10 Reasons The Early 90s Were Better Than The Early 2010s

Let’s say your crazy inventor friend has built a flying DeLorean and, due to an unfortunate series of events, you’re stranded in the early 1990s.

Your hometown looks the same, but there are little differences: people aren’t walking down the street talking on phones, nobody walks into you while texting and you don’t hear a ring tone every 5 seconds. In fact, there are hardly any phone stores.

You can sit in a cinema without the guy three rows in front updating his status, checking the time or taking photographs during the talky parts. There are 10 movies on 10 screens and not every one is a sequel, a remake or a superhero flick. Hell, some were even made for adults.

Back home, the lack of social media means that people sit in front of that other idiot box, the television. The shows are quieter and less frenzied than you’re used to, and the movies, while edited for language and violence, are more coherent.

When a night out beckons, you can go to see a performer who isn’t a micro-celebrity or a manufactured pop sensation. Most of the bands are young and hungry, not tired old men on the comeback trail.

There are many reasons why the 1990s were better than the 2010s, and here are 10 of them. 

Assuming you were alive, you probably don’t remember what you were doing on the day Pulp Fiction came out, but you damn sure remember the buzz that surrounded its release.

Time edits out the clunkers and embarrassments, so it’s easy to glamourize the past and forget that Leprechaun made more money than Reservoir Dogs, but movies had more impact back then. They left a cultural footprint, as it were.

To illustrate the point: Pulp came out to great reviews and saturation advertising (winning Quentin Tarantino a screenwriting Oscar in the process), but more than that, it was an event. 18 years later, Django Unchained came out to great reviews and saturation advertising (winning Quentin Tarantino a screenwriting Oscar in the process), but you knew it’d be available on Netflix in a few months, assuming it wasn’t already streaming on pirate sites.