The Cambrian Explosion of Pop Culture
Imagine a world where Pokémon didn’t exist — not even the original Game Boy games. If you’re a member of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, that probably seems impossible. You’d probably be astonished by the idea of a game with 150 different “Pocket Monsters”, and that you could collect them all. Imagine South Park being so new that the idea of a cartoon where a bunch of fourth graders curse and talk about sex is just mind-boggling, to the point that its very existence makes headlines. Imagine a world where the idea of an actual novel for children, as opposed to a short serialized “kids’ chapter book”, was something new and amazing. Harry Potter practically invented that concept. Or, going back further, imagine being shocked at the idea of fantasy and sci-fi elements in the same movie. That’s what Star Wars normalized in 1977.
All this is really just my way of pointing out that there’s a reason we see so much nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s even today, when a large number of internet users weren’t even born in the 90s. So many of our most beloved franchises have their roots in a 20-year span between the late 1970s (when Star Wars came out) and the late 1990s (when Pokemon, among many other things, arrived).
And I know a lot of you are going to be heading to the comments section right now to tell me how your favorite movie, TV show, book, video game, or whatever was made after the 90s. The thing is, I’m not denying that. There are always going to be new intellectual properties being made. This is less about new stories than it is about new kinds of stories. Pokemon Red and Blue weren’t just “monster-collecting games”, they were the definitive monster collecting games. Ditto Jurassic Park and dinosaur movies, Harry Potter and children’s fantasy novels, South Park and adult animated TV shows, and so on. While new works certainly continue to be produced, for the most part they exist within the frameworks set forth by the founding works . And these came out within a relatively short (historically speaking) span of time. But that begs the question of why we haven’t seen any new groundbreaking concepts emerge in such areas.
To answer that question, we have to look even farther in the past. Hundreds of millions of years, in fact, to an event known as the Cambrian Explosion. This happened between 540 and 520 million years ago, and was when complex animal life first appeared on Earth. Many of the familiar animal groups, or phyla, of today, such as the vertebrates, the mollusks, the annelids (segmented worms), and the arthropods, made their debuts at this time. Many other phyla also appeared in the Cambrian that simply did not survive and became extinct. Since the Cambrian, however, not one new phylum has appeared. The majority of animals living today belong to just a handful of phyla that appeared in the Cambrian. By the following period, called the Ordovician, all of these groups were in place, and would continue to dominate the world, with their many variations, up to the present.
And so it goes too, it seems, with pop culture. The 1980s and 1990s were, in many ways, a “Cambrian Explosion” of popular culture, at least as far as the English-speaking world is concerned. So many of the franchises currently being re-visited (and re-re-visited) by pusblishers, movie studios, and game developers today have their origins in this era, or at least are closely associated with them. Star Wars. Transformers. Ghostbusters. Super Mario Bros. Alien. The whole Disney Renaissance. Pokemon. Harry Potter. The Simpsons. Jurassic Park. And so many, many others.
The Cambrian Explosion produced losers as well as winners, but the winners — the ancestors of today’s great animal dynasties — proceeded to dominate the world to such an extent that no other group could hope to achieve the same success. Once the chordates had hit on the winning formula of evolving a backbone, they monopolized the niches of large swimming animals. Likewise, when these iconic franchises took off, they became so successful that any would-be competitors were left in the dust. Tellingly, many of the biggest TV, movie and video game flops of the past two decades have been attempts at igniting new franchises that suffered from comparison to existing ones.
Will there ever be another Pop Culture Cambrian Explosion? It’s hard to say. With the once-invincible Marvel Cinematic Universe seemingly in its death throes, and traditional television slowly fading into irrelevance in the face of streaming, we are definitely at a crossroads not only in terms of what media we consume but how we consume it. The tides may yet turn in favor of all-new ideas, but only time will tell.
