lyn and The Baroness, because they were more a part of the action then the designated Female Heroes. That shit has to mess us up a little, right? Characters like Rey, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline, Katara, the Crystal Gems…they are cool enough where no one would feel “stuck” with them.
There’s an entire book to be written about how having to role-play the Baroness and Evil-Lyn affected the girls of the eighties. That and seeing David Bowie’s pants in “Labyrinth”
Huh. Off to therapy I go.
I know this isn’t a sword fight, but one of my favorite movie segments was when Arwen saves Frodo and floods the Nazgul. Liv Tyler was super confident in that moment and I was really into it. I’m glad they changed that from the books, I think it was Elrond or Strider who did it, but it was a good call shifting that to Arwen.
Mario Maker! When I was a kid, the original Super Mario Bros. was my first introduction to video games. My dad worked in tech, so we had all sorts of computers and old machines laying around the house, and I went from spending all of my time messing around with a primitive drawing app on the family computer to playing Mario incessantly. It took my little kid hands forever to even get past the first gap, but I remember dashing upstairs and waking my parents up in the dead of morning to tell them I’d beaten the first level.
From there, it was a love affair, but my overeager little kid’s mind was as interested in the fundamentals as in playing the games. Somewhere in my parents’ house there’s still piles and piles of graph paper meticulously sketched with level designs for imaginary games. I tried to learn BASIC and Visual BASIC at the suggestion of my dad (who I would later learn had designed a couple of primitive shareware games of his own. He’d apparently receive residuals of a few cents or a few bucks randomly for years later). But my ADHD-addled little kid brain couldn’t really grasp it. Later on, I’d come to mess around with easy development kits like RPG Maker, but by then I was older and distracted by teenage/preteen things and the fact that my interests had moved more towards writing and acting.
But holy smokes, if I’d had Mario Maker when I was a kid, I would have been obsessed.
Harry Potter books. Hardy Boys and The Secret of Wildcat Swamp, The Secret of the Old Mill, The Clue of the Screeching Owl, and The House on the Cliff just didn’t cut it.But I am glad I had 1960s MAD MAGAZINE
But I am glad I had 1960s MAD MAGAZINE
RIP, Alfred E.
I had 90’s Mad Magazine and it was great. Such a damn shame for kids today and in the future. Something will have to replace it.
Cracked?
Or just regular crack. We had that, but not in my neighborhood.
I’m probably going to go with the Harry Potter books as well, along with the explosion in fantasy and general YA fiction they spawned. I wasn’t a leisure reader as a child, something which carried through into adulthood. I was much more into TV and other activities. I remember Narnia but didn’t do Tolkien. I think if I had this series at the right time, it might have triggered additional exploration and the discovery of genres that I genuinely enjoyed.
Being the weird kid who read fantasy novels while most of my peers barely read anything if they didn’t have to, I never could have predicted that there would be something like Harry Potter, or that you could ask someone a question like “What’s your Hogwarts house?” and have them know what you mean and answer you.
Its funny, I actually resented the mainstream popularity of Harry Potter when it first blew up. I was a nerdy fantasy/sci-fi/comic reader who was occasionally mocked or ostracized for those interests, then while I was in high school the Potter books blew up and the movies started coming out. I just didn’t know why THIS thing was socially acceptable to be super into, but my Star Wars Extended Universe Encyclopedia made me lame. Had to get over it eventually, though, because nerd culture in general became mainstream over the following decades. Although it still pisses me off the superhero movies are the most popular movies in the world but 99.9999(recurring) percent of those viewers will never read a comic book.
When I was a kid, I loved superheroes as a concept. Loved the Christopher Reeve films, the Superfriends, the Hulk TV show and Adam West Batman re-runs, but I never picked up a single comic book during my entire childhood.
The Roaring Twenties.(I may be older than the average AVC readership.)
Well, I’m personally pretty satisfied by the books, video games, TV shows and movies I had growing up as a kid. I had MST3K, Calvin & Hobbes, Redwall, Goosebumps, Simpsons, Jackie Chan flicks and more.The music, though. Especially as I entered teenagerhood. What a fucking shitshow. I would definitely consider today’s pop and indie scene a major upgrade.
I still have MST3K 🙂 My first episode was Eegah. My sister and I read the Redwall series, I still would like to read the last one that came out before Brian Jacques passed away. My brother and I used to try to come up with our own comics thanks to Calvin and Hobbes. I remember reading the Fear Street Saga books and liking/getting creeped out by them, though there are aspects of it that I think if I re-read them I’d be riffing it MST3K-style.
