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Two Decades Behind
aka: Still The Eighties
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The twenty-to-thirty-year lag between reality and TV-land. Shows that first ran in The Eighties carry a lot of cultural baggage from The Sixties, and shows that first ran in The Seventies hearken back to The Fifties. Today, this can be seen in how some works seem to suggest that they took place in The Eighties when they are supposed to be set in the present-day or a little earlier. In such settings, the "cool kids" still rap and skateboard and the lingo is still Totally Radical (even in cases where it was not relevant to begin with). In many cases, it's clear that someone Did Not Do the Research.
It happens because TV writers tend to be busiest in their late 30s and early 40s, and (like everyone else) their tastes and preferences were formed in their teens and early 20s; by the time they reach the big time, what they think is fresh and modern is actually 20 years out of date. This is closely related to the fact that such franchises as Transformers, Ninja Turtles, and He-Man are getting revamped ~20 years after the peaks of their popularity; in fact, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) was a revival of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero from the 1980s, which was, in turn, a revamp of the original Joes from the 1960s.
See also Pac Man Fever and Popularity Polynomial. Contrast Present Day Past, Anachronism Stew, and Purely Aesthetic Era. Disco Dan is a character who personifies this trope.
Examples:
Advertising
- Chuck E. Cheese kept running the same commercials from the early 1990s until very late in the 2000s. The new ones are still just as Totally Radical. And Chuck is still in his not-fooling-anyone skater drag. Seriously, it's like watching Abe Vigoda play a surfer or something.
- The incredibly 80's commercials for the toy Skip-It remained on TV from the late 80's all the way through the 90's, perhaps because it was such an Ear Worm.
- The original Baby Bottle Pop commercial, from 1998 mind you, looks like it's straight out of 1988.
- TV spots for the Brooklyn, NY area burger joint Roll N Roaster have run in a mostly unedited form for about forty years. You can see it here. Unfortunately, the waitstaff no longer wear berets.
- A 1995 commercial for Eggo Cinnamon Toast Waffles exemplifies this trope to a tee. In it, a kid suggests combining his school with a music video. What follows is a school with its kids dressed a decade out of date, wearing spandex and ridiculous amounts of hairspray. If the advertisers did their research regarding what was hip when the ad came out, the boys would've all had Kurt Cobain haircuts and dirty clothes.
ComicBooks
- Marvel Comics' disco-themed Dazzler (aka, sometimes "The Disco Dazzler") got her solo series in 1981... by which point disco was considered, well, Deader than Disco.
Film
- For One More Day has flashbacks that portray the main character being a child in what appears to be The Fifties. However, he is played by a 41-year-old Michael Imperioli (born in 1966) who doesn't look at all like someone in his 60s. You could argue that the film isn't set in The Present Day (after all, Imperioli uses a rather old car and a pay phone), but a flashback to nine years earlier shows him working in an office with fairly new-looking computers.
- The Craft, released in 1996, has one teenager refer to another as looking like Loni Anderson, who was best known during the 1970s.
- Of course, this could be because she did look more like Loni Anderson than anyone else. An in-universe aversion of Small Reference Pools.
- Check out some of the Disney live-action comedies from the 1970s, where it's Still The Fifties: milk is still delivered to doorsteps; women are still housewives; and the chances of seeing any hippies, punks, or glam rockers are slim to none.
- A common comment of the original Fright Night is that despite its Eighties setting it feels very much like the Fifties with the way it portrays teens and the way they act and speak. Aided by the fact that the monsters are heavily inspired by Hammer Horror films from the 1950s.
- Though the soundtrack is very distinctly 80s, with bands like April Wine and Autograph.
- As often happens with portrayals of ice hockey in U.S. media for some reason, The Love Guru did this through Justin Timberlake's character (really Still The Seventies). His Jason Voorhees style goalie mask was about thirty years out of date, as was his personal appearance.
- The 2006 Casino Royale has James Bond requesting a martini (which he eventually names after Vesper Lynd), taken word-for-word from the original 1953 novel. The trouble is, one of the key ingredients, Kina Lillet, was discontinued in 1986, replaced with the reformulated Lillet Blanc (which lacks the quinine that gave "Kina" its name). The film is set in the present-day, yet still mentions Kina Lillet by name. This also occurs in the next film, Quantum of Solace.
Live-Action TV
- Spoofed with the Robin Sparkles videos in How I Met Your Mother, which were supposedly from the mid-1990s but look as if they were made in 1986. Robin explains that "the Eighties didn't come to Canada until 1992."
