I thought I'd make a page that's a bit unusual here. Nostalgic gets clicks, it gets sales. But everything wasn't that great in the past either. This page serves as a bit of a reality check.
  • Car windows. You had to actually physically crank that fucker up and down. Sometimes, back windows in cars would pop outward. It was weird. It was ass.
  • Everyone smoked. Everyone. If you had asthma, grown adults would intentionally blow smoke in your face for having the audacity to ask them to not smoke near you or roll down a window. If you were in a car with the windows down and even brought it up, there was good odds at least one smoker in the car would immediately roll up their window in an attempt to increase how much smoke was around you. This would be followed up with "it's worse for me than for you, I'm more likely to get cancer from this", as if risking every single person in the car getting cancer was somehow okay so long as they kicked the bucket first I guess. Adults all smelled like cigarettes all day long. You could tell which of your teachers smoked because they smelled awful. All the lunch ladies smoked. At least one bathroom for each gender at school would be filled with cigarette smoke most of the time from kids smoking and teachers who blamed it on kids. Going to a restaurant with a no smoking section? Haha, you're not sitting there. Your smoking parents will not skip smoking during dinner. I don't recall ever seeing kids in the no smoking section. I'm sure some parents actually took them, but it was usually couples or single people. 80s and 90s parents loved to increase their kids odds of lung cancer and having asthma. This started to peeter out around the mid-00s, mostly due to legislation, not less shitty parents.
  • *dial-up noises for 15 minutes* Finally, I'm online. *your mom picks up the phone to talk to a telemarketer even though you have caller ID*
  • Uh oh. Mom opened the wrong email. Here comes a worm to eat every single thing on the computer! Better hope your most recent saves are backed up on one of your forty floppy disks.
  • It will take you roughly one hour to download one Inuyasha ED song.
  • Scanlation ass translation or wait a few years for the manga to finally catch up to Japan...oh never mind, Tokyopop is just gonna leave that one there in limbo forever. Buy Peach Fuzz and Dramacon today! Well, there's always Viz and their flipped, censored books instead with equally questionable translations. Let's fuck up everyone's easy to translate names. Who the fuck okayed "Jizabel"? How hard is it to spell Jezebel, guys? Favorite censorship type: when random Christian symbolism in manga is removed because what if it would offend a Christian.
  • Mondo Cool. I'm not elaborating.
  • This anime needs to hide that it takes place in Japan. Quick, come up with character names that sound like they're out of Captain Planet! Flip the video! We can't have the kids know cars drive in different directions in other countries! What will happen if they find that out? CHAOS!
  • Tail Spin getting canceled on a cliffhanger episode because parents thought it was too scary for kids. (No actual kids were complaining.)
  • SWAT Kats being canceled because it's too violent and not because it's written by absolutely constantly horny furries who are supposed to be writing a kids show.
  • Justin Timberlake's ramen noodle hair and whatever that cursed short, front spikey hairstyle that all the douchey boys had. The eldest Brother's Gracia haircut.
  • Liking a show that has appeal to most kids/teens. Network cancels because too many girls watched. Too many being if show reached 50% female viewership. Even if it was originally pitched as a girls show so the 50% boys is actually kind of surprising. Not enough boys.
  • When Steve Irwin died, so much animal-related television shifted to being about how scary, vicious, and deadly a lot of animals are and a lot of wholesome or education stuff started to get pushed out. I also remember some "think pieces" about how "weird" it was that Terry Irwin wasn't performing "sadness" correctly in interviews after Steve's death.
  • Honestly, a lot of mainstream media seemed to hate Steve Irwin. He was popular with actual people, but companies didn't like him. Now that I'm older, I wonder if it was in part because he suggested a method of dealing with "pest" animals not by killing, but by relocation and promoted not being terrified of wild animals. You know, living in harmony with animals, because we share the same planet. We're not more "entitled" to it than animals are. Wendigos hate messaging like that. The media would go out of their way to try to make whatever Steve was doing look much more dangerous than it really was too. I also remember a lot of people online wanting to know Bindi's reaction to her father dying. Bindi was eight.