MST3k is like the opposite of this question for me, in that I wish I had been OLDER when it started. The first time I saw it was at age 10 or 11 in a hotel room (Laser Blast!). I fell in love immediately, and when we went to the book store that day I found the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide and bought it. We didn’t have Comedy Central at home, so for a year or two I just read the book over and over, seeing a handful of episodes on family trips. Then we finally got Comedy Central, right after they cancelled the show. Thankfully we got Sci-Fi also, and soon it started airing there.Sure, today I can stream basically any episode I want, but hearing about the days when Comedy Central had nothing better to do than air multiple episodes a night, the original Turkey Day marathons, the conventions, I would have loved to have been in my teens/twenties to share in that experience.
I definitely understand that. I also discovered MST3K when I was 11, in 1996. So that was well into their run, and I all I had to rely on were Comedy Central repeats and (eventually) Rhino VHS tapes. The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide definitely helped clarify some jokes I wasn’t getting, but a full 70% of their reference-based riffs continued to elude me. So if I was older and more pop-culture savvy, it would have helped. However:One of my favorite father-son bonding moments ever was when I begged my dad to take me to the one theater in San Jose playing The Movie. Once he realized they were going to make fun of This Island Earth the whole time – a movie he remembered making fun of with his friends when it came out – he lit up and we both screamed with laughter throughout. So if I was a moody older teen or something, I would have just driven myself there and missed out on that.
Aww, that story with your dad is super sweet! And you were one of the five people that actually got to see The Movie in theaters!When I was a moody teen, comedy was one of the only things that I still shared with my dad occasionally. When we were both in agreeable enough moods (usually after we each secretly and seperately got high), I got him to watch Upright Citizens Brigade, That’s My Bush, and Strangers with Candy. Although thinking of the timing of those shows existence, we probably stopped having those occasional hang outs around when I turned 16.
Redwall was the bomb. The moles and hares were the best. I liked the ferrets too, for some reason.
Redwall was the bomb. The moles and hares were the best. I liked the ferrets too, for some reason.
Redwall was the bomb. The moles and hares were the best. I liked the ferrets too, for some reason.
I DID grow up with ‘current pop culture! Today’s Marvel and DC franchises are based on characters that go back fifty years (or very much older) See attached – and note the whopping twelve cents the comic book cost..
Therewas a garage sale by my grade school one summer where the guy had boxes and boxes of sixties marvels for 10 cents each. I bought about 100. Didn’t eat lunch at all…. so I would have killed for the actually GOOD Marvel movies we have now…I’m doll pretty stoked at how much is recognizable and NOT fucked up. I could show anybody one of those Hulks, Caps or Dr. Stranges from back then, and they would know the character from the movies. My favorite was always Fantastic Four tho. I got a run of them at that garage sale starting with #41, and the sheer enormity of the imagination on display blew my mind….so…fingers crossed…
wow what a deal. 100 for like $10?
I would’ve left with 500!
WHAT ever, Barron.
Oh no I meant NOW.If I had $50 on me as a youngin then I’d probably be doing much bigger things than commenting here.
I was in college when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and it made me wish I had read it when I was younger and had more capacity for awe.I was roughly the right age for Harry Potter (and remember Animorphs being the popular YA series preceding them), but got bored and stopped reading after Goblet of Fire. Reading about what makes the series appealing to others is more interesting to me than the books themselves.
Two answers spring to mind. The first is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My little kid mind would have been blown off the map if I could have seen films like ‘Iron Man’, ‘Winter Soldier’ and especially ‘Civil War’ in cinemas. All I had was the occasional Batman film, which I still loved, but were something incredibly different and quite a bit less spectacular.The other is ‘Over the Garden Wall’, which I can totally imagine being one of those “Did that really exist or did I just imagine that?” shows that every good childhood should have. (The actual one for me is a claymation sci-fi show called ‘Plasmo’.) It probably would have scared the hell out of me if I watched it too young, but a little bit of nightmare fuel is something else all good childhoods should have.
Plasmo is a bizarre series, that’s for sure.
“Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors” is my did-I-dream-that kiddie entertainment. I’ve only known one other person who remembers that one, and we grew up like 7000 miles apart.
The MCU. I think I love it now in large part because it’s fifth grade me’s dream come true.
i would have absolutely loved stranger things as a kid
Any of the great indie horror films of the last decade. I wouldn’t have wasted so much time on terrible video scaries looking for my fix.
I wish I had been alive to see Randy Rhoads with Ozzy, and by extension that he had lived longer and put out more material. I know it’s widely believed that he was about to quit anyway but I’m going to go on the assumption that Sharon convinced (fucked?) him into staying.
Star Wars. I was 18 when the first movie came out, and although I’ve been a fan ever since, I wish it had been as magical for me as it was for my children 30 years later.
