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Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

As I move into my second decade as an educator (started as a teaching assistant around 2012, now a history professor) it's been really interesting seeing what "sticks" and what doesn't. A couple years back I made a Simpsons reference that I know would've landed with my students from circa 2015, but it was crickets. However I feel like certain movies and other cultural productions from as far back as the 70s are still on students' radar -- like Scorsese films, for instance.

I've got a two year old daughter and as she gets older, I'm tempted to show her old episodes of the PBS show Nova and the original Cosmos so we're on the same cultural wavelength, but I probably shouldn't try to force it. She was born with an illustrated box set of the Lord of the Rings already sitting in her room though ;)

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Kids today are growing up in an age where people do not have shared experiences when it comes to media. When I was a kid everybody sat and watched TV every evening, and the next day we would discuss it at school. This no longer happens anymore: everybody is watching on-demand content (or TikTok) and there’s so many different services and so much content that it’s rare that anything breaks through and achieves a critical mass of viewers that allows it to enter the cultural consciousness - Squid Game is a good example of that happening.

This is a very good point. On the literature side, Harry Potter seems to have attained this critical mass, too. One of my daughter's school friends was shocked that she hasn't read it, and lent her the first book. She read it, and when I asked her about it, she said "well, it's kind of ok". Of course, one of the reasons of HP's popularity is that it's not difficult to read - the language is relatively simple, the books are not overly long, etc. OTOH, having recently read LotR, Ursula le Guin's Earthsea and some Sanderson it's no wonder that she found JKR a bit... boring.

As a child of that time the real magic of Harry Potter was that he grew up with you. The books got gradually more mature throughout the sequence, Rowling was writing for her fans as they grew up.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the first full novel that I read. The first books are tame and suitable for young children. By the time the last books came out I was an adolescent and I appreciated the more mature themes.

Then a second slightly later generation had the same experience but with the movies instead of the books.

as an adult, the magical aspect was that this was a series where the books were coming out on a regular cadence, and millions of people were invested in the series while it was still being written. I can think of very few other recent examples of that - the game of thrones books, but they basically stopped coming out, and everything else was either not an ongoing series or had a much more limited audience.

I hope they figure out in their twenties what they've missed and try to fix it. Could see a renaissance in hobby clubs.

This is the outcome of streaming video and algorithms picking things for you. Since there was so little choice, shared culture was something you could rely on. Now that everybody essentially has their own version of the internet, it's much harder to find common ground.

I think this is why image macros spread so easily. Even if you haven't seen the source material you can usually get the meaning from the image itself. If I say to a classroom "no, it's the children who are wrong" very few will get it. Maybe the ones who have seen the image macro before[1]. But if I put it on a slide, then everybody understands.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch

Every year, fewer and fewer co-workers get all my little jokes and references from 90s (and 2000s) movies. Really nails home how old you're getting. I made a silly Pulp Fiction reference in front of a group of developers, and nobody got it. I explained it and one of them said, "Man, that movie came out years before most of us were even born." Wow, arrow to the chest.

Yeah well so did many other great movies for me: Jaws, Godfather, Star Wars, Alien, Its A Wonderful Life, numerous Disney animated features, etc etc but there's many of those that are timeless. But I do imagine as the quantity of content increases it becomes harder for timeless features to break through. Probably doesn't help that the streaming services tend to split the cultural catalog in a way that video stores never had to suffer from.

Thanks to the Cape Feare episode of the Simpsons that I watched way back in 1993, I understood references to Scorsese and Gilbert & Sullivan that I couldn't really explain to adults at the time...

I think if you watch whatever the kids are watching, you'll find there are little references here and there to stuff the writers enjoy. These little moments, often non-sequiturs, tend to stick out, maybe because they seem a little out of place.

I've been collecting movies for my Plex server for a few years, and I went through the phase where I was getting all the classic movies, all the Oscar-nominated movies for every calendar year, etc.

And I stumbled on a movie I would never have watched. But in reading the synopsis for it, I recognized a reference I had picked up as a small child from what was either the very late 1970s or maybe early 1980s. For less than a year (I'd imagine), everyone must have been making jokes about "Turkish prisons". The kind of thing that stand up comedias on Carson would have joked about, SNL, etc. And I overheard one of those jokes (or several), filed it away, and never figured it out.

Midnight Express (1978).

It's funny to me, there have been other such instances. Only took me 40-some years to solve.

I only knew the reference from Airplane! A few years after.

Oh, maybe that's where I heard it. I remember what age I first heard it, but couldn't place the reference.

Thanks for sharing this! I also knew the Airplane reference, but assumed it was some kind of non-sequitur or a joke about a Turkish stereotype I was unfamiliar with.

I also had no idea it was a reference to another movie! I thought Turkish prisons were just known for some sexual connotation.

I always wanted to watch the movie, not because of the critical acclaim, not because I want to see graphic prison scenes, but because of the Giorgio Moroder score. The wrestling tag team Midnight Express, Dennis Condrey and Beautiful Bobby Eaton, managed by Jim Cornette used the main theme as their entrance music, and Art Bell used it to introduce his radio program. I figured if these guys, who I was a fan of, were so into it (whether they were actually into the movie, only wanted to piggyback off its success, or just liked the song, I don't actually know), I should check it out. The last straw that made me actually watch it was when my gf happened to live around the corner from an all night diner that we went to a lot named "Midnight Express".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD4Ks_EMQBY

The Midnight Express theme song is pinned on my "strutting" playlist.

It's a great story but if Moroder is your only interest in it, you're probably going to be disappointed (I like crime/thriller/escape movies myself). The song itself plays in an early scene and the rest of the movie is pretty bleak.

The 1982 song "Some People (Have All The Fun)" was a minor hit in Australia, New Zealand. It includes the lyrics:

    A Oh mumma make me happy, send me lots more cash
    Don't worry, I saw the Midnight Express thirty-six times
    And I know where to keep my stash

Young me took a few years to understand the reference.

Completely agree. My kids watch lots of Spongebob, Teen Titans Go, etc and there are so many pop culture references from before their time and before mine even. Reminds me of how much I learned about older things from watching the Simpsons as a teen.

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