Seven Costanza said:
walton91 said:
Didn't Carrie Fisher and George Michael teach us anything?!?!? Start this thread over with a list of 40-70 yr olds!!
That got me thinking, I wonder how many famous people there are in that age range, assuming we defined famous as being able to be identified by 50% of adults in the US.
it's gonna be HUGE......YUGE........I pointed this out before (different thread maybe but)......
the 70's and 80's was an absolute explosion of pop icon figures.....it's no exaggeration to say the number of stars easily increased 10x....maybe 50x in that period because:
Music - MTV made video stars of literally thousands of artists and new bands and opened up the world to all of these artists and recognition of them in a way never seen before. Likewise it let us see bands and stars from all around the world. The days of not even knowing who the artist was cuz you just heard a song on the radio were gone. Also music became portable for the first time really with the walkman which made it all more popular as well.
TV - the late 70s and early 80s saw the explosion of cable television and we went from 3 networks and a few local crappy channels to hundreds of channels almost overnight and that brought tons of new stars into our homes. They had to fill 24/7 on all these channels with something and that meant a lot of new faces. Cable TV with premium movie channels also meant viewing of a lot more movies (see below).
Movies - the mid 70's saw the advent of the summer blockbuster (Jaws) and soon the explosion of sci-fi movies and action movies and teen movies that followed and were all staples of the 80s and 90s and made superstars of so many young movie stars. The days of the studios controlling the movies and just casting a handful of hand picked favorites were over. In addition the 90s saw the real growth of independent films and low budget films that gained wide audiences (not the B movies of yesterday). Also the advent of VHS tapes and rentals meant an explosion in movie watching as well and people seeing movies they never saw in the theaters.
All of that contributed to a huge number of stars that were born (in our minds) in that period. And they are all 45-70 now in addition to the older stars that have lived long enough now to be 75-100 as people have lived longer but now they are starting to die off simply from old age.
The number of deaths we have seen in 2016 is just to be expected now...in fact that might just be a new threshold I wouldn't be surprised if we don't surpass that from now on, or for the next 25 years or so regularly.
