Anyone else have the "where were you 20 years ago" problem with media?

[Samuel Fuller]

Sometimes, things just aren't meant to be popular at the time no matter how much they tried.

Take Earthbound for instance, Nintendo spent god knows how much time and effort localizing it to make it palatable for American kids and even threw in a freaking strategy guide and scratch and sniff stickers (remember those???), and even with all that, nobody gave a shit and they mostly sat on shelves for years until being liquidated in clearance or otherwise. It took mid 00s forums, youtube reviews, and image boards to make people notice the gem it was and start to talk about it in earnest. Fast forward to current year, any and all discourse/mods/etc. of the series are saturated with trannies and/or soycucks with Peter Pan syndrome. Go figure.

Case in point:

Earthbound came out in North America a couple of weeks before the PlayStation launched and a couple months after the SEGA Saturn launched here. Nobody gave a fuck about SNES anymore.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

I mean, I agree. What this topic is getting at though is how personal aging figures into it.

Like just for example imagine if you somehow never saw Batman the Animated Series until you were forty. You might still be able to appreciate it on some level but it won't hit the same because inherently a forty-year-old is more picky and might even have reached a point where superhero media doesn't do much for them anymore.

Or to recycle the OP, I often have this issue with SNES RPGs, particularly fan-translated ones. In the 1990s I would have been all over this shit because I was a huge RPG nut. But now I practically hate the RPG genre and find every time I play one they just kinda get on my nerves, so even games that might actually be the classic literature of the genre are stuff I probably can't tolerate for more than an hour. I find myself wishing I could go back in time and give these games to my younger self.

Tubi is a good example of this. It's loaded with the kind of cheesy B action movies I grew up on as a kid yet I rarely use it. When I was 13 my mind would have been blown by the idea of being able to stream hundreds of movies anytime I wanted for free, but today it's just meh to me.

Batman is a retarded character, and at some point everyone should realize that. It's a middle-aged man dressing as a bat to fight crime. Even if the writing and acting is great, what's the point? It's a concept that was intended for children in the pre-WW2 era.

 

[Jason Wynn]

I’m a kid of the 80s and 90s. My generation already grew up with the best media. There’s practically nothing I can think of in Current Year I wish would have been available to the child version of me.

Boomers had one of the best eras of music. Would have been cool to grow up experiencing that for the first time I guess.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Growing up in the 90s-2000s era means got exposed to reruns of shit from as far back as the 20s or 30s but there's always like something come across every few years I wish had experienced sooner. No really specific examples but there's a lot, especially if you count things knew about but never got around to watching for media and getting or playing myself for games.

Take Earthbound for instance, Nintendo spent god knows how much time and effort localizing it to make it palatable for American kids and even threw in a freaking strategy guide and scratch and sniff stickers (remember those???), and even with all that, nobody gave a shit and they mostly sat on shelves for years until being liquidated in clearance or otherwise. It took mid 00s forums, youtube reviews, and image boards to make people notice the gem it was and start to talk about it in earnest. Fast forward to current year, any and all discourse/mods/etc. of the series are saturated with trannies and/or soycucks with Peter Pan syndrome. Go figure.

Earthbound was locked behind an expensive bundle with the strategy guide and the time of release combined with that killed it's sales.
This also isn't even going into the fact they tried falsely marketing it as an update/remake of the NES one they shitcanned last minute before release due to nebulous fucking "shifting focus" reasons. That probably would have continued if it weren't for the actual NES game leaking online some years after SNES earthbound came out. Earthbound exploded in popularity after the SNES went and the carts stopped being stocked and due to this it was one of the first games to fall to the "value speculator" plague of mass produced game cartridges that would soon gradually consume the entire market and make things unaffordable and unplayable without piracy.

 

[skykiii]

Tubi is a good example of this. It's loaded with the kind of cheesy B action movies I grew up on as a kid yet I rarely use it. When I was 13 my mind would have been blown by the idea of being able to stream hundreds of movies anytime I wanted for free, but today it's just meh to me.

That's exactly how I feel about Tubi's animation offerings. The idea of being able to stream an entire anime series would've seemed like black magic in the 1990s when I was used to VHS tapes having only two episodes per tape and many shows never being finished in English. Just now I watched the first episode of something called God Mazinger (which was not what I expected) and I know that as a kid, I would've marathoned the whole series in one night. As an adult? I'll be surprised if I even return to the series despite liking the first episode.

Batman is a retarded character, and at some point everyone should realize that. It's a middle-aged man dressing as a bat to fight crime. Even if the writing and acting is great, what's the point? It's a concept that was intended for children in the pre-WW2 era.

I mean you're not wrong, but is Batman any more retarded than most other concepts meant for children? Like say a man turns into a giant gray-and-red guy to fight men in rubber suits aliens? Or a party made up of humans, elves and dwarves go exploring underground places looking for treasure? Or a guy with a magical police box has adventures all over time and space?

For me the retarded thing about Batman has always been how its handled as the writers IMO focus on all the wrong things. This is a discussion I've had in other threads and I'm not sure they're worth derailing this thread with.

Earthbound came out in North America a couple of weeks before the PlayStation launched and a couple months after the SEGA Saturn launched here. Nobody gave a fuck about SNES anymore.

I've always found this narrative kinda weird. I was there, and that wasn't how it was at all. For a long time the Saturn and Playstation were just things I read about in magazines, everyone I knew stuck with the SNES for a bit because it was the thing we had and not only were we not convincing our parents to get a new console, we just didn't see anything that enticing yet. Heck I remember SNES games still being bought and sold well into the launch of the Nintendo 64.

I know I was way more interested in Earthbound than I was in anything on Playstation (yes I actually played it when it was new).

Mass adoption of the Playstation didn't start until Final Fantasy VII was announced.