iPhones are being traded in for flip phones, emoticons are replacing emojis, and – if Kim Petras’ Slut Pop album cover is anything to go by – the CD is making a return, too. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve seen people lean into escapism by flocking to eras past, whether that’s digging out old childhood videogames, revisiting weird entries on Urban Dictionary, or putting on Von Dutch caps and calling it indie sleaze. Its maximalist, Microsoft Paint aesthetics serve as a direct contrast to the stark and utilitarian visuals of its Web 2 successors, as seen with Apple and Facebook.Īn extension of our growing fascination with Y2K is the return of early web aesthetics. ![]() Although it would go on to lose popularity at the onset of mobile gaming technology, reentering its now-dormant servers is like glancing into a living time capsule: an innocent time when the internet was a boundless site for experimentation and play. I take part in a number of games and quests, customising my personal plushie store with rudimentary Adobe Flash and socialising on the website’s glittery chat boards, the gamified experience serving as a portal to brave new worlds.īoasting 25 million users at its peak in the mid-2000s, Neopets was as synonymous to early aughts childhood as Tamagotchis and McDonald’s Happy Meals. Here, I bypass the parental controls and check up on my virtual pets Blumaroo and Shoyru. I enter my username Pebble_78 (a reference to the then-newly released Motorola Pebl) into the server and enter the vast digital world known as Neopia. The faint blue CRT light on the Dell family PC casts a shadow across my face. And that’s not including the increasingly easy access to international material like City of God and Let the Right One In.Īnd we still haven’t touched upon Pixar’s golden age ( WALL-E, Finding Nemo), Hollywood finding the formula for comedies perfectly balanced between smart and dumb ( The Hangover, The 40-Year Old Virgin), or that the Fast & Furious series got its humble beginnings here.It’s 2005 and I’m playing Neopets. Meanwhile, under-served voices started to make some noise in the mainstream with films led by females ( Mean Girls, Whale Rider, Bend It Like Beckham, Twilight), made African-American filmmakers ( Love & Basketball, Barbershop), and featuring Asian-American stars ( Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Better Luck Tomorrow). Fanboy culture, the internet, and sites like the one you’re reading now helped bring “genre” movies to the cultural forefront: zombies ( 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead), sci-fi ( Avatar, Serenity), horror ( The Descent, Saw), and fantasy ( Pan’s Labyrinth). And it wasn’t just superheroes making the leap to the mainstream. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Spider-Man 2 opened up new ways of connected storytelling (and money making). And speaking of those series, we didn’t want their installments taking up all the spots on this list, so one movie representing the whole franchise was chosen for those worthy.Īnd your vast comic-book trivia knowledge became a social asset, not a bullseye for beatings. ![]() We escaped into magic and wonder in the months after 9/11 with Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, while we celebrated the end of the Great Recession by getting the hell off this planet with Avatar. Movies were also used to absorb our collective trauma. Sofia Coppola ( Lost in Translation) and Neill Blomkamp ( District 9) certainly benefited from the new technology. ![]() Without digital cameras, zombies would’ve stayed dead 28 Days Later was only possible with how quick and easy it is to set up with them. Film cameras were the standard way to shoot a movie for over a century, and now they to had to make space for upstart digital.
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