i prefer to revel in the innocence of mares

@Background Pony #3E7C
[oldfag] It's not just TV ads. It's everything. This sense of nihilism and despair and self-hatred, this yearning for annihilation, it permeates everything. Everything. For a real contrast that could give you culture shock, have a look at this. It's a real studio trailer for a real movie that was released in 1955. Here's another from 1957.

There was real fear in those days. Things were ramping up in Indochina. This was in the tense, fearful years in between the Berlin Blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 2022 we perceive these films as quaint, silly, cheesy. Put that aside for a moment. This was their popular entertainment. This is the popular entertainment of a culture that is essentially optimistic. Our popular entertainment is all about vampires and the zombie apocalypse, mostly played absolutely straight. Zombies are anthropomorphic personifications of decay, destruction, entropy, whose appearance means there are no longer any rules, and that can be killed without guilt or consequences. Vampires are glamorous unaging immortals who are bound by no rules. These are things that strike a chord with people who are scared absolutely shitless of the future. I haven't seen this much obsession with zombies in particular since the late 1970s, and then it only lasted a couple of years. We're twenty years into the current episode of zombie-mania, if you count "28 Days Later" as the starting point. People have been very, very afraid ever since 9/11, and it's only getting worse. This is our culture's entertainment and art, and it's all about death and rot—fighting against them, being a blood-powered superhuman that ignores them, or reveling in them. That terrifies me when I think about it.

@Background Pony #3E7C
I agree. You can look at ads from '80s and notice how they're much more upbeat, classy, and cultured compared to today. Here's a good collection and commentary.

@AA
The 1980s were a strange time. But in a good way. It was a positive, manic, fun, life-affirming kind of crazy, as opposed to the 1970s, which were a depressing, bleak, hopeless, despairing kind of crazy, kind of like the present day.

Tony Randall is one of my all-time favorite actors, but hearing him endorse My Little Pony is surreal.