  • Rape jokes in everything. Rape jokes about man on woman, woman on man, man on man, woman on woman, woman on boy, all of it. Sometimes, in kids shows. A lot of internet humor was also around rape, from shit that would be on Newgrounds to anime fandom creepiness.
  • Yaoi paddles.
  • Ordering online was a crapshoot. In the early days, every single purchase at any site was always a gamble. I definitely recall a few sites being infamous for never shipping anyone anything, and they stayed open for years. Because no one did anything about that back then.
  • The anime section at Blockbuster would often have nothing rated and sometimes you didn't even have the case art to go by. You were just really hoping you didn't rent hentai for your sleepover. Yes, they'd just have the hentai mixed in with Pokemon and Duel Masters. Kite was always there. Which version? Who knows.
  • Blockbusters and movie rental places in general didn't get many new tapes in often. Actually new stuff was usually hard to come by because it'd been constantly rented out for a while and they'd never have enough copies for the demand.
  • Those crazy prints you see on faux retro clothes and accessories these days would've never been on those items back then. A lot of what people are putting on clothes are carpet or wallpaper patterns you'd see in some theaters or arcades. Houses were pretty dull. Everything was wood and from the 70s or early 80s. Not all malls were that "loud" in design either. Most weren't. Some of the other "retro" patterns people get faux nostalgia over are really just corporate stuff. And I mean, some of it did look nice. But people at the time would've seen it for what it is, corporate "art".
  • So much pop music that was made simultaneously for little girls and pedos. It was an openly pro-pedo time in music, film, and TV. You could have characters that were forty dating 16 year olds on family entertainment because the creeps in Hollywood didn't even bother hiding that shit anymore.
  • So many people with EDs.
  • Final Fantasy House. I actually remember when the LJ stuff was freshly posted.
  • It was common on LJ for people to fake having babies, fake babies dying, then fake their own deaths. Faking illnesses and race was also common. The former usually involved a grift of some kind. The latter sometimes did.
  • A lot of teens and adult women in the 90s wanted to have flat butts. Having a big ass meant you were "fat" even if you were thin everywhere else. This was mostly for women, but there wasn't much in the way of nice asses on men in that era either. Just pancake butts everywhere. A Hank Hill era.
  • This is around when you really see schools ramping up re-segregation policies via re-districting that makes the most ridiculous gerrymandered voting districts look tame, "school choice", and more private schools.
  • Mainstream news had already turned to shit. Local news was still good in this time period though, but local news begins to degrade once we're getting close to the 10s. Newspapers are dying out. Magazines start dying out. Some switch to digital, immediately lose all quality, and then die online.
  • Some boys shot up a school! Time to ban trenchcoats! That'll solve all the problems.
  • Satanic Panic that never really went away. Sigh...You might even have to be see a "documentary" or a powerpoint about Satanic ritual sacrifices at your pulic high school. You gotta get permission to watch Harry Potter (frollomeme.png) and Jurassic Park (evolution omg) though, and also for sex ed. But Satanic Panic, you can't opt out of that. But that's been ongoing. People actually recommend The Body Keeps the Score by that fuckface Bessel van der Kolk, who was a key figure in promoting the Satanic Panic. No one ever talks about what's actually in that book. You ever notice that, when people rec it? They're just like "ultimate book on understanding trauma by an EXPERT"!! It's just repressed memory recovery via hypnosis BS that was debunked over 30 years ago.
  • It Came From X-Box Live
  • Stupid screamer videos people would pass around. If you got sent a video of something peaceful, especially someone just driving around, you knew it was coming. Better close it quickly before the loud noise and dumb "scary" face pops up.
  • Send this email to fifty other people or you'll be cursed!!
