Alan Moore is a genius. Either Watchmen or V for Vendetta would have been enough to cement his legacy as the most innovative comic book writer of the 1980s. That he did both, and completely changed the game, puts him right up there with Schuster and Siegel or Lee and Kirby.
I say that because if you’ve read Watchmen (and if you haven’t I will explain now), you notice the ads for “Nostalgia” perfume, and how the Veidt corporation appeals to that sort of imagery for maximum profit in times of distress. This is either well-researched, or tremendously intuitive. Most people under 40 probably won’t recall this very well – I certainly wasn’t cognizant of it until well after the fact – but the 1970s in American were a time of massively huge nostalgia, to the point where Time ran an entire issue about it.
Think about it. There’s the obvious stuff – Happy Days and Grease spring to mind. There was a movie version of Doc Savage, which just hit at the wrong time to become a massive movie franchise, there was American Graffiti, and off its profits there was Star Wars which was nothing if not a return to 30s movie serials. (Lucas actually wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie but couldn’t get the rights, but both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers would see theaterical release before 1980 was out). Beyond that, the hula hoop came back in, there were attempts to bring back the exact sort of variety show that had just been killed off with the cancellation of Ed Sullivan – does anybody remember that NBC had to call their show “NBC’s Saturday Night” because ABC already had “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell”? Just think, they thought the Bay City Rollers were going to be the new Beatles….
So yeah. To borrow a line from another Protestant supporter of Celtic, “you glorify the past when your future dries up.” Oil soaring, gas through the roof, unpopular war, ridiculous interest rates, incumbent President about as popular as herpes, people buying ridiculous little cars to replace their massive American gunboats…anybody else got the deja vu?