These were released by Timmee Toys in the 1960s and are very hard to find.  I don't own any of them.  All of the pictures below are from ebay auctions.  I cannot be sure about the size but Timmee was making mostly 60mm figures at the time and they are probably in that scale.  

These figures were made as cheap competition to sets like Chap Mei's Wizards Magic and the Darkness Warriors.  About the same three inch scale.  These look cheap but still have their charm.

I don't think these are actually hobbit skeletons but I think I might use them as such.

I learned a hard lesson with these figures.  That lesson is always specify the color you wanted them to be printed in.  I did not and they sent me figures printed in translucent green which sucks.  You cannot see the detail in the figures because of the translucent material.  I did not specify because I never imagined that an option this bad was even possible.  What moron would do this?  They also sent me a set of hobgoblins in translucent green that are so bad I will never even post them.  I was so angry when I received them that I wanted to pitch them right into the trash but I spent way too much to do that.  The one gray figure I have is so cool that I almost cannot stand it.  Learn from my mistake and do not let them ever give you translucent figures.  They are around 70mm.

I took pictures of the translucent figures in very low light and that is the best I could do.  Pictures in sunlight show absolutely zero detail and just look like pale green blobs.   

I don't know how makes these but they come from China and are about 65mm.

LOD has produced two sets of alien and human fighters.  They are both full of well detailed and very cool poses.  The first set is your classic "gray" aliens and the second set has squid faced aliens and space marines.  

Set 1 - The Grays.

Set 2 - The Squid Face Aliens.

I found this at Walmart and was surprised by how much I like the figures.

Beleriand toy Soldiers ("BTS") just keeps making more and more amazing figures.  The magi figures make good druids.  

TihonFigureN has a 60mm figure set based on the TV version of the Witcher.  

Until recently, you could buy extra and leftover figures made for various tabletop games directly from China on ebay with either free shipping or extremely cheap shipping.  Most are made in smaller scales but I found a bunch of random figures that work with toy soldiers.  I don't know which games these figures were originally made to be played with.  I don't believe that the sellers know either.   
These are all very high quality both in terms of the sculpts and the production value.  

Publius has only made three poses of goblins as far as I know.  They are very high quality just like all of their figures.

LOD has started a series of 70mm Greek Gods.  High quality at a midlevel price.  Seven figures so far.

Ares.

Athena.



Poseidon. 
Apollo. 
Athena II.
Aphrodite.
Hera.

TihonFigureN is another Russian maker of very high quality figures.  Not cheap, but worth the price for their best stuff.  This set of 18 includes several "gun dwarves."  

This castle playset comes with three inch figures that are like a poor man's Papo/Schielch.  

Photo from an ebay auction.

3D printing is almost certainly the future for high end figures of all types.  It is still fairly expensive to print the figures compared to mass production, but that may change in the coming years.  Below are the first 3D printed figures I purchased off of ebay.  The are a random assortment of super cool poses.  These are in 54mm scale.  It would be easy to spend a fortune on these figures.  I intend to be very particular about the ones I buy going forward.

Biplant is the corporate successor to Oritet.  They recently released these sets of elves with dragonriders including three colors of dragons.   They are about 60mm.

Photo stolen from a demon.

Hello you wonderful people, monsters and other dungeon crawlers.  I am back from my long absence. 

Around three years ago, I was diagnosed with life changing health issues.  Issues for which medical science has no effective treatments.  So, my priorities changed and I went on a personal journey of exploration to find alternative treatments and solutions.  My path turned a bit dark and eventually drew the attention of law enforcement resulting in a host of criminal charges.  My trial was an absolute circus with the prosecution recklessly tossing around terms like "atrocity" and "ritual sacrifice."  I fought the good fight in court but the deck was stacked against me.  The final result was my sad, and untimely, execution by the State.

Fortunately, my younger brother has a real talent for unspeakable acts of necromancy.  This past solstice he pulled me back from my convalescence in the grave.  Sure, I had to give him back his soul and his spell makes me cluck like a chicken whenever he says the word "burrito," but that is a small price to pay for a new lease on life.  I do mean lease as I must pay the rent every equinox and solstice from now on and eat a very restricted diet, if you know what I mean.  At least I was able to get a lot of work done while in the dirt and I will now be able to get back to regular weekly posts for the next several months.  I have a lot of new figures to catch up with.  I hope you will all enjoy. 

