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Austin is politically adaptable
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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The thing that weirds me out is that Austin Powers was frozen for 30 years and when he woke up, society had changed so much between the 60s and the 90s that he was hilariously out of place.
If the movie were made today, he'd be frozen for 30 years to go back to... the 90s. Obviously a lot has changed with technology since then, but the societal differences aren't as visible.
It seems like it'd be a movie where Austin barely understands the Internet and cell phones - and does stuff against social norms like trying to smoke in a restaurant.
The attitude towards LGBTQ+ folks is a lot different compared to the 90s. Back then "gay" was an insult I heard at school all the time, and it was a huge deal when Ellen came out.
Now that I think of it, it'd be almost impossible to make the movie funny and instead it would sound like a conservative ranting about how they got cancelled on the Internet for calling someone gay.
Depends on how it's handled. While I think your version is the most likely outcome, especially considering the creative team are a bunch of aging Gen Xrs, the reason the original escaped the pitfalls we are talking about here is that Austin's 60s sensibilities are the butt of the joke, not the advancement of societal norms so often decoratively labeled as "political correctness". The movie is about the character learning to adapt to the times, and not the character demanding the times return to the 60s status quo.
Really though, I think they already sort of made the movie we are talking about here, and it turned out fantastic. The 21 Jump Street movies were basically what we are describing, just without time travel shenanigans. Channing Tatum's character, who was hot shit at his high school in the 90s, returns to high school 20 years later and finds that the things that made him popular are no longer cool and he has to learn to adapt to changed circumstances. Obviously that one is specifically satirizing the change in school culture post-90s, but it works on a general level too I think.
Little Demon also does this bit. Chrissy (the Antichrist) is hanging out with the cool girls at high school. Who, this being the 2020s, are wiccan social justice warriors. Chrissy's dad Satan (played by Danny DeVito) is very mad about this, and decides to help her friend Bennigan become popular at school so he can talk her out of being cool. First he tries telling everyone that Bennigan slept with a hot teacher, but this just leads to the teacher getting arrested and everyone feeling sorry for Bennigan. Then he tries getting Bennigan to prank the skater hooligans, but Bennigan refuses and gets them to open up about their feelings instead, which is what actually makes him popular.