Quotes / Vindicated by History

Films - Live-Action

I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it.

— Marty McFly, after playing a Van Halen-esque guitar solo to a confused 1950's crowd in Back to the Future

Live-Action TV

Ted: (at a porn convention) Dude, c'mon, let's just find bizarro-me and get out of here.
Barney: Oh, oh, I get it. Ted Mosby, non-porn star, thinks this is all crude and disgusting. You know who else was considered crude and disgusting? Shakespeare. But his themes— love, lust, forbidden desire— were universal, which is why his work has stood the test of time. And so will all this. Four hundred years from now, some high school drama class will be doing a plucky, spirited production of Beef Party 7.

— How I Met Your Mother, "I'm Not That Guy"

Magazines/Newspapers

"If I had seen Revenge of the Sith in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), "Power! Unlimited Power!," I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement. The entire movie is filled with an absolute splendor of the pulp sublime, and that moment is its very apogee. Lucas reaches historic heights in the filming of action: the martial artistry of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s double duel versus Dooku, the gaping maw of outer space and of the airshaft into which the heroic duo drops, Obi-Wan’s light-sabre fight with the four-armed Grievous, and, above all, the apocalyptic inferno of the confrontation of Obi-Wan and Anakin (which, regrettably, cuts back to Yoda and Emperor, a much duller battle). I watched these sequences over and over...and was repeatedly and unflaggingly amazed by Lucas’s precise, dynamic, wildly imaginative direction."

— Richard Brody, "What the Seven Star Wars Films Reveal About George Lucas", The New Yorker, January 06 2016

Music

"Art is never understood
Especially when it's good"

— The Foremen, Who Needs Art?

Every CD, critics gave it a three, then three
years later they go back and re-rate it.
Then called The Slim Shady LP the greatest,
the Marshall Mathers was a classic,
The Eminem Show was fantastic,
but Encore just didn't have the caliber to match it.
I guess enough time just ain't passed yet.
A couple more years, that shit'll be Illmatic.

— Eminem, "Careful What You Wish For"

Web Video/Blogs

"The epic, 10,000 year-long story of a man stuck in time who must cope with immortality and his own dickishness. Although it wasn't appreciated at first (our brains weren't fully evolved back in 1993, as evidenced by The Nanny's inexplicable popularity), Groundhog Day is now seen as the turning point in Bill Murray's ascension from funny actor to mythological figure. This movie is one of the greatest accomplishments of our culture."

—Cracked, on Groundhog Day

"Black Ocean – refers to k-pop fans in an audience turning off their lightsticks to show disapproval for a performer or group ... Only one confirmed black ocean exists in k-pop history ... The group involved, Girls' Generation, went on to become the most successful girl group in k-pop history to date, which just goes to show that k-pop fans are as dumb as they are powerless."

— Kpopalypse blog

"This is a good enough Doctor Who story to be made for television in the modern era. It was good enough to get a Hugo nomination a decade later, and for a version of itself that wasn’t even as good as this book. In a better world we’d just skip the intervening decade and bring Doctor Who back now while frantically waving this book around and saying 'Look! Look! See how good it can be!' We can’t. We didn’t."

—El Sandifer on the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Human Nature

"Ironically enough, Kirby's high-concept surreality has weathered the years better than most material from the period. One of the benefits of being out-of-sync with the times is relative immunity from datedness."

— Andrew Weiss, on Jack Kirby's '70s work

Dante: So you must be the secret ingredient.
Gaming Brit: And who the hell are you...?
Dante: My name, by the way, is Dante!
Gaming Brit: Nero... Buddy... I'm-I'm sorry. I-I take back everything I said. I was wrong. Come back to me, please! We made a mistake! You're not that bad! You're not that bad...
Nero: Too late for regrets.

— The Gaming Brit changing his mind about Devil May Cry 4

"It's like I've been sucked into an alternative universe, where instead of being uncool because I actually liked the GameCube, now I'm uncool because I don't like it enough...Or maybe I was just always uncool."

