CSotD: (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Metamucil)
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It was yesterday. It was 25 years ago. That's "yesterday," dammit.
"The Elderberries" is one of a tiny sub-category of strips that have improved under new management. It was successful but creatively a bit nondescript until about four years ago, when creator Phil Frank entered the last stages of cancer and Corey Pandolph was called in to take over the strip.
After working with Frank during a transitional period, Pandolph kept the basics of the strip intact but slowly worked in his own eccentric world view, not enough to transform it into something it hadn't been, but enough to add a level of silliness that elevated it above the norm.
I would note that, in today's strip, he has departed the normal base at the retirement home and done a one-off of two guys on a bench. Fact is, if you were 16 when the Beastie Boys released "License to Ill," you're only 41, which hardly puts you in Elderpark's demographic.
Now, turning 40 is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the mosh pit.
And, having just touched on the subject in Sunday's posting, I've got to say that it's good to see a pop culture reference that won't be totally lost on anyone under 50 or so. Whether anyone under 30 knows who the Beastie Boys are — or "were" — is not the question. You can't have any nostalgia at all if you're not allowed to go back more than a decade.
Which reminds me that I'm so old I can remember when the "Golden Oldies" they played on the radio were only two or three years old. I also remember when "Golden Oldies" emerged as a format: I had just started working for a TV station in Pueblo, which would make it the mid-70s, and KOA radio started playing nostalgic songs from, yes, the previous decade. The "Golden Oldies" playlist has been frozen in amber ever since.
"Frozen in amber" being an elegant way of referring to a fossil.
Feeling nostalgic for the Beastie Boys doesn't make you a fossil.
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