alt Hacker NewsThe X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
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I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
Recommend "Halt and Catch Fire" series, if you haven't already seen it.
Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush.
The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker.
It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.
Geocities had a ton of xfiles fansites https://geocities.restorativland.org/
(beware, has auto-playing audio!) https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/
and many more.
On a similar note, go back and watch the party scene from the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
ELO's 1981 song "Ticket To The Moon" lyrics said:
"Remember the good old 1980s?
When things were so uncomplicated?
I wish I could go back there again
And everything could be the same."
At the time, it was a bizarre and crazy idea that the 1980's would be better than the future.
The idea that the future would be MUCH better has always been a given - at least for me but I think much of society felt that way back then.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.
X-files was great for the first couple of seasons but then it went downhill, fast. I watched it start to finish twice, including fillers, and I gotta tell ya, past the first 2-3 seasons it really ain’t that great a show. I remember playing the live action video game that was split across several cd’s. that one was real nice. sometimes i still rewatch let’s plays on youtube about it.
I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.
There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
Morpheus was right, the 90s were the peak of human civilization.
The 90s truly were a wonderful decade for human creativity.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
Best show on network TV at the time (and possibly since then). I look forward to seeing how Hulu is going to ruin its remake.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
X-files was so great show...
Here's another, next-level of nostalgia: a copy of the official Gillian Anderson website (1) with her favorite music from the 2000s.
1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
Yep, things went downhill after social media.
Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Cigarette Smoking Man! I was a kid when I first watched the show, and he seemed so mysterious and fascinating to me from the moment he appeared.
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
My wife and I rewatched X-Files start to finish a couple years ago. It still holds up. The monster-of-the-week where Mulder sings the "Shaft" theme song is still hilarious.
But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing.
I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.
Like Synthwave
The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization".
* Music was incredible
* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least
* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent
* People were friendly and had time for strangers
* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.
* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today
Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)
If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
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The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.