Beleriand Toy Soldiers of Russia has released a super high quality series of 60mm figure sets based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Children of Hurin.  They are among the best figures ever to come out of Russia.  They are very expensive ($10-$15 each fig).  Sadly, they are made of a very soft material that can distort under pressure.  That makes storage a little complicated.  

Set #1 Children of Hurin.

Set #2 Orcs.

Set #3 Donath

Set # 3.1 Donath

Set #4 Nargothrond 

Set #5 Dorlomin

Stock photo.

Set 5.1  Dorlomin.

Stock photo. 

Set #6  Beren & Luthien 

Stock photo. 

Recollections  / December 17, 2024

ROBERTS: I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into this, but I suppose it has to be done. A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15. I think it’s winter: you can see a couple of LPs on the bed—Mad Parade’s A Thousand Words and The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me—that came out in early ’87, but you can also see a Punisher comic (#5) that came out around November (the cover date is January, but comics were future-dated so kids like me didn’t think they were old). Given all the tokens of war and violence in view, it’s somewhat incredible that I didn’t turn out to be crazier than I am. This is Reagan’s America, baby!—Even though I was a staunch Democrat and was already gearing up to pass out Dukakis bumper stickers and buttons at school. You can also see “SKT4” and “WAR SUCKS” written on the wall. Was I trying to suggest something about the duality of man? The Jungian thing? 

I also had a thing for vigilantes, as you can see. Along with the Dark Knight (Frank Miller’s series came out in 1986, changing comics and pop culture forever), Wolverine, and The Punisher, I was an avid Mack Bolan fan (the poster next to the baseball lamp). And all those yellow bags? They’re from Tower Records, which had recently displaced California Comics as my favorite destination. I was either working at the video store at the time or working at the mall (selling personalized children’s books!), or both. You see where the money went, for the most part—my skateboarding gear is not in view. And yeah, that’s a waterbed, suckers! My dad “got a deal.”

Things were about to change, though: I would stop collecting comics within a few months, Bolan would be cast aside for “classic literature,” and all of those posters would come down. We would move soon—in ‘88 or ‘89. I was about to buy my first electric guitar and my first amp. Kool Kelly—bless my dad, who designed and painted that when I was around 10—was going full teen.    

I’m pretty sure that my parents took this photo because I was a slob and they wanted formal evidence of that fact. Now the whole world knows. 

MCKENNA: What’s that expression you lot over there use to express incredulity? “Hoo boy!”? Well, hoo-fucking-boy! I knew when Kelly announced he had this picture that it would be good, but I presumed it would just be very telling about—and punishingly humiliating for—Kelly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would be an absolutely on-the-nose perfect metaphor factory for a whole fucking country. Because it feels like all of the demented soup that is your great nation is in there. The “War sucks” within five feet of multiple images of people blasting their enemies into oblivion that you’ve mentioned above. The toy submachine gun right next to the panda plushie. The vast inflatable Shamu that looks like it’s being used as the world’s least comfortable pillow. The phone, presumably trailing one of those forty-mile-long cords that you lot love. The weirdly feeble plug sockets. It’s as if someone turned an American Mind inside out.

Where to start? Not with the tissues. We’ll leave the tissues well enough alone. Or with that weird pickled thing in the bell jar. Or the way American beds always seem to look like a cross between a medieval voivode’s funeral catafalque and a dismantled piano. Let’s start with the elephant that is literally in the room: the writing. Mike, you share a nationality with Kelly—what the hell is going on here? And what the hell is a “baseball lamp”?

GRASSO: What’s going on here is the quintessential late-1980s suburban American boy’s materialistic id unleashed. Well, maybe there’s a bit of ego and superego in here as well, let’s be fair. I will say straight off: my bedroom in 1987 wasn’t quite this overloaded with my precious material possessions (that year I was in that awkward edge-of-adolescence period between putting away childish things—my Hasbro universe G.I. Joe/Transformers obsession—and falling head-first into Dungeons & Dragons), but ’87 was the year I discovered comics. I was into Marvel as well, Kelly, but more into the mutant titles like Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants than Punisher and The Dark Knight Returns.

