28 Days Later: Aftermath

It’s over. For the second time in 35 years of life I have said “so long” to the year 1996. I’ve learned a lot over the last 28 days and re-learned even more. 1996 was chock full of exceptional movies and music, was in the jagged, foggy in-between period of 3D-puberty for video games, and was a year mostly void of terrible breaking news tragedies compared to every year since, at least domestically. 

Movies absolutely kicked ass. This month I watched Beavis & Butthead: Do America, Mars Attacks!, Happy Gilmore, Twister, Down Periscope, and Black Sheep. I even watched Bio-Dome, though I’m less happy about that one. I braved Trainspotting again for some reason and even took a chance on Trees Lounge which depressed me. I didn’t even take the time to watch some of the other immediate classics like The Cable Guy, Kingpin, The Edge, Jerry McGuire, Spy Hard, The Rock, Primal Fear, Escape from L.A., Jack, The Frighteners, Fargo, A Time to Kill, James and the Giant Peach, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Matilda, Mission: Impossible, From Dusk Til Dawn, Multiplicity, Nutty Professor, Slingblade, Bottle Rocket, Eraser, Jingle All The Way, Scream, Broken Arrow, Space Jam, or Independence Day. Sure, maybe some of those aren’t classics but you’ve heard of them all and it’s crazy these movies all came out the same year. An insane year for blockbuster movies and for Blockbuster rental stores too, I imagine.

I’ve talked about music an awful lot in this series. I won’t waste your time by recapping all of that again but I did discover and rediscover some music. Corrosion of Conformity’s Wiseblood is solid, Type-O Negative’s October Rust is perfectly weird, Sepultura’s Roots, and Stuck Mojo’s Pigwalk were also nice revisits. Some music did not age as well for me, namely Korn’s Life Is Peachy, but I fully expected that. I dug deeper on albums I only knew the one hit from like Butthole Surfers’ Electriclarryland that I previously only knew Pepper (a.k.a. “the avalanche song”) from. I discovered some new-old bands I like, such as Edge of Sanity and Therion. The landscape of marketed music was much more narrow back then before the internet paved the way for easier, middle-man-less accessibility so it was easy for me to pillage much of what was made available for the masses in 1996. Doing that now would be next to impossible. There is an awful lot of music these days despite the Boomer notion of “there hasn’t been any good music since Layne Staley parted Alice in Chains!” Rather, the issue is that the music you like is harder to find because it’s buried in heaps and heaps and heaps of other music, most of it Scandinavian. 

The first half of my month in 1996 was a true, iron-clad, shield-toting, sword wielding adventure. What is out there? What challenges will I face? Will I feel anything? Will I hate it? Love it? Or even die from it? I didn’t know. I dove into books, movies, magazines, newspapers, commercials, headline news, “taped” live events, TV shows, music, and video games without reservation. It did not take long for the top-floating cream from each of those modes of entertainment to disappear and I found myself cruising the bottoms in search of treasure. That quickly became exhausting. I was not able to mention every ounce of media I consumed this month, or else these writings would have become more boring than perhaps they were already because much of it is just not worth talking about. 

That should not sound like a complaint, however. I should have been a historian or something because I loved every second of this. The restrictive nature of something like this felt like going camping. Left to my own devices and a highly curated selection of entertainment that wasn’t just curated for being favorable or good, but from a time. It was, to describe blandly, highly engrossing. Surprisingly, my inner nostalgia monster donned its rose-tinted goggles less than I anticipated. There were a few moments where I really felt more transported through a combination of nostalgia and Deja-vu than is typical in any regular life encounter and those were very tranquil moments. I could get high off any zenful experience harkening back to the days when I had few responsibilities and my biggest worry was whether my clothes looked cool enough to avoid being bullied on the school bus. Ya know? Better times. 

Those nostalgic moments were rare because the things I enjoyed in the actual year of 1996 were likely not from 1996. Save for a few hit songs and newly released movies, the things I interacted with in 1996 were from earlier periods. The things I reexperienced this month were things I discovered later in life. This exercise essentially trapped me into a state of being the wealthiest, early adopter of media in 1996. Someone who read all the newest books, watched the newest movies, played the newest games, and so on. Not an improbable character by any stretch but not true to my time in the real 1996. Not to mention, I heavily sought things I had missed during the time and had no prior attachment to anyway.

The perspective I walk away with from the past month is a compelling one and one not that different from the feeling I got from 1996 when I lived through it. It’s a year of strong anticipation and high hopes. Maybe every year can claim that to an extent, but in 1996 cell-phones were ubiquitous enough to be referenced in most movies and books for the first time, video games were in 3D now (sort of), movies like Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Space Jam, and even Twister were films centered on people unifying to overcome an otherworldly, or nearly so in the case of Twister, force. Marvel and Star Wars are rife with chosen ones. In 1996, outside of The Phantom, superhero movies based on godsend characters weren’t as common. The collective fantasy is that we could all band together for the sake of humanity, a laughably improbable notion in 2021, and a naïve one in 1996. There was a presidential election, the summer Olympics, and Nintendo’s follow-up to the Super Nintendo - massive things to get excited over.

The idea of foreign terrorism was near last on the mind of anyone traveling or attending a large event, although domestic terrorism did rear an ugly head once in Centennial Park just as the bombing in Oklahoma City from the year before was still fresh. No one fretted air travel for reasons outside of the expected anxieties. Schools were considered safe. America’s self assessment was positive. The world had its problems but the US was focused on fighting off movie aliens and watching professional sports and did so at the same time if possible.

I would like to do this again some day with a different year. Would you join me?