I wonder as well how some of the early RTD era Who will start to look soon- there's a lot of pop culture in there.
I think it's already aged very poorly. Some of that is because of the terrible lighting in Seasons 1 & 2 that tended to emphasize the crappy quality of the video that they were shooting on. Also, the first couple seasons have a very tentative feeling, like they didn't know how far they could go with some of the sci-fi stuff. The later seasons felt much more confident.
As far as
Star Trek, I think it's weird how the original series has aged better in the last 50 years than
The Next Generation has in the last 30. Season 1
TNG especially. I keep thinking of "Haven" and how we're supposed to think that one blonde alien woman is so beautiful but all I can do is retch as the awful frizzy hair. Then there was all the swearing & sex references in Season 1 which felt really out of place next to later seasons.
A lot of the pop culture jokes from early seasons of
Mystery Science Theater 3000 have aged so poorly that I really have no idea what they're talking about.
I do agree of the 'studio audience' style sitcoms. I think they will fade.
They're already far less common than they were in their Must-See-TV heyday 20 years ago.
I wonder though with so many shows and movies set in the past and with nostalgia based shows like "Stranger Days" and the fact that younger people interact with older people if lot of the references might be understood if not fully appreciated in the same way as older viewers.
I dunno. When I was a kid growing up in the late-1980s & '90s, I felt like I absorbed a lot of pop culture stuff from well before my time, like references to Elvis & John Wayne & Richard Nixon and reruns of shows like
The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, &
M*A*S*H. They're not the kind of stuff that I would have sought out on my own but I watched them because that's what was on. Nowadays, I think the current younger generation has far less pop culture literacy because they can stream or download whatever they want and not have to digest other stuff just because it's what's on. I'm in an improv comedy troupe with a bunch of people of various ages and I'm often shocked at how little the college kids know, even on a broad stereotype level, about much of anything that's more than 20 years old (except for
Star Wars).
I mean I never lived in the 60's but I get most hippie jokes and some of the 60's pop culture stuff though it does take some time to get a better feel of the past IMO. I feel like I understand the 60's better today then I did 20 years ago, even though what I understand is a shadow compared to people who lived during that time but even then those memories are not always reliable because everyone is unique and also because people experience different time periods at different times.
I thought that anyone who says they remember the '60s wasn't really there. Which perhaps explains all of the missing
Doctor Who episodes from that era.