  • In an all ages space? Or a kid/teen focused space that technically doesn't ban adults? Welcome to Pedoland. Pedos, pedos everywhere.
  • No one actually travelled all that far alone on their bikes for hours. Every adult is exaggerating that shit. People were just hanging out in their neighborhoods or the woods playing with broken glass until they were old enough to go to the mall without their parents so they could go be proper consumers. People were outside more and parents were rarely home, but that's about all that's true. No one went thirty miles on their bikes off to some other town or whatever. LOL.
  • Oh no, I'm sick. Staying home from school. Let me take some medicine and go back to bed. What's on TV? HI THERE FACE HERE. *face drinking itself*
  • All the foot fetish shit on Nickelodeon.
  • 12oz Mouse
  • Anime going from looking great to complete ass when switching to digital painting.
  • The endless discussions on forums about Vegeta's virginity. For some reason.
  • People used to die on Black Friday. People also used to be entertained by people dying on Black Friday.
  • There used to be a lot of TV stuff for Thanksgiving back then basically making up fake history about the holiday. All of it was badly done, most of it was racist, and no one enjoyed them but they'd air that shit anyway. You'd be seeing this stuff for the whole week of Thanksgiving. Thankfully (lol), that shit has mostly faded away. I've never met anyone who ahd any nostalgia for those weird Thanksgiving specials. The only Thanksgiving TV thing I like is the aiport episode KotH did, which was more about the chaos of the day and had a lot of funny jokes in it.
  • Being in second grade and my teacher talking about cheating and blowjobs in class because she was upset about Bill Clinton. Ma'am, I am seven. What the fuck. So, so many adults pretending to be upset about Bill Clinton.
  • The Macarena
  • The stupid Courtney Love conspiracy theories. Some bipolar guy who's addicted to hard drugs and has previously had some obvious suicidal ideation and has nearly died from an overdose already escapes out of rehab by scaling a wall and goes to get more drugs and buys a gun. Somehow, this is a murder case caused by an evil woman!! Who wasn't even at the location at the time. But you see, she hired a secret assassin!! A lot of people really believed that shit. Some still do. That it was more logical a woman already divorcing a dude would hire a hitman to stage him killing himself with a plan that also involved the guy to be murderered needing to want to and successful escape out of rehab for the set-up than for it to have just be a very mentally unwell, unstable guy succumbing to his addiction ending up dead by his own actions. Nope, couldn't be that! These same conspiracy theorists always get upset when you show them videos of Kurt around this time where he was very obviously physically not looking well shortly before the end. The man killed himself. It's sad that he couldn't overcome his drug problem and that combined with his mental illness made a recovery very difficult path. There's no need to make up shit. What happened is plain as day, but I think some people just don't want to see their "idols" as normal, struggling people. People's understanding of mental health back then was also really terrible.
  • All the ring tone commercials with shitty ring tone songs that existed just to be ring tones to buy in iTunes.
  • Some kid's mom listening in on your four-way phone call on the landline but no ones sure who's mom it is.
  • Porn pop-ups on everything. Even the school computers.
  • When channels would go off at night. Gotta switch to radio or play video games or watch a movie now. It won't be back till morning, and morning programming was always, always shit. Morning radio was also shit. Just some fuckers talking and occasionally playing a song or two. No one cares about your asinine thoughts. Just play some songs.
  • Oh, cool. A movie I really like is playing on this channel. *it's censored with redubbed less naughty words added in and some key emotional/cool scenes are cut for commercial time*
  • Speaking of commercials, the same episode of a TV show airing but different scenes being missing each time because of differences of when the commercials played.
  • Friends being on TV. Ugh.
  • The weird obsession with joking about autoerotic asphyxiation when famous people committed suicide by hanging.
  • People making fun of that poor woman whose baby was killed and eaten by dingos.
