But there was post-1980s stuff in the trailers, like The Iron Giant and Overwatch...

The Iron Giant is replacing Ultraman, which they couldn’t get the rights to for the film because Ultraman’s rights are a total mess right now. WB made this film and owns the Iron Giant, so it sidesteps any rights issues.

I think of it this way when it comes to RPO: The Oasis’ unintended side affect was that it killed pop culture. People didn’t create anything new because they become overly obsessed with nostalgia. Maybe there is some non-Oasis populace out there with their own music, comics, shows, etc. But the majority of the…

I am also annoyed by this trope, but I can see an intellectual case being made for it. I think nostalgia gets stronger as pop-culture gets more fragmented. I often use 80's music as a crutch when I have my friends over because we all have such different musical tastes as adults, but we listened to the same shit as…

One question I have: how is everyone simultaneously so poor and living in such a shitty world that they retreat into the closest thing they can get to the Matrix and able to afford, in both time and money, the ability to do so?

a. Then why are Overwatch, The Matrix, and Iron Giant in there? None of those are from The 1980s?

That was my issue with early trailers. In the book they had a pretty good explanation: Halliday loved the 1980's, he designed this and left his fortune to whoever could figure out his easter eggs, so boom... worshiping the 1980's was born. It was pretty clever. It sounds like there’s an explanation in the movie, so…

As always:

It’s actually not that radical of an idea that by the time movies have been around for 200 years, they’ll have more or less exhausted all forms of cinematic novelty. No one’s to blame; when a medium is new, there’s all sorts of exciting new possibilities, but after a couple of centuries, all the permutations have…

I’d do very obscure and specific ones.

I’ve thought about writing a parody of the book, where all the pop culture references are replaced with references to fictional stuff from the 2020's or 2030's. So instead of a DeLorean, it’d be a limited edition high-end Tesla or whatever.

The thing is the book covers this. It’s not that everyone in 2045 is into the 80s cause they are cool. The creator of the Oasis was weird dude obsessed with the 80s and when he died and set up the secret hidden treasure in the game worth billions people studied everything he wrote about, owned and loved trying to…

I get that argument and it does help build sympathy with the characters if we can understand their little obsession. Even an invention like Quidditch is basically just the sports we already know with magic thrown in, so you can make the parallel to soccer fans, etc.

a. Actually, jazz comes form jasm which was a version of jism.

Indeed Star Wars had a totally new form of popular music! It was called Jizz. You know, like jazz but it comes out of your dick?

It’s really not 30-50 years, the movie has clearly fucked that up with overwatch characters and whatnot. The guy who triggers all this was obsessed with pop culture from the 80s and early 90s. And not just pop-culture, nerd pop-culture. And perhaps even obsessed is wrong, he was deeply immersed in the pop culture of…

Star Wars takes place in the past.

I think the reason for that is you’d have to come up with something that could pass for a great future work of entertainment, and when a work of entertainment depicts another, fictional work of entertainment the work’s credibility suffers if the fictional work isn’t as great as it’s made out to be. 

The basis for the pop culture obsession in Ready Player One is not nostalgia. It is because of a specific set of interests held by the creator of the game so that they can try and win his treasure hunt. Therefore they are limited to the time period which he was interested in.

I always had the same problem with Star Trek, where characters often have these nostalgic obsessions - film noir, movie serials, Westerns, Sherlock Holmes, Gilbert and Sullivan - but only as long that nostalgic thing is pre-21st century. Does the Federation just really suck at coming up with new pop culture? Were…