Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: I also liked Douglas Adams as a kid, but I don't think his stuff has aged well

[quote name="blackwater"]The problem is, he's basically a comedy writer and comedy doesn't age very well. It's kind of like Monty Python (which he had some involvement with, I understand... too lazy to look up what). They had a bunch of sketches where they made fun of King Arthur. That was very funny in the 1970s and 80s, since King Arthur was a big part of the culture. There were lots of books, movies, and cartoons about King Arthur, and how he was a role model of honor and legitimate authority etc. It kind of falls flat in the 2020s, because now King Arthur is just another dead white guy we don't care about. So I can have warm memories of Monty Python but not really feel the need to quote it all the time or tell kids they need to watch it. Now I know people are going to link me a bunch of Monty Python stuff that HAS held up. And that is cool, that stuff is out there and still funny. They probably have a few good memes left in them. But I just wouldn't tell a teenager in 2022 to watch Monty Python from start to finish, necessarily. I feel the same way about Douglas Adams. Compare that with something like Dune, or Solaris. Or even something like Neuromancer or A Scanner Darkly. It just feels like stepping into another world. I think that stuff will hold up better. Whereas a lot of stuff from Douglas Adams already feels dated. For example, the Vogons were a spoof of bureaucracy, but where are their terrible bureaucratic websites and automated account closures? It doesn't exist because that stuff didn't exist back in the 1970s when most of this stuff was written. It's dated in a way that Dune isn't. (Of course we could nitpick whether the tech in Dune even makes sense or could exist, but that's not the point, really.) Douglas Adams was a good writer. If your choices are Adams or some trashy 2020s Young Adult writer, then by all means, choose Adams. But his subject matter was fundamentally the society that he lived in, and that society is passing into the night as time marches on. Even today I feel ancient dropping references to things like Zombo.com or Goatse.cx. The kids don't know what these things are (were).[/quote]