But hey, speaking of D&D, when we first shared this image around the Mutants campfire, we were trying to identify the suspiciously LP-shaped item in the extreme bottom right of the photo. It was a long search. I had this weird feeling it was a group of musicians and I wondered what kind of jazz fusion group the nerdy beardos on the back cover of that thing could be. Lo and fucking behold, Kelly’s unwavering commitment to pop culture detective work ended with him discovering it’s the 1987 Dragonlance Legends art calendar, which not only helped us date this photo but put a real spring in my old-school 1980s AD&D nerd step. Much props, Kelly. While I wasn’t into vigilantes or the Bones Brigade, any kid with a Dragonlance calendar earns much 1987-Mike respect. We should roll up some 1st edition Krynn player characters sometime!

ROBERTS: I was just getting out of D&D at this point, Mike. But the year before, on the 8th grade “outdoor ed” camping trip, we were all playing the first Dragonlance modules, and I had read and loved the first set of Dragonlance novels. As far as comics, The Uncanny X-Men and The Amazing Spider-Man were my favorite titles at the time, although nothing here would lead you to that conclusion. I did sacrifice a comic to put the brilliant fight sequence from Uncanny X-Men #173 on my wall. Those Punisher posters—penciled by the great Mike Zeck and airbrushed by Phil Zimelman—were released on the heels of the first limited series, which did extremely well and launched the first ongoing series.   

You can see The Damned’s Phantasmagoria cassette on my bed. I can’t make out any of the others, but I was very much a post-punk kind of guy (still am). How did I reconcile all of this at the time? Skateboarding, The Damned and The Cure (the goths at school were not my biggest fans), comic books, a baseball boy lamp, vigilantes and the Vietnam War? Also, what’s in that filing cabinet? How did I sleep here? 

And Richard, no one uses “hoo boy” over here any more. You’ll get beat up for that.

MCKENNA: You beat me to it with the filing cabinet. Was that just standard issue American youth furnishing? Bed, bedside table, filing cabinet? I mean, I don’t doubt you had important files to put in there—and judging from the state of your room, I’m guessing files on the people you were planning to make pay for the imagined wrongs they’d done to you. But still, right next to the bed? Yep, files and a fixation with vengeful Vietnam vets—definitely in no way worrying. Also, very sub-optimal speaker positioning.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but despite the fact that you could probably have found variations of everything in this picture in kids’ bedrooms in the UK, there’s a kind of cultural brashness and confidence about it that I’m not sure you could have gotten away with over our way. I don’t know how “Kool Kelly’s Place” in foot-high letters played to eventual visitors to your bedroom, but unless you were absolutely faultlessly cool, I feel like something similar would have been a social death warrant in Britain. Thatcher’s manifesting or liberating—depending on your reading of it—the individualism the country had been repressing since WWII was still in relatively early days, and acting cocky or showing off—i.e. just being mildly confident—was still a bit of a taboo gauntlet to run. This particular bedroom wall in the same period in the UK would have been a bit like daubing “Witchcraft done here” on the door of your condo in 1690s Salem. How did it play with people when they first walked in and saw you vaunting your alleged coolness like it was a Nasdaq ticker display?

Oh, and I’m still completely in the dark as to what a “baseball lamp” is, because nothing in this picture looks like a baseball.

GRASSO: As I may have mentioned in past Mutants outings, I was a pretty spoiled only child of the ’80s. To put it bluntly, I had a lot of stuff. That stuff definitely skewed towards the nerdier books-and-toys-and-things side of the ledger—I didn’t really get into sports posters or equipment or anything—but I do recall my tiny bedroom being packed full of crap. Just so Kelly’s not too alone in being embarrassed, my own bedroom had a very prominent space given over on the inside of my door to the (form) letter I received from Carl Sagan’s Planetary Society and the glossy Voyager photo of Saturn’s rings I received from same—just like the kids in that Brooklyn classroom in Episode 7 of Cosmos! As I’ve mentioned here before, my childhood idols were definitely less Mack Bolan and Frank Miller and more sensitive types like Jim Henson and Sagan. 

