It also makes me appreciate “Alien” a lot more. It’s one of the few movies from the 70s that had a lot of effects in the story, and still doesn’t look particularly dated. Apart from that computer.
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There is a reason why we didn’t recognize it at the time: we were ourselves underage, and that placed the underage girls squarely in our interest. I think a lot of us imagined ourselves as the protagonist, and his age was not as important. We were wearing his skin, so to speak. But the people he interacted with, their age is more visible to us as readers.
We were young, we were naïve, but also, even the underage girls were older than us.
I write this as I am re-reading the first book I ever read in the Dune series, Dune Messiah. It’s a mixture of nostalgia in seeing the same words again, but also seeing it with new eyes, seeing Alia different now that I am older than she was (remember, physically during Dune Messiah she’s still a young teenager!), and even older than Paul will get to be when we meet him for the last time in Children of Dune. What we gobbled up as kids now seems creepy now instead of titillating.
By the way, I can see why so many fans of Dune hate it, because Frank Herbert is hammering home the point that Paul is not a hero, but a man who has been trapped in a fate and machinations that were steering to a very bloody war, and the only reason he doesn’t run away from his bloody jihad is because he fears it would be even worse, even bloodier without him. It was there in Dune, I saw it clearly when I re-read it this summer, but Dune Messiah makes it the centerpiece.
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I lol’d at this:
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Generation X-men.
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My argument is bolstered!
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That actually took me a second look to get it.
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This reminds me. I’m really bothered by how reruns of old TV shows have been enshittified by not preserving the original aspect ratio. It is just never done well because you always end up with one of the following depending on how it was modified:
- Everything is stretched horizontally making the proportions of… well… everything look weird because it’s wider than it should be.
- Things are stretched around the edges, which means things have weird proportions around the edges. Panning and zooming is especially awful because of how distorted it looks.
- Cropping or re-masking causes the loss and/or gain of picture information
For example:
Where you can clearly see the edge of the set.
Or this example:
Where the entire “the three different Duff beers are the exact same stuff” gag is cropped out and as a result the joke is completely lost.
In no case does this preserve the intent of the directors and editors that originally crafted the scene. And, sure, you could just say “who cares” when it’s someone complaining about how fucked up re-runs of Friends are as a result (and not simply because it is a terrible show that has only gotten worse with age). But it’s a problem that seems to affect just about any TV show or movie originally presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
For example, I was watching M*A*S*H reruns on Hulu. In the later seasons where things become much darker there was a frequent use of dramatic zooms and character close-ups. Because the aspect ratio correction simply chopped off the top/bottom of the frame, it often looked poorly composed because of the extreme close-ups – the screen was essentially filled with the entirety of someone’s face with no negative space framing it. I know it wasn’t like that originally.
Are black bars really that offensive to the viewing public? When I was young, I understood that old TV shows were black and white because … that’s how they were filmed at the time. I’m sure today’s young folks who only ever knew a time after wide screen TVs were the norm are capable of understanding that black bars are there because old TV shows used a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9.
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Don’t get me started.
Try to watch the HD “remaster” of Buffy and take a drink whenever you see lighting equipment or crew in the shot. Or in one scene, a character who has disappeared and the other characters are all “where did they go?” and they are clearly visible standing off to the side!
It’s maddening because it’s the same stupid shit I railed against 20 years ago. “Why are you chopping off the left and right of the picture to fit this square frame?” has become “why are you chopping off the top and bottom of the picture to fit this rectangular frame”? I thought 16:9 screens would end this stupidity but “scan & pan” has just been replaced by “chop or stretch”!
Something lawn etc
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What also bothers me is how they cut the content to add more commercials. There was a debate somewhere about Data in ST:TNG and I mentioned something that character did at the end of the episode “The Measure of a Man.” I was shocked to see that was completely cut out of reruns that aired on BBC America. Because the ending was cut, the relationship between two characters in a later episode (Data’s Day) made no sense. They did the same thing with Doctor Who. The first run was complete, and reruns were a fraction of the content, with some of the best scenes removed. 
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Thankfully, you can find some series in full content on YouTube without commercials.
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See also speeding up the play speed to fit more ads in. Because the actors and director clearly knew nothing of the timing
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