  • The yearly annouced "hot toys" by mainstream newscasters would tell parents kids are dying to have that no kid actually asked for but the parents would buy because a "reporter" told them what to believe about what their kids "really" wants. Looking back, this shit was so clearly manufactured.
  • R. Kelly and Bill Cosby being everywhere.
  • All the media cared about with Tatu was them being lesbians corrupting kids, then them being fake lesbians (even though Yulia is bisexual) and exploiting the gays. The fact the girls were sexually exploited to make pedo shit? Just fine. The music video for "Prostye Dvizheniya" is CSAM. Yulia (age 17) was filmed masturbating in a hotel bathroom she was not allowed to leave. A more explicit version was played at Japanese shows. Yulia would fake masturbate in front of the video of herself masturbating as a minor when she was barely 18. "Malchik Gay" has the weirdest sexual dance moves (many of the early songs had sexual performances). The girls (again, underage) pretended to have rough gay m/m sex while barely clothed involving forced head, fake slapping, and lots of thrusting.
  • Space Jam really is not a good movie. I'm sorry.
  • Rugrats having more than two seasons.
  • The countdowns until "legal" websites for various female kid stars.
  • Hit Clips. What the fuck.
  • Shock Jock radio bullshit.
  • All the poor neurodivergent kids who got labeled as "rainbow", "indigo", or "crystal" children thanks to dumbass New Age people who encouraged the kids parents to not bother with getting any kind of accomodations at school and reassuring them that, "no, you're kid isn't (r-slur), they're actually a magical being from the universe, and they need no help or resources, you're messing with god's perfection". The anti-vax movement overlapped pretty heavily with these dipshits. Did you know the founder of Hay House used to sell that she could magically cure AIDS? I will remain forever proud of getting banned from receiving ARCs from that evil publisher.
  • Acid rain and so much smog.
  • Girl toys: ♫Be a princess, be a bride, be a mommy, so sweet inside, girls are made of pink and rainbows, buy our latest Barbie, make sure to lock your diary♫ Boy toys: BREAK STUFF EXTREMEEEEE NASTY GROSS PUKE BOOGERS CARS GUNS WAAAAR SEXY GIRLS BOOBIES GIRLS ARE ANNOYING RECORD YOUR SISTER WITHOUT HER CONSENT YEAHHH *EXPLODES*
  • Commercials telling kids to eat lots of sugar, TV shows showing kids craving and eating lots of sugar, adults feeding you meals full of lots of sugar. Here have your sugar drink, with your sugar meal, your sugar snack, and your sugar dessert. We love you so much. The fact that we let you have so much sugar is proof of our love. Kids and sugar are meant to be. And remember, you can't give out apples for Halloween. There might be razors! You can only consume mini candies. It's for your own safety.
  • Regularly scheduled straw feminist in family and kids shows coming to ruin the day for everyone, but most especially women and girls! (showrunner is a man every time)
  • Gwen Stefani, just in general.
  • The reaction to Jessie Bannon by 30 year old dudes. I will never let it go.
  • The weird hatred by mostly adult men for Scrappy Doo, Godzooky, and Snarf. Some of them even hated Niddler. GTFO. Goodbye. Also, Snarf had every reason to complain. Imagine you're the babysitter for a ten year old, your planet blows up, and you have to travel across space and still take care of this ten year old, but now he's got the body of a 20 year old and is super strong...but still the brain of a ten year old. And he has a crazy powerful weapon and is constantly getting into dangerous fights. You are powerless. You are still this fucker's babysitter. And Godzooky? See the Y2K short for why Godzooky matters. But also, really? WE ALREADY WENT THROUGH MINILLA. STFU. Just because he's not Junior doesn't mean he's awful. Don't even get me started on Scrappy. The weirdest shit ever. Scrappy Doo was great. When Scrappy was born, after the doctor slapped him on the ass, he slapped the doctor back. Funny as shit.