I really dig that beige-ass push-button phone extension, Kelly. It got me thinking of when I had various electronic appliances of my own in my bedroom. I probably got my own TV in around 1985. One of the first things I remember staying up to watch was the BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series on PBS. Before that, we did have a little household communal 12-inch-or-so portable black and white(!!!) TV that we moved around the house for various purposes. For someone who was arguably raised by the television, having my own cable hookup in my bedroom meant spending even less time with my folks in the living room. I think I got my own phone a couple of years later; there wouldn’t be much call for it before then, but when I got it, I used the hell out of it. I got my own stereo right around ’88, most likely, when I moved into the larger space in the basement where the IBM-compatible PC lived. 

By the time I was Kool Kelly’s age in the early ’90s, my growing love of alternative rock was starting to take over my walls, along with my rapidly exploding CD collection. (As I said in Mutant Chat, Kelly, I love the Vans shoebox marked “TAPES”; this rang so true to me.) And while I never had a steel filing cabinet (which, honestly, I probably would’ve loved) I definitely had a desk to stow all my juvenilia—my stories, drawings, maps, and other scribblings. Was my room as messy as Kool Kelly’s Place? I’d like to say no, but I’m pretty sure it at least occasionally was. I’m still envying the waterbed in 2024, to be honest.

But we did live amidst great abundance, didn’t we, Kelly? As Richard points out, the same “grab all you can” strivingly materialistic impulses that were sinking into the British psyche were going truly overboard in the U.S., and kids were, as we’ve noted elsewhere, an important consumer demographic to be marketed to. From every age, the commercials bombarded us with commodities to fetishize and status symbols we needed to keep up with the classmates. Playing with Transformers or G.I. Joes with the kids in the neighborhood around 1985 was a truly fraught exercise in class envy and false consciousness. Did they have Omega Supreme or the U.S.S. Flagg? I ended up thinking a lot about whether my grade school “friends” were hanging out with me for me… or for my toys. Whether it’s something as “cool” as a computer or something as inexplicable as an inflatable Shamu (heh, sorry Kelly), our “stuff” defined us socially in a way that sometimes gave short shrift to ourselves. Pretty good training for adulthood in materialistic America now that I think about it.

ROBERTS: Yeah, you really got to the heart of it, Mike. At no other time were kids courted on such a massive scale, and never was there so much stuff to have and hold—or covet, as was often the case. It was a culture entirely to itself, entirely for kids (adults had no interest in reading our books, watching our movies, etc., and it was fucking great), and if your family didn’t have the money for these things, there was a social cost. And yeah, we did make friends with the kid down the street to get to his ColecoVision and Kenner’s AT-AT. He was a dick and held it over us, so I don’t hate myself too much. By this time I was making my own money—the real American way, under the table!—although I may still have been getting an “allowance” (if you know, you know). I was not saving a damn penny, that’s for sure.

I was pretty embarrassed by “Kool Kelly’s Place” at this point, Richard, and I was trying to cover it up with paper, graffiti, whatever. It was “kool” when I was 10—not so much when I was 15. But what a gift to get when you’re 10! My dad loved building stuff, fixing stuff, and painting projects; in the condo we lived in before this, he painted some ‘70s supergraphics all the way up the stairwell walls. I wish I had a picture of that.

A few notes: the file cabinet was a cast-off from one of my parent’s offices and used primarily as a perch for my record player; I really have no idea what I kept inside of it. The baseball boy lamp (not a “weird pickled thing,” Richard!) was probably from the ‘50s—my grandmother ran her own antique shop in Texas and sent us various vintage knick-knacks. Shamu was a show at SeaWorld featuring several performing orcas—I vaguely remember a trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park around this time, and we must have gone to nearby SeaWorld as well. No idea how I ended up with a pool float (we did not have a pool). 

