Where is the '90s nostalgia?

One of the earliest mainstream successes that took a look back at the 1980s was The Wedding Singer, a movie released in 1998 that was set merely 13 years earlier in 1985. Then 2001 saw Not Another Teen Movie (satirizing movies from throughout the '80s), Wet Hot American Summer (set in '81), and Donnie Darko (set in '88). More recently there was Adventureland in 2009 (set in '87) and Hot Tub Time Machine in 2010 (set in '86). Even in the first run of Family Guy during the early 2000s, about half of the pop culture references were to the later '70s and '80s.

None of these are very good movies or TV shows, but that is not the point. The key is that there's been a steady record of '80s nostalgia that began not even 15 years after the target year, encompassing music, clothing, slang, current events, cars, leisure activities, and everyday behavior -- the entire zeitgeist.

Even the Coen brothers, who made better movies than the ones above, chose to set their most successful movies during rising-crime times, although it is not out of nostalgia and therefore the emphasis on music, etc., is usually lacking. Fargo was released in 1996 and set in '87. No Country for Old Men came out in 2007 but was set in 1980. And The Big Lebowski from 1997 was set on the other side of the 1992 peak in the violence level, during the 1991 Gulf War (and of course many of the characters are pulled straight from the late '60s through the mid-'70s).

So, it's now been 12 to 18 years since the portion of the 1990s that came after the decline in the crime rate radically changed the culture, about the same delay after the '80s ended and the nostalgia for them kicked in. And yet there is zero interest in setting a movie during 1993 (or even '92) to '99 to cash in on nostalgia. It's not that there was not a zeitgeist for people to remember -- just that it was boring and annoying, hence of no nostalgic value for those who lived through it, and of little recruiting power for those who are too young to remember it very well first-hand.

I know there are pockets of '90s nostalgia, for example a '90s music channel on Verizon's FiOS cable selection. Still, even that looked to be majority early '90s. Virtually all of VH1 Classic's programming focuses on the '60s, '70s, and '80s, with a token recognition of the early '90s. And people still watch blockbuster movies from the '90s, whether or not they liked the music from the same time. Also, most people still wear very bland-colored clothing, chop most of their head-hair off and keep what's left plastered close to the scalp, again regardless of what they think about the music and movies of the '90s.

But just try to imagine a movie or TV show or whatever that tried to revive interest in the full zeitgeist during that time -- wearing oatmeal-and-mud plaid skirts (with brown Frankenstein shoes), going out to see Titanic or staying in to catch Seinfeld, driving a fat shapeless sedan, piling into a chatroom on AOL instead of getting a life, saying "word" and "all that and a bag of chips"... not even to mention the soundtrack of mopey-dopey alternative (if set in '93 through '95) or fun-starved pop (if set in '96 through '99), plus trying-too-hard gangsta rap throughout. That project would be dead in the water.

Looking forward, I doubt the 2000s will elicit much nostalgia either, aside from the housing bubble years of 2003 through 2006, and then not so much the music, movies, or anything tangible at all, but just the general euphoria that everyone felt.

And looking backward, there has been a steady stream of '60s and '70s nostalgia for awhile now. Baby Boomer audiences did not drive that trend, since people who weren't even alive then have still been fascinated. Just look at how many people born after 1975 were tuning in to The Wonder Years.

There is occasional '50s nostalgia, although typically it's the late '50s when the crime rate began rising (like Stand By Me, set in 1959). The world of 1955 in Back to the Future is exciting enough because it was right on the cusp of blowing itself open, and that's palpable in the joyriding, booze drinking, hanging out unsupervised, and boy chasing. Happy Days was mostly the later part of the '50s and the early part of the '60s. M*A*S*H is technically set during the Korean War, but for all anyone knew and could tell, it was about Vietnam.

The portion of the falling-crime era of 1934 through 1958 that wasn't right on the edge of exploding, like the mid-to-late '30s and the 1940s, have never gotten much nostalgia either. As I pointed out in another post, that was an earlier period of helicopter parenting and young people just taking their parents' orders. That's emphasized in the three main movies set in that period that come to mind -- A Christmas Story, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Radio Days. Pretty unexciting stuff compared to the '60s, '70s, and '80s, not to mention the earlier wave of soaring crime from roughly 1900 to 1933, in particular the later half of that wave known as the Jazz Age -- Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather Part II, Inherit the Wind, The Untouchables, and so on.

People may feel nostalgia about the childhood and adolescent parts of their lives no matter when they happened, but that has more to do with the changes in human development, not necessarily the broader culture. When it comes to nostalgia for the whole zeitgeist, it looks like only those from rising-crime periods bring out a yearning to return even decades later on.