TIMES, TIME, AND HALF A TIME. A HISTORY OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM.

Comments on a cultural reality between past and future.

This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.



Thursday, June 14, 2012

Monster TV Nostalgia Watch: Dallas Reboot

Image Source: Seeking Alpha.

The energy economy has not changed in a generation. Maybe this is why the famous nighttime soap, Dallas, which dominated ratings from 1978 to 1991, rebooted yesterday so successfully. People Magazine focuses on Millennial nostalgia for the 1980s, rather than a decades-long stalled energy crisis:
Like finding an abandoned Teddy Ruxpin at a garage sale or discovering a Swatch watch at the bottom of a Trivial Pursuit box, hearing the theme song to Dallas opens an instant wormhole to the '80s.

Wisely preserving the iconic tune – along with the now-retro scrolling opener – this updated take on the classic nighttime soap pulls off a 10-gallon-hat trick: It's both old and new, a comfy piece of nostalgia that doubles as a fresh guilty pleasure.
A few years ago, I discussed Dallas with someone who dismissed it blankly as trash TV. Aside from the characters and flashy sets, I felt the show had a lot of interesting themes. It was grounded in a stereotyped, but recognizable Texan history of established cattle ranches overrun by oil wells, dramatized in movies like Giant (1956). That film was based on a novel from 1952 about the impact which the discovery of oil had on Texan society.

And in the end, the television soap reflected reality: in the years that followed the show's height, a Texan oil family entered the White House more than once. The whole world became Dallas. Real business connections and intrigues, of precisely the kind featured in TV drama, became the stuff of 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Either way, the theme song (below the jump) brought back waves of nostalgia, and the subtle stylistic changes over time show how a formula endures.

2012 Dallas opening © TNT. Video Source: Youtube.

:06 - New Omni Hotel in foreground of downtown Dallas
:07 - Campbell Centre at Northwest Highway and Central Expressway
:08 - Fountain Place
:09 - Renaissance Tower
:13 - Reunion Tower
:14 - Bank of America Plaza
:23 - 1700 Pacific, 211 North Ervay, and Comerica Bank Tower
:24 - White Rock Lake
:26 - New Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge at Woodall Rodgers
:33 - Trammell Crow Center in foreground of Reunion Tower
:37 - Dart Rail at West End
:38 - Cowboys Stadium
:44 - Fountain Place in foreground of Dallas World Aquarium
:45 - Southfork Ranch in Parker

Compare the 2012 version to the opening from 1978 here, and 1991 here.

1 comment:

  1. Only shows that we still have very limited knowledge of space's dangers heading this way. In this case, I don't see what could of been done to stop this rock and the impact would of been a major event, possibly with catastrophic damage/consequences. Scary stuff.

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