It's not often that I'm conscious of the moment something becomes
annoying. There are a lot of things in our world that are overdone and
overused, but started out as good ideas. If you're my age or older, you
may remember the first time you saw a minivan. What a great idea: a
van (which, as of the early eighties, was still inherently cool) but for
families. Then one day years later, you're looking for a parking spot at Wal-mart, find yourself cursing an entire row of spots all taken by minivans, and you realise that at some point you learned to hate them.
I just noticed that the same thing happened to me with Stan Lee
cameos. It used to be fun, you felt like you were in on a subcultural
connection if you recognised him in one of the X-Men movies. But
watching the latest Dr. Pepper ad, I groaned internally at their chummy
attempted in-joke. Maybe the concept has been done to death, maybe
Comics Culture has gone too mainstream to have inside jokes, or maybe
it's just the fact that a months-ahead tie-in commercial.
On
the other hand, I know exactly where I was when I got tired of those
child-drawing family stickers in the back windows of cars, SUVs, and the
aforementioned minivans. Just a few days ago they seemed cute, but
then, as I walked through a mall parking lot, I saw one, something
snapped in my mind, and they just started getting on my nerves. They're
as boastful as the "Baby on Board" signs from the eighties, but without
even the pretence of having a useful purpose. They've also been hurt
by the lack of variation: Usually a trend that lasts this long gets
spoofed. You'd think that by now, bored children in the back seat would
find a way to combine the family stickers with one of the Calvin peeing
stickers you see in the back of pick-ups.
No comments:
Post a Comment