Glance around online, and you see more and more people discussing the besetting vices of Generation Y.
Oh, a lot of them are swallowing the revisionist psyop that’s dialed back the start of the Millennial generation to 1979 or earlier, so they use the term “Millennial.” But when you’re ragging on people who wax nostalgic about Saturday morning cartoons, Street Fighter 2, or Guns N’ Roses, you are talking about people whose formative years occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, not the turn of the millennium.
Labels aside, the pathological nostalgia is real. So people wising up to the Popcultishness of Gen Y – by any other name – and calling it out is a positive development.
Because every big franchise that dominated pop culture in the 80s and 90s has long since succumbed to the Corporate IP Death Cycle. Gen Y’s beloved childhood brands are now skinsuits whose purpose is to fleece them at best and propagandize everyone first and foremost.
But so much money is still tied up in these zombie brands that the emerging counterculture will be fighting an uphill battle until consumers stop paying companies that hate them.
Which it’s in everyone’s best interests to do, if only to help beat inflation.
Few manifestations of Gen Y nostalgia reach the same level of morbidity as their pining for Blockbuster Video.
In case you forgot, Blockbuster Entertainment was a corporate leviathan that became a near-monopoly by making sweetheart deals with distributors and embracing shady business practices to put smaller video stores out of business.
If any aspect of the video rental market deserves to elicit a nostalgia pang, it’s the local chains nestled into strip malls, the Mom & Pop stores on Main Street, and the small retailers that devoted a corner of their floor space to renting out tapes and NES games in the 1980s. Not a soulless megacorp.
Maybe you could argue the beast that killed and replaced Blockbuster is more evil. And you’d be right. But even though Blockbuster embodied the 80s Mammon type of evil instead of the Current Year Moloch variety, we’re still well rid of them, and the best outcome would be for both them and Netflix to join each other in oblivion.
That said, the odious rise and belated fall of Blockbuster does serve a useful purpose.
It tracks almost exactly with the flowering and withering of late 20th century pop culture.
Watch this pictorial trip down memory lane:
“Hang out a minute,” I hear you saying. “Blockbuster kept growing until 2005. That’s almost a decade after Cultural Ground Zero!”
And I would reply that yes, the total number of Blockbuster stores nationwide started dwindling then. But that was a symptom of the decline that had set in long before.
As usual, Danny DeVito explains …
The “Getting an increasing share of a shrinking market” stage is what the Blockbuster Video … video shows happening from 1998 to 2005.
After that, it’s down the tubes – slow at first, then all at once.
Is the fall of Blockbuster a bellwether for the fate awaiting its Death Cult streaming successors?
Only time will tell.
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