MCKENNA: After looking at it for the hundredth time, I think the thing that stands out to me in this photo as being decisively American—apart from that fucking ridiculous horizontal wardrobe of a bed—is that phone. Phones were such a use-only-when-necessary thing in the UK, at least as I remember it. Maybe it was just the milieu I inhabited, but the combination of the faintly WWII-ish “keep lines free for urgent communications” vibe, an obsession with penny-pinching, and the very public placement of the phone in what was often the draughtiest point of the house, meant that making a call was usually more of a pain in the arse than it was worth. It was less hassle just to get on my bike and go round their house. So coming from that, a phone in a kids room seems like such an insane extravagance. I mean, come on: who the fuck does a kid actually need to phone? And yet it also implies a very different reality for kids, one where they maybe have more agency? Where it’s accepted that they have their own lives and their own communications needs? I don’t know, I find the whole thing quite confusing while also being immensely jealous. And with that admission, I will bid adieu to the sleek metropolitan chic of, ahem, Kool Kelly’s Room. I can sleep easy now knowing that my dreams aren’t being spied on by some weird little baseball golem.

GRASSO: When I was 8 or 9 I had some friends over to play and one of them knocked over and broke a Snoopy lamp I’d had since I was really little. (Peanuts was another media franchise I was really into when I was younger, with all the merchandising that entailed.) Oh man, I cried and cried; I was inconsolable for ages. In retrospect, it was one of those formative lessons in loss that looms larger in retrospect than you can ever fully internalize when you’re little. The attachments children have to “stuff” can be an important part of the natural process of emotional maturity, self-actualization, and ego formation. Letting that stuff go, especially when you’re anxious and attachment-prone, can be inestimably harder.

I’ve come to believe that the process of “managed loss” accompanies us throughout our lives, and it changes as we get older. I’ve radically lost the acquisitive impulses I had when I was in my twenties: chasing the newest technology, the newest gadgets, the newest phones. Why on Earth would I need more stuff? In countless moves to new apartments and houses I’ve left behind objects that once I considered sacrosanct; and now, with the benefit of time, they don’t even tug at me anymore.

Things pass away, but memories and emotions remain. If I suddenly lost the glossy books on Galaxies and the Voyager program that my grandmother got me around that time, it wouldn’t take my memories of her away from me. Those memories, specifically around how well she knew the things I loved, that she wanted to encourage my love of learning, will always live within me. This photo, and the ambiguous feelings teenage (and middle-aged!) Kelly might have had about the Kool Place his dad built, seems to fall in that bittersweet zone of how the things we possessed and the relationships we treasure intersect in our nostalgic memories.

ROBERTS: I guess what hits me hardest about this photo is that I am middle-aged Kelly (distinctly uncool), something I would have thought impossible as a high school freshman reading comics and listening to records in this pig-sty of a room. I still don’t understand how it’s possible! My oldest kid just turned 13—two years away from where I was here. Time doesn’t fly—it gushes. 

Which brings us to the phone, yes? Because the 13-year-old I just mentioned and her 10-year-old sister really, really want one, but not in the way I wanted one. Not even close. When I was a teenager, it was important so that you could (a) figure out where you were going to meet up with your friends, and (b) talk to girls/boys without your parents listening. Phones now are your Identity Discs, and so many of the things represented in this photo are now mediated by the phone, or they’ve been replaced entirely by the screen. There’s good and there’s bad, I guess. As we said above, we grew up in a time of too much physical stuff, but we’re no less materialistic now. We just buy apps and streaming services and devices instead of books and records and video tapes. 

Anyway, it’s not the things I’m interested in; it’s what’s inside of them: stories, music, illustration, film, games. You know—art. And I’m still obsessed with the same kinds of pop culture I was obsessed with when I was 15. Just take a look around the site. It’s all here. This is our room.  

