Movies then vs now | TheaterFire

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lancerreddit@reddit

Yeah it happens. Ferris Beuhler I saw a few weeks ago and was like this kids a real dick

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Poppykosh. I love that movie still. I look at any movie as when it was made and what was going on. If I look at it with today's lens I do see your point. But it's a good bit of nostalgia for my genx self.

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ultimate_ed@reddit

Whatever you do, do not try to watch "Megaforce" again as an adult.

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Extra_Elevator9534@reddit

Or do so ... now that we have adult money to buy adult beverages, and can watch Megaforce as a drinking game.

Just have medical transport ready.

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6ifted1@reddit

I watched it a couple years ago. The 80s GI Joe team cartoon had to have been inspired by this movie. It was so hokey, but it sure felt like they should have yelled "YO JOE!" from that C-130 at the end!

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EmperorMeow-Meow@reddit

A lot of the stuff we enjoyed back in the '70s and '80s where ridiculously simplified for television or the theater. And the messed up part is, I don't know if it's because we were underdeveloped in our critical thinking, or if society overall was just so much simpler that no one questioned the storytelling. Either way, a lot of those films didn't age well... Like action stars never reloading, or fight scenes that treated their characters like they instantly regenerate their injuries..

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Stereo_Jungle_Child@reddit

Because everyone watched the same few shows and movies back then, society had a shared moral framework put in place. The "good guys" won and the "bad guys" lost. There were clearly defined moral limits and outcomes most of the time.

Today, everything on TV is dark, edgy, violent, and full of anti-heroes. There's moral ambiguity between the "good" and "bad" characters (at best) that leave moral teachings open to interpretation. And we wonder why people in real life have forgotten how to be nice and why the crooks seem to get away with everything now? They've been taught that that's how things work now.

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EmperorMeow-Meow@reddit

I think you're mistaking that people are "taught" through television. Television is trying to imitate life not the other way around.

Good people do bad things. Bad people can do good things. The good guys don't always win and when they do it's not always a matter of right and wrong. People are far more complex and morally nebulous than anything easily out into media.

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Stereo_Jungle_Child@reddit

People are "taught" things through all of the experiences in their lives. People learn how to act by watching others act. How else are they going to do it?

People at this time watched a LOT of TV. Children grew up watching how other people acted on TV. There were only 3 TV networks. Since nearly everyone watched TV, there was a 33% chance that any person you met had watched the same show you did. You certainly can't say that anymore with the thousands and thousands of different choices of "content" people have on TV/video now.

We are SO much more fragmented as a society now than we were back then. Part of that reason was the shared experience we all had of watching the same few TV shows that were available at the time that all contained the same basic moral lessons.

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

Yet, corporate greed exploded in the 80s and 90s🤔

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MaybeOnFire2025@reddit

I was trying to explain to my teen the concept of must see TV network television, where you talked about it the next day with friends/family, etc. Friends, Seinfeld, Cheers, etc.

Even articulating it out loud sounded...old. But I miss it.

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

What? 70s cinema didn't have dark, edgy, violent and anti-heroes?🤔

Taxi Driver, Deerhunter, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Clockwork Orange, Chinatown, French Connection, Dirty Harry, the Warriors, Deliverance, Deathwish

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justmarkdying@reddit

Try watching Excalibur. My heavens.

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Brock_Savage@reddit

Excalibur is still a great film along with Zardoz

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RobDaCajun@reddit

Zardoz is for the refined viewer.

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Dogzillas_Mom@reddit

The last time I watched Excalibur, I was tripping balls on LSD and I am going to leave those memories right where they are. That’ll do just fine.

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mfhandy5319@reddit

Spash. Movie nite with the parental units. First movie in a long time where, we didn't have an intermission, nobody fell asleep, and we all watched the whole movie.

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Swimming-Compote-168@reddit

Don’t watch Krull.

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sinsandcrimes@reddit

Easy now.

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Dull_Marketing_3256@reddit

They Live

Holds up

40 years later & It’s all out of bubble gum but still kicks ass 👊

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sinsandcrimes@reddit

You know what? I just saw a Carpenter interview where he said just one stuntman played every masked alien.

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Spicercakes@reddit

The best thing about watching Iron Eagle as a 50 year old vs a 10 year old is realizing the name of the fictional country in the move, "Bilya", was just "Libya" scrambled. Also in all of the Bilyan Air Force Base scenes, the director didn't even bother to cover up the Israeli writing and color scheme over all of the equipment and vehicles.

The 80s were simpler times.

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FantasticStooge@reddit

The funniest part of watching movies that we loved from 40 or 50 years ago is how over the top the music usually was

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Available_Wolf1059@reddit

I loved The Dukes Of Hazzard as a kid. I can’t sit through 5 minutes of it now. Red Dawn I could probably watch, I need to look it up and try and watch it again.

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Patient-Cap-4004@reddit

I felt the same way about every single John Hughs movie. Especially, the Breakfast Club.

I'll preface this with that I'm oldest person i know with a "don't snitch" mentality, and I found myself rooting for the assistant principal.

"No, you little turds, I'M the one asking who do you think you are!"

