Date: February 7th, 2020 11:39 AM Author: razzle athletic conference
Free month of Hulu and they have the whole series.
I was perfectly positioned in Gen X for the original airing to be a weekly event.
IM OLD: the original airing was a LOT closer to 1968 that it is to today. And relevant to XO tropes, it's startling to see an entirely white, homogenous Southern California. Suburbs where every mom stayed home. Fathers struggled with making money, but everyone owned their four bedroom and had two cars. None of that shocked in the late 80s, early 90s either. The only lib propaganda was satirized in dreary public school teachers making dramatic pronouncements about environmental degradation, which apparently is as old as the 60s.
If you're open to sentimentality and nostalgia, and I fucking am, it's still an amazing show, with even more effect given the background of how completely we lost the suburbs.
The production values are the second biggest shock: the film looks terrible and there are long pauses between dialogue, with no music filler, that modern tv would never allow for.
And despite the boomer porn, it wasnt nearly celebratory or exclusionary to Gen-X. That would come later.
This is from an episode I don't remember from the first go-round, in which Kevin quits piano lessons out of laziness. It's one of the few that ends with a truly bleak note:
Date: February 7th, 2020 11:42 AM Author: razzle athletic conference
they never resolved that. in-show references to long island and new york (kevin's famous jets jersey and fandom), but obv shot in socal, with the mountains and neversnow
Date: February 7th, 2020 11:42 AM Author: Aphrodisiac Up-to-no-good Point
Tried it. Doesn’t work. Too boring and a lot of the interest when we were younger was the “hope” that it gave us and that we had a lot of good things to look forward too. Now that we’re older and realize that life is miserable flame, it has no value.
Date: February 7th, 2020 11:54 AM Author: confused tanning salon
I remember one episode only. He has a job working for a crotchety old man in a hardware store and has a chance to learn valuable carpentry skills. But he quits to work in the mall because it's cooler and he can meet chicks. In the last scene the crotchety old man lets down the facade and pleads with him to stay, offers him a raise, but he leaves anyway.
remembering it makes me so angry at boomers i could spit
Date: July 8th, 2020 5:48 PM Author: Fighting base
as a prole from the sticks, this site sometimes blows me the fuck away. almost everyone here had so much more prestige than i did until at least grad school, but no one seems to have gotten a real cultural education and there's this sense of passivity about it, exactly like the jackass boomer kid in the show.
music lessons aren't free, but practicing is. foreign languages can be learned cheaply with textbooks from the library and duolingo and foreign radio stations. you can go on libgen for 5 minutes and have anything you want from world literature. you want to get good at math, you get some textbooks and annotate them and work through all the problems. adjusting for my local situation and the tech when i was a teenager, that's what i did, because i was sort of poor and extremely bored and i didn't want to be like the hicks and dorks i grew up around.
i think a big part of it is that doing this stuff doesn't actually make you prestigious; it won't directly help you to get a shiny resume for ivy UG or swing a swanky job after graduation. but the prestige ladder is leading more and more to bluecheck hellscapes and an elite that can't actually fucking do anything except status-jockey, spend down their trust funds and tweet about black trans lives.
maybe prestige is bullshit and we should just learn to do hard things. that's how you don't forget how to play pachelbel.
It's impossible for me to watch Wonder Years because we have already been saturated with so many boomer nostalgia films and TV shows that I react with illness towards anything in this genre I see. Perhaps this was not true at the time Wonder Years was on TV but it is true with any attempt to watch it now.
Date: February 7th, 2020 12:11 PM Author: razzle athletic conference
fair criticism. fwiw, I think the adult boomer narration does something delicate though. It didnt feel, at the time, like he was talking to other 45yo boomers, it felt like he was talking to current 13yos watching. There were no digs at "kids nowadays dont know X", and if anything the idea was the elites who hold power are always blowhards who fail to understand the real lives of adolescent white kids in the suburbs. Its made explicit in the first and last episodes.