Most likely the MCU. Immense, immersive, varied, diverse, packed with dense layers of fascinating characters with criss-crossing stories and adventures, just so much. I always loved the character backstories and histories that were on the back of GI Joe action figure packaging, so to have a movie universe that went into and expanded upon all those stories with live-action movies and franchises and super-franchises of their own would’ve been a dream. As much as I love it now, I can only imagine how much further I would be delving into it as a kid.
The MCU! I would have freaked out about big budget comic book stuff.As a Marvel fanboy in 70s England my media choices were limited – Lou Ferrigno’s hulk and a godawful live-action Spiderman TV show
The funk is powerful with this SpiderMan. and Peter Parker is like 30.
Steven Universe I think is the one thing kids have now that would have uplifted the world of 1988 more than any other. It played a part of me being able to admit I was transgender even when I was 36, just as a measure of how far-reaching and powerful its messages of freedom and love and inclusivity and talking earnestly with other people about your feelings is.
I’d say Regular Show, but given the 80s references it probably wouldn’t have made much sense
VR. Okay, VR technically existed in the 90s, but it was far from consumer-level and it frankly sucked. (at least, it sucked when you were a kid trying a demo rig at a computer show, you couldn’t wear your glasses in the headset, and you didn’t quite grasp the head movement part of the concept)But modern VR would have put kid me in a joy coma. I swear that my internal 11 year old L.S. Dog screamed with happiness the first time I tried classic Doom in VR. (side note: all of the 90s shooters in VR, please. Yes, all of them. Even that one. Redneck Rampage in VR, fuck it, let’s do this.)Also, could you imagine the batshit insane design philosophies of 90s PC gaming transferred to VR? My god, man. “It’s like this tiny QuickTime video is right there in front of me!”
1990s VR actually wasn’t all that much worse than today’s which still sucks. I want VR from science fiction that makes me actually think I’m in another world, not some nonsense with screens in front of my eyes.
While VR has a lot of growing to do, I’d say that the immersion is fantastic given the limitations of making it affordable. Mobile VR is pretty rough for sure, and has probably turned off countless potential fans of real VR, but the tethered options are exactly what I want and expect for the price point. Compared to 90s VR, though? I mean, two different ballgames. The resolution and general improvements in graphics alone make a massive difference, as does the greatly more accurate (although still not perfect) tracking. I’m not entirely disagreeing, there are a lot of hiccups left to work out, but to me the only similarities between 1994 VR and 2019 VR is the general concept behind the tech.
Hell yes. Playing Wipeout in VR was damn near transcendant. It’s pretty much the exact future I imagined and wished for when playing the original Wipeouts when I was like 12 or 13. Sure, VR still has a long way to go overall, but now I can play a Wipeout with more content and better graphics than the old ones IN FREAKIN’ VR! Once I got my VR legs, turning off all the comfort settings and spinning through the air, hitting huge drops and loops, just amazing. And I always sucked at Wipeout, but VR has made me way better because I can look at different angles than just where my ship is facing and have a larger field of vision, so I can see what turns are coming even while moving at high speed. And I would have been able to wasted incredible amounts of time in VR as a kid/teen, instead of being an adult who only gets a few hours in a week, if I’m not too tired or lazy after work.Adventure Time would have been amazing also, as its basically a show built from the parts of everything I was into at age 12, but VR would be a bigger deal.
Really broad answer, but YouTube. I got big into rudimental marching percussion in my early teens, and the only learning materials I had were what my instructors at the local high school could provide. My instructors fortunately had quite a bit of experience in the drum corps world, so I had relatively good exposure to what was “good.” But the level of difficulty kids are able to achieve today is way beyond anything I could have imagined at that age. I credit a lot of this to videos people can watch of high achieving groups and instructional videos.
Honestly it would’ve been neat if Super Mario Maker was around because then me, my brother and my sister would’ve just created and played each other. Or failing that Pokémon Go.
This would’ve been more helpful to me as a preteen than an actual child, but being raised by two very conservative/Catholic parents, I would’ve liked to have Big Mouth.
I’m pretty happy to have grown up in the 80s and 90s, and I wouldn’t trade that pop culture for much of anything that came after. Not musically or cinematically, anyway. That leaves the cartoons, and with the exception of Avatar The Last Airbender, I’m good on those, too. Well…I suppose it would have been cool to have gotten The Boondocks back then.
Hell yeah, McGruder-run Boondocks was the best. After he left the show it wasn’t quite the same. You heard they are rebooting it? And Aaron is back.
