Why do people love the ‘90s so much?

Absolutely.

I am certain that what has been fashionable has changed more than once or twice around. Currently, I believe we're in an 80s kick. We're doing reboots of Halloween (and, yes, the 90s franchise Scream, but I would argue Scream itself plays off nostalgia for 80s slashers), Blade Runner, Alien, and Stranger Things is playing off a lot of Elm Street (and other 80s series'). I believe nostalgia in and of itself is just "in" at the moment, but I think we pull most of all from the 80s. We have a Flash movie coming out that's playing off Tim Burton's Batman.

I wonder what things will look like in the next twenty-something years. They're rebooting Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and we saw a new Spider-Man movie that heavily played off the 2000s Spider-Man, so we are already starting to see a changing of the guard, so to speak.

I dont notice many people getting romantic over the 90s. Compared to the 80s the 90s were more chill and negative. Those good vibes were gone and now Batman took over and all the popculturites were playing cold war. The 80s were more to your face and confrontational, a continuation of the 70s, the beginning of the digital age. Pictures were sharper, computers made leaps and bounds, the party life ruled. The 90s were darker and more evil, at least the way I remember it. People were more devious and indirect. In movies it was less glamor and less oversimplifying but then when the 2000s hit great movies were becoming less frequent as society decayed. Now we got... not much to get excited about in that natural progression of entropy. But I think its fair to say the 70s and 80s are closer to each other than the 80s and 90s, moviewise and popculturewise.

I'm liking older cinema more as I watch more of those movies, it seems like less of a gamble to pick up something from the 60s or 50s because even when those movies were flops they were still entertaining.

I remember in the late 1980s everything seemed to be the mid 1960s. In the mid 1970s I remember the 1950s were quite popular. In the 1960s there was a huge interest in the roaring 1920s with odes to silent film comedies (though I was too young to know that at the time).

Don't know today if anyone is nostalgic or not? If so it's probably about old phones and old game playing stations I guess everything becomes popular again but I sure wish shredded jeans would go out of style

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This is also true. I remember in the 90's some people saying the majority of the movies being made were garbage with an increasing pandering toward political correctness (same types of things people say today). And that movies then weren't of the quality that movies used to be, etc.

Some criticisms will remain virtually the same despite the generation. I remember I had a sociology book in college which very poignantly made this point... At the beginning of one chapter was a quote that sounded like an adult criticizing the youth of the time (it sounded very much like criticism by the post WWII generation of the hippie generation)... then it showed that the quote was from an ancient Greek sometime in the B.C. era!

I like to watch those YouTube videos where today's young people try to figure out how to use a rotary phone!

When I was a kid, our phone was on a party line - so we had to check to see if our neighbors across the street were on the phone before attempting to make a call!

But one good thing about our old "landlines" is the phone didn't depend on electricity - from the main power line anyway - or from batteries. The dedicated telephone line carried its own charge to send & receive audio signals. So when the power went out - which was a much more regular occurrence when I was a kid, practically during every big thunderstorm - the phones kept working!

On the other hand, we can reduce all of history to a false equivalence if we say, "Well, people have always been complaining." Sometimes the old-timers have it right. History runs in cycles and great civilizations tend to run into decadence, decay, and inevitable decline.



Complaints recur, but sometimes the complaint is on the money, and we should consider the frequency and intensity of the complaints to see it, at least from the point of view of the complainants, that something really is amiss (and the complaints not just being the record of the handful of old fools who will make the same old complaints no matter what).

You should see a YouTube video of me trying to figure out how to use my wife's mobile phone I'd make those kids trying to use a rotary phone look like rocket scientist compared to all-thumbs me

Yeah, it's just a part of the generational cycle of nostalgia, like Lindsay Ellis talked about here:

Ah wow this makes me feel old. As a Gen-X kid I'm biased but I think it was a solid decade for serious movie fans. Lots of auteur guys like Tarantino, Lynch, the Cohens, Scorsese, etc were making some of their finest films. I never much liked the vibe of the 80's, so the 90's counterculture punch resonates with me. Also, it was like a foundational decade for Americans discovering anime.


But like others have said, the big vibe that's hard to explain to younger folks was America being a more chill place before the wave of 9/11 paranoia, the endless terror war, and etc.

'Somehow, the allure of a fictionalized past, a golden age, etc, is always appealing. Life was better than, before all of the sh*t hit the fan when something _______ happened. The further back it gets, the more the lens grows cloudy.

When I was a kid, I recall old folks talking about how life was more meaningful, carefree, etc, in the 1940's, the decade that brought them World War II, the nazis, red scares, the cold war, Peal Harbor, the holocaust and the bomb. Some older folks spoke nostalgically about the 1930's, the era of the great depression.

My guess is that, if you survive things like that, your brain saves you from realizing how many times the bear almost ate you, so that the WW II era was really about Glenn Miller and big band music.

Basically, around 20 years is nostalgia and around 50 years is the golden era. Doesn't really matter when. People researching this stuff find it going back all the way to the 1700's and 1800's. As an example, A Christmas Carol was Dickens ode to those long lost childhood Christmas', before they became too commercialised and that was published in 1843.

Or it could be that, like the 70's, the 90's was the best time for music and film of the C20th.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

I think a large part of it is just belonging. Even if it was awful, it was yours. As we age, many of us become like vampires in Anne Rice novels, out of step with the times. It's a difficult thing to find yourself increasingly alienated from your own culture. We die and the world simply moves on with out us. Those who live long also die, but they may also get to see the world move on without them while they're still drawing breath.

I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, but most of my nostalgia is for the 80’s.
The 70’s and 60’s are my favorite decades. Followed by the 80’s.

I largely agree with this. Ususally when the question is something along the lines of 'why were things better in X?' the answer is because you were young. Being young is better than being old and, add in the lack of experience and not knowing any different and how could it be otherwise?

Nostalgia, probably.

Good times.