- Shawn and Gus do this very self-consciously on Psych, where it's obviously supposed to be an In-Universe character quirk (other characters often call them out on it), but in the High School Reunion episode, their reunion seemed to be playing an awful lot of 80s music, given that they graduated in 1995... (Though, in fairness, Gus organized the reunion, so it's not entirely implausible.)
- The first season of Friends, despite being made in 1994/1995, seems stuck in a bizarre 80's/90's hybrid universe. The general looks and mannerisms of the six main characters are a little (though not entirely) on the 80's side. While some of the haircuts, particularly Matt Le Blanc's during the first seven or eight episodes, are VERY 80's.
- Some of the side characters this season, such as Anita Barone (who plays Ross's ex-wife Carol in The One With The Sonogram At The End) also look about six or seven years behind the season's timeframe. While others, such as Megan Cavanagh (who plays Monica and Rachel's former classmate Luisa in The One Where The Monkey Gets Away) look a little more period appropriate.
- Fortunately, by the second season, the show had the 90's zeitgeist down pat and looked/felt completely appropriate for the period.
Music
- The Bowling For Soup song 1985 examines this phenomenon.
- Parodied and deconstructed in "Last Friday Night" by Katy Perry.
- The videos for The Lonely Island songs for Dick in a Box, Motherlovers, and 3-Way go straight for the full 80s style. The clothes, the hair, the interior decorations, and even the backgrounds in the outdoor shots are as 80s as possible.
- 80's style Synth Pop is still big in Europe, particularly in Germany. While the style faded out of popularity in the U.S., there it branched out into EBM and futurepop, still retaining a very 80's feel in most cases. Makes sense because that's where the style really originated.
- This also goes for power metal as well. Scandinavia in particular is home to many bands whose style derives from 80's metal bands like The Scorpions.
Pro Wrestling
- Pro wrestling is often said to always be about five years behind pop-culture wise, particularly WWF/E. Thus watching any old WWF programming until about 1995 always has a very 80's feel to it. The 90's didn't really start to kick in until the Attitude Era.
- Hell, they're still behind the times - at least in some ways. A lot of the haircuts (I'm looking at you, Edge and Dolph Ziggler) look like they've been time-warped from 1984. And then there are the sexual politics, which (at least until recently) always seemed like they'd been time-warped from 1954.
- The most likely explanation for this is Vince McMahon (who has final say on everything) is always described as an obsessive workaholic. Because of that, he doesn't get the chance to read, see movies, watch tv, etc., so he always tends to be a little behind the times as far as pop culture goes. He only tends to approve of something cultural if it has become so widespread he simply can't ignore it anymore.
- If you really want a good example, there was a wrestler who was coming into the company in 1992, and while working on a character, he started aping a couple characters from a famous famous movie. Vince and his buddy Pat Paterson loved it; but they never even heard of the movie's plot and characters, and thought he was making it all up on the spot. The wrestler was Scott Hall, the character was Razor Ramon, and the movie he was directly quoting was none other than Scarface.
- Shawn Michaels was a pretty good personification of this trope all through the 90's and the 00's, thanks to his hair, attire and ring music, which he never changed. And everybody loved it.
- Hulk Hogan had this problem in the mid-nineties, as the gimmick he had in The Eighties had become old and stale. He solved it by making one of the most notable Face Heel Turns in pro-wrestling history and forming the nWo, which were decidedly Nineties (they wore a lot of black and had a "graffiti" graphique). Later when he re-joined WWE he reverted to his Eighties gimmick though, by which point it was nostalgic.
- He continued with the Eighties gimmick when he became on-screen president of TNA in 2010 - but following his Face Heel Turn that October, he reverted to the nWo style.
- There was also Jay Lethal's "Black Machismo" gimmick in TNA in 2010, which was literally this trope.
- Thanks to the popularity of Jerry Lawler, Memphis-based USWA was the last full-time wrestling territory in the United States and continued to produce television straight out of the early eighties, complete with MTV style music videos and cartoonish gimmicks. Alas, the Monday Night Wars inadvertently led to the death of USWA, as Mondays were traditionally the promotion's biggest gates. For fans of regional promotions, it was the End of an Age.
