Best year for pop culture you've lived through?

[wildojinx]

We had that bad years for pop culture thread, what would you say the best year (or years) were? 1989 or 1998 are probably tied for me.

[Hit Girl]

1982 because Thriller and ET were released.

Nothing beats that.

[Deleted]

1984

It gave us Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Terminator, Metallica's Ride The Lightning, Van Halen's 1984, and there's probably other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head.

[BorneAgain]

As a kid, 1994.

Spider-Man the Animated Series begins, Lion King and Star Trek Generations in theaters, Two Sonic games, Donkey Kong Country, and Streets of Rage 3. Twas some good times.

As an adult, its trickier as no one year seemed to have a fantastic hat trick of best games, TV, and film at the same time; though the quality of games in 2017 was so good I'm almost tempted to name it as one.

[trollrogue]

Year 2006 for me-- I met Shigeru Miyamoto, and he literally watched me play the Wii with mirth on his face-- as a fresh-faced college grad covering E3 2006 as my first 'real job' outta college (and... it was the last GREAT E3 before attendance dropped by over 60,000 people in 2007 when they closed it off to the general public-- even though I had a press badge for 2006 and 2007 so it didn't effect me), I also go to see/touch the glass case holding Eddy Guerrero's tights at the WWE event at E3, it was the HUGEST nerd-convention ever before Comic-Con really became Comic-Con (let's face it, the death of E3 in 2007 opened the door for the comic nerds to steal that huge crowd of gamers over); Nintendo Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360 (HD-DVD) and Sony's PS3 (BLU-RAY) were ALL debuting at the same damn time!

E3 started being open to the general public again in 2013 but I believe you have only a limited window to buy the new hella-expensive Fan Tickets since they limit attendance still.

So yeah anyways, I was one of the first people in the world to ever see/experience those 3 ground-breaking, game-changing systems and meet all the game professionals/interview them for our website (now defunct!) 'The Game Feed'.   It was my first real job out of college, and the first time I'd ever been to L.A. (I grew up in Florida, born in Midwest USA, so mind-boggling was an understatement) and I was old enough to drink at all the crazy after-parties the IGN journalists strong-armed all us 'little guy' bloggers and smaller game news sites into coming for (so everyone would be in the same room if some kinda news broke, and of course they're buying drinks so we're all loose-lipped about our exclusives after a few hours...

(Anyway I'm digressing and rambling on here so skip this paragraph if I'm boring you, but as you can see clearly Summer 2006 was FUN AS f*** and just kinda the moment when pop culture and my life seemed to intersect for 3 days at the L.A. Convention Center... If you can imagine being in a room of guys I grew up reading-- e.g. Ultra Game Players game magazine I knew almost all the editors by name, EGM and EGM2's staff were all there, Game Informer, the aforementioned IGN/Ziff-Davis media bastards were all there an went on to corner the market and put all those old-time print-media Game Mags out of business after a couple more years... damn I'm starting to depress myself with this rambling... even though the old ways are gone I'm still always a gamer at heart, although my gamernerd's sig is often never updated in real-time for FANetwork ijs)

Oh-- I also saw Paris Hilton, months after her sex-tape leaked so you can imagine how cool it was for her to call my afro "hot" while I was in line waiting for her autograph.

Oh-- I also met Sinbad (the comic, not the Sailor), and we literally played Wii-Sports together while him and his family got to cut in line with all the press agents (the normies had to wait HOURS to play the Wii, if they even made it into the Nintendo booth for that day's alottment of game testing you only had a set amount of time to play and most people without a pass I knew of waited all weekend just to get into the Wii play booth and ended up missing out on everything else fun.  There were no wait times hardly for the PS3 and 360... but I for one was having a blast holding impromptu tournaments at Microsoft's play booth with their Ping Pong game against all comers.

This year, they're projecting that E3 will finally be bigger than 2006. Only took the ESA over a decade!

[Cranjis McBasketball]

I dunno. I’ll say 1989. Got into wrestling, Ghostbusters 2, Aerosmith released “Pump” for my money, the last great rock and roll album, the Simpsons and Seinfeld debuted.

[Alexander The So-so]

Combining both what I enjoyed as a kid and what I later enjoy now as an adult, I think 1996 and 1997 were back-to-back awesome pop culture years.

1996: the N64 comes out; Super Mario 64; the first Tomb Raider; WCW catches on fire with the birth of the NWO; ECW is doing well at this time; pretty good alternative rock music (one of my new favorite songs, "Pepper" by The Butthole Surfers, becomes a hit); in anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion is released and concludes; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of my personal favorite Disney movies, comes out.

1997: Goldeneye 007 for the N64; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1; this is the greatest year to be a pro wrestling fan, with the products for WCW, WWF, and ECW each firing on all cylinders; good movies from this time include fun stuff like Men In Black and good drama like Good Will Hunting; The End of Evangelion, the movie conclusion to Neon Genesis Evangelion, is released.

[Clash, Never a Meter Maid]

1994 was a lot of fun. SatAM was just concluding and there were two classic Sonic games that year. There were a ton of films that year I loved, like Lion King, The Mask and Forrest Gump. At ten there was a “I’m going to go see a GROWN UP movie!” anticipation with Gump.

