Thoughts on re-watching "The Wonder Years"

Date: February 7th, 2020 11:39 AM
Author: Sticky, and still cleaning up the mess!

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbk4FrVf08A

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4440198&forum_id=2#39557447)