WALL OF TEXT: EVERYTHING IS CURRENT

WALL OF TEXT: EVERYTHING IS CURRENT. We have never had this kind of access to the media of yesteryear. Everything seems new, but it’s not, and I think it’s been causing confusion among younger generations. I’m seeing it more and more. People talk about Star Trek TNG and VOY as if they were on the air. I see youtube channels STILL talking about video games from the 80s as if they were part of culture today. We are in the era where every TV show can be its own channel. James Bond movies have their own TV channel. Things meant for audiences of the 1920s are easily accessible as if they were meant for us. Hell, Loony Tunes makes frequent references to Blackface, and we still think those cartoons are meant to appeal to us? Audiences of the 1940s do not seem so distant from us, but they are. Everything nowadays seems meant for us, but that wasn’t always so. From the 60s through the 2000s, being a Godzilla fan meant you had tapes of crappy English dubs of cheesy Japanese movies. Dubs were cheap and lazy because few people cared about quality in foreign film imports then. Video games had famously bad translations because the studios were small and localization teams did not exist at the time. These games are now easily available and we get to compare them to corporate-localized modern games and now everyone is wondering what the hell happened back then. We are at a point where the media of yesteryear is easily viewable but without the context it originally existed in. TNG is not current, so it’s unfair to judge it in hindsight. If you’re wondering why Worf seemed to get dissed and put down again and again, it’s because Klingons were meant to represent Soviet Russia. You need to go back to TOS (or hell, even earlier) to understand that Science Fiction is rooted in the Cold War, and aliens often represented what Americans thought Soviet Russia was doing: starting wars in all these other countries and forcing the US to adopt some awful responses just to maintain world peace. So when Picard scolds Worf, it’s meant to represent the USA scolding the former Soviet Union and its evil warriorlike ways and demonstrating diplomacy and reason are superior. None of this was accurate, of course, but it’s how the US perceived the Soviet Union. If you want to watch Star Trek, you need to know this going in because audiences understood all of it at the time. These details are lost on us now and all we can think is what could have been. Fiction exists as a reaction to current events, so to take in any piece of media from a time earlier than one was born, one needs to understand the context that piece of media existed in. That’s what school is doing when it forces you to read Shakespeare. It’s not about timeless stories. It teaches broader skills such as how to understand the culture, the politics, everything about the time period a work was crafted, and what the audience expected. We have entered a time when we need a high school course to understand old Loony Tunes shorts, or Popeye cartoons, because those were made for audiences who had different expectations and values. They weren’t made for us. Even shows made in the 90s require some preparation. The internet has collapsed all media to the present day, but most of it is not for current audiences. None of this stuff should be available for entertainment without education on its context.