December 06, 2002
WILL I DARE TO EAT A PEACH?
Nov. 30, 1990
[Of course, as long as we're talking about feeling old, the 5-year-old in question is now 17... GH]
So there I was, a year ago, watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home on cable, and my 5-year-old daughter wandered in.
"What are you watching, Daddy?"
"I'm watching Star Trek," I replied.
She plopped down in front of the set and watched along with me for a few minutes as Kirk, Spock et al., went through their paces. And then she turned back to me and asked two words that haunt me to this day:
"Where's Worf?"
Never had I felt quite so old as I did when I heard that question. Because here, genuinely, was the Next Generation. To me, the words "Star Trek" will always conjure the first Enterprise and its crew. I always refer to the new TV series as Next Gen. But to my younger daughter, Trek will be epitomized by a Klingon security guard.
Since then, I have become a lot more aware of aging. I'm not talking about the physical aspects, although Lord laws they're there. I'm speaking of the intellectual realization that I'm getting up there in years, although I'm not even 35. I'm older than most of my editors. And most of the fans I interact with were and are shaped by entirely different experiences.
Just as my parents would stare in horror at me, if the name of a 1940s movie star was meaningless to me, so now do I find myself looking through my father's eyes in terror at an upcoming generation who knows nothing of the times I lived through and cares even less.
It hits home even more for me, because I'm in a field of endeavor that so often brings me into contact with people younger than myself-- brings me into contact in droves, particularly at conventions. And my own kids are there to provide reminders at home, as well.
Having recently passed my 34th birthday (and received a number of very kind cards from fans, so thank you very much, all) I find myself reflecting on many recent instances when what seems like relative youth becomes instead twisted into the opening guns of Social Security years:
• While we were driving to visit my parents in Pennsylvania, my 9-year-old daughter asked if she could play her New Kids on the Block tape on her cassette player. Before we could tell her that it was fine with us, she added solicitously, "Or, if that's going to bother you, I have a tape of Julie Andrews that you'd probably like better."
I almost drove into a median strip.
My wife and I had grown up with the Stones and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, for crying out loud: performers who, by their music and appearance, threatened the fabric of society and gave our parents ulcers. To childcert of the '60s and '70s, New Kids are about as threatening as the Archies. I could easily picture Donny and company performing "Sugar Sugar."
But I'm ooolllddd. I cannot, by definition, like the music that "kids nowadays" listen to. The moment you hit 30, you must gravitate to the Big Band Era or Lawrence Welk. It's expected.
The purpose of music that kids listen to is to shock parents, and, frankly, it's probably causing no end of damage to modern teenagers that their parents are musically unshockable.
• At the San Diego Comic-Con, there was a nubile young lady who hung around a number of pros. I found out that she was 14. And I thought to myself, Where was she when I was 14? Then I realized. When I was 14, she was -6.
• That tastes change in artists and writers is not surprising to me. What does surprise me is the vehemence with which they change. Modern young comics fans aren't remotely interested in the creators that I grew up with and yet don't realize that they owe the talents of the current favorites to those artisans of yesteryear.
Readers who picked up Steve Ditko's Spider-Man reprints in Marvel Tales sniffed disdainfully, in my presence, "This guy draws like Ron Frenz." Where would Frank Miller or Dave Sim be without Will Eisner, yet, out of every 10 readers, how many buy reprints of The Spirit, or even know who he is? ("Wasn't he one of the villains killed off by The Scourge?")
• The guy who thought that Napoleon Solo was Han Solo's brother in the Star Wars comic book or the girl who thought that Illya Kuryakin was a rock singer.
• The guy who didn't get the ending of "Quantum Beast," because he didn't understand who the "Dr. Z. Smith" guy was supposed to be.
An unrelated aside: At Eaglecon in Philadelphia, a guy came up to me with two fanzines that had appeared earlier this year. To my shock, someone else had come up with the exact same idea I had, "Quantum Beast," right down to the title. It was published out of Colorado, and unquestionably the author beat me to the punch with this, so, if you see it at a convention, you'll know who came first.
The fanzine treatment is somewhat less tongue-in-cheek than mine, and the companion zine focuses on Vincent in the Waiting Room while Sam is using his body. It's the title duplication that really gets me. I should've used my alternate, "Bestial My Foolish Heart.")
• At a costume competition there was a woman in a very tight-fitting black dress. I mumbled, "She looks like Morticia." The guy next to me said, "Who?" Hopefully, this will change when the Addams Family movie with Anjelica Huston comes out.
