Well, At Least I'm Younger Than Them

I'm old.

There's much to write about these days. I could write about all the black people at the RNC, but that wouldn't be long. I could also write about how Dustin Pedroia has become the best player in baseball. I could even write bout the worthlessness of Fantasy Football, but happily, I feel the backlash to that idiotic activity these days. Like poker, it's not as big as it once was. I could also write about how I may be wrong about those fading Rays (but I'll be right, you'll see!) or shred the new Pacino/De Niro certain flop (it makes less than 10 million, I guarantee). Or I could discuss the awesomeness of this fall's live music scene. Or lament the fact that Heidi Whatney may be banging a big assed, flat topped, .210 hitting Jason Varitek.

But I couldn't get juiced up for any of those because I was busy feeling bad for myself because I realized I'm old. When did this realization come to fruition? When I made a reference to The Breakfast Club and a student of mine said it was "mad old."

Old? What? Are you kidding me? No way. In fact, I disagreed so wholeheartedly that I got really pissed. I spent the rest of the afternoon cursing the stupidity of today's youth and their non appreciation for all things great. I mean, could they turn off Gossip Girls, shut off their iPod, and get off of Facebook for a few seconds? Can't they appreciate all the greatness that has come before them because if they thought superbad Superbad was funny, then they know nothing! Funny was the eighties and nineties I tell ya! Funny was Marty McFly, Lloyd Christmas, Farley and Spade, Fletch (that's for you Hayes), Caddyshack (that's for you Wall), Animal House (Thornton), and The Big Lebowski (Mike). Those are (were?) funny! And by god so was (definitely WAS) The Breakfast Club!

But you know what? My new student was correct. The Breakfast Club is old. And to this young woman- who was born in 1992- The Breakfast Club is indeed, Mad Old. And once I thought about it, not only is it old, but it's not that good. How do I know this? Why, I watched it just five days ago.

While The Simple Minds are great, Principal Vernon is hilarious (I can't believe that I related to him the most!) and the general story of teens from all walks of life is a classic, the movie is far from funny. There are painfully dated lines (Barry Manilow's wardrobe), the "dramatic" parts aren't that dramatic and there's been a glut of recent high school films that surpass it (my binkie Napoleon, Mean Girls, Can't Hardly Wait to name three). And worst of all is Judd Nelson. He is virtually unwatchable and his tough guy of a character is so beyond outdated that it is hysterical (there just aren't "skids" anymore people).

And that got me to thinking. To this girl, this movie is ANCIENT. It came out a full seven years before she was born. That may as well make it Citizen Kane to her.

Think about the year you were born. For me, that was 1974. Now go back seven years from said birth year. That puts me at 1967.

In 1967, there was no baseball playoffs, just the World Series. There were no Walkmans, let alone iPods. U2 were just recently gametes. No one had heard of something as simple as Pong. The Cosby Show and Family Ties were decades away. Hell, even Jaws and it's comical mechanical shark was too futuristic (it arrived nine years later). And wikipedia was a word that would have got you put into special ed classes if you said it too often. Only there weren't special ed classes either. And heres a car from 1967:


I'd rather have a club foot than be seen driving in that piece.

On the pop culture scene, The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Bonnie and Clyde, and In The Heat of the Night were big films of that year. I've seen all four. $50 and a six pack pf PBR Talls wouldn't get me to sit through one of them right now.

Have you seen a television show from 1967? You probably have... For about five seconds because some of the shows that were on in 1967 were Hogan's Heroes, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Carol Burnett Show, and Beverly Hillbillies.

Those shows aren't good.

And it's not that they are not good because they are old, they are not good because they are not good. Just as, upon further review, The Breakfast Club is not good.

I frequently get in this argument with people, especially when it comes to music. Because a song or band is old and was an essential part of our youth, doesn't mean it was good. I bet the first time your older brother gave you Foreigner, 4 (add "Urgent" to the songs I immediately switch off), you loved it. Not so much because you liked the music , but more because you liked the fact that your brother was actually being nice to you and not giving you a charlie horse (or drowning you in the pool, right Molly and Mike?). But have you listened to it in comparison to the music that is out these days? These guys wouldn't open for Cold War Kids, let alone headline a tour in 2008.

Because if you can push aside for a few minutes all the nostalgia that comes with something old, you may realize that these movies, TV shows, songs, bands, cars, video game systems, and gadgets were just plain bad.

And so that young lady in my class doesn't hate The Breakfast Club strictly because it's old. She hates it because it's bad and unfunny. The actors are of no relevance to her and Don't You Forget About Me is a song she may or may not have heard covered on One Tree Hill. Instead of being the geek icon that he was in the 80s, to her Anthony Michael Hall is just some old dude that hasn't been in a relevant movie in twenty years (although he was seen pissing off a balcony in Entourage recently). Molly Ringwald is no one to her and Emilio Estevez? C'Mon. She probably knows his dad better from those re-runs of West Wing.

I wrote in a very early post that old TV shows on DVD should not be watched because they aren't good. The same can be said for all pieces of pop culture, not just TV shows. And while old isn't always bad ("So Lonely", Iggy Pop, 2001: A Space Odyssey, To Kill A Mockingbird, "Take Another Piece of My Heart", Monopoly), so much of what we loved is really, REALLY bad.

Take for instance Atari. I've had a habit of buying for Playstation old Atari games (just to give you a sense of the memory on those old school cartridges, you can get about fifty games on one Playstation CD-ROM) and you know what? They suck. There's a reason why people invented Intellivision, Colecovision, Nintendo, Sega, genesis, N64, Playstation, and XBox. Why? Because each of these were way better than their old, outdated, worthless predecessor!

And just as we understand that this is a GOOD thing when it comes to technology, we should also understand that it is a GOOD thing when it comes to entertainment too. Because while three guys slapping each other and poking one another's eyes may have been funny at some point in our lives, I'm certainly glad we progressed from that to Ferris Bueller's Day Off (still weathers time), to Pulp Fiction, to Napoleon Dynamite, to Flight of the Conchords.

But guess what? I like lots of old things, like Seinfeld. This past May marked the tenth anniversary of Seinfeld ENDING! Can you believe that? For anyone in high school, that Thursday night when no one got the button joke means absolutely nothing! Neither, frankly, does the return of 90210. Why? because to a teenager, Jennie Garth and Shannon Doherty are just two old beat chicks moving staggeringly close to cougar status. They are part of no current drinking games as they were to many of us in college and teenagers certainly have no idea what the phrase "Donna Martin graduates" means.

So the next time I make a Frank Constanze joke and it falls flat (as it did the other day), I need to realize that- in the words of good ole Constanza... It's not them, it's me.

I need to start making Gossip Girl references and instead of talking about the hotness of a now 43 year old Brad Pitt, I need to say how dreamy The Jonas Brothers are. I need to get it together because my circa 1997 jokes are really not good and you know why?

It's because I'm old.