I also can't watch "Freaks and Geeks" because I have similarly been saturated with so many films and TV series about how hard it is to fit in during high school (especially high school in the 1990's). I understand that, similarly, this was not really the case when Freaks and Geeks first came out. Both of these shows, I was too young to be watching them when they first came out and saw them later on Netflix.
So many things in Wonder Years and Freaks and Geeks are now well-worn tropes that I'm sick of seeing.
not a wonder years scholar, but i think freaks and geeks was a knowing exploration of well-worn tropes and expertly reused them in a way that underscored their universality.
Date: February 7th, 2020 12:23 PM Author: Exhilarant Digit Ratio
Remember the episode with the tough math teacher who is pushing Kevin to do his best, and then Kevin purposely fails the test with joke answers? The teacher died over the weekend but didn't grade Kevin's test and the principal gave it to him as a second chance. Kevin finishes and tells the principal that he doesn't have to grade it, because it's an A.
I remember 2 episodes. One, where they go to the shore and stay in a shoddy motel, and dad complains about how expensive it is and there is a feeling that they are chasing a dream vacation that they cannot recreate.
The second episode I remember is the same theme, but they’re trying to recreate a fishing trip, and they drive up to some pond that has become littered with refuse and is now polluted and stagnant.
Date: July 8th, 2020 3:22 PM Author: Exhilarant Digit Ratio
he eventually got it. that's part of growing up. you look at all these famous people and think they are heroes, when in reality the real hero is the man at home
this is a great clip from the show. one of its best scenes
Date: February 7th, 2020 2:52 PM Author: Dead nudist dilemma
I think about that episode a lot. IIRC there's a scene where the piano teacher tells Kevin he feels the music like it's in his heart even if he's not technically playing well. Whether she was bullshitting him is irrelevant. Kids need that kind of encouragement and the feeling that someone believes in them. Ultimately there is the let down when Kevin bails on the recital and rides by to peek in. It just reminds me of all the things i missed out on because i was afraid to try or afraid that i'd fail, and now it's just too late.
The quote from the beginning of the episode is something i think about a lot too:
When you're a little kid, you're a little bit of everything. Artist, scientist, athlete, scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is a process of giving those things up one by one. I guess we all have one thing that we regret giving up, one thing that we really miss, that we gave up because we were too lazy or we couldn't stick it out… or because we were afraid.
Date: February 7th, 2020 2:58 PM Author: razzle athletic conference
yeah its fraud that most of us arent practicing piano or getting better at high dives or something. Last summer I posted after dropping my kid off at a summer camp at the U Miami campus. Around 7AM there was some dude out there, doing high dive after high dive, practicing, getting better. Probably woke up at the fucking crack of dawn to get to the pool
Date: February 7th, 2020 3:02 PM Author: Indecent bespoke site dopamine
freaks and geeks gives you the same kind of flashback value and is a lot more reflective on a moment to moment basis of what real life is like. also funnier. i recommend rewatching that instead.
Date: February 7th, 2020 7:54 PM Author: bonkers startling church
I remember going out with a 24 year old chick a few years ago (I was a little older) and she didn't even know what Boy Meets World was, let alone the Wonder Years. It was at that moment that I realized a few interesting things.
First, that Savage brothers were responsible for the two definitive coming of age series' of the 80s and 90s, which is pretty incredible. Second, I don't think any show after Boy Meets World captured the level of magic it and the Wonder Years had, so younger millenials onward pretty much only had/have garbage TV with no appreciation for what it was like growing up in pre-9/11 America. Third, there is this sort of cliff of people born around 1993 and after where they don't know or care about nostalgic shit in the 80s and 90s - shows like Wonder Years and Boy Meets World, icons like Sylvestor Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme, etc.
So when I try to think back to that time, I remember ABC's TGIF night. It had like Family Matters and Step By Step. But I don't remember The Wonder Years or Boy Meets World being on that. Was it? I remember the shows, I just don't remember the full TGIF lineup.
Date: February 11th, 2020 10:48 AM Author: razzle athletic conference
WY was a wednesday 8PM show. the anchor of the night, but a step less prestigious than thursday night, and apart from the kiddie shit that aired friday night for babysitting