• Fans debating over all sorts of nitpicking about the new Flash TV series. The majority of them, concerned over whether this depiction of The Flash is "serious" enough (people still grumble over the costume, for example) don't recall that the last time The Flash was done live-action on TV, he was part of this godawful special in the '70s that featured a plethora of DC super-heroes, spearheaded by Adam West and Burt Ward as you-know-who. Speed effects were done by having The Flash pose in a running motion and then just vanish off the screen, the sort of cheap-jack in-camera visual effects that are rarely done any more.
• A newscaster, in reference to the current "unpleasantness" in Saudi Arabia and the impact that it's having on oil prices, said, "Americans may have come to terms with the idea that the days of cheap gasoline could be gone forever."
I started laughing. Clearly, the newscaster had to be in his early-to-mid-20s, utterly unaware of, and oblivious to, the gas lines and gas crunch of 1973 and '74. Back then, when prices escalated from about 30c a gallon to over a buck, and people had to wait in block-long lines to get it, and locked gas caps and in-the-car gas-tank release buttons became standard issue (no one had them in the '60s) to counter gas siphoning-- that, Mr. Newscaster, was when Americans kissed good-bye to cheap gasoline.
• The favorite bonding pastime of my generation is to stand around and compare notes on the question, "Where were you when you found out Kennedy was shot?" Several friends of mine were tossing this around at a convention, when a young lady, walking past, overheard this question and said with some surprise, "Ted Kennedy was shot?"
• A friend of mine threw a 1970s Nostalgia party. I was astounded. I mean, the only things to come out of the '70s were gas lines and Nixon's resignation. Otherwise, you can bag the whole damned decade. Just toss it. It was as if everyone was catching their breath from the '60s, and preparing to launch for the '80s: 10 years of treading water.
Yeah, OK, the new X-Men came out of the '70s. But what was the hottest-selling title of the time? The biggest thing? Not X-Men, kiddo. It was Howard the Duck. You can still get big bucks for Giant Size X-Men #1, but how much demand is there for the Howard #1, a comic book once so sought-after that store owners were descending on 7-11s and grabbing up every copy they could find?
Shows how much the '70s knew. Either that, or it shows how much damage one bad movie can do to a character.
What's the point of all of the above? Well, nothing, really. Except maybe fans will understand why, for example, I don't take it all that seriously when they tell me that my work on Spider-Man was the best ever. Because the best ever was Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and we've all been spinning our webbed wheels since those issues.
Just starting to feel my years is all. And of course there's lots of people in the business older than I am, who can look at me in the same way that I can look at younger fans and say, "You think you got problems? You think you're so smart? People in their thirties nowadays think they invented introspection and confusion. Why I remember-- " and so on.
It's just that somehow, in the war of "Us vs. Them," we're always so surprised to wake up one morning and realize we've become "Them."
(Peter David, writer of stuff, is becoming age-obsessed.)
Posted by Glenn Hauman at December 6, 2002 11:16 PM | TrackBack | Other blogs commentingI'm a high school teacher. It just dawned in me recently that most of my students would remember a time before The Simpsons started its run as a regular series on Fox, and none of them would have been around when the Simpsons shorts first started up on The Tracey Ullman show...
And of course, in my earlier comment, by "would," I meant "would not."
Can you tell that I don't teach English?
(I am so embarrassed...)
Hey, I know how you feel. I didn't start coming to grips that I was no longer a kid until a remark by one of my employees. Coincidentally, she made it on my 23rd birthday. She walked into my office, saw the picture of my then 21 year old girlfriend (now my wife), and asked me, "hey, is that your daughter?" Since then, I've learned to accept my age. Of course, the fact that everyone thinks I'm in my mid-thirties when I'm only 26 makes my feeling old that much more pronounced. I keep wondering how old people will think I am when I make it to sixty!
It really hits you like a ton of bricks. I just turned 30 this past August, and it's just amazing how certain thoughts and perspective creep into your head that were never there before, turning you from one "them" into one of "us."
My cousin Lauren celebrated her 15th birthday in September. She is now the age I was when she was born.
I remember the episode of Full House when Bob Saget's character turned 30. At the time, 30 was seen as this really old milestone. Now I'm thinking that they were nuts to do that episode. Ages like 30 and 40 no longer seem as old as they did when you were a kid.
I no longer think of "kids" as a group I myself am a part of. It's an extremely disconcerting transition to notice oneself to have made.
Time used to move SLOW when you were a kid. Now it moves faster than Flash looking for a bathroom in Mexico.
When I was a kid, teenagers were old.
When I was a teenager, 25 was old.
When I was 25, 30 was old.
When I turned 30, 40 was old.
I'm only 31 now and I'm starting to think that 80 is old.