Great shout on Gravity Falls. My favourite part of the sibling relationship happens in the pilot. Dipper has found the first of the journals, which contains the note ‘Tell no-one’. Mabel asks him what it is, and he flounders. She then good-naturedly mocks him and asks ‘are you seriously not going to tell me?’. Dipper then relents immediately.It cuts through all the long-form mystery bullshit of characters not talking to each other, shows that Mabel can’t even consider that Dipper could keep something from her an demonstrates Dipper needs only the slightest nudge to trust his sister with his mysterious new secret.I’ve probably over-analysed that one line to be quite honest with you.One I wished I’d seen as a kid but only saw in my late 20s is the magnificent Hue & Cry, and Ealing studio kids adventure. It sees a bunch of kids just after the war taking on a criminal gang. It’s superb, particularly the cinematography of a running battle at the end. It was made in 1947 so the fact that I didn’t ‘have’ it is on me.
The sheer EASE with which you can make things like animated shorts, simple video games, self-publish your own books, etc…I can’t imagine what I would have created as a kid without the harsh limitation of paper and ink.
the SUPER MARIO MAKER games. I’ve been playing the Mario games since the first one a little after it came out. If that had come out then, I would have been all in, no question. It’s probably all I would have done.I was hyped for the first Mario Maker and dabbled in it a bit, but I just don’t have the time to sit and perfect my levels like I would if I was a kid.
Oh man, that’s a good one. I can’t imagine the time I would have sunk into Mario Maker or Little Big Planet as a kid. My friends and I used to draw our own video game levels and ideas, to actually be able to make and play them would have been crazy.
I swear if Mario Maker had been available as a kid I would have grown up to be a video game designer. These days I am hovering over the button on the Nintendo eShop (correctly) surmising that I will never have the time or inclination to make it worth the AU$90 they are charging for it.
I couldn’t think of anything, but this is a great answer. When I was growing up, the only Mario Maker I had was my pen and the blank side of whatever worksheet I was finished with at school.
Kiss. Anime. Nuff said. Or streaming. It was impossible to get any anime besides expensive $40 DVDs of 3-4 episodes at a time when I was a kid. Or Netflix DVD, I’ve watched so many movies now I’m into the deep side of Ozu and starting to get into old Hollywood musicals. I wish that I had a comic store near me growing up, now being familiarized with that entire world through the MCU movies. I was very lucky to have Harry Potter at the exactly right time, even into the end of college.
One of the cooler things I saw in my lifetime was Anime going from bootleg VHS of things described as “Japanese cartoons with blood and boobies” passed around in high school or if you were lucky late night cable. To a cult phenomenon that you could buy at higher end video stores or see at a cool Indy theater. Then to kids TV mainstay. There of course were always the occasional Japanese show showing up when I was a kid on TV. I was to young for Speed Racer, Battle for the Planets and Star Blazers but I did get Robotech and Voltron but that always seemed different then the “Japanination” of my high school years. The dark, adult stuff that you felt so cool watching at 16. Bubblegum Crisis, Wicked City and of course Akira. Im not even sure the anime industry still produces those dark, bloody, hyper sexual movies and OVAs anymore.
OH, they absolutely still do produce that kind of movie. Netflix streaming has some I’ve come across. I just think with the accessiblity of all the other anime available it’s not so in your face anymore as the only example.
The monster rape tentacle porn belonged in the late 80’s with stuff like Stallone’s Rambo going on and other American pro war-power movies. Devilman Crybaby is on Netflix though, that’s a Go Nagai adaption with the classic demons getting blown up and destroyed. Isekai is a big thing now, visiting other worlds like in a video game with a harem in toe.
I guess I don’t think like this… I asked my brain this question and it said, “You’re a grown-up.”
What’s it like to be so boring?
No, don’t you see, Squamate is the interesting one, always taking the opposing viewpoint to everyone else and not liking things. Only they know the right way that things should be done. We should all try to be like Squamate.
When I was growing up in a tiny cultureless town in the middle of nowhere in the 90s, the only way I could find out about new music was from my copy of the Rolling Stone Album Guide. I took whatever ratings they had as gospel, and reading it now it’s incredible how absolutely wrong they were about a lot of my favorite music. If I had something like Spotify back then, there’s a lot of music I could have discovered as a teen that I missed out on.
Yeah, I would kill to have Spotify or Pandora during my high school days, where everyone liked top 40 pop and/or heavy metal – and I hated both to the point I thought music in general wasn’t for me.
Luckily I had the Spin Guide to Alternative Rock, which included tons of fun shit I’d never heard of and pointed me in all sorts of cool directions. I had to buy all of it without hearing it first, but so the system wasn’t perfect, but still. That book clued me in to Spacemen 3 were. My life was simply not the same afterwards.
I usually read that one trips to Waldenbooks, but I didn’t actually get a copy until about 1999. The top 100 album list was a good jumping off point.
Oh, right! With that little record-player doodad the magazine was so fond of. Used that one as a buying guide, too.
