Pop Culture Blind Spots

No Potter movies.
No Citizen Kane.
No Star Trek movies. Or full TV episode for that matter.

Finally broke my no It's a Wonderful Life string a couple years ago.

 

Beats By Dre. I guess it's a thing.

 

Pretty much all of pop culture since about 1980 would be my blind spot.

 

Me neither...

 

I watched one early season of "Survivor" because my wife was into it, and at the time I was trying to date her. That was probably the last and only reality show I watched. I suppose I do catch some of "The Voice" at times because my wife and son watch it together every week.

 

No Twilight movies or books.
No 50 Shades of Gray.
No late 80s/early 90s ABC sitcoms like "Full House," "Mr. Belvedere" or the one with Tim Allen as the tool guy.
No "A Christmas Story." I mean to remedy that one every holiday season, but never seem to.

 

For a guy who has more than 600 CDs and over 5100 songs on my iPod, I own exactly zero Bruce Springsteen.

 

Another one for Harry Potter. Don't give a fuck.

Pretty much anything on HBO in at least the last decade since I don't have it. I see the shows in dribs and drabs on work road trips and free previews. See enough to know the characters, but really don't know what the fuck is going on in the shows.

 

No:
- Harry Potter (books or movies)
- Lord of the Rings (have the first one on DVD, courtesy of a friend, but never watched it)
- Twilight (because I'm a heterosexual male in my 30s and, thank all that's holy, my wife isn't into it)
- Most reality TV shows
- I still haven't seen Return of the Jedi all the way through
- Blazing Saddles
- 97.6 percent of all hip hop artists are unrecognizable to me (is Frank Ocean the son of Billy Ocean? I have no idea)

However, I, and probably most people, undergo what I like to call "cultural osmosis." It's when something becomes so pervasive, or you listen to enough reviews or see enough parodies of it, that it bleeds into your brain and you get an idea of what's going on without actually seeing it.
All of the movies I listed above fall into this category. I haven't seen more than a scene or two of LotR, Harry Potter or Blazing Saddles, but can spot their references and tropes when I see them in other places. It feels like I've already seen them, or get the gist of what they're about.

 

I wouldn't consider not having seen a specific movie or TV show to be a pop-culture blind spot. Not knowing anything about a movie or TV show would be. For instance, if you didn't know The Wire was about the Baltimore underworld, that would be a blind spot. Also, more genre-wide gaps in knowledge would count. Basically, if you could get a Saturday Night Live joke about something, it's not a pop-culture blind spot.

I fell way short when 30 Rock parodied Real Housewives because I don't watch or pay attention to reality TV at all. I didn't get the jokes, which was unusual for me watching 30 Rock. If someone made a light Sopranos reference, I would grasp it despite never having seen that show, either. I know enough about it to put things together.

It's probably safe to say everyone here listing Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings has cultural reference points on those things, right? If you recognize the name "Dumbledore" or a joke calling a ring "my precious," you have the requisite level of knowledge on the subject.

 

What about Gatsby?

 

I'm with Versatile on this. Even before I read the books or watched the movies, I could understand references to LoTR. So it wasn't a cultural blind spot so much as something in which I hadn't yet immersed myself.

I'm the type of person who generally tries to avoid cultural blind spots. If a discussion is going on about something, I want to at least be able to understand it. So for instance, I don't watch Community on a weekly basis, but anytime that one of their episodes becomes a big deal (ie: Modern Warfare or Remedial Chaos Theory), I make sure to check it out so that I can join in when my friends talk about it.