When Popular Culture Caught Up to the Way We Live Now

Our take: The America of yesterday has changed, as evidenced in the transition of family-centered entertainment from the black and white days to the more vulgar media of our color generation. This Wall Street Journal article discusses how changes in pop culture and entertainment have seeped into society as a whole.

It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black-and-white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists. Those of us who are a couple of decades older than that well up with intense nostalgia at the sight of that reassuringly familiar place, even the uncomfortable districts that harbored desperate souls hurtling toward a rendezvous with film-noir death. After all, that's the place where we grew up. For those under 30, though, black-and-white America is an impenetrably strange land peopled with creatures who look like human beings but live in a parallel universe of fedoras, dial telephones, three-channel TV sets and more or less nuclear families.

Read more about America changing on WSJ.com.