Also: oh, no, Waldenbooks!
I wished that I had started WHEEL OF TIME in HS. THE EYE OF THE WORLD came out my senior year of high school and somehow I missed it.
THE VENTURE BROTHERS or RICK & MORTY for sure. And I agree with the chorus of AtLAs.
I had Small Wonder and Out of this World. What else could anyone possibly need?
Don’t forget Buck Rogers! And Tom Hanks in a dress … them were glory days.
You Can’t Do That on Television, too.
Please. I grew up in the 1970s. We had the best TV shows, including the best cartoons and the best version of Saturday Night Live, the best rock music, and the best movies. I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything that came after. Now, I admit that the fashion was shit, and the cars were terrible, but in general, the 70s were fucking awesome.
How about fucking ANYTHING that told me it was okay to like boys?There’s an unfortunately large part of me that gets angry when I see same-sex teenage couples happily PDAing all over each other, because selfish regret is ugly. And another part of me worries that they won’t remember how hard it was to get to this place, and we’ll be back to pogroms for the queers.What a drag it is getting old.
The volley ball scene in Top Gun wasn’t enough! I mean it’s subtext but man are all those dude banging later!
Things just aren’t the same today, you hear every mother say…
This is going to sound really tame, but I would have loved something like Ben 10.
Ben 10 is awesome though. I didn’t have it as a kid but I got to enjoy it with my son.
I have cats. Sadly, the only TV they like are bird videos.
The marvel cinematic universe.
I like the LEGO playsets that were around when I was a kid, but I do wish they had introduce the Star Wars and superheros sets a lot sooner. Man, 10-year-old me would have had a field day with LEGO Spider-Man.
Nothing in particular but as a child of the early 80s, I wish there was something that spanned my entire childhood akin to Harry Potter or even the Toy Story movies. I still feel toy story 2 is the best but I can also understand people getting “the feels” from part 3 as its closure to something they grew up with, mirroring Andy and his choice to pass childhood things along. I was well into my 30s by the time 3 came out so I kind of envy those people who had that connection.
#1 for me would be the Internet as a whole. I grew up a nerd in a small Southern town, and never met anyone like me. So I often felt lonely. Finding something like VlogBrothers earlier would have been amazing to my teenage self. I loved learning, but struggled with going to the library since it was 10 miles away with busy parents. Studying and learning would have been a cinch. Unfortunately I graduated in ‘96 before the Internet took a hold.#2 Harry Potter. There’s no telling the Impact that series has had on my life as an adult. I can only imagine what if would have been like as a kid. A series of novels about a lonely kid who finds life at a school. Yes, please.#3 Gilmore Girls. Rory has issues like all of us, but she was a super smart Bookish Person (especially in the early seasons) who worked hard at whatever she did. It’s another positive show that shows the value of education, especially whenever it contrasts with Lorelei’s experience of having missed out on those experiences. That would have been a great show to have. Instead I got Saved by The Bell and 90210 that both glorified slackers, and the non-importance of Education.
“ I was, despite all previous exposure to nerd culture, surprised by some of the negative reaction. People were waxing nostalgic about the original and how the new show could never come close to it.”Never, EVER underestimate the ability of emotionally stunted adult nerds to have knee-jerk defensiveness about their “beloved” garbage properties from their youth.We have adults – ADULTS – who are obsessed with Thundercats for chrissake…
I tend to think of this as a mostly American phenomenon. Adolescence has sort of extended itself in a few of the countries I’ve lived in, but nowhere I’ve been has mankids like the U.S.
Spongebob Squarepants. That might be sort of a cheating answer though for two reasons, 1) Spongebob is still somehow on the air, and 2) I WAS a kid when it came out. I was just at the age where I thought that I was too old and cool for cartoons, so I never gave it a shot. Years later I found that the show (at least in its early years, now is comparatively subpar) was actually really good, with jokes that work for both kids and adults, like a modern day Looney Tune.
I’m not sure I can come up with anything. Virtually all the good pop culture of the last three decades seems better experienced as an adult than as a child. I grew up without YA literature, or even much in the way of kid lit … but I feel like I came out the better for having grown up reading adult stuff. And though the internet’s a godsend and I wouldn’t make it go away even if I could, there are several upsides to fording the trials of childhood without it.
Samurai Jack.As a kid on holidays i would see stuff like Dragon Ball, Ranma 1/2 or Ulyses 31 and other assorted anime but at home for action orientated cartoons there was He-Man or Thundercats which felt lacking in comparison. Samurai Jack would have blown my mind not just with the action but the humour, inventiveness and sheer style. It might also have shown me at a much earlier age that action animation could be more than just the fights. Well, maybe. All I cared about then we’re awesome fights so that’s probably all i would have taken from it. Hell, the only episode I can think of right now is the awesome Jack versus shadow Shinobi. So damn cool.
