Wherein author JD Cowan points out that cracks were showing in the pleasure dome the Boomers built to pacify their kids years before it collapsed.
This summer of 1995, however, had felt somewhat off. Ray couldn’t put his finger on why. This movie continued that oddly detached feeling he had stuck in the back of his head. Why wasn’t it the way it was supposed to be?
Batman Forever was fine, he supposed, but there was a piece missing from the picture. He’d still rent it when Ultratech Video II got it on the shelves in a few months, certainly. It just . . . wasn’t that good. Of course it wouldn’t ruin his fifth grade summer vacation, nothing could, but he expected better. Summer was supposed to be perfect. That was just the way it was and always had to be. There was no sense wasting time thinking about things—that was for school. And school was over.
While the High 90s do represent the last hurrah of Western pop culture before Ground Zero devastated most of the entertainment industry, JD accurately identifies areas where the rot set in early. The source material for cape flicks was already stagnant by the early 90s, before Marvel’s 1996 bankruptcy left comics a narrative wasteland.
Ray looked at his three friends and thought for a moment. There was already a mistake here. “How come you didn’t say Mortal Kombat 3 instead? It just came out, right?”
“Are you kidding?” George said. Ray’s shorter friend pushed up the scuffed glasses on his nose and sighed. His freckles and red hair always made him look like he had just fallen into a dirt pile. “You know why, Ray. MK3 blows. The new characters and stages are so lame. It doesn’t do anything new. They barely even tried. Midway didn’t even put in Scorpion!”
“No new girls on the level of Mileena or Kitana, either,” Andrew mused. The tallest boy laughed as he looked upon his three friends. “No idea what they were thinking with that one. The editor in that one letter column in ProGamer Monthly called us ingrates for not liking it. Feels weird that they didn’t get it. I thought everyone got how much of a letdown that one was.”
Again, the decline hit different sectors of different industries at different speeds–classic JRPGs still had one year left, and PC gaming had 10. But the seeds of gaming’s downfall, even the corruption of the gaming press, had already been planted.
“That’s just it, guys!” Ray said. He couldn’t figure out why exasperation nipped at him so hard, but he knew he was close to figuring it out. “Something’s been off this year, don’t you think? Usually things get better, right? Super Nintendo, Terminator 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the next season of The Simpsons . . . my Dad always tells me that’s how it always was when he was growing up. We’re always getting better …”
Hindsight is 20/20. The signs of imminent collapse are easy to see in retrospect.
Why couldn’t we see it coming? Ray’s last sentence offers a big hint. Every cultural institution from the media to academia was pushing the Liberal myth of progress, and had been for a long time. They still are today, despite the increasingly obvious descent into Clown World.
JD’s tale poses the chilling question: If we couldn’t see Pop Culture Ground Zero coming in 1995 despite the clear warning signs, what red flags are waving right in front of our eyes right now that we don’t want to see?
The Panorama Agents. Ray remembered those harsh abrasive sounds with unbelievably angry lyrics that sounded like how Ray imagined everyone in high school talked like. Aggressive music for hopeless people who hated the very idea of the future. They all just sounded so depressed. Didn’t they know how great the future was going to be?
Read the rest of his post for hints at an answer.
And read the new title that makes sci fi anthologies fun again:
