Remember when dropping an anvil on someone's head was funny?
Ok, I'm officially an old geezer. It's bad enough that The Matrix is playing on American Movie Classics, but when your own kids don't recognize Bruce Lee... that's when something just ain't right. Oh but it gets worse. Remember LL Cool J? Well someone put a YouTube Video of an LL Cool J song as the background for a bunch of Bruce Lee fight scene clips. It was awesome!
So here's the "worse" part. My 14-year-old son is watching this video with me and initiates the first half of the "geezer conversation"...
Son: "Dad, how come it's the same guy beating up everyone?"
Me: "It's Bruce Lee. You do know who Bruce Lee is, right?"
Son: "Nope."
Ok, THEN to add to the mayhem, my 7-year-old son (who's watching the video too) abruptly ENDS the geezer conversation...
Son: "So, Dad, how come he's beating everyone up?"
Me: (who's now aged about 160 years in 1 millisecond)... "When I was young this stuff was cool."
End of conversation. I was, however, laughing hysterically by this point.
When we were kids, we had John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Sonny Chiba, Roman Gladiators, Gunslingers, etc., even Muhamed Ali, George Foreman and the likes. And what did they have in common? They could kick your ass and that made them cool. We wanted to be the guy who could beat up a room full of bad guys and not even get our hair messed up or our clothes dirty, and we lived to watch that stuff on TV and the movies. Now you're cool if your phone has a full keyboard so you can text people more easily, if you can do an ollie on your skateboard, or if your car wheels have spinners.
Even the cartoons... Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Heckle and Jeckle, Road Runner were riddled with obscene amounts of violence. Anvils falling on your head, people blowing up every 12 seconds, people falling from high places and splatting on the ground, AND IT WAS FUNNY!!! Comic books... Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Hulk, even GI Joe, Sgt. Rock, etc. was all about the good guys kicking the bad guys' asses from here to the next galaxy.
I still see Boxing, Wrestling, Mixed Martial Arts and sports up the wazoo on TV these days. But I'm starting to think that all that crap is for us dinosaurs who are having a hard time letting go of the past.
So here's the "worse" part. My 14-year-old son is watching this video with me and initiates the first half of the "geezer conversation"...
Son: "Dad, how come it's the same guy beating up everyone?"
Me: "It's Bruce Lee. You do know who Bruce Lee is, right?"
Son: "Nope."
Ok, THEN to add to the mayhem, my 7-year-old son (who's watching the video too) abruptly ENDS the geezer conversation...
Son: "So, Dad, how come he's beating everyone up?"
Me: (who's now aged about 160 years in 1 millisecond)... "When I was young this stuff was cool."
End of conversation. I was, however, laughing hysterically by this point.
When we were kids, we had John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Sonny Chiba, Roman Gladiators, Gunslingers, etc., even Muhamed Ali, George Foreman and the likes. And what did they have in common? They could kick your ass and that made them cool. We wanted to be the guy who could beat up a room full of bad guys and not even get our hair messed up or our clothes dirty, and we lived to watch that stuff on TV and the movies. Now you're cool if your phone has a full keyboard so you can text people more easily, if you can do an ollie on your skateboard, or if your car wheels have spinners.
Even the cartoons... Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Heckle and Jeckle, Road Runner were riddled with obscene amounts of violence. Anvils falling on your head, people blowing up every 12 seconds, people falling from high places and splatting on the ground, AND IT WAS FUNNY!!! Comic books... Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Hulk, even GI Joe, Sgt. Rock, etc. was all about the good guys kicking the bad guys' asses from here to the next galaxy.
I still see Boxing, Wrestling, Mixed Martial Arts and sports up the wazoo on TV these days. But I'm starting to think that all that crap is for us dinosaurs who are having a hard time letting go of the past.
posted by Tony at 1:22 AM
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