I don’t have anything specific, but something that didn’t feature heteronormative relationships. I grew up at the end of the AIDS scare; also when Ellen coming out was shocking, and it would have been great to have a bisexual character that was well adjusted and in a healthy relationship so I wouldn’t have spent the majority of my teen years feeling like there was something wrong with me.
It existed but I kinda wish D&D(and other table top RPGs) were as popular when I was growing up as it is now. I started in the 90s, so it was after it’s coolness height in the late 70s and 80s but before the rise of “geek culture” in the 2000. It’s cool that I’ve seen it change from a niche game played by introverts, to spreading into alt-culture(mostly through White Wolf games) to just becoming a thing people of all walks of life enjoy and play. I can describe how different the makeup of people were at the first Gencon I went to, 1994, compared to today. I love the game and the time I’ve had with it regardless but I kinda wish I was 13 years old discovering D&D right now like my son is.
It’s hard for me to discern what’s pop culture anymore but the recent endless glut of doom/stoner metal would have been greatly appreciated when I was a teen.
The Bruce Timm/Paul Dini DC animated shows. I loved them when they arrived in my 20s but if I’d been a kid when the Batman animated series dropped I think I would have turned it into a religion.
I grew up in the 80s… nirvana would have been a LOT more fun than hearing susudio by Phil Collins on the radio for the umpteenth time.
People get nostalgic about the eighties, but the distance between, say, Liquid Liquid and the glurge that was on the radio was just a fucking chasm. The big eighties were so horrible.
As someone who was a teenager in the 1980’s, at least towards the end, it’s been a bit odd to see the nostalgia for the decade. I will also say that the one thing that surprised the hell out of me was Africa by Toto suddenly becoming a thing again for a while. Not the song I thought would get sudden interest again.
Indeed. I missed most of the eighties because I lived outside the United States. But even I knew that shit was way wrong when we moved back in the late eighties. Peak hair metal, New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul, overproduced everything, bad slasher movies, all of it appreciated without any ironic distance whatsoever? Christ, what a wasteland. I was a nineties teen, but, in retrospect, most of my culture was drawn from the by-then-quickly-disappearing eighties underground/reaction to that sort of nonsense. There was a lot of quality stuff there, but people have really forgotten how bad the late eighties monoculture really was. There was a reason Nirvana sounded so fresh to so many people.
As for Toto’s “Africa,” I’m more confused as to how Weezer, America’s whitest, blandest band was the one to revive that one. It does have a nice enough chorus. And if you watch the original video, it seems that something like two-fifths or three-fifths of the band could have starred in “Napoleon Dynamite.”
that really explains why i don’t like anything that Gwen writes
Big Mouth. I would have been so much less confused about everything going on. Sex Education (the show) would have been helpful as well.
I honestly tried to think of one. And while I’ve been intrigued at grown up trends that I’ve missed out on like online dating, I’ve couldn’t think of one for my childhood.Mainly because 80’s toys (He-Man, GI Joe, TFs, Mask, Thundercats…), tv animation (same plus Ghostbusters etc) and film (Goonies, E.T., Batman, Indy Jones and more) were simply amazing and a constant joy. Everything (EVERYTHING) was perfect and it’s weird for me to say that out loud because the usual case is to gripe about what we didn’t have back then.
The Disney Renaissance, plus Pixar.I was a kid for the very beginning of it (The Little Mermaid) but for the most part animation was dying in the 80s.
I would have loved to have been a kid in the forties, spending day after day in great old movie theaters watching double features. It would have been amazing to sit with a big audience through all the Val Lewton movies (or even the later, goofy Universal horror films). My second choice would be a kid in the fifties during the sci-fi golden age. Third choice would have been the fifties through mid-sixties during the wide screen era. I’d have loved to see a bonafide three-projector Cinerama film.
Pixar. All of it. Fuck it throw cars in there also. I know it’s garbage but I’ll watch it as a 6 yr old.
Not necessarily a specific cartoon, but the current spirit of writing for animated series. It seems to me that much of the writing for animated series these days is relatively mature and narratively satisfying, as opposed to cheap, lazy ways to make a buck off of merch. Not that the merch is NOT a concern, just that it seems like modern cartoon writers know how to appeal to BOTH the hearts/minds of the audience AND their parents’ wallets.ETA: Loathe as I am to admit it, almost every modern remake of an 80s cartoon is just way better written.
Harry Potter is the obvious answer, but here is another excellent one: Phineas and Ferb, ideally followed by Milo Murphy.Also South Park. And Daria.