— The Geek Critique during his retrospective on The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games

"But over the course of the decade, much like a few other games around this time, opinions on Sonic and the Black Knight started to shift. Nowadays, you're likely to see more people think a little more positively about the game. I could say that's because the only people actually playing the game nowadays are those that liked it from the start and those that didn't have long since moved on and viewpoints are skewed, but that would be the asshole thing to say."

—SomecallmeJohnny in his review of Sonic and the Black Knight

"EarthBound (1994), the 1993 SNES JRPG that attained cult appeal, but initially sold in America about as well as oily rags sold to people who are on fire."

—Zero Punctuation

Wind Waker pioneered a cartoony cel-shaded aesthetic that, at the time, garnered a mixed response from the neophobic cretins of the world, who have all since cracked their skulls open on their vintage tin lunchboxes to the delight of a grateful nation. While most attempts at realistic graphics from the GameCube era now look like SkyNet's ill-fated attempts at Play-Doh-based Terminators, Wind Waker's exaggerated characters and flat colors looked fine and still looks fine.

— Zero Punctuation

"Well, the problem for Christmas Carol, back in 1992, was that it was the wrong movie for the moment. Jim Henson had just died two years earlier, and this was the first major Muppet project under Brian Henson's leadership. It was also the public debut of Steve Whitmire's version of Kermit — there'd been some minor appearances by then, but for most people, this was the first time they'd heard the frog's new voice.
And instead of making a sunny, wacky Muppet road trip film like they probably should have, Brian made a cold, dark film about Michael Caine coming to grips with his mortality, attended by a subdued cast of familiar Muppets, mostly in cameo roles. There were little groups of two or three Muppets, each of them cordoned off into their own space in the timeline, so Kermit couldn't interact with Fozzie or Gonzo, and Miss Piggy was confined to a single domestic set, in a maternal role that didn't really suit her.
People already suspected that without Jim, the Muppets would be diminished somehow — less funny, less creative, less magical — and this film seemed to confirm everybody's worst fears. The Muppets weren't fun anymore.
But it turns out that was only a problem in the immediate aftermath of Jim's death, when people expected the movie to signal what the Muppets would be like from then on. As more Muppet films came out, especially the 2011 relaunch, it became clear what The Muppets Christmas Carol actually was — a standalone production, a little festive treat — rather than a harbinger of the Muppets Yet to Come.

— Danny Horn on The Muppet Christmas Carol, Tough Pigs

"If you ask [Gorillaz] fans nowadays what they think of Plastic Beach, you'll probably hear that it's one of, if not actually their best album, and a high point for the band and so cool and so great. But I don't endorse participating in historical revisionism. I was there, and I remember that Plastic Beach was divisive in the fandom when it dropped. Yes, a fair bit of people liked it even at the time, but looking back on discussion threads from that era, you'll find a surprising number of negative comments: People who didn't like the more pop-centric sound, people who didn't like the amount of collaborators, people who hated the amount of rap on the album, people who hated that there weren't more rap songs in the style of Feel Good Inc. or Clint Eastwood. The backlash wasn't something I'd call big, but it was noticeable; a showcase that at the very least, there were a fair bit of people who weren't gelling with the new Gorillaz sound. I should know, I was one of them."

— Lady Emily, Plastic Beach: The Masterpiece That Almost Ended Gorillaz

Real Life

"History will vindicate my memory from every unjust aspersion."

— James Buchanan (it didn't)

"We all make mistakes. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals."

— Walt Disney on Fantasia^note Though admittedly he was more upset by the film's almost studio-destroying box office performance than by the film itself, which he was still very proud of.

"In the beginning, it was not a hit. I remember when I went to New York to do P.R. for the picture. I went to a restaurant and the doorman said 'Hey, Mr. Knotts. Welcome back to New York. Hey, I understand you got a lousy movie in town.' Anyway, it was re-released...It started to pick up, it started to do better, and as time went on, it just seemed to build and build until, as I understand, it's become a sort of a perennial favorite."

— Don Knotts speaking about The Incredible Mr. Limpet

"Forget about what this movie's doing now. In fifteen years' time, this is going to be the movie you're glad you made."

— Kurt Russell to Paul W.S. Anderson after seeing Event Horizon, which was critically savaged at release but has since come to be considered one of the greatest sci-fi horror films ever made

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