So, I’ve been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people — at least a few people — are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie’s release.

Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who’ve posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would’ve sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie’s premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we’re using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?

I’ve been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen — some would probably say “stagnated” — somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period — let’s say 1966-1989 — that ended a generation ago.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: the biggest movie of this past summer, Transformers, was based on an ’80s-vintage cartoon and toy line. The most successful movie franchises of the past several years — the comic-book flicks, specifically Spider-Man and X-Men — feature characters who were created in the ’60s. (Batman, a perennial favorite who was revitalized by Batman Begins after a few years on the trash heap, originated even earlier, in the 1930s.)

How about the fact that the most critically acclaimed television series of the past few years is probably Battlestar Galactica, a remake of a series from the ’70s?

Another example: The Girlfriend’s favorite feature on her favorite radio station is an hour of “mash-ups,” new songs made by mixing two or more existing together, and every time I’ve listened to this stuff with her (I’m not a big fan of mash-ups, personally), the raw material has been music from our high school days.

It seems to me that American culture, at least a sizable portion of it, is fixated on the past. How else to explain the way we keep reworking, remaking, remixing, reimagining, and rebooting the same old stuff? How else to explain that you can now buy reproductions — made from the original molds, no less — of Star Trek action figures that first came out in 1974? Or that there are dozens of online shops out there selling t-shirts with logos of old TV shows on them? Or that someone has made a real-life version of a game that never actually existed anywhere but in a relatively obscure science fiction flick from the year 1984?

Nostalgia has been for sale for a very long time, of course, but it seems so much more prevalent now than, say, in the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t recall seeing any reproductions of 1950s-vintage toys when I was growing up, and remakes — although they’ve always been around — weren’t nearly as numerous then, either.

I suspect — and I’m just talking out of my hindquarters here, with no evidence of any kind to back me up — that the reason this stuff remains so vital, at least in the minds of we thirtysomethings who are currently driving the entertainment bus, is that the ’80s were the last decade when we all shared a common pop-cultural experience. Everyone who was around in the ’70s and ’80s saw Star Wars. We all watched Roots. And we all listened to Top-40 radio stations that played a wide range of musicians, from Madonna and Prince to Duran Duran and The Eurythmics to Def Leppard and ZZ Top.

It’s not that way anymore. Audiences are atomized and entertainment is narrowly targeted to specific demographics. Radio stations play only a certain kind of music, entire TV networks are dedicated to a single type of programming, and people are relatively isolated in their own particular niche interests.

Maybe movie producers are cranking out stuff with names we already know in part because they sense an audience yearning for those remembered communal experiences? And maybe we geeky types who blog about the crap we loved as kids and recreate video games that never technically existed are expressing that same desire to share something rather than keep it as our own personal hobby horse? I don’t know… it’s just a theory of mine. But it is interesting, don’t you think?

In an interesting corollary to this line of thinking, I came across an article earlier in which the author complains about the apparent lack of pop culture in the 23rd Century as depicted in the Star Trek franchise:

According to the mythology of those two series, human culture stopped evolving shortly before the advent of Rock and Roll and picked up some 300 years later just in time for future hams to chew up the scenery with Shakespeare performed in Klingon. There’s nary a Stratocaster in the Star Trek universe. Nobody listens to the Beatles or reads Stephen King. Riker plays trombone in a holodeck jazz combo, Data favours the violin and Mozart string quartets, while Spock strums a Vulcan lyre (whatever that is) as Uhura improvises madrigals in the mess. The crew of the Enterprise-D lives out film noir and Western fantasies on the Holodeck, which is also the scene of a titanic struggle between Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes.

Maybe the real reason none of that exists in the Trek future is that pop culture ceased to exist following years and years of rehashing the stuff from the previous century until everyone was sick of it and ultimately decided to abandon it? (I do recall an episode of The Next Gen in which Data claims that television did not survive the 21st Century as a significant form of entertainment. Maybe we all finally get sick of the incessant remakes. Or else the writer’s strike is going to drag on much longer than anyone is expecting…)