  • Honestly that, aside from the Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and related movies in that universe, nearly all Scooby Doo stuff after the 80s is shitting on Scooby Doo because whoever was making it clearly hated Scooby Doo (and Scrappy too!). Whenever you'd get a rec for Scoob content, someone would be like "Oh yeah, this Scooby Doo is great. It's absolutely nothing like old Scooby Doo. They hate on everything in old Scooby and make fun of it. It's so great because it does that. That is what makes it amazing.". I actually owe a thank you to that shitty modern Velma show for, at least for now, finally killing off this "variant" of Scooby content thanks to being so ass. And I hope it never returns.
  • The "first season" of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest for every reason. Making Race unrecognizeable, taking away Hadji's supernatural powers because it's "offense to Indians" and then making him a non-action Indian tech support guy in an action show instead (I HAVE NO WORDS), the meh art style (looked good in still promo art and comics, but ass animated), making Hadji look the shittiest out of everyone in the cast, trying to make everything "realistic" and giving "rational" (or sci-fi) explanations for any supernatural ideas, the Quest World CG bullshit, just all around ass. "Season two" was so much better. It still had the shitty CG stuff from time to time though. And yes, it was bad even by the standards of the time. See season 3 Reboot and then compare it to whatever the fuck this show was putting out. But god, "season one" vs "season two", it's like CSM season one vs the Reze movie.
  • The Flinststones on the Rocks making me have to think about Barney and Betty fucking on a vibrating bed. Really needed to make that bed rock, huh. And Fred and Wilma could hear it too. We all heard it. Why.
  • The fourth Omen movie. What a New Age mess. Also, this girl got her period early. It's because she's connected to SATAN. Oh boy. Honestly, the Omen in general looking back is some weird shit. Between these and all the "possession" type movies needing an exorcist, a lot of horror was just weirdo Christian shit. Ironically, a lot of churches would boycott this stuff even though it basically reaffirms to the masses the delusions of the Christian death cult. I just can't take any of these movies seriously. Remember that terrible sex scene in the third movie?
  • Congress wasting time having a moral panic about violent video games while deregulated everything in existence for corporate profit.
  • Enjoying an episode of The Boondocks and wondering why you never saw it again with other reruns. People these days say, "oh the show wouldn't be able to get away with all the stuff it did back then". Yeah, it didn't get away with all that shit back then either! Four episodes were banned.
  • Absolutely nothing about That 70s Show has aged well.
  • "Young ladies, young ladies / I like 'em underage see / Some say that's statutory / But I say it's MANDATORY!"
  • Dudes would just write songs openly about underage girls they fucked and make it clear the person was underage in the song.
  • "Don't Stand so Close to Me" really had the lines "Young teacher, the subject / Of schoolgirl fantasy" with a profession you can already enter pretty young (and even younger back when this song came out and teachers needed less years of college in many places compared to today) alongside "This girl is half his age". So, uh, how old is this girl? If we assume this person got a bachelor's at the typical age one would complete it (this song came out in 1980 and would be in reference to 1970s standards for employment) plus some training afterwards, a young teacher would probably be around 23-27. Any older seems a little silly to call a "young" teacher. Even 27 is pushing it. Thirty is definitely not a "young" teacher. So, right out the gate, as half of thirty is fifteen, this girl must be under fifteen years of age. Since we're presuming this is taking place in the UK, we can also presume she'd need to be 17 to drive, as the song makes a suggestion about her being too young to drive with this part: "Wet bus stop, she's waiting, his car is warm and dry". The age of consent in the UK is sixteen, so just from that line we can't tell if she's technically legal or not, but the "young teacher" part nixes that. If we assume 23-27 age of the teacher, the girl is somewhere between 11 1/2-13 1/2 years old. If we're generous and round up, 12-14. Still well below the age of consent. This isn't a "technically it's legal, but it's morally gross" situation. This is straight up completely illegal. This is further proven by these lines: "Loose talk in the classroom to hurt, they try and try / Strong words in the staffroom, the accusations fly /It's no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov". Dolores Haze is twelve at the start of the novel Lolita. She escapes H.H. around age fifteen, marries someone around her age and has to see H.H. one more time when she's seventeen to beg for money due to being so broke, and dies in childbirth before ever reaching her eighteenth birthday. Everything in this song is telling us this is a child. She very much is likely 12-14. Sting was previously a teacher, making this whole song even creepier. He was a teacher for about two years, around when he 23-25.
