I haven't let modern culture affect how I view older media, I'm stuck in that in between where I see problematic language for what it is but am too familiar with it to have a completely negative reaction. But what I find in watching any show that existed prior to 2001 is, it won't contain any mention of any piece of media I've grown to despise since that year.
Pretty much all media after 2001 has been either influenced or is a basis for reference for various intellectual properties I've just been so desperate to avoid hearing about. Even shows I really want to watch I have to put up with some throwaway line at the least, or parody at the worst. And the people I watched on YouTube were either reviewing the shit, or loving the shit, or loving the bad fanfiction related to the shit, or the fandoms of the stupid shit. I really wanted to enjoy this one girl's deepdives on toxic fandoms but she got grating, and she's another of a handful of people I watch who got stuck on the phrase "surffisive to say". I don't like to harp on about words that are not words, but if you're turning a misheard phrase such as "suffice it to say" into that, it's still not a real word. I know these kids type out their scripts so I don't know how their spell checkers never picked it up. I don't want to be a hater or a corrector, because it really crushes people to be corrected, I know dumb 40 year olds make those kinds of mistakes too, I'm the last person to judge. I still get annoyed. I also end up getting annoyed at these kids being into Wattpad fan fiction that's made me so sour about being an author that I can't get attention for any original work, even if the stories are getting dunked on and criticised either in its original form or in some adaptation, it's still getting attention and that only bolsters the people who write this shit to do more. All the people my university lecturers would have had thrown out for plagiarism and juvenile crap were the ones getting publishing deals, I stuck by my integrity and got stomped. I can't sit and have fun in that space with these YouTubers, I got to commiserate with one while we were both being screwed, but her platform rewarded her with the leg-up I could never get, so I had to leave her too.
My old DVDs and shows are the safest place for me, even if they're full of un-PC language, they're okay for me, and yes I recognise this 1000% as privilege. Even with politics, this is all before Trump and Hillary, hell it predates W. Bush robbing Gore, it predates 9/11. I can't praise this period since it makes me look nostalgic for a much shittier time, where people's feelings weren't protected at all, and I don't want to go back there, it just sucks that's the place I don't have to hear about current day stuff. I'm kinda into younger kids watching Degrassi, they're really good with humorous references and commentary, I get to watch their bug-eyed responses to language that isn't appropriate if they do go back to the older series. But, and I OOOP, the person I've never seen before who was doing a reaction video MENTIONS A THING I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT.
No YouTube channel is safe for me anymore. I've actually unsubbed from so many channels I have less to watch, so when we don't have an internet connection, I throw on a DVD series, and suddenly I'm not so interested in going back on YouTube. I think if I did this for maybe six months, if I limited all my media down to pre-2000s content basically for the rest of my life, I'll be fine. Fuck, if Billie Eilish can reboot 90s fashion, if the Gen Z crowd wants to resurrect pencil-thin brows and baggy shorts, fuck it, I'm here for it. I want a full length pencil skirt but I'm too hippy for those now. Harry Styles seems to have reached his Thom Yorke existentialist phase while hiding it behind 80s synth-pop parodies and I'm here for it, I listened to it repeatedly online months ago after it blew up on TikTok but didn't bother buying it until the other day. We've left too much of the past lying around for present-day kids to ignore it. My parents' music filtered into the songwriters I grew up with and since I didn't listen to pop princesses, I knew Leonard Cohen's shit via covers. Which is fine, I didn't expect teenagers to discover the Smashing Pumpkins and resonate with it too. They're better people than I am, I want them to have their things and love them, but I'm opting to run from it and go back to all the shit I loved before I left home.
The only major issue I have with 80s references in current day shows is, I'm starting to feel like the reference is the starting off point, and the whole scene/episode is written around it. It's not reached organically as you're fleshing out the story, you've gone "Wouldn't it be cool to have this reference at some point? However we get there is less important." It's why I find that shit so cringey and not cool and something worthy of genuine enjoyment. Stranger Things kinda wrecked the NeverEnding Story theme in that regard, now I guess Kate Bush is wrecked for some people. (True story, I still prefer the Placebo version, I like the original but I was never a Kate Bush fan, were I to say this elsewhere I'd be strung up). At what point to we stop using these references as a crutch and start making anything genuinely new? It's something that bothered me before the 2000s, reboots were so en-vogue even then, something stupid as Dr Doolittle with Eddie Murphy had me asking, okay so when do we get new movies? Star Wars was being re-released in cinemas, the everything old is new stuff was already a problem by the end of the 80s, I'm sounding like a giant hypocrite now. I wasn't that into it, I've never liked Star Wars. I've never really liked anything. One day we might get the Last Unicorn live-action remake, it's likely now but I won't hold my breath for that or the HBO Degrassi reboot, which might be dead due to that merger. Pretty soon, nothing will not be under Disney. I'm still waiting for my company to be absorbed by Amazon.
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