RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[claws]

Just like those Ghibli-style videos, a new wave of AI-generated shorts has flooded feeds with titles like "You Wake Up And It's Christmas 1988," "1985," or "1981." Most likely churned out by content farms, these clips aim straight for pure nostalgia, evoking an era explicitly branded as "a long time before Wi-Fi."

These videos follow a remarkably predictable formula. They almost always feature a grandmother at the stove stirring pots while a younger relative puts the finishing touches on the Christmas roast. You can reliably expect a POV walk through a mall, shopping carts loaded with discontinued treats, a shot from inside a car driving through snowy streets, a husband hanging lights on the roof, and a cozy POV of someone holding a warm drink while watching a Christmas movie on TV.

Technically, the quality is surprisingly high, and I've noticed many are built using picture-to-video live-action techniques. Pop-culture nods default to Back to the Future or Home Alone, while the soundtrack in nearly every single video is Whitesnake's "Is It Love."

Lately, though, the trend has taken a weird turn, shifting its focus toward attractive young women, even featuring wildly out-of-place women in skimpy outfits cooking holiday meals. At this point, it honestly feels like being trolled.

Naturally, Summer and Autumn spin-offs of these 20-to-30-second clips have started popping up, too. It was fun for the novelty at first, but it's gotten far too repetitive, and it's obvious that the creators know next to nothing about what life in the 1980s was actually like.