For the past several years now, we’ve catalogued various cultural phenomena under the umbrella heading Ground Zero. Whether in movies, comic books, or anime, it’s well-documented that consumers could no longer expect new iterations of popular IPs to improve on their predecessors, starting in 1997.
Nor did Ground Zero happen all at once; it was a decade-long process of sporadic decay that culminated with video games after 2007.
Yet new data points keep emerging in support of Cultural Ground Zero as online commenters increasingly notice the aesthetic exhaustion that fist struck in 1997.
The latest instance of a prominent cultural noticer observing the Ground Zero effect came to my attention just the other day.
Meet the Report of the Week, aka Reviewbrah.
In the course of a career spanning fourteen years, Reviewbrah has tasted and critiqued more fast food than perhaps any other human being in history. So it’s no hyperbole to call him the most trusted man on YouTube.
Recently, Reviewbrah produced reviews of Taco Bell’s new Decades Menu. For those who are unaware, the Mex-American restaurant chain has rolled out a special menu which reintroduces five popular items, each from a past decade.
Because Taco Bell’s release of the aughts item was, as is par for the course, delayed, Reviewbrah separated his analysis of the Decades Menu into two videos.
See him review the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s items here:
And the aughts item here:
Upon watching both videos, it occurred to me that within them, Reviewbrah discovers Food Ground Zero.
For those keeping score at home, here are Reviewbrah’s ratings for each menu item, arranged by decade:
Related: Ground Zero
The results are unmistakble. And they reflect the larger cultural trends prevalent in America during those decades.
A downturn in the 1960s hits a nadir in the 70s, only to make a dramatic recovery throughout the 80s to a high point in the 90s. After that, it’s pretty much back to the doldrums of the 1970s–the decade taste forgot.
Which is where we remain stuck to this day.
But never fear. New generations of creators inspired by the high culture of the 80s and 90s, and informed by the rich traditions of the pulp era, are working hard to break the Ground Zero barrier.
And we’re taking you with us.
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I can only only speculate on this as a child of the 90’s, but it seemed like there was a noticeable rush in commerce to get ready for my generation’s entry into the marketplace. I vaguely remember that people were always talking about what could be sold to Millennials once they were old enough to have a job and start spending money. Lots of subtle changes were made to appeal to us when we were early teens. I have to wonder if the downward spiral was the market trying to sell to a generation they didn’t understand. I think it could be related to the miscategorization of my generation, made recently evident from the election, where we had been mixed in with Gen Y. Lots of money was wasted on a failed attempt to bankroll the largest generation since the Boomers. This idea is only reinforced by my time at Pizza Hut from 2015 – 2016 when they rebranded and explicitly stated it as to attract Millennials. Needless to say, that rebranding failed, the new ingredients didn’t last but a few years. They tried to be “cool and modern” but fell flat on their face. I think that backlash is why PH is now trying to go back to their classical look and reclaim their identity.
It feels like on the surface we had an economy wide abandoning of the core customer base to chase a new demographic and it broke entire industries. Not saying this is the be all end all explanation, but I’d imagine it was a facet of the problem. You could chalk it up to my generation being groomed to take over because we were hyped up as “the future” of this world.
Marketers are in crisis now because they found a golden goose in using TV to sell to Boomers. That one dynamic drove the explosive growth of every capitalist enterprise from the 60s to the 90s, whether it’s McDonald’s, Star Wars, VHS players, etc. Many presume that companies shifted their marketing efforts to Gens X and Y in the 80s, but they were still targeting those generations’ parents, the Boomers.
As alluded to yesterday, McDonald’s didn’t air commercials during Saturday morning cartoons so Gen Y kids would go to the restaurants and spend money. Kids don’t have money. The purpose of those ads was to make kids bug their parents into spending money.
Fast forward to Ground Zero: Xers and Ys have neither kids nor any money for kids to pester them into spending. So like you said, Madison Ave. tried selling direct to Millennials, the next biggest cohort. The problem is, they only know how to sell to Boomers. Plus, Millennials are also broke.
Tl; dr: The marketing paradigm that made everybody rich in the late 20th century is over. And marketers are still waking up to that fact.
The Millennials being broke is such a funny thing. A lot of businesses which cater to or have tried to cater to Millennials are stupid expensive. Gone are the days of combo meals, you now pay for every little thing.
Who remembers when appetizers were about the price of a side? Now they’re priced like entrees. Want fries and a drink? You just doubled your ticket price. It’s not efficient pricing, but it is effective.
On one hand, people presume Millennials don’t have money to begin with, which is correct, but on the other hand, they don’t have money because basic needs are so expensive.
” A lot of businesses which cater to or have tried to cater to Millennials are stupid expensive.”
To the extent that corporations are treating Millennials like trust fund Boomers, this makes sense. The new Jaguar commercials and comical lack of design in their cars is about an aesthetic I dislike intensely coming off of the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s.
The pop culture channels I watch were laughing at the degeneracy and pointlessness of the commercial. (I tend to listen to them as podcast.) When finally watched the commercial, I realized it was just a throw back to TV in the 1970’s. It’s only that Jaguar in particular was about the James Bond branding, which made it look so garish.
Honestly, I get why people from the WWII generation looked at TV and culture in the 1960’s and were vaguely horrified.
