Everything Was Better

Someone posted a Game of Thrones intro from the 1980s. Fake, obviously—no such thing exists—but the commitment is solid. Old cassette aesthetic, the whole package. And it works because the first thing your brain does is think: yeah, of course it was better in the 80s.

That’s the entire joke. That’s all you need. Nostalgia is so reflexive now that you don’t even have to say anything. Just put an old date next to something moderately famous and people will do the rest of the work for you. Everyone’s already nostalgic for things they never watched, times they never lived through, versions of art that never existed.

Game of Thrones is perfect for this because everyone’s already saying it was better when it hadn’t aired yet. The show became a cautionary tale so fast that the fictional 80s version—which never did anything, never disappointed anyone, never ended badly—is now somehow the real draw. You can’t ruin a show that never happened.

There’s something almost honest about how quickly we all agree to this. Someone showed me this thing and I was immediately ready to believe it, ready to believe that everything used to be better. Ready to believe that the thing I wanted to watch was made in a time before it had a chance to get worse. That’s the real joke, I think. Not the fake intro. Just how fast we all nod along.