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TouchingTheMirror@reddit

I saw The Breakfast Club once back in the 1980s when it got to home video, and I must have thought it was fine and generally entertaining because whenever the movie would come to mind in the years that followed I don’t recall thinking poorly of it.

Then one random weekend afternoon in the early 2000s I happened to turn the television on as it was starting, so decided to watch for the hell of it. The film definitely doesn’t hold up well now. The heartfelt confession scenes for each character were often pretty cringe inducing, and the final takeaway message seemed to be that the weird, quirky, artistic girl’s life changed for the better when she started acting and dressing normal, began wearing makeup, and so got herself a jock boyfriend. Oof.

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UrsaMajor7th@reddit

You’ve changed

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Scoobysnax1976@reddit

Tv shows are the same. Try watching the Dukes of Hazard, Macgyver, Knight Rider, or the A-Team today.

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CitizenChatt@reddit

I just listen to the theme songs and then I'm okkaaaaaayyyy.

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MaybeOnFire2025@reddit

Holy crap, the production values of the first season of MacGyver were *atrocious*. In fact, the pilot was directed by Alan Smithee (the former DGA name used for "I don't want my name on this shit!).

Started re-watching it with my son from the beginning, and wow some of those eps were horrible, and they all look incredibly cheap now.

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Scoobysnax1976@reddit

Loved the show when I was 10. Thinking back on some of the episodes, they broke the laws of physics a lot.

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MaybeOnFire2025@reddit

Physics, chemistry, even biology (the Army Ants episode).

Also, as was true in most of those shows -- looking at you, The A-Team -- the bad guys have awful aim.

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Ellphis@reddit

I still love these shows. They’re the perfect type of show to watch while I workout. The plot is pretty straightforward and each episode can be watched on its own. I don’t have to watch them in order and keep track of everything that happened previously to enjoy the current episode.

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Equal_Insect8488@reddit

Yeah, it turns out that they were kids shows

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silverbulletsam@reddit

I watched police academy again the other day and it’s still great! So many laugh out loud moments!!

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CryptographerOk3814@reddit

I watched Ace Ventura so many times I knew it line by line.

Can’t even watch it now. 😂

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CitizenChatt@reddit

Allllllrightyyyyy then

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idlefritz@reddit

Red Dawn is better for me now that I know that the production turned into an irl lord of the flies. There’s no chance many of these movies could be made the same way now considering how reckless we were with people and animals back in the day. The lead up to the invasion in the script is interesting as well. China for some reason is fighting against the communists too if I remember correctly.

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IamTheMan85@reddit

China and Russia had a long history of hating each other, regardless of their political system.

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LeftCoastGrump@reddit

They had a shooting war in 1969, and a bunch of proxy wars. There's a bunch of relatively recent history that most of us westerners just don't know because of the tendency to treat the communist countries as a unified block.

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FBS351@reddit

Yeah, John Milius, the director, is pretty nuts. Among other things he inspired John Goodman's character in the Big Lebowski

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JessieColt@reddit

The movies of our youth? They were written and produced by our parents not our peers.

Let that sink in for a few moments.

Think about some of the movies that were released when we were in school or early college and think about what that says about the movie makers who were our parents peers, not ours.

A college kid in a fancy car hooking up with a 15yo on her 16th Birthday? (16 Candles)

A bunch of geeky high school social rejects meeting up in college and getting back at the people who bully them? Yes. Rejects. One of the guys in the group is nicknamed Booger, for obvious reasons. (Nerds).

A bunch of rural kids who have farm smarts but not so much book smarts who are not destined for much other than working at the local feed store in town or on the family farm join up to save their town from a bunch of foreign invaders (Red Dawn). Talk about having a Meal Team 6 hero complex.

An outsider who gets moved to a rural town decides he needs to be a hero for himself and the other high school kids and save them from their overbearing parents and authority figures. (Footloose)

A bunch of misfit school kids that constantly get into trouble get detention and have an epiphany about who they are and how they actually have a lot in common? (Breakfast Club)

A high school kid decides he is the only one who can save his hostage dad from kidnappers in another country so he steals a fully armed fighter jet with the help of an old man near retirement age and bombs another country. (Iron Eagle)

There are a LOT of movies from our youth that just do not hold up, at all.

Some of them are still fun to think about or watch with nostalgia but some of them are just plain hard to watch, especially when you think about how the people who thought up these were mostly our parents or our parents peers.

Puts a whole new perspective on what THEY were thinking about.

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IamTheMan85@reddit

I hate this generation. So serious and ready to be offended about everything.

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bendingoutward@reddit

At least we got to see that reckless teenager grew up a bit and did things by the book in Iron Eagle 2.

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Zealousideal_Draw_94@reddit

They spent our childhood and youth telling us anything is possible, then in our 20-50’s saying we had unrealistic expectations. If we weren’t already the IDGAF generation, we would be.

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IamTheMan85@reddit

I watch it ever other month and still love it as much as I did then.

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xantub@reddit

On the other hand, I considered Back to the Future as the best movie ever. I watched it a few years ago and I still thought it's the best movie ever.

