I guess with the eighties being the Reagan era it kind of makes sense that there would be a lot of romanticizing Michael Bolton kinda paeans about the strength of familial love that gradually transitioned to a sanitized grunge disillusionment in the nineties but idk
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
You could talk about broad social trends about the '80s being an era when America buried its head in the sand and embraced conservatism and its accompanying sentimentality Although it may have just been a few specific people's success coloring our view of the era
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Frederick and Salvay were a songwriting team who made it big in the '80s with their signature style for sitcom theme songs -- they really liked big, epic lyrics with a soaring, heartstring-tugging melody
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The producer duo Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett (Miller-Boyett Productions), who'd already made Mork and Mindy and Laverne and Shirley, took a shine to Frederick and Salvay and commissioned theme songs for their big '80s hits from them
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
They're the ones who wrote the Perfect Strangers theme ("Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now"), the Full House theme ("Everywhere You Look"), the Family Matters theme ("As Days Go By"), the Step by Step theme ("Second Time Around")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Nowadays we might say that these lyrics come off as really melodramatic and overwrought for the kind of show they're actually about, like the whole defiant "It's MY life, it's MY dream/Nothing's gonna stop me now" is a bit much for Balki Bartoukomos' life story
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
But they kind of made that the expected style and it stuck for a decade and a half Like yeah I guess you could say people really did want sincerity at that time and previous eras' overt tweeness and goofiness felt old-fashioned
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Replying to @arthur_affect
that's kind of my thinking—that sincerity in a theme song felt like the emotional equivalent of going from 480p to 720p, like "look, we can use this new technology to act more like humans!"
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
The time transition in WandaVision people notice least seems to be the '50s to '60s one between the first and second episodes, and yet there's a really major one right at the beginning -- the house looks like an actual house
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
'50s sitcom sets like the apartment in I Love Lucy and the Petrie house in The Dick van Dyke Show barely looked like real houses They were obvious soundstages
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It's not just that the fourth wall is missing it's that the whole architecture of the room cheats outward so it expands like a trapezoid so the whole studio audience can see directly into the stage
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And the actors likewise are cheating out and using their outdoor voices when acting because they weren't being amplified at all They played it like an old stage play, hence the melodramaticness
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The style of acting and set design in sitcoms got more "realistic" over time just due to TV being bigger business and getting higher budgets Having the money for more cameras and more cameramen so you didn't need a big open space to capture all the action
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