LogFAQs > #940780664

Zeus posted...

Do you honestly believe that half of Family Guy fans "get" most of the show's pop culture references?

Depends on the fan and on which season of the show you're talking about.

But even then, Family Guy references are shallow at best, and often either don't really require you to "get" the reference, or are there and gone fast enough to not really impact your perception of the show even if you don't get them.



Zeus posted...

And yet FG -- a show that heavily exploits pop culture -- still pulls in surprisingly strong numbers.

It's also worth noting that most of the references Family Guy does make are from years ago. So it's still drawing on a period of time when shared culture was a stronger thing, and appeals to an older audience who still remember those things.

Show me Family Guy episodes from 2040 that are exclusively referencing things from the next 20 years worth of pop culture, and if the ratings are still as strong, I'd be more inclined to agree with you.

Though at this point we're getting into the problem The Simpsons has - at a certain point, people aren't watching the show because of the content of the show. The show itself has essentially become the nostalgia that is being exploited. People who watch The Simpsons today really only do so because they kind of remember that it used to be funny once. And because it's a comforting, familiar thing.

Family Guy has been on the air for more than 20 years. And, much like the Simpsons, I'd argue that it stopped being worth watching years ago. At this point I strongly suspect people watch Family Guy more because it IS Family Guy than they do because of any aspect of the actual content. Which makes any arguments about ratings translating into quality or appreciation of the content to be somewhat specious.



Zeus posted...

That's always been true. SW:ANH is one of the biggest drawing films of all time yet there were a lot of people in their teens when it came out who never saw it

That's somewhat disingenuous.

It pulled in hundreds of millions at a time when that wasn't common. It was rereleased multiple times, so even people who didn't see it during its first theatrical release were able to see it later. Many theaters shows the preceding films when a new film was released (this is how I saw it, in 1983, when my local theater showed Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back two weekends before Return of the Jedi came out), opening them to an entirely new swath of the audience. The advent of cable in the 1980s meant that tons of people were able to watch the films on TV. The rise of the home video market means that people who had no chance of seeing it in a theater or on TV could still see it.

It's not really a stretch to say that a HUGE percentage of the overall population (at least in the West) saw it. Which is WHY it became a pop culture touchstone, in ways that "Damnation Alley" (released in the same year) never really did. How many people even know Damnation Alley exists? Do you even know what Damnation Alley is?

(I do, because it was based on a story by Roger Zelazny, and Roger Zelazny is an awesome author. But most people today don't know who Roger Zelazny even is, which is one of the many, many reasons why I will continue to hate our species forever.)

In contrast, I'd argue that, regardless of the critical popularity of Avengers: Endgame, and for all the money it pulled in (way more than "A New Hope" in 1977), vastly fewer people have ultimately seen it (or will likely ever see it). It ultimately is not - and will almost certainly never be the pop culture touchstone Star Wars/New Hope was.

And I will continue to argue that, in the future, film successes like we've seen with the MCU (or even Star Wars) will slowly become fewer and farther between, while home media content will continue to disperse. Which will in turn absolutely diminish shared culture.



Zeus posted...

And honestly, everybody at every point in history thinks that their world is unique and special because they want to feel unique and special.

To be fair, I think you're vastly overestimating the significance I attach to the phenomenon I'm discussing. For most of human history, we didn't even HAVE anything resembling shared pop culture. So if it does go away in the future, it won't be a huge world-shaking shift. Nor am I really arguing that pop culture somehow makes us superior to everyone else, while I decry the ignorant savages of the past or bemoan the social bankruptcy of the future.

But it's absolutely a facet of our current cultural paradigm that is absolutely different from most other eras of the past. And it's not really ethnocentrism or to actually acknowledge that.

And it's not really all that ridiculous to look at things sociologically and extrapolate out how things might shift based on current trends and future developments. There are people who get paid to do that as their entire career.

The shifts may be relatively minor or unimportant overall, and we can debate the "value" of said shifts, but social culture today is objectively different from what it was in 2000, which in turn was objectively different than it was in 1980, and it will almost certainly be objectively different again in 2040. Plenty of underlying facets may be the same (and those may have still been the same 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, or even ten-thousand years ago), but lots of cultural facets have shifted as well. That's just life.



Zeus posted...

Yes, things change, but tv catching on in peoples' homes and then everybody having a computer isn't the world-changing paradigm you think it is. We're just links in a great chain.

You're absolutely out of your mind if you think the last 200 years of human history aren't qualitatively different than most of the rest of human history, though. So that's not really a valid argument.

That's not to say that human nature as a whole has changed (I'd argue it hasn't, and that's the root of a lot of our problems), nor that there are elements that have strong continuity for most of human history, or even that modern culture is inherently superior (that's just basic ethnocentrism), but you can't really radically change nearly every facet of how humans live and experience the world and not see qualitative changes in behavior and culture.

Like it or not, technology HAS changed us in a lot of ways. We're different from the humans of the prior 8000 or so years in the same way they were different from the humans of 50000 years prior, and so on.
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