A matter of characters

[tangaroa]

Were the 1980s the best decade for entertainment of the last three decades? I don't know, but the 1980s had a lot of novelty characters and concepts gain mass popular appeal. You could make references to them and everybody knew what you were talking about whether they'd seen their movie or TV show or not, and the shows were usually very good.

Popular characters from the '80s that I can remember:

• Indiana Jones
• Rambo -- from Rambo II, not First Blood.
• Robocop -- but hardly anyone knew who ED-209 was.
• the Terminator
• the Predator
• Highlander -- the concept of a sword-fighting Immortal, not Connor.
• He-Man
• Pee Wee Herman -- everybody found him disturbing but everybody still watched at least one episode and knew who Chairy was.
• several WWF characters -- Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, and Sergeant Slaughter were each as individually popular as anything else on this list. Hacksaw Jim Duggan's act was popular but his name was not; Jake the Snake's name was popular but his act was not, except for the fact that he had a pet snake.
• the Ghostbusters -- The kickass theme song helped. The team and the concept were what people remembered, not the team members, although Slimer the cartoon ghost became popular when they marketed him.
• Police Academy -- The concept and the characters were well known, and the first and fourth movies were not that bad.
• Ernest -- as in "hey Vern". He was very popular for a very short time, then people stopped caring when they noticed that all his movies after Camp stunk.
• "Wax on, wax off" and the Crane Kick -- but nobody cared about the Karate Kid himself.
• Back to the Future's time-traveling car and Doctor
• Betelgeuse from Beetlejuice
• the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation -- although it took until the early 1990s for the show to get popular.
• E.T. -- it's interesting to see the gap in social behaviour between how popular this movie was in the 1980s and how nobody could be made to give a damn for the re-release in 2002.
• Pac Man and Super Mario -- the first video game characters to have the same mass appeal of TV and movie characters. Frogger and Donkey Kong came close.
• Freddy Krueger and Jason
• Conan the Barbarian
• Chucky from Child's Play
• The Energizer Bunny, the 7-Up Spot, the California Raisins, Domino's Noid -- even marketing mascots got popular.
• The Smurfs, The Care Bears, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- Adults outside the target audience might not have known any specific characters from the series but were familiar with the general concepts they all followed and their taglines.
• Crocodile Dundee
• the ANGRY! SERGEANT! stereotype from Full Metal Jacket
• Howard the Duck - Dishonorable mention, but everybody knew the Duck.
• Jessica Rabbit
• Kitt from Knight Rider
• Gizmo, the cute fuzzy creature from Gremlins
• Garfield, Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat, Calvin and Hobbes, Gary Larson's cows and nerdy kid -- new stuff on the comics page.
• Mr. T -- a character based off a real person playing himself.
• MacGuyver
• Bill and Ted
• Axel Foley
• Al Bundy
• Voltron
• A.L.F.
• Doctor Sam Beckett and Al the hologram -- is on the 1989-1990 edge.

Not qualifying: The Princess Bride was not popular until the 1990s as more people saw it on video after hearing about it through word of mouth. Urkel and the Simpsons appeared in late 1989 and did not become popular until the 1990s. Twiki from Buck Rogers is on the 1979-1980 edge, but early enough that I will call him a 1970s character. Alien was 1970s. I don't think the Equalizer or Punky Brewster were popular enough to include.

In the aughts, what new and interesting characters and concepts were this popular?

• Harry Potter characters -- Harry was already popular from the books; Hermione, Snape, and Dumbledore were popular from the movies.
• Jack Sparrow
• The Lord of the Rings characters -- from the movie portrayal.
• House
• The Spartans from the 300
• Jack Bauer from 24
• No reality TV characters, but the networks have tried and failed to make celebrities out of several of them, and the concept that reality TV sucks and nobody watches it was pretty widespread
• All Your Base Are Belong To Us -- it still shocks me that this did get mass appeal.
• The guy from Grand Theft Auto 3 -- no one cared about GTA 1 and 2. This guy was the star of a Coke commercial.
• Some of Pixar's new characters like Wall-E and Dory
• Naruto -- anime and manga went mainstream in the US in this decade, although there are still enough people who recoil at cartoons that its inclusion is debatable.
• The gay cowboy concept from Brokeback Mountain
• Avatar's giant blue aliens
• Shrek
• Jigsaw
• The traveling garden gnome from Amelie, thanks to the Travelocity commercials
• V from V for Vendetta -- it took the movie to make him popular
• The Bride from Kill Bill
• Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away
• The creepy girl from The Ring
• Borat
• Bella and Edward
• Bob the Builder
• Dora the Explorer

Not qualifying: We already had Wolverine and Spider-Man since the 1970s and they were still fairly popular in the 1990s. South Park, Spongebob, and Teletubbies were 1990s. Triangle Head and Captain Falcon are popular among gamers, but I don't think they made it outside of gamer culture. The new My Little Pony started in the 2010s and it might not be that popular offline. Metalocalypse was heavily popular among metalheads and the late-night young adult set -- its soundtrack is claimed to be the best-selling death metal album of all time, though I can't find any actual numbers on that -- but it is otherwise not widely known. Frank the rabbit from Donnie Darko was very popular among people who saw the movie, but not enough people saw the movie for him to count. The same goes for Shaun of the Dead. Jason Bourne from The Bourne Identity was well known and the movies were very popular but the character has not gained celebrity; I guess Matt Damon looks too much like a normal guy and there are so many action heroes that Bourne blends in with the rest. The Watchmen movie adaptation was not popular enough to count; how many people who had not already heard of the characters care about them now?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a literary character that might qualify. Even if most people only know her as that book that they've heard about that's supposed to be pretty good, they've probably heard of her.

There seem to be fewer great stories and fewer interesting new characters in the last decade than in the 1980s. Reasons?

• Instrument Error

  I started paying less attention to mainstream media around the same time I began to notice a lack of interesting stories and characters in the late 1990s.

• Producer Choice

  Insert the usual complaints about Hollywood not producing anything of value for fear of risk-taking, not having a taste for art, killing new TV shows before they can gain an audience, or whatever other reasons you want.

• Divided attention

  Sometime in the '80s or early nineties we went from 13 TV channels to more than 30, and then we got video games and the Internet. Not as many people are likely to be watching the same thing anymore, so it may be harder for anything new to become as popular.

• Repetition

  Nearly everything I mentioned in the 1980s had sequels. Were they popular because people were reminded of them every few years when a sequel came out, or were they given sequels because they were already popular? Probably both.

Feel free to add ones I missed, argue for inclusion or disinclusion of ones I mentioned, or discuss this further.

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Side Thought: The late 1960s to early 1970s had some deep-concept sci-fi movies like Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. Did the success of the shallow-plotted Star Wars kill off this genre? We still had Blade Runner in 1982 and a few more high-profile movies from Philip K. Dick stories since then.

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Side Thought: If you don't count the mixed-race groups such as Police Academy and Star Trek: TNG, there are as many black men as there are vehicles in the '80s list, and none in the '00s list. If you don't count the mixed-sex groups, women are also poorly represented. And the list is obviously USA-centric.

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Obligatory ink to Retro Crush.