What is the Classic Era? And Why?

Eugene's most recent post about dress and hairstyles (notably, Audrey Hepburn's) reminds me of a question Mike posed recently: Why do so many movies and shows perceive the 1950's to 1970's as classic? Mike points to "the current trend to try to create a kind of 'timeless' era, that isn't really specified" and points out that this "'timeless' quality tends to have a late fifties, early sixties feel" (or, as Mike puts it, "Rockwellian").

Mike points to Christmas movies like Polar Express as using this particular time period but also to the following movies:

• The Incredibles
• Meet the Robinsons
• The Iron Giant

He also points out that many sci-fi films re-imagine NOT the current modern age but the '50-70's in the future.

So why is this?

I think one possibility is that these movies are evoking feelings of nostalgia, and nostalgia is always about 40-50 years in the past: 40-50 years ago, life was perfect! Which is nonsense, of course, but it has made me wonder if, in another 20 years, people will be waxing nostalgic about the 1980s and 1990s. (A friend of mine does own a book about mullets.)

I also wonder if the '50-70s are seen as the end of the mechanical age before the digital/computer age came along. And maybe we humans miss the hands-on aspect of the mechanical age--like on Star Trek: Voyager when Tom changes all the buttons on the shuttle to blinking, punchable lights. Way more fun!

In other words, all this nostalgia is nostalgia for the pre-computer/pre-cyber age. Right now, we are inventing a new mythology (The Matrix, Ghost in the Machine, etc.), but before we have a complete new mythology, we have to rely on the old mythology. In about 30 years, laptops will be seen as cute, nostalgic technology, but right now, to get really nostalgic, we have to go back to blinking lights and clumsy robots.

Or it could just be that the 50's-70's do provide classic images, and the 80's (fashion-wise at least) are just a complete embarrassment (and we are too close to the 90's and 2000's to see the trends yet).