Video Games
- Metal Gear's vision of Twenty Minutes into the Future (and even The Sixties and The Seventies, to some extent) is mostly based on late Eighties sci-fi movies - things like Total Recall, Max Headroom and Blade Runner. The visual aesthetic, the fashionable clothes and body types (not to mention the hairstyles on the men), the politics, the themes, the Shout Outs and the sense of humour are all based on that tradition. Part of this is Zeerust Canon and is why Metal Gear Solid 2 moved away from the aesthetic a little, but Metal Gear Solid 4 goes back the other way and invokes it as deliberate Zeerust.
- The Phillips CD-I game Hotel Mario played a lot like a simple 80's arcade game. When The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed it he said it would have been a better game if it had come out ten years earlier (it came out in 1994).
- Similarly, by many accounts Duke Nukem Forever could have been a fine game if it had actually come out when it was supposed to.
- Though set in the 1990s and made in 1994, the world of EarthBound still bears more resemblance to the eighties. Payphones are still everywhere, no-one seems to have personal computers, some of the language (in the English version) falls into Totally Radical territory, and Ness's attire isn't all that different from that of his predecessor Ninten, whose game actually was set and made in the eighties; most other characters' attire is also quite eighties-like. In fairness, creator Shigesato Itoi is Japanese, not American, and one of the key points of the series was to show America as interpreted by another country based on its media output, so it could be recursive: it's still the eighties in EarthBound because it was still the eighties in quite a lot of contemporary American media.
Web Original
Webcomics
- Mocked in this Shortpacked! strip.
- Given how many Republican politicians fight over which of them was *most* inspired by him, this strip is actually a pretty straight example.
- A number of old toys are being brought back, and only a few of them give any indication that they are a re-release (as in, the only ones that say that they are a reissue of an old toy are the ones being sold for the nostalgia factor).
- Oddly for Shortpacked!, Transformers does not count — it's had a toyline, show and comic from pretty much 1984 onward.
- A lot of the guys' hairstyles early in El Goonish Shive are very '90s (but probably were still in style in 2002). Buried within the strip's Art Evolution, Elliot's mullet and Justin's two-level bowlcut have been changed to less Frozen In Time styles, while Tedd's iconic, grape-jelly colored shoulder-length curtains have not.
Western Animation
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still Totally Radical, as well as bodacious, awesome, tubular and like, cowabunga, dude. This may be a Grandfather Clause, though.
- Also, in more recent adaptations, Michelangelo is the only one who's still Totally Radical, and the others usually mock him for it.
- In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy where the three main characters go to a old folks' home for monsters. "Dracula" [Blacula], the Wolf Man and the Bride of Frankenstein are all treated as "Classic" monsters (fair enough) but the "New, Modern" monsters are Freddy and Jason. The episode in question aired in 2005, after several generations of horror fads had come and gone since the old supernatural slashers of the 1980s.
- Family Guy can certainly be this at times. A gag in the episode "Big Man on Hippocampus" (which aired in 2010) has Richard Dawson as the current host of Family Feud (despite the fact that it's been 15 years since he left the show), John Hughes referenced at a rapid-fire pace, Macho Man Randy Savage cutting promos at live wrestling events, and O.J. Simpson's case treated like a current event.
- This is particularly obvious with any scene set in high school. They look like something out of an '80s teen film and any recent cliques that could be farmed for humor are conspicuously absent.
- It's gotten better in later seasons once Chris entered high school. In earlier seasons, Chris and his school were usually a representation of modern school problems, where as Meg and her school had the plots and gimmicks of an '80s teen movie.
- Also, most of Stewie's toys are merchandise from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and the G1 version of Transformers.
- Betty Boop was an Older Than Television example of this, being a flapper throughout The Thirties when flappers were more popular during the 20's.
- The Disney Channel's Disney BLAM, which consists of scenes from Classic Disney Shorts dubbed over with a Totally Radical narration explaining why each scene is funny, seem to be made with the idea that it's still the early Nineties.
Real Life
- Take a look at your own grandparents. If they haven't gone completely casual for the sake of comfort (wearing sweatsuits, sweatshirts, etc,) then they probably dress about 20 years out of date. In The Eighties, many grandmothers wore polyester dresses that looked more suited to The Fifties or The Sixties. The aging Casanova who dons a polyester Disco suit (complete with chest medallions) before going out on a date is also a common image from media of that era. In the 1920's, it was common in movies to portray old women wearing clothing with long skirts that wouldn't have looked out of place in the 1890's. Before the age of television or the movies, fashions dispersed very slowly. It wasn't uncommon in Renaissance Europe for people out in the countryside to dress in fashions that were about 20 years behind the clothing worn by people at court.
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