BayCon has been around for 30 years. Before that, the niche interests just change -- my dad and his friends have been dressing up in 20s garb and driving 20s cars to period events since the 60s. There are Civil War re-enactments and sex clubs and costume parties and all sorts of things.
And anyway, making those things into an indictment of society at large is silly, especially when there are so many trivially easy indictments of society (like the way everyone always thinks this generation is worse than the ones before it).
> Something like "The Searchers" is an order of magnitude more poignant and challenging than Iron Man or Avengers.
Are you being disingenuous, or did you not realize you're cherry-picking here? Spaghetti Westerns and shoot-em-ups and grindhouse films and silent comedies have all occupied a place as entertainment alongside more serious films, and "serious" films, if that's what you're into, are still alive and well.
Try comparing Laurel and Hardy's "A Perfect Day" to The Avengers while comparing The Searchers to, I dunno, Gran Torino or Million Dollar Baby or Interstellar or whatever your poison.
> Just that those kind of movies (and even more naive "action" movies) are prevalent today with the 20-40 demographic, something which wasn't the case in decades past.
And my point is that he's wrong, and history proves it.
This is just a classic rose-colored glasses problem, that's all. People are imagining history as they prefer to imagine it, not as it was.
This page has a picture of the nonexistent 20-40 year olds turning out to see Stan Laurel in 1947: http://www.nwemail.co.uk/memories/stan-at-queen-s-first-roya...
"When one goes, as I did recently, to a city like Chicago and finds on the South Side, a district equivalent to New York’s Harlem, a two-million-dollar building of a magnificence housing nothing but photoplays, and sees over four thousand people packed in, watching and listening and obviously amused and thrilled, he asks what all this means, and admits, unless he is a Dumbkopf, the coming in of a new order. Particularly is he amazed and bewildered when, in the same city, he witnesses a brilliant spoken farce-comedy, deftly played by distinguished actors, given before half-empty benches – yet in the very heart of the town. What is one to say in the light of such over-whelming evidence? Simply that something has entered the world, suddenly, which grips the people, appeals to them, rivets their attention, and drives them out of the old established theatres."
That was written in 1921.
Context at https://nenaghsilentfilmfestival.wordpress.com/category/frid...