Features / November 27, 2024

In my mind and in my car
We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR

—The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star” 

ROBERTS: I saw this on Facebook the other day and had to call an emergency round robin. I don’t know the original image source but I’ve seen it on several clickbait nostalgia pages at this point. The amount of “sad but true” comments is staggering, made more perplexing by the fact that most of these comments are from people who claim to have lived through the ’60s and ’70s. The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we’re at and how we see ourselves. It is, quite simply, Big Brother level propaganda. This version of 1974 never existed (we’ll get to 2024 later). Nothing about it is right. Where are the cigarettes and ashtrays? Where are the beer bottles? Why is everyone bronze-white? Where are the tablecloths (is this 1974 or 1874?)? Why the fuck is that giant window there? Is that a chess board on the table? The answer is so ironic that I can hardly stand it: the cartoon was generated by AI, which is the product of the (alleged by the second panel) grim and joyless and mercenary technological age that the cartoon attempts to condemn.

GRASSO: Yeah, we can very safely put aside all the aesthetic elements of this atrocity that are attributable to the fact that it’s AI: the color grading, the inimitable and easily discernible Escherian uncanniness to all the visual elements, the kitsch factor, the utter lifelessness of the art itself. That’s all baked into the material reality of AI art. We’re dealing with a nostalgia meme made for Facebook here, for Christ’s sake—of course it’s going to bore a hole of distilled banality into the viewer’s skull. But still: someone, some actual human somewhere had to feed this thing a prompt. Some part of it came from an actual human mind. And what that mind wanted to convey with this thing is “wasn’t it better when social spaces were truly social and we weren’t all sitting around on our phones, isolated from each other?”

Leaving aside another grand irony—the fact that this meme ended up finding fertile ideological purchase on the internet, on those very same phones—there is a certain libidinal thrill in all these generational memes, whether visual or textual: a violent, agitated staking of psychological territory, projected in a threatened, growling voice onto the younger generations on the internet, a statement of misplaced solidarity and pride: “REMEMBER WHEN WE DRANK FROM THE GARDEN HOSE, GENERATION X? REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO SPEAK TO EACH OTHER AND LAUGH IN PUBS? NOT LIKE THESE MILLENNIALS AND ZOOMERS, ALWAYS ON THEIR PHONES.” The implied distance between the “good old days” and today is shrunk down to the most elemental of caveman emotional urgings: “then happy, now sad; we from then, we better than you.” 

The vibe here is almost poignantly desperate in a way, giving the impression that the older generation is almost glad things are this bad in 2024, because it allows them to stand in smug superiority against those “young people always on their phones.” When the past is a frozen tableau, painted by AI, nothing can harm it anymore or expose the truth about those 1974 pubs and bars: they weren’t all limned in golden sunlight, full of happy people singing and chatting. In fact, they were often grotty, violent, and full of alcoholics just as hypnotized by their beers as the millennials and Zoomers are by their phones in the 2024 image.

MCKENNA: At a guess, this is from my side of the pond, because us Brits—or more specifically us simple English folk—just love this kind of shit. And if that is the case, a few of the incongruities do kind of make sense. Even the absence of any ethnic minorities can probably be explained by a combination of extra-urban demographics, varying cultural attitudes to boozing, a general diffidence towards outsiders, as well as pretty widespread bigotry. To be honest, in the late eighties the majority of pubs outside metropolitan Bohemian zones weren’t all that welcoming even to your average random straight white male, so anyone not belonging to that group would have been forgiven for thinking twice before popping in for a disgusting pint of Skol or Harp ten years earlier. As would anyone who spoke with an Irish accent, given that the Provisional IRA had begun carrying out attacks in mainland Britain the year before—1974 was in fact the year the Birmingham Pub Bombings happened—so suspicion of strangers was through the roof. The whole year in the UK was pretty fucking horrible, to be honest. Bagpuss debuting on TV was about the only good thing that happened. 

But though pubs like this do—or did—sort of exist, the vibe feels more like a wish-fulfilment melding of the atmosphere of some twatty village pub in the Cotswolds, where the farmhands still live in some Wicker Man-esque idyll of rural submission to the local landlord, with that of a working men’s club, places which I remember as having a much more balanced mix of the sexes and a very different and more cheerful mood. To give you an idea, the only picture I have of my dad drinking a pint (of shit lager, natch), he was in a working men’s club: the man won’t set foot in a pub. And as Mike says, pubs could be hostile places, full of aggro alkies looking to start on anyone who looked a bit odd. 

