• RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 day ago

    If they made Better Call Saul in the 80s it would have been about Mike ruthlessly tracking a family through an authoritarian pan-dimensional nexus.

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
    381·
    2 days ago

    Anyone who says that TV in the 80s and 90s didn’t have ‘woke’ or ‘politically correct’ elements in it hasn’t been (re)watching a lot of TV from the era. Many major shows I grew up watching in the 90s were chock full of it. Quantum Leap, MacGyver, Sliders, The entire premise of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and basically every fucking Saturday morning cartoon…

    Speaking of Saturday morning cartoons. I wonder what those people would think of characters like Charlie from Biker Mice from Mars? She was a tough, no-nonsense girl working a blue collar job (motorcycle mechanic), and there were times when they wanted to ‘Damsel’ her but it turned out they didn’t. The funniest one for me was when an episode that starts out with a bank robbery, and the robbers claim they have a hostage, the Mice all go ‘Charlie?’ and then she shows up behind them and says ‘why do you always think I’m the hostage?’ You know who the hostage was? Greasepit… the villain’s main henchman and a certified dumbass.

    Every fucking time I go back to rewatch those cartoons I ALWAYS find elements that would make reactionaries go nuts. The pilot episode to M.A.S.K had the bad guys think that one of the protagonists trying to thwart their plans was a man… only for them to figure out quickly that it was a woman. Even shows that I would now consider to be really, really stupid, like Dinosaucers, had gender flipped characters. In Dinosaucers they were making a tribute episode to old-school Film noir detectives, and they had to meet ‘Sam Spade’ (Sam Spade was the protagonist of the Maltese Falcon), only for them to find out it was not Samuel Spade, but Samantha Spade.

    I could go on forever. But one thing that I DID want to say that I honestly did find problematic even as a child from cartoons of the era was what I would call ‘the love potion episode’. What I mean is that sometimes in some cartoons they would have an episode where a love potion or something or the other that causes a character to fall in love with another and cannot control it. So what’s the contradiction I found as a kid and more so as an adult?

    Well… if the person afflicted by the potion is female, the entire episode will center around it. Two examples is one from Dinosaucers were a female dinosaucer gets influenced by it and now is OK with wanting to marry the leader of the antagonists. One other example that was played more for laughs is in Gummi Bears when Duke Igthorn wanted to get Lady Bane to fall in love with him in order for him to gain access to her powers or something or the other to finally capture the Gummis… only problem? The person she falls in love with is Toady, Igthorn’s bumbling chief henchman, and the whole episode centers around getting Lady Bane to snap out of it.

    So that being said, one thing I DID notice is that sometimes the person being affected by a love potion or spell is a guy… and when that happens, the plot or the show doesn’t take it seriously at all and is usually a quick gag. The main example that comes to mind is from Conan the Adventurer where they have a quick scene where a very large, ogre-like woman is dragging a scrawny little man who is actively resisting her and she says ‘give him a love potion, I want to marry him!’ and the man protests, but the love potion is forced on him and he then he falls in love with the woman he detested and… well, that’s it. The episode continues and those two are never mentioned again. There are probably other examples, but that is all that comes to mind.

    Trust me when I say it, if these people ended up waking up 30 or 40 years ago and thinking ‘ah ha! finally! no more woke!’ they would be in for a rude awakening. Don’t get me wrong, there was a fuckload of problems with representation in the media at the time. Things like brownface/yellowface hadn’t fallen entirely out of style yet, and there were issues with female representation and racial stereotyping. MacGyver had those issues to an irritating degree, especially in the earlier seasons. Neurodivergent people weren’t well represented and in many cases not present at all. And don’t get me started on transgenderism. It is almost like at the time being transgender was a gag more than anything at best or a highly sinister trait at worst.

    • End-Stage-Ligma@lemmy.world
      20·
      2 days ago

      I recognized even back then that it wasn’t perfect, yet in many ways the culture of the 90s felt more progressive than today. And there was hope about the future.

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
        2·
        6 hours ago

        90s liberalism had its flaws (it often didn’t acknowledge systemic racism as we know it), but at that time most open racism had been thrown out of mainstream media, except for occasional spots on scandal shows like Jerry Springer.

        The very idea that racism would become open again like it is now was unthinkable. But they slowly and surely allowed it to come back.

        Racism on the internet always existed. Stormfront and various white nationalist sites sprung up almost immediately once the internet became mainstream in the mid-90s. From what I understand, the first ever site on Martin Luther King was literally a site smearing the man and calling him a fraud back in 1995.

    • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      10·
      2 days ago

      Okay but like some of the cartoons weren’t woke, like that one about the respectable businessmen fightong those eco terrorists and their heathen goddess of hating job creation.