Also we had a lot more variety. Look at the movies in 1984 or 1987 and there were very different movies. Nowadays it's like 50% superhero movies and the rest is the usual rom-coms, slasher movies and kid movies.

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BenefitAdvanced@reddit

BTTF IS the best movie ever!!!

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MaybeOnFire2025@reddit

Yeah, it's great. But the Biff rapey stuff, and the "Beat it ****k" line did not age well...

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Haisha4sale@reddit

Check out that 4x4. That is hot. Someday, Jennifer. Someday. Wouldn't it be great to take that truck up to the lake? Throw a couple of sleeping bags in the back. Lie out underneath the stars.

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freisbill@reddit

about 50% of the movies I re watch suck...

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Wild_Peach075@reddit

I've found that to be true of a lot of the music that I thought was so good. I think to my 50 year old self, and go..."God that was a stupid song! We're we REALLY that horny, back then?"

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HousesRoadsAvenues@reddit

I may have been horny, but I didn't see too much action. :)

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Wild_Peach075@reddit

Well, hopefully that's turned around for you, as of late.

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HousesRoadsAvenues@reddit

Happily it did! :)

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Wild_Peach075@reddit

Glad to hear it!

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Defiant_Employee6681@reddit

Try Highlander. How did I not notice the ridiculous sound effects?? 🙉🙉

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HousesRoadsAvenues@reddit

Clancy Brown as the bad guy, doing tongue wags at the nuns in the church...I don't know why I found that so funny.

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Gai_Daigoji@reddit

There should've been only one.

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WinterTourist25@reddit

There was only one.

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Jolly-Guard3741@reddit

Yes. Fandom has basically disowned the other “Highlander” sequels.

Eager to see what happens with the remake / reboot.

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spikewilliams2@reddit

And the TV series?

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Jolly-Guard3741@reddit

I liked the series and so did most other people that I know who watched it.

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spikewilliams2@reddit

I think I can remember watching it but can't remember anything about it. It's the same with the RoboCop series.

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LadyNorbert@reddit

It's got Henry Cavill in a kilt and also in a black leather longcoat. Though I suppose it also has a plot...

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Jolly-Guard3741@reddit

It's got Henry Cavill in a kilt and also in a black leather longcoat. Though I suppose it also has a plot...

— A little something for the ladies —

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IronStan7@reddit

You didn't like the one with the plot about the ozone layer?

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Stereo_Jungle_Child@reddit

Too much boom-boom? Big strong man like you shouldn't be afraid of a little boom-boom. :)

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Old-Kaleidoscope1874@reddit

I can't hear the sound effects over the awesome soundtrack.

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Dont_Care_Meh@reddit

I used to love Ladyhawke. I watched it recently and could not process how 10yo me could get through the music.

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Uptight_AI@reddit

The production and story are so good, and the music is so bad!

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DetroitXL@reddit

It’s a product of its time. Look at the 60’s Batman show… little me thought it was the coolest and never missed a syndicated episode (especially when Batgirl was onscreen) but now me revels in its campiness

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Maverick-Mav@reddit

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DetroitXL@reddit

Little me would say that’s my girlfriend

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Maverick-Mav@reddit

I liked cat woman

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LadyNorbert@reddit

Heh, I'm on the staff of a fan convention that took place last month. We had a lovely older gentleman come in dressed as the Penguin from that show and he was absolutely glorying in the camp. He had the most wonderful swagger.

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ted_anderson@reddit

Exactly. Back then when you were presented with a certain level of absurdity that's more or less reality today, it makes the show not as fun or exciting. As someone pointed out with TV shows like Knight Rider- We thought it was so cool how he would press all of those buttons on the ceiling of the car for no apparent reason other than make those touch tone noises. He's just driving down the road and then Kitt says, "Uhh.. Michael. Devin is calling." And then he'd hit the buttons.. "dooo-doo-deee-doop...." even though Devin could contact him on the screen unannounced. Today with the advent of facetime, zoom, and other face-to-face options, all of that extra button pushing is just stupid.

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Stereo_Jungle_Child@reddit

There were SO many good movies back then that turned into decades long franchises.

Think about it. Between 1977 and 1987 there was Star Wars, Alien, Mad Max, Raiders of the Lost Ark, First Blood, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Predator, etc.

That's a LOT.

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HearingDue2119@reddit

all the horror franchises

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Sean-SoCal@reddit

Raiders of the Lost Ark is still the GOAT

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LadyNorbert@reddit

I always preferred Last Crusade, myself, but I have a soft spot for Connery.

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JesusMaryandJose@reddit

I'm looking at you Scarface

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Tim-oBedlam@reddit

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FREN

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AbsolutesDealer@reddit

RIP Swayze

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What_Scripture_Saith@reddit

I still like Red Dawn. It didn't need CGI to tell a great story.

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gringoloco01@reddit

I always think of Red Dawn when I drive around Las Vegas NM or Raton. Beautiful country around there.

Avenge MEEEEEEE!!!!!

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What_Scripture_Saith@reddit

Actually I always think of it when I see those old-style elementary schools. Those parachutes coming down and the kid hanging out the window after being shot.

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