    Sting graduated college with a B.A. in education and went on to teach English, music and soccer to nine and ten year olds at a Catholic School in the UK. He was the only male teacher there. The singer once revealed that while he didn't experience anything described in the song, his time teaching still inspired the 1980 hit "Don't Stand So Close to Me." -iHeart Sting further explained in a 1993 interview with The Independent that "this idea of a teacher, a Humbert Humbert character, appealed to me because I'd been a teacher before the Police. Also, to be frank, it was right in our market - a lot of teenage girls were buying our records. So the idea was let's write a Lolita story.” -Ultimate Classic Rock
    Stores will still play this song because it's "nostalgic".
  • Butterlfy. Sugar. Baby.
  • We all got a virus or two from Limewire.
  • The Gundam Wing fandom mostly revolving around the 1st four episode of the show for a while because of Blockbuster and fujoshi. I'm not explaining this. To this day, Relena is still getting shat on for her behavior in those four episodes from a show that is over forty episodes long. That, and the US dub fucking up Heero's character because his VA just refused to emote during any lines. On the other end of the shippers, there were people screaming about how all the boys had love interests. For Trowa, they would claim this was Cathy Bloom, his biological sister. ♫Sweet Home Alabama♫
  • Disney dominating the 2D film market with repetitive, big budget slop while going out of their way to fuck over smaller studios by any means necessary only to intentionally crash the 2D film market and then shutter their own 2D film department so they could move to CG films.
  • I still know why this voice means everything, but I don't know why I still know that. Even in my sleep, that rooster's words are stuck in my head.
  • Before anime became mainstream, people would go out of their way to intentionally mispronounce Japanese words. This wasn't that they didn't know better. If you educated them about this, they would doubledown on how their way "sounded better", so it didn't matter. This is an American thing. Ramen being intentionally mispronounced was a big one. Ray-men was preferred by a lot of of Americans, but especially stupid were the ones who decided it would be better pronounced as "Roman". This applied to other languages too, especially Spanish. The ramen one was just an especially dumb one. There were also people who would non-ironically say "tor-til-a" and "jah-lop-e-no" because "this is 'merica".
  • Chopsticks in hair, kimono t-shirts, and stick on bindies from the dollar tree.
  • Anime dubs would not even bother trying to say anyone's name correctly. Hell, they wouldn't even bother having the entire cast pick one way to say any name. It was just a choose your own pronunciation game. You would even see one VA pronounce the same name differently from scene to scene. No one gave a fuck. This made a lot of these dubs so-bad-they're-good, but a lot of them were just plain bad.
  • "What's with this big ass?" "Dat ass needs you, granny."
  • Manga was called "Main-gah", for some reason. By everyone. Even the weebiest weebs who would pronounce other things closer to correctly and be anal about it. No one knows why.
  • Boku no Pico being every goddamn where on YouTube.
  • Bible Black being on YouTube.
  • There were some days on old YouTube where there were just constant spams of porn trailers and porn clips being uploaded. A lot of them would be uploaded as "educational".
  • Chuck Norris jokes.
  • So many "teen"/college movies just casually having rape in them by the "good guys".
  • "1000 Games" packs where it's really like 20 full games and a bunch of trials and trailers for paid games you have to download at various shady sites, some of which will already be dead when you buy this $1 disc.
  • That one Sony demo disc that had like two games on it and when you played it, it erased any memory card you had in the console at the time.