    • TwinTitans@lemmy.world
      326·
      2 days ago

      It was tastefully done and minimal. It’s so over represented and in your face it comes off as forced.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1287·
    2 days ago

    Honestly, one of the worst things House did to the modern zeitgeist was to convince techbros that shoving ket up your nose 24/7 will make you smarter.

    • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
      29·
      2 days ago

      1. It was vicodin

      2. It didn’t make him smarter, it allowed him to think about something else besides the pain.

    • ceenote@lemmy.world
      103·
      2 days ago

      Wasn’t it vicodin abuse? All I remember them saying about ketamine was House saying it was a lame drug for being heroin without the high.

            • shneancy@lemmy.world
              7·
              2 days ago

              yeah but only because his leg didn’t hurt at all, so he wasn’t miserable. Non-miserable House didn’t make others miserable as much, which in his mind was bad because him being an ass made others better doctors. and since nothing mattered more than saving the puzzle, he didn’t want less than the best from his team

              so House in fact thought being nice made him dumber

        • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          I think at the end of s2 or start of s3 (or s1 and s2) he had a spinal injection of Ketamine that removed his pain, but it eventually came back.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        2 days ago

        Wasn’t it vicodin abuse?

        Yes, for the leg pain initially. Although, I thought for sure either he or one of his staff experimented with other drugs, including stimulants, for various reasons.

        I might just be confusing him with Sherlock Holmes, who was notorious for cocaine addiction.

        • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          Well for one episode he did try some risky drug that eliminated his pain completely, but he ended up stopping the use because it was extremely dangerous.

        • xorollo@leminal.space
          4·
          2 days ago

          I think the lady that had the degenerative disease did party drugs as she grappled with her diagnosis. I don’t remember names.

          • shneancy@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 days ago

            lmao very fitting because she was referred to as “13” for most of the show, i think her real name was Remy? she had Huntingtons

    • Apocalypteroid@lemmy.org
      18·
      2 days ago

      Last time I did ket I found myself lying on the front lawn of an LA suburban family home, in the rain, watching Mel Gibson choke out Gary Busey, but I definitely was not anymore intelligent from that encounter.

    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      40·
      2 days ago

      Bojack Horseman actually came out in the 90s. That’s why in the theme song it talks about running in th 90s. For more movie facts subscribe to my webzone.

    • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      2 days ago

      Idk but we need to tell more people that the early 2000s was hugely influenced by the I Love the 80s VH1 TV series which caused a resurgance of swing and is where we see some of the stuff like Mambo #5 and Christina Aguilera’s Candyman, please teach your children the lore

      • buttnugget@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 day ago

        No, your title makes more sense. People who grew up in the 90s would have watched House in its original run. The thing that makes no sense is the censoring of the word god.

    • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
      512·
      2 days ago

      2005 was essentially the 90s. People were still talking about the matrix, playing n64 and ps1, barely anyone had a mobile phone and most internet connections were still dial up.

      • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.worldEnglish
        222·
        2 days ago

        BS the 90s ended after 9/11 and 2005 is when people started using social media and YouTube…the beginning of the end.

        • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
          51·
          2 days ago

          That was 2006. Youtube came out december 15th 2005. Facebook became available to general public in september 2006.

          Look, hsres a graph

          2005 was roughly the end of the internet dark ages, but it was barely different to the 90s.

          • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
            71·
            2 days ago

            the end of the Internet dark ages

            That seems like a strangely backwards way to word it in my mind. Thats around the time the Internet stopped being “the internet” to me.

            • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
              2·
              1 day ago

              I see what you mean. Yeah, the internet was a better place back then.

              I was coming from more of a stance of the tech behind the internet.

              When someone could ruin my game of ultima online by picking up the phone.

              When niche message boards existed and msn messenger was how i spoke to my friends.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    411·
    2 days ago

    I’m not sure, but I think that in the 90s, those goddamn Nazis couldn’t express their despicable views publicly without being met with widespread contempt. So it seems to me that the 90s were much more “woke,” whatever that means.

    • Die Martin Die@sh.itjust.worksOP
      191·
      2 days ago

      I agree, but there’s a trend with some Millennials (and younger) boomerifying themselves and saying you could be a bigot or even a literal nazi with few or no consequences “back in the day”

    • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      My speculation: as long as there were significant numbers of WW2 vets around, an outright Nazi movement could never gain traction in the US. Not that the Greatest Generations was made up of paragons of social justice, but there were limits to what they were willing to tolerate in open society. That generation (and probably home front Silents, as well) was inoculated against going full Nazi in ways that Boomers weren’t.

      The few that remain now aren’t numerous enough to hold much sway.

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
    8·
    2 days ago

    Guys, House is woke now. Yeah, they made a meme in this thing called “Lemmy” that suggests it’s woke, so it’s woke now.