I was 37 when the last Harry Potter book was published, and when I got to the bookstore that threw a midnight party for the release and watched all of the kids running around in their little robes waving wands about, I thought, “Wow … I’m kinda sorry I’m too old for that.”But I don’t know that I would have been as into HP as a kid as I was as an adult. When I was a kid, the only kid lit I read was Encyclopedia Brown – I spent more time in the adult section of the library, reading and checking out age-inappropriate material, or at least stuff not written especially for kids. In fact, when I was assigned early YA in school (Across Five Aprils, Jacob Have I Loved) … I hated it.
I do wish anime had been more accessible when I was younger. I loved Robotech when I was a teen, and Battle of the Planets when I was even younger, but as a poor kid in an ethnic neighborhood – I had no idea how to get more Japanese cartoons until I was much older and it was still a slog – I might have become a bigger fan if I had figured out how to mainline the stuff.
My experience in high school was there were two neighborhoods you could easily find anime for rent(this was the early 90s in the Chicago land area)You could drive over to the rich suburbs and try to rent legit VHS and/or Laser discs at high end rents place. They charged an arm and a leg for one day rental, you needed a credit card on file just to rent and even then may not rent to people who didn’t live close to them. Or you found a urban video store in the sketchy parts of the city where most of the videos were bootlegs like I did. They rented to anyone and if you made friends with the owner he never cared about late fees. He also sold boxes to get around tape dubbing protection and sold blank VHS right in the store. He even gave me and my friends store cash if we secured him bootlegs of stuff he hadn’t seen so when I was older and started going to conventions I ended up making money hooking him up with tapes of new stuff that was getting passed around. I doubt the original owner is still there, he was an old man in the 90s, he’s be ancient now, but I heard from a friend that the video store is still there.
Yeah, I was literally ‘grown’ when I got my first VCR, and the stores that had anime that I knew of (in the mid to late 90s) were Santa Monica or Beverly Hills-adjacent (this being L.A.). Sounds ironic for L.A., but … South-Central wasn’t known for its wide-ranging, accessible cultural content. The Tower Records in West Hollywood may have had anime, but I would not have recognized it.
‘Inside Out.’ At 22 it showed me that sadness and anger were worthwhile emotions that need to be felt and recognized to live a fulfilling life. It would have been nice to have recognized that about 15 years earlier.
I mostly had what I needed when I needed it. Dragon Ball Z and Trigun forged my morality. My only want would have been a show that would have let me know it was okay that I was gay so I wouldn’t torture myself being closeted for 25 years, missing out on a large part of my life. But I don’t think there’s a gay character in any cartoons even now. I’ve seen lesbians, and bi women, Korra and a few other shows, but can’t think of any strong gay characters in anything.
I do not envy the contemprorary cultural output for children in the least, but I do envy things like entire TV channels devoted to cartoons. In socialist Yugoslavia we had ONE 5 min cartoon per day at 7:15 p.m., two if very lucky, and that was it.
Was it a propaganda cartoon? Soviet era propaganda cartoons are the best!
Nope, the classics: Bugs, Tom and Jerry, Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye…
Worker and Parasite?
The only cartoons I watched as a kid that hold up today were Alf/Alftales and Robotech.
Actually…YouTube.
If I had seen the Lego rendition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a teenager my head would have imploded.
Beatlemania.
No question, the MCU. I was a huge comic nerd as a kid and so deeply invested in all of that and the reality is is the quality of the 80s in the 90s was pretty crappy across the board. Having movies like the MCU in the 80s and the 90s would have been a revelation, as much as I geeked out over Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, or Alien versus Predator I would have been in goner, I wouldn’t have paid attention to another damn thing
It would have been much easier to earn my first degree if the internet had existed in it’s current form. Having it while I earned my second, got me through Calc I – Calc III with ease. Thanks Youtube, Wolfram and Khan Academy.
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Well, all of it, of course! The pop culture of my 80’s childhood sucked so bad that it was revelatory when I discovered anime around the turn of the century and found that cartoons didn’t have to suck. I could have written Wanerski’s entry myself, though I would have highlighted different things about Adventure Time. I really love the kindness and compassion of the show itself, as exemplified by the character of Finn. I love the weirdness of it all, too. I wish we’d had good comic-book movies. I wish we’d had action movies with better female characters, like Mad Max Fury Road. I wish I’d had the book series The Girl Who… (the first one is Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making). Just an amazing adventure story in which the main character is a girl who gets to exert lots of agency and ingenuity while meeting fantastical creatures in brilliantly-described fantasy worlds. I’m totally jealous of kids these days, if you can’t tell.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was around when I was a kid, but I didn’t watch it until I was an adult. I still love it a whole lot, but I think some of the humor might have gone further when I was a kid. I can appreciate how epic the plot and character developments are, as well as the intricate fight scenes, more as an adult though.