Anyway, the main things missing are the dense cloud of acrid smoke and the bitter cold, which is my abiding memory of the few times I entered a pub before I was ten, and the frequent air of lurking threat from some pissed-up yobbo, which is my abiding memory of pubs in the ’80s and ’90s. Oh, and the stench, which is admittedly hard to render in pixels. Most pubs got fitted carpets at some point post-WWII, and most pubs never changed them, so years of absorbing revolting yeast-heavy spilled beer—and probably a surprising amount of urine—meant that the places often fucking reeked. A friend and bandmate very kindly got us some occasional work cleaning the pub his stepdad ran in a small provincial town on our dinner breaks from school, and the reek of sour beer in the place was fucking nuclear. I actually preferred cleaning the toilets, because at least the urinal cakes drowned out the various other stenches. And this was not a smelly pub, it was a well-looked-after one! So yes, this is a combination of good-old-days nonsense with the kind of idyllic, cozy vision of pub life CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) was aggressively pushing in opposition to the increasingly corporate mindset governing what had visibly become an industry.

ROBERTS: The question of where it comes from is an interesting one. Many of these nostalgia sites are run out of Europe (several from the Netherlands), but they generally target American clicks. The pint glasses would explain the absence of bottles if these weirdly Stepfordian people were in Britain, but look at the “band,” at least two of them clutching instruments that don’t exist in the real world! And look at all the gleaming wood, and the curtains! Add a couple of cowboy hats and we might be in the small-town world of Little House on the Prairie, which was itself a nostalgic idealization of American frontier life in the late 19th century. It was a hugely successful TV show that premiered in—you guessed it—1974, a little over a month after Nixon resigned. The year also saw mile-long gas lines, stagflation, smog sieges, kidnappings, hijackings, and parents were still smoking cigarettes in cars with the windows rolled up. For a lot of Americans, 1974 was less like a country band jamboree and more like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Listen, I do lament the fact that so many people, including me, are buried in their phones for too much of their lives. We don’t, as societies, talk as much as we used to. We don’t have the physical spaces that we used to have that gave us common ground and a shared reality that actually resembled reality. But the most Orwellian thing about 2024 is not people looking at iPhones, it’s Trump, whose slogan is the fuel behind this poisonous meme. 

GRASSO: A few weeks ago comedian Conner O’Malley and a cohort of fellow millennial comedians put out an hour-long film called Rap World. Set in January 2009, right before the Obama inauguration, and shot on period-appropriate equipment, it tells the story of a single night in the lives of a bunch of aimless young people in the Pennsylvania exurbs recording an “intelligent” rap album. Much of the commentary on this very funny film came in the form of younger millennials and Zoomers enviously noticing how much “simpler” and less distracting life was, or at least seemed in… 2009! Cell Phones existed, but most of them didn’t give us full access to the internet; there was more of an overarching monoculture, more opportunity and desire to be social in real space. Think about how many of the most beloved nostalgia pieces of the past half-century—American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, hell, even the music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies”!—mine the cultural and social touchstones of only a decade or so in the past! Juxtaposed with this Boomer/Gen X AI atrocity… Well, I guess what I’m getting at is that every generation can fall into their own traps of thinking things were cooler and better and easier, that they just missed out on the Best Era Ever. One can always locate a perfect moment in the past, even as that distance between idealized history and harsh present shrinks more and more as technology peddles nostalgia to keep us from asking the very pertinent question, “What is to be done?”

Obviously we’ve talked a lot about nostalgia at We Are the Mutants over the years. One could even argue it’s all we’ve talked about in one way or another. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about nostalgia myself recently; nostalgia and Trumpism, nostalgia and political reaction, nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the world we’ve handed down to ourselves (because ultimately, we’re all responsible for the atomized world we’ve inherited). If things were so much better “back then,” why do we collectively find it so hard to make a world we do want to see and live in now? We have a blueprint, after all, thanks to this idiotic AI image and countless thousands of others just like it. What elements of our present world are so irrevocable and irreversible that we can’t just pick ourselves up, put our phones away, and go to a pub and hang out with our friends? What, substantively and specifically, are the obstacles to a better, more meaningful life with richer, more fulfilling social experiences? If we were to start asking deeper, more specific questions like these, answers might emerge that some people—the ones who profit most from our current system—might not like us to have awareness of: economic and employment precarity, a deliberate closing down of public third spaces, sky-high rent that prevents working- and middle-class people from opening their own third spaces, less free time because of the demands of a 24/7 workplace, and the lack of energy that comes along with it that discourages us from planning and attending social events. One can blame technology, “phones,” for all of this, but that’s only identifying the symptom of the underlying disease. That disease is within us all and it’s called capitalism, kids. Sorry to be the kind of strident communist bore you’d probably slowly disengage from down t’pub.

