I have become a fan of the "The Walking Dead" in recent years, love the show. As a kid I was a huge "Star Trek" fan. So I'm thinking about the two shows, both in the sci fi genre so to speak. Shows like WD now have ascendecy and those like ST are rare, so I was thinking "Why is that?" So I get to thinking about the times, in the '60s & '70s (vs. today) , we probably had all these ambitious visions, when I was a kid, I really believed we'd cure diseases and colonize planets and travel to other galaxies! We all believed, the future was limitless. Fast forward 40 years, nowadays we don't believe in crap! Kids are taght there future will be worse than the past. Our country, our government, our corporations, our world is garbage, people are fighting each other over table scraps, it's really very easy to believe in the BS, PC fake asss world we live in that some virus could destroy all of humanity based on some a-holz mistake, go to planets & galaxies? F that! We can't even pay for pencils for school kids! optimistic future, BS, ain't no man going where no man has gone before in the crappy asss world that's developed since "Star Trek'', so it's easy to understand why "Walking Dead" is popular, just because we BELIEVE it could be real in the BS world we live in today.
Do not let it get to you, it still exist. Both you and I are looking at it through or own old eyes such as our parents and grandparents did. Kids still are excited and dream of a better future. I wish HBO would bring back Carnivale with a second series, talk about a classic good vs evil show.
It's really comparing apples to oranges. Walking Dead is a consistently downbeat show, with the main theme the utter hopelessness of the survivor's situation. Star Trek's view of the future was always ridiculously optimistic. The show actually backtracked on a lot of it's premises with Deep Space 9, which took a more realistic view of religion, ethnicity, oppression, and scarcity, than the Utopian Federation. But I've noticed that dystopias seem to be more popular when times are rough. The 1970's saw a lot of dystopian TV and movies and the popularity of "survivalists." The cycle is returning so we get a lot of dystopian TV and movies and "preppers" are popular.
Star trek when it was first on tv never enjoyed the popularity that walking dead has now... I dont believe walking dead zombies are real or could ever be, but the plague that created them could devastate our civilization...spanish flu, bird flu, hong kong flu, ebola...
No doubt about it, the optimism is gone. Probably has something to do with people taking a look around at the world. "First generation to do worse than their parents". Indefinite detention without trial. People getting shot over seat belt violations. Man eats homeless guy's face under the bridge (hows that for zombies?). And the space program that went to the moon floundering ever since.
That's what I'm talking about. Sure, I doubt we'll see zombies, I mean besides the meth addicts, but it's way easier to see this bs country accidentally or even purposely exterminating itself with a deadly virus that ever going to Mars or even the moon again or curing cancer or anything positive.
