Word: retro
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Maybe 2002 was a big year for you. But who writes headlines about you? In the news this was a fake year, a retro year, a year when new ideas were kicked to the curb like some dorky futuristic scooter. If someone came to you 10 years ago and told you that one of the biggest news stories of 2002 would be the rescue of a bunch of guys who work in a coal mine actually mining coal, you would tell Future Boy to get back on his dorky scooter and go home...
Instead, the typical reality-TV hit of 2002 took a retro format and gave it a good nose piercing. The Osbournes was a '50s nuclear-family sitcom with dog poop, drug rehab and F words. American Idol, with its aspiring teen stars and vicious-insult wars, was Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour as reconceived by Jerry Springer. And The Bachelor wed--literally--'50s gender relations with 21st century sex. The show's secret (clear to its viewers but not to the paleofeminists and moralists who decried it) is that while The Bachelor pretended to celebrate a primitive dating ritual...
...heard a lot about nostalgia this year: the vogue for vintage blue jeans (or mock-vintage blue jeans at premium prices); the continuing popularity of retro design elements (like '30s club chairs and surfaces "distressed" to look antique); punk and garage-rock revivalists like the White Stripes, the Hives, the Strokes and the Vines. The Bachelor, with its retro-style dating theme, was just one among many nostalgia-oriented television shows. There were reunions of The Cosby Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and numerous others (for God's sake, even Alf made a comeback...
This was a fake year, a retro year, a year when new ideas were kicked to the curb like some dorky futuristic scooter. If someone came to you 10 years ago and told you that one of the biggest U.S. news stories in 2002 would be a big-time politician saying nice things about racial segregation, you would tell Future Boy to get back on his dorky scooter and go home. And if he told you that one of the year's biggest European news stories was going to be the supposed rise of anti-Semitism, you'd tell...
...trucks and SUVs--would be foolish. "It's a question of priorities," says Chris Theodore, Ford's vice president for North American product development. "Nobody here says you can't build a two-seater, but it comes down to making the business case." The automaker is banking on its retro-styled Thunderbird, rumbling Mustangs and the upcoming Mazda RX-8 (Ford owns 36% of Mazda) to hang on to its sports-car credibility. Few of Ford's top designers and engineers, however, are working on them. Says J Mays, vice president of design: "A lot of our top talent goes...