2016 had some of my favorite films I’ve seen in a while. Hell Or High Water, Captain America Civil War, Moonlight, Zootopia, Finding Dory, Moana, Deadpool- the box office was lit.

[Natural Born Farmer]

Around '04-'05. NWOAHM in full swing, TV was starting to enter it's renaissance of long form storytelling, WWE was in a pretty good place with the Edge vs. John Cena rivalry as the focal point, lot of awesome comics (especially Scalped)... A little nostalgic because it's when I really started hitting my stride in college, but I feel it still holds up.

[legendkiller1985]

I'll echo 1994 and 1997. I'll also add a lot personally from 2011-2013. During this time I played a lot of Arkham City, Last of Us, GTA V, Uncharted 3, LA Noire, Mortal Kombat IX, Assassins Creed III, Bioshock Infinite, Injustice 1, MVC3. Gaming was awesome on the ps3 during this time. I watched a fair amount of Breaking Bad, South Park, Game of Thrones, 30 Rock, Community, Parks and Rec, COlbert/Daily Show/SNL was must see for me weekly. I was/still am Obsessed with the MCU, The Wolverine, Wreck It Ralph, Skyfall, Django, The Hobbit movies. I also started developing my comedy career more by taking sketch and improv classes which led to an internship at the theatre I took classes at.

[Malcolm]

Apr 20, 2018 18:08:59 GMT -5 trollrogue said:

Year 2006 for me-- I met Shigeru Miyamoto, and he literally watched me play the Wii with mirth on his face-- as a fresh-faced college grad covering E3 2006 as my first 'real job' outta college (and... it was the last GREAT E3 before attendance dropped by over 60,000 people in 2007 when they closed it off to the general public-- even though I had a press badge for 2006 and 2007 so it didn't effect me), I also go to see/touch the glass case holding Eddy Guerrero's tights at the WWE event at E3, it was the HUGEST nerd-convention ever before Comic-Con really became Comic-Con (let's face it, the death of E3 in 2007 opened the door for the comic nerds to steal that huge crowd of gamers over); Nintendo Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360 (HD-DVD) and Sony's PS3 (BLU-RAY) were ALL debuting at the same damn time!

E3 started being open to the general public again in 2013 but I believe you have only a limited window to buy the new hella-expensive Fan Tickets since they limit attendance still.

So yeah anyways, I was one of the first people in the world to ever see/experience those 3 ground-breaking, game-changing systems and meet all the game professionals/interview them for our website (now defunct!) 'The Game Feed'.   It was my first real job out of college, and the first time I'd ever been to L.A. (I grew up in Florida, born in Midwest USA, so mind-boggling was an understatement) and I was old enough to drink at all the crazy after-parties the IGN journalists strong-armed all us 'little guy' bloggers and smaller game news sites into coming for (so everyone would be in the same room if some kinda news broke, and of course they're buying drinks so we're all loose-lipped about our exclusives after a few hours...

(Anyway I'm digressing and rambling on here so skip this paragraph if I'm boring you, but as you can see clearly Summer 2006 was FUN AS f*** and just kinda the moment when pop culture and my life seemed to intersect for 3 days at the L.A. Convention Center... If you can imagine being in a room of guys I grew up reading-- e.g. Ultra Game Players game magazine I knew almost all the editors by name, EGM and EGM2's staff were all there, Game Informer, the aforementioned IGN/Ziff-Davis media bastards were all there an went on to corner the market and put all those old-time print-media Game Mags out of business after a couple more years... damn I'm starting to depress myself with this rambling... even though the old ways are gone I'm still always a gamer at heart, although my gamernerd's sig is often never updated in real-time for FANetwork ijs)

Oh-- I also saw Paris Hilton, months after her sex-tape leaked so you can imagine how cool it was for her to call my afro "hot" while I was in line waiting for her autograph.

Oh-- I also met Sinbad (the comic, not the Sailor), and we literally played Wii-Sports together while him and his family got to cut in line with all the press agents (the normies had to wait HOURS to play the Wii, if they even made it into the Nintendo booth for that day's alottment of game testing you only had a set amount of time to play and most people without a pass I knew of waited all weekend just to get into the Wii play booth and ended up missing out on everything else fun.  There were no wait times hardly for the PS3 and 360... but I for one was having a blast holding impromptu tournaments at Microsoft's play booth with their Ping Pong game against all comers.

This year, they're projecting that E3 will finally be bigger than 2006. Only took the ESA over a decade!

I'm glad your 2006 was awesome. I'm not being sarcastic. I mean that genuinely because that sounded awesome.

My 2006 was personally hell. My younger siblings were taken by the state for a while(and I still blame myself for it to this day for opening the door like an idiot) where they ended up getting abused and molested by the foster family.

Pop culture wise, it was the year where they announced Smackdown vs Raw would go multiplatform, the Kids WB weekday block was ended, the WB and UPN were replaced by the CW, Monday Night Football went to cable, and Sonic 06 came out. So yeah, for me, 2006 sucked.

