Last night I watched an episode of the 1950's Spider-Man show. It was being rerun late at night on Teletoon (the Canadian cartoon channel) for some bizarre reason. I can almost say that it is the worst show that I have ever seen in my whole life.

The story wasn't even intelligible. Spider-Man spent most of his time swinging in a still pose that slid across the screen in front of abstract colors. Visually, it looked terrible in every way, from bad drawings to recycling the same drawings whenever possible. It looked like a group of guys had drawn a handful of bad pictures of spiderman and tried to piece together an episode from that in a weekend.


People sometimes lament about how good culture used to be. Parents are especially guilty of this, when their kids listen to crappy pop music, watch terrible action movies in theaters or something like Pokemon on TV. The kids grow up believing it on a certain level, although they usually don't care.

But their parents weren't watching Casablanca every weekend, they were watching Space Invaders from the Dark Planet or some other drivel. Every concert they went to wasn't The Beatles or Bob Dylan.

The apparent decline of culture is simply explained: Only the cream of the crop still exists. Everything else has sunken into obscurity and disappeared. Most of every generation's music, movies, and books have been crap, but only what's stood the test of time remains, and it isn't an easy test.

The 90's won't be remembered for TLC, Ace of Base, or the New Kids on the Block. In fact, many of those are hard to remember now. Nor will it be remembered by films like Anaconda or Godzilla, it'll be remembered by films like The Shawshank Redemption or American Beauty. Hercules will not define the state of animated films in the 90s, The Lion King will.

There are still good and innovative movies being made, music being performed, animation being done, books being written. You have to dig a little to find it, but that isn't new, it's always been that way.

Nostalgia is a waste of time.

If I've insulted a band or movie you like here I'm sorry. They were arbitrarily picked based on popular opinion.

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