Millennials: We have no money.
Marketers: But surely, you’ll be getting all your Boomer parent’s money from inheritance to buy all our stuff, right?
Millennials: *stares silently*
Marketers: . . . Right?
I always knew things got worse in the 2000s, but nobody believed me until years later. It really was a step down in just about every way on everything.
Now you know how Cassandra felt.
Speaking as someone born in the 2000’s, the only affinity I have with anything from that decade can be largely boiled down to “it’s something I watched during childhood” and that’s about it. Looking at it now as an adult, I find everything from that time period to just be profoundly ugly in almost every way.
Just as an example, I sometimes catch my mom watching crime dramas from that period, and it’s almost always the same type of protagonists engaging in cheap cynical and nihilistic banter, in-between pointlessly nasty conversations that always sound like everyone’s ready to wrap their hands around each other’s throats. Combine this with graphic nudity & sex (looking at you, Homeland), and at that point, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with such a show.
The absolute best evidence for Cultural Ground Zero to me is the following: when you talk with most people about the 80’s and 90’s, the topics that come to mind are virtually always cultural stuff like games and movies, despite the fact that you had events like the Beirut Bombing and of course things like Waco and Oklahoma City.
What do people remember once you get to the 00s and beyond? Always the political events, with virtually nothing said about anything cultural, which is a shift that could only have come about because of cultural stagnation and decline…
Your firsthand testimony supports JD’s prediction that there will be no aughts nostalgia movement.
The cultural products of the 00s really were bad. We’ve gone over a lot of them, but a lot of people didn’t want to admit it because they were still convinced in the myth of progress and blindly believed things HAD to get better or there was something wrong with you.
I don’t know at what point that illusion was shattered, but I think when the ’10s ended up being more of the same everyone had to admit the truth that things had stagnated.
That’s all well and good, but we’re halfway through the ’20s now. It’s time to finally leave the dead weight behind.
Playing Devil’s advocate, the one counter argument I hear against Cultural Ground Zero is “But good product X, Y, and Z came out in the 2000s!”
And to steel man that argument, I can say that my all-time favorite anime series, one of my favorite rock albums, and the Jackson LotR movies came out in the aughts.
But all that just goes to show that exceptions prove rules. The follow ups to each of those products have disappointed, and the general quality of pop culture was objectively higher in the 90s.
Yes, arguments about specific products just don’t work when it comes to the 00’s. I could easily counter by saying that every single one of the major franchises in the 2000’s (LotR, Transformers, Harry Potter…) was based on exisiting works. Not one of them was something original.
The only thing that might come close for me is Pirates of the Carribean, which used the ride it’s based off of more as dressing whilst the plot and characters themselves are more inspired by various pirate stories & myths.
2000’s nostalgia is going to be internet based. There was something special about the internet in the 00’s. The internet in the 80’s and 90’s was great too, but severely limited. The main difference with the 00’s is that internet speeds got high enough to the point where people could easily share artwork, music and especially flash animations. This also allowed a lot of creativity in web design, with many websites intentionally designed as an experience that could not be replicated in any other medium. This time also overlaps with the golden age of PC gaming (about 1996-2004).
This type of internet died out circa 2007 with the smart phone revolution. The internet got more and more homogenized and more and more focused on simple sites that could be used on a smart phone.
But internet nostalgia will never translate into mainstream nostalgia for two reasons:
1.) The people on the internet (for things other than e-commerce, e-mail and basic use of references) pre-2007 were necessarily non-normies. Mainstream nostalgia needs a normie component.
2.) Internet history has been very poorly documented, and in some cases is being actively erased. It’s a “you had to be there” thing and most people weren’t there.
Here is where I bow to the generation gap and admit I don’t get internet nostalgia. Since my formative years took place in the analog world, I still think of the net as a research and business tool. So nostalgia for the internet of the aughts makes no more sense to me than nostalgia for a discontinued line of toasters.
There are Millennial channels on YouTube that seek to document the Wild West Internet that defined the ’00s (the only thing that defined it), but once YouTube falls, which is inevitable, all of that is going to disappear.
It looks like the all-digital future we were sold when the analog era faded is going to be an utter disaster. I’d say to prepare accordingly, but given that a lot of people still trust streaming services I don’t know if it can be done. Regardless, I’m trying to preserve what I can when I can.
The good news is that much of the late 90’s/early 00’s internet could be preserved nearly perfectly. Rather than relying on a series of external services, most sites simply served up HTML pages with images and flash files. Get those files and put them in the proper directory structure, and you’ve got the site. Obviously this can’t simulate active message boards and whatnot, but a good chunk of that era of the net could be preserved, and some of it has been preserved.
Now we can preserve videos, music and images that people post, but not much else. This is also much more space intensive than older preservation, but then again external hard drives are pretty cheap compared to previous eras.
Low-hanging fruit here, but a big part of Food Ground Zero was probably the switch from cooking things in beef tallow to seed oils. Notable case in point: fast food french fries.
The seed oils are way more unhealthy, but far more profitable, and it was sold to the public with all the hubbub about “cholesterol,” “low fat,” and “heart-healthy” foods. I remember hearing about this all the time when I was a kid, with the big push for that nasty Olestra stuff that completely flopped.
There’s no question about it.