In 1989, Seinfeld, famously billed as a show “about nothing” gave us a quartet of basically unlikable characters with a recalcitrant avoidance of learning the moral lessons so often dispensed in 1980s situation comedies. In television, The Cosby Show and Family Ties were met with Married with Children and The Simpsons. Such ambivalence soon asserted itself in all aspects of pop culture. If the 1980s were characterized by the moral certainty and sunny optimism of Reagan and Superman, the 1990s opened with a paradox, the end of the Cold War but a new decade dominated by the glowering psychological ambivalence of Tim Burton’s Batman, giving us a hero arguably as emotionally broken as his nemesis. He is in no danger, no one notices that he has been abandoned by his parents, and even the threat in the film are two incompetent burglars known as “the wet bandits” who ultimately pose no threat to the child.īy 1990 fissures in the “Cold War moral clarity” were starting to become evident. Kevin is a cute child left behind by his harried parents to fend for himself. Cartoonish delineations held sway for the decade and arguably reached their apotheosis in the live action cartoon that capped off the 80s, 1990’s Home Alone. Tom Cruise’s Maverick in Top Gun does battle with Iceman and the Top Gun Academy instructors to prove himself – but his ultimate confrontation is with the nameless and faceless Soviet pilots whose “Mig” planes are obviously F-5 trainers. And then there were the numerous 1980s action movies in which we, via Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone, fantasized about going back and “winning” Vietnam by saving all the American prisoners of war believed to be there.Īt a more domestic level Ferris Bueller sought a day of fun and adventure without the intrusions of principle Ed Rooney. Red Dawn imagined a Soviet/Cuban invasion of the United States from Mexico and Canada. James Cameron’s The Terminator could be seen as a prediction of how far down the path to doom Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative might take us. Star Wars was only slightly more literal than the White House in its naming of the good guys and bad guys. The reductionist narratives we children of the 1980s were being fed were merely the “trickled-down” narratives that adults of the Reagan era were buying and selling themselves. So Transformers was actually only the tip of the iceberg. What could be more blatant than the Force and its Dark Side? When Scott Brown invoked the term “Cold War moral clarity,” he was touching upon what is arguably the defining trait of 1980s pop culture: a thoroughly dualist cosmos. Our hero was Luke Skywalker, aided by loveable rogue Han Solo and the haughty but noble Leia. On the side of good was the ragtag Rebel Alliance fighting to restore freedom. George Lucas gave us an evil Galactic Empire led by an Emperor whose chief henchman was the black clad mechanized man Darth Vader (“Dark Father”), described as more machine than man, twisted and evil. Indiana Jones may have been a thief, but he was a saint compared to the Nazis. Within pop culture things were cast in similarly stark colors. This was the decade, after all, when President Reagan referred explicitly to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire”. When critics decry 1980s pop culture for its cartoonish characters and cartoonish conflicts, it is not without reason. For now, sit back and watch a (jedi) master at work: If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that Jeremiah is building an argument, setting the stage to explore some very ripe territory. We come now to the end of the beginning, the final installment in Jeremiah Lawson aka Wenatchee the Hatchet’s four-part Cartoon Nostalgia series.
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