Through the Ages

A couple years ago in pointe class, my mother, who was also the teacher, put on a piano version of the theme song from The NeverEnding Story for one of the barre exercises. This class had a wide range of ages from around twelve to twenty-one so when this tune played, three different age groups had a take on it. One of the more wee kids said something like, “hey this song is from TikTok”, only to be corrected by another slightly older kiddo who responded with, “no it’s not, it’s from Stranger Things”. I had a good internal chuckle to myself because TikTok is an app that people can’t even create music on and Stranger Things is a show based in the eighties where two children sang that theme song. After said chuckle, I told the two of them that the song was originally from an eighties film that I grew up watching in its hunk of a VHS form. 
The whole situation got me thinking though. 
Each generation seems to get really annoyed that the generations after them didn’t experience the same things or they just don’t expect the younger generations to know those experiences at all. For examples, one couple remarked to me that I wouldn’t remember what DVDs are, and another time this fellow asked me if I knew who the singer was for Sweet Caroline because it was currently playing. As a matter of fact, I have an extensive collection of DVDs so I do remember what they are and my mother had several Neil Diamond songs on her ipod so I know Sweet Caroline is one of his. But since I look twelve, these people instantly thought I would have no idea about the common things from the past. In the instances of older generations getting annoyed happens most, in my experience, when songs or movie quotes are associated with a newer thing. Such as the theme from The NeverEnding story. The quote “what’s a nice place like you doing in a girl like this?” was originally from the 1999 film The Mummy but was also in Deadpool. All of the soundtrack that was in The Guardians of the Galaxy was comprised of songs from the sixties and seventies. 
Here’s the thing though, even if I hadn’t grown up in the last two years of the nineteen hundreds and the entirety of the early aughts, I can still be aware of the times before I was born. Things get passed down and reused and reworked into different forms. That’s good, that keeps these things alive and relevant, like making a cover of a song. One of the episodes from Glee had a cover of Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson done mostly with cellos and it was wicked! I’m not a huge Michael Jackson fan but that song with cellos? Chefs kiss. Because of that, now I know a song of his that I like even though it’s a cover. I prefer the 2012 version of Total Recall but I know it’s a remake and I can appreciate where it came from. Yet people get so upset that I don’t like the original thing or that I never knew of the original thing, and this goes beyond that one film. 
It’s just such an odd mindset to either have distaste for someone who didn’t grow up in the same years as you or expect someone to know only what’s happened in the years they’ve been alive. We studied Shakespeare in school and he hasn’t been lurking around amphitheatres since the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, you don’t hear his ghost haunting us like, “aye thou youths, doth thee hath naught of knowledge from days before ye breathed?!” Ellen DeGeneres had a segment on her show where she would have younger people try to figure out the wiles that thwarted those older than them. She had them fight to fold maps, struggle to operate a rotary phone, contemplate the correct way to work a typewriter. A lot of those guests had a hard time and they were laughed at because they didn’t grow up with these things. That doesn’t make them stupid. I used to have a typewriter and used it a fair amount as a child but that doesn’t make me smart. 
I would say, at the end of this confusing mess of a log, that it is both unwise to just assume us younger people are so unaware of the world before we existed, and, to hold resentment when we do lack awareness of what the world was like before we existed. We’ve all had vast upbringings and experiences and I think I said the exact same thing in my People Have Different Tastes log. As I kindly divulged the origin of a popular theme song that two young girls didn’t know before, I urge you to pass on the knowledge of your generation the same way. Kindly and patiently, for despite the misinformation, everyone knew of that iconic song and that’s what matters most. The NeverEnding Story continues to never end because it’s rebirthed into each new age in a new form just like how in the Jumanji “sequel” the board game became a video game to appeal to a more modern world. We are supposed to improve our recycling so…making covers and remakes and reworking the old into something new or different is good.