Leaving the '80s

Man Alone made some good points about leaving the 1980s behind, but I have to disagree with the overall assertion. After all, many of my favorite things were released in the 1980s - many things that, "You could never do now." And that's the key phrase.

Having said that, I get where he's coming from. I certainly don't want to hear or see endless remakes and new takes on proven commodities with just a bankable title attached. AD&D is from the 1980s (and '90s), even though it started in the 1970s, and that's all I need insofar as D&D goes. That was their heyday and they released an awful lot of content (mostly good, but a lot of bad too) during those eras. Were I to play D&D, I would play one of those editions and obviously a lot of people agree.

Although my teenage and young adult phases were in the 1990s, most of what we got then were remakes and revisions of products from the 1980s. I don't want to relive my past, but neither do I want to toss babies out with the bathwater. 

I'm eyeballing kung-fu styles for Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game, for example, and am likely to base them on games from the 1980s when the ninja craze fueled several systems in which Martial Arts Styles were a big deal. And I am not about to entertain notions of "cultural appropriation" nor any other pop-psych nonsense; these are games meant for having fun, and they present a lot of things from a lot of different sources, not just other cultures.

In fact, if you're reading critically, I suppose I am saying that ninja are as much a part of our pop-culture as anyone else's. After all, the popular, American notion of ninja - who they are, what they do, and how they do it - is pretty far removed from their historical counterparts.

I don't need a remake of The Goonies or Ghostbusters, but I still love those (original) movies and they inspire me to do other things. So, I will not be leaving the '80s alone even though I long ago left them behind... and now I'm old.

© The Weirding, 2024