The Lego movies, I loved the first one and Batman, but I would have watched all of them in theatres as a kid. I guess my list is more “stuff I like as an adult that I would have loved as a kid”
The current ubiquity of Doctor Who would have been great to have back in the ‘80s. I basically had to watch the Tom Baker seasons over and over and over on PBS, and while they were great, it would have been so freaking amazing to be able to watch the subsequent seasons, especially as they happened.Every time they played the last episode of “Logopolis,” I got super excited that maybe, this time, they’d follow it with “Castrovalva” (I knew the story titles thanks to Doctor Who Magazine and the DWFC), but every damn time it was “Robot.”
Probably Black Panther. Not to be cliche but when I was little in terms of black people in superhero stuff we had Static Shock, Storm, and that was basically it, outside of just straight up reading comics (and I don’t think I knew anyone who physically read comics until I was like 16).
I feel like I got pretty lucky with my formative pop culture. In 2002 I had the last few seasons of Buffy and Angel. I had albums by the Strokes, Interpol, the White Stripes, and a Libertines early release. Throw in a bonus British Sea Power and the Kills (not Killers) and a little Mando Diao to account for personal taste…and that’s a great soundtrack to being 17 and sneaking into NYC bars.
If I had to pic one, it would have to be The Expanse. It’s the kind of scifi I grew up reading, and how I thought it should be, even as they were trying to pass off weak sauce like Star Wars and Star Trek as the real deal. Gravity would also be right up there, though with the qualifier that the visuals on both properties would be up to 21st century standards. Now I’m wondering what Ray Harryhausen could have done with a modern workstation loaded up with Maya.
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Although I did have an NES, I absolutely PINED for Mario Bros toys. There is so much of that stuff around now! I have a few amiibo things but back then, man, that stuff would have been my crack.Al that being said I actually did have Mario and Koopa from the live action film and a McDonalds Goomba.
The idea that anyone would think the original She-Ra was better than the Netflix show continues to annoy and baffle me.
Sure Harry Potter is an obvious answer, but I had Neverending Story to scratch that particular itch and re-read that book so many times my local library had to replace it.
This is more of a teenage thing than a kid thing, but I wish I’d discovered the Bad Brains’ first album at 15 instead of 30. I listened to lots of hardcore punk as a twitchy, frustrated teen, but never got around to them. Maybe because they were half a reggae band? Maybe because they went metal later on, and I’ve never been a metal fan? Anyway, I lived overseas and this was pre-internet, so my musical education was very hit-or-miss. Anyway, hearing “Sailin’ On” and “Banned in DC” at 16 or so would have certainly improved my life.
Not the reggae half of the album, though. Those songs sucked balls then and suck balls now. But you already knew that.
Mad Max: Fury Road. Jesus Christ, I waited THIRTY FUCKING YEARS.
B 1971, the best kids stuff on TV was Loony Toons, which was already quite old. The Hanna Barbera stuff dominated Saturday mornings for a while, and it was awful. There was the Voltron/GI Joe/Transformers wave*, and that was cool (Thunder Cats!). But, now that I have watched a few thousand hours of ‘00s and ‘10s kid media with my kids, I can tell you that EVERYthing is better now. The joke density of an average episode of…anything, whatever is on the Disney Channel right now, is much much higher than anything from 30-40 years ago. This is true in animated movies, too….the scripts are much more involved. Sometimes it makes things worse (IMO Star Wars Episodes 1-3, Zack & Cody) but the average quality is way higher than we had. Like, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention Phineas & Ferb, but that show is an absolute marvel, and there are approximately one billion episodes, each one with more fun than the entire Animaniacs run. *I’m not a TV historian, no need to correct my timeline.
What pop culture do I wish I had when I was a kid? Nothing. Maybe it’s because I can only view today’s pop culture through grown-up eyes. But I don’t see where anything that’s available today is better than what I had in the 60s and into the early 70s. And I would rather watch a cartoon from Hanna Barbera than anything that’s on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network.
As a kid, I would have loved something like the Aquabats.Both for their music and for the tv show.
I’m a grown ass man who wishes he had Star vs. The Forces of Evil when he was younger. It recently concluded and hit all those notes that Gravity Falls and Adventure time did. Star probably hits the manic pixie dream girl button a little too hard for some people, but to me she also represented the too-interesting, too-busy, too-kind-for-me girl that I invariably fell in love with throughout my adolescence.
Avatar: The Last Airbender. A serialized action cartoon that was both funny and moving, with amazing characters, beautiful animation and lovely spiritual/moral philosophy. It’s a lot smarter than a lot of adult programming out there.