Bobby
For me, feeling old(er) started when I realized I clearly remembered things that had happened before legal adult friends of mine were born. When the 20th Anniversary Edition of E.T. came out, a younger friend of mine went into mild panic because she remembered the original release and she couldn't possibly be old enough to remember something from twenty years ago. I pointed, laughed, and welcomed her to the club.
Dav2.718
(Thanks for posting this on my birthday Glenn; I'll have to whack you with my cane next time I see you :-))
I think I first felt old when I realized there were teenagers active on the net who were born after I first got on the net (1980).
Btw, each year some person does a thing for college professors to remind them that this year's frosh were born in (whenever; 1984 this past fall) and thus will not remember things like Ronald Reagan being President, the Challenger explosion, etc. on a firsthand basis.
Talk about feeling old... I'm teaching high school now, after three years of teaching middle school (grades 6-8). I recieved lots of grief from my students when I told them that the original Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in the theaters. To them, Star Wars was a silent movie starring Charlie Chaplin (not that they know who that is, but you know).
Old? My daughter gleefully did that to me years ago with this
COMMENT:
Dad, have you seen Wayne's World yet? They have this really great tune in it by some band called Queen.
> sigh <
I also teach high school. I'm 30, and my moment went something like this:
We're having a formal debate in my forensics class, and one of the speakers turns to me and asks, in response to his opponents' statement, "Can he say that?" My response (and a long reach it was): "He can say that, 'cause he's riding with the Chocolate Monk!" Every kid in that class turned and looked at me, and I realized none of them had ever even heard of Cannonball Run.
Youth truly is wasted on the young.
I came up with the thing about "The Simpsons" myself a few months ago, mainly to shut up some 22-year-old interns at work who'd been trying to make me feel old for remembering something from my teen years...which were way, way back in the '80s. (How many of us reading this are 30, anyway? I made the "leap" just a few weeks ago.)
I've had several moments of "Oh, my gosh, what happened to my life?" -- the 20th anniversary re-release of "Star Wars", certainly, and the realization a few years ago that most cutting-edge TV ads are no longer directed at my demographic. Just in the last few days, I heard a TV news story about self-driving cars of the future that said, "Generation Y will be the first to accept the new technology." Yep, 'cause us crotchety Gen-X'ers ain't gonna trust them fancy-schmancy newfangled horseless carriages.
Longtime reader, first time poster, by the way. Hiya!
My 'tempus fugit' moments that stand out....in the context of this page, anyway....are: (1) the replica-edition of 'Amazing Spider-Man' # 149 that Marvel released at the height of The Clone Affair in the Spidey books many years ago. I realized then that the 'kids' reading the current 'clone' storyline were probably the age I was (or younger!) when I started reading 'Spider-Man' (around the self-same issue 149), and that something that was first published in the mid-'70s must seem as 'long ago and far away' as, say, 'Showcase' # 4 seemed to me in 1975!!
And: (2) standing outside the Great Movie Ride at Disney/MGM (a daytrip, living in Tampa), waiting for my (then) girlfriend to come out of the Ladies room, and meeting a family of friends from out-of-town at that spot. I idly looked at a facsimile one-sheet for "Alien", triggering memories of seeing it for the first time....opening day....in 1979....1979?!?....twenty-plus years ago?!??
I seldom feel my chronological age, but this was one of those times when I felt a vulture perched over my shoulder whispering: "....tick....tock..."!!
Hooper
I almost committed justifiable homicide on a young protoge of mine in an actor-combattant group a couple of years ago when we went into a Bennigan's at the end of oue of our practices. The loudspeaker was playing "You Can Go You're Own Way." The Kid asked whe the band was, to which I answered "Fleetwood Mac." To which he responded "Oh, that's that OLDIES band..."
The restraint ot throttle his neck was, suffice it to say, hard to keep. I'm sure a lot of you can relate (I'm almost 34...around the age you wrote this column, PAD. ;>)
Don't hurt me.
There are exceptions but in general I found out, I am not fond of classics. I don`t like the old SF movies with the evil monsters from space, screaming females, strong male heros who are not allowed to show any "weaknesses" and an overly militaristic background. I admit it, I am also not fond of the artwork of many old Marvel comics, like Steve Ditko (I have German reprints of some of these old classics). I also became a Trekker with TNG, not with TOS. Just some examples.
But on the other hand, although I am not a fan of a lot of these early works, I respect them for what they are, the basics of the modern works I enjoy nowadays. This first of all applies to old SF, even TOS. SF certainly evolved from these beginnings. Of course not everything that is offered today is good but something like Babylon 5 or DS9 is certainly much more mature than movies dealing with the monsters from space.
And sometimes there are Classics that are indeed timeless masterpieces, IMO. "Metropolis" still amazes me today on so many levels. I enjoyed "The Day the Earth stood still" immensely. I love "Raumpatrouille", an old b/w SF series that is still extremely popular in Germany. I have a LOT of respect for Stan Lee and his achievements. I would also classify the early years of the New X-Men as timeless classics, like the Dark Phoenix saga. I miss these times!
Another good example is my husband`s hobby which is computer games. He has an extensive collection, including a lot of Arcade machines and boards. It is not so different from SF and comics: Some of these beginnings look indeed very crude to me but some of these classics became timeless like Space Invaders.
My opinion is, people should stop saying "This is great because it is a classic". That is not enough, not to me. Some classics are indeed great but not everything is it any more by today`s standard. It actually gets on my nerves when TOS fans confront me with the argument, I should like it because this is the original Star Trek and without it the more recent series would not exist. Why? No, I don`t have to like it but I think we all should respect the classics. There is a difference.
30? 30?! Kids, yours truly will be hitting the big Five-Oh in April, so don't talk to me about being old! I think it really hit me at Dragon Con about 10 years ago, when I was standing in line to enter on the first morning. I looked up and down the long line and I was obviously the oldest person in line. So I had to ask myself what was so different about me - was I way too old to be still reading and loving comics? Too old to be going to cons, standing up and yelling at the "Duck Dodgers" cartoon? Too old to be trying to fill holes in my collection, trying new comics, still feeling that "sense of wonder" that pervades so much of my life? Will there come a time when I no longer love SF/fantasy/comics/action in my reading and viewing? I don't think so, but really - am I too old for this stuff?
what amazes me the most in this tempus fugit thing is the video Games.
When i first played one in my teens, there was a Bright spot shooting little bright spots on moving bright spot at it and was fantastic ! It was an invasion from other space, you know ?
Now they has this unplayable games in tri-dimension that turns around and around and make me vomit.
What i ask me is: How i actually saw an Space ships there where were only bright spots?
You guys feel old? Ha. I got y'all beat. Remember what it was like to be 17, still clearly able to remember your elementary school years, and keenly aware that in less than two years, you'd be responsible for taking care of yourself as an adult? Now THAT'S when you feel old!
Yeah, I'm the same age as that then-five-year-old girl in PAD's column. I became a Trekker with DS9 and TNG, with DS9 carrying most of the weight. My first ever legitimate book was one written by PAD himself. And I'm absolutely terrified of college.
None of you could possibly be feeling as old as I do!
I'm 44. I remember as a kid reading about the Sleepers in the Captain America Tales of Suspense stories, and thinking in 1965 (or whenever the exact year it came out) that "My God, this WW II is like a different world". My mind had no frame of reference for something that long ago. And that was only 20 years or less. My comic experience (and life) now is almost double that. I also remember at age 25 thinking, "I'm 25, how much longer can I go on reading Superman?" Now I'm still asking that question 20 years later. It is very weird.
Here's the formula. It is a constant. It never changes.
Old = Your Current Age + 15.
My first "Am I that old?" moment came during a USENET discussion. We were talking about the Six Million Dollar Man and his origin.
One of the posters in the thread quite seriously piped up with the comment "Stone Cold was in an accident?"
I felt very old at that point.
For those of you too young to remember The Six Million Dollar Man's real name was Steve Austin.
I always wondered if the Wrestler took his name because he was a fan of the show?
Sci posted: None of you could possibly be feeling as old as I do!
Some of us can. Swap TNG and DS9 in your post, and you pretty much have my case.
When did I start feeling my age?
One definite clue was reading a message board thread about the Gaiman/McFarlane lawsuit and someone mentioned the PAD/Toddy debate in terms of "oh, they had this big panel about something or other a long time ago, I think Todd won..."
How soon they forget.
JSM
This comment is not about age, only to say that I find it interesting that in the 90's there was a band in Argentila called Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas...
My version of this is to check out Letterman's studio audience, and note that some of the college-age ones weren't born when Letterman started on NBC.
I first had the age thing hit me (I'm 30, btw..sigh) when talking to some highschoolers who had joined the SCA, and getting the revelation that they hadn't been born when Star Wars or Empire were first out. Oy.
It's the youngen's that make you feel old...kill em all I say.
As for the Stone Cold Steve Austin question...actually, he took the name Austin as that's where he lived and was short pressed to get a "stage name" (his real name is Steve Williams, also the real name of 80-90's era wrestler, Dr. Death Steve Williams..hence the need for a name change).
i'm 13 years old, and to me 25 or even 30 isnt really that old. i would say... 50.