MCKENNA: Of the three of us, I’m probably the one least irked by nostalgia. Partly because of a desire, however clumsy, to maintain a link with your past and your past emotions in a world where commerce demands that things change constantly seems pretty natural. And partly because—perhaps too forgivingly—I tend to see nostalgia more like a repressed acknowledgement of how terrifying the passage of time is than something more worrying. Seeing the past reminds us of the diminishing amount of future we have left, and that’s distressing, so instinctively we cling onto it. So there’s a part of me—namely most of me—that does empathize with the nostalgic. But then there are these scumbags eager to channel that distress into the hideous pipelines they’ve constructed with the goal of getting attention, or clout, or power, or just riling people up or whatever. People like the dickheads who made this picture.

That said, go into any pub, at least in the UK, and I am fairly certain you won’t see anything like the bottom scene. I mean, you’ll 100% see horrible, soulless structures all painted grey or whatever modish color scheme is currently in vogue—it’s got that right. And you’ll see a few people on their phones, ignoring everyone else. But you don’t need a phone to ignore everyone else—the world’s full of people who are quite capable of ignoring you even while they sit across from you and pretend to have a conversation with you. If you go into a pub, though, I’d say most of the people will be engaged, be it with each other or with getting absolutely rat-arsed on revoltingly overpriced IPAs. They’ll be talking shit, much of which will be stupid and possibly offensive, but they’ll be talking. So, while I agree that phones are unhealthy and we spend way too much time on them, I’m unwilling to subscribe to the phonophobia the pic wants to elicit. Without phones I’d be far, far less in touch with friends and family. I’d never have met you two. Wouldn’t have done the website. And the implicit presumption that people doing something on their phones is supposedly less—productive? Worthy?—than them just staring into space, or reading some shit book, also seems a bit optimistic, as if reading is axiomatically valuable even if what you’re reading is absolute dog turds, while whatever appears on a phone screen is automatically drivel.

Basically, I’d be lying if I said that the top pic, despite everything fake and stupid about it, didn’t pluck faintly at my heartstrings—because I’m exactly the kind of idiot this shit is designed to hook. At the same time, the comparison with the bottom pic is exactly the kind of fraudulent bollocks this stupid meme wants you to believe it’s railing against.

ROBERTS: I’ll tell you why this image made me so angry. Because at first glance, I bought it. I thought to myself: “Jesus, life was so much better in ‘74.” And then I saw the “singer” with the microphone stand jutting out of his wrist, and the zombified faces of the old men in the band, and the distorted dart board, and the non-existent musical instruments, and so on. We’re all susceptible, especially those of us born before the internet took hold. I’ve said before that nostalgia is a fantasy, and I enjoy it as such. But unchecked, it becomes something much worse: delusional Golden Ageism that’s often empowered by contempt for people who are different than you.

I don’t know what’s to be done. I think we have to start by being honest with ourselves about a lot of different things. I think we are always going to look back and yearn for the glory days—it’s part of getting older and being human, and every generation does it. But we have to recognize that this idea of looking backwards for a way forward has become a pernicious social and political obsession. I can’t say I’m a communist, Mike—I know you’ll forgive me. I’m a boring old RFK (the good one, not the shitty one) Democrat. I do believe that when money controls the tools that can make life better for everyone, it’s a good bet that life will only get better for those with money. And when the combined technology of AI and smartphones and social media is leveraged to venerate a time before the technology of AI and smartphones and social media, you can be sure that making life better for everyone is an idea whose time has come.