Have your own entertainment tastes and preferences changