Recently shared the bttf series with my 11yo. The third doesn't hold up too well, but the first two are great. The funny part was that she saw the 80s and the 50s as basically the same.
I think it's an issue of the fact that they're both "before my time". I treat the 20s and 50s as the same, I wouldn't be able to tell you any difference, even though they must be massively different.
Yeah, they both just looked "old fashioned" to her. Obviously she could pick out some differences, but when they first went back to 1955, she didn't really notice that the cars, outfits, signage, etc. were particularly more dated than they had been in the 80s version.
Movies of the 80s and 90s feel a lot more modern compared to the “old movies” we had living in the 80s. Black and white movies with cardboard acting sure felt quaint for the tv generation.
Today though I’m constantly surprised by the number of young people who recognize things from 80s movies and especially music. I’d say that number is higher compared to our generation.
The 80s and 90s produced a lot of movies that became pop culture classics (Back to the Future among them).
Millenials and Gen Z grew up in an era with much easier access to older media than previous generations. First was the video store - while Gen X had this too, it really took off in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was $5 to rent a new release or 3 for $5 for old releases. This meant that we were basically encouraged by our parents to watch older stuff, and of course the fact that they lived through the 80s themselves meant they tended to recommend movies to us from that era.
Of course, after the video store came VOD services like Netflix. Old movies are a great way to pad out a VOD catalogue, so that increased the access to 80s/90s movies even more.
It also doesn't hurt that, as you've pointed out, many of these films still hold up pretty well today.
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
In my experience jokes usually do well on HN. Memes and catchphrases don't. That's the main difference. Once something becomes a meme it's not actually funny anymore, but you'll still get upvoted for it on a place like Reddit because you're signalling that you're part of the "in" group.