[Clash, Never a Meter Maid]

2006 was also the year the Cardinals won their first World Series within my lifetime. That was a huge boost, personally.

[Fade]

All the 90s were awesome for me. Particularly the late 90s. Getting into wrestling for the Attitude Era, getting into Star Wars and it coming back with the OT, Titanic insanity, The Lost World, the Internet, N64/PS2, 1999 being a great year of films, even Y2K was fun in its hilarity.

And I recall digging music/movies/tv shows between 2009-2012 in particular.

[mattperiolat]

I want to say 1984 for me. Michael Jackson and Prince blowing up, Bruce Springsteen, We are The World, the 1984 Olympics in my backyard (used to live in Orange County, close to LA), Ghostbusters, Footloose... damn, I’m getting old.

[fw91]

1999. Solid music from all genres, and maybe the best summer movie season ever. Granted I was only 8, but it also seemed like a time where pop culture itself had a boom period.

[trollrogue]

Apr 21, 2018 11:54:41 GMT -5 Malcolm said:

Apr 20, 2018 18:08:59 GMT -5 trollrogue said:

Year 2006 for me-- I met Shigeru Miyamoto, and he literally watched me play the Wii with mirth on his face-- as a fresh-faced college grad covering E3 2006 as my first 'real job' outta college (and... it was the last GREAT E3 before attendance dropped by over 60,000 people in 2007 when they closed it off to the general public-- even though I had a press badge for 2006 and 2007 so it didn't effect me), I also go to see/touch the glass case holding Eddy Guerrero's tights at the WWE event at E3, it was the HUGEST nerd-convention ever before Comic-Con really became Comic-Con (let's face it, the death of E3 in 2007 opened the door for the comic nerds to steal that huge crowd of gamers over); Nintendo Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360 (HD-DVD) and Sony's PS3 (BLU-RAY) were ALL debuting at the same damn time!

E3 started being open to the general public again in 2013 but I believe you have only a limited window to buy the new hella-expensive Fan Tickets since they limit attendance still.

So yeah anyways, I was one of the first people in the world to ever see/experience those 3 ground-breaking, game-changing systems and meet all the game professionals/interview them for our website (now defunct!) 'The Game Feed'.   It was my first real job out of college, and the first time I'd ever been to L.A. (I grew up in Florida, born in Midwest USA, so mind-boggling was an understatement) and I was old enough to drink at all the crazy after-parties the IGN journalists strong-armed all us 'little guy' bloggers and smaller game news sites into coming for (so everyone would be in the same room if some kinda news broke, and of course they're buying drinks so we're all loose-lipped about our exclusives after a few hours...

(Anyway I'm digressing and rambling on here so skip this paragraph if I'm boring you, but as you can see clearly Summer 2006 was FUN AS f*** and just kinda the moment when pop culture and my life seemed to intersect for 3 days at the L.A. Convention Center... If you can imagine being in a room of guys I grew up reading-- e.g. Ultra Game Players game magazine I knew almost all the editors by name, EGM and EGM2's staff were all there, Game Informer, the aforementioned IGN/Ziff-Davis media bastards were all there an went on to corner the market and put all those old-time print-media Game Mags out of business after a couple more years... damn I'm starting to depress myself with this rambling... even though the old ways are gone I'm still always a gamer at heart, although my gamernerd's sig is often never updated in real-time for FANetwork ijs)

Oh-- I also saw Paris Hilton, months after her sex-tape leaked so you can imagine how cool it was for her to call my afro "hot" while I was in line waiting for her autograph.

Oh-- I also met Sinbad (the comic, not the Sailor), and we literally played Wii-Sports together while him and his family got to cut in line with all the press agents (the normies had to wait HOURS to play the Wii, if they even made it into the Nintendo booth for that day's alottment of game testing you only had a set amount of time to play and most people without a pass I knew of waited all weekend just to get into the Wii play booth and ended up missing out on everything else fun.  There were no wait times hardly for the PS3 and 360... but I for one was having a blast holding impromptu tournaments at Microsoft's play booth with their Ping Pong game against all comers.

This year, they're projecting that E3 will finally be bigger than 2006. Only took the ESA over a decade!

I'm glad your 2006 was awesome. I'm not being sarcastic. I mean that genuinely because that sounded awesome.

My 2006 was personally hell. My younger siblings were taken by the state for a while(and I still blame myself for it to this day for opening the door like an idiot) where they ended up getting abused and molested by the foster family.

Pop culture wise, it was the year where they announced Smackdown vs Raw would go multiplatform, the Kids WB weekday block was ended, the WB and UPN were replaced by the CW, Monday Night Football went to cable, and Sonic 06 came out. So yeah, for me, 2006 sucked.

People always say for every happiness or joy you get in the world your mirror gets equal misery or suffering-- I extend my heart to you and your 2006, but also hope that my good times cast some light against the shadows of those memories for ya.

btw OP, good thread idea-- I just canceled some of my therapy sessions as a result

[Deleted]

1987 through 1995 were all incredible.