Major Spoilers head honcho Stephen has more than a couple of theories about pop culture, but one of the most insightful is his theory of “formative years”, that the years between 14 and 18 are the time when our favorite bits of pop culture are locked down, and the strongest connections to fictional worlds are created. Interestingly, I also find that years to which I have strong emotional ties (such as 2004, the year Widget was born) also have similarly strong ties, for what I believe to be similar reasons, which leads us to today’s entirely subjective query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) tends to find clusters around 1989, 1995 and even 2011, but is probably most enamored of the comic books of 1984, asking: What’s your favorite year for pop-culture?
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I’m going to say 1989. It has two important events I can remember, Batman movie and getting my own NES.
That *was* a good year… Legion Vol. 4 was that year, and Heathers, and Say Anything…
I think 1968 and 1969, a big year for pop-culture across the board. Most of which has had long lasting affect on mainstream culture to some extent. A lot of media from those years also really influenced who I am as a person.
1977, the year that Star Wars first came out and began growing and evolving into the best thing in the history of ever.
However, since I wasn’t born until 1979, I suppose I should also pick a year within my lifetime, so I’ll go with 2003. It still ties into my original choice since 2003 was the year Star Wars Galaxies first came out. For the first couple of years, that was my absolute favorite game I have ever played, and nothing has come close to it since. Even the later years of SWG was only a poor imitation of it’s former glory after they decided to take a unique game and turn it into a WoW clone.
Freddy vs Jason finally came out that year (I know a lot of people hated it, but I really enjoyed it), as well as Lost in Translation, Elf and House of 1000 Corpses.
2003 was also the year I became a volunteer GM in EverQuest. It was volunteer, so it didn’t pay anything (unless you count that volunteer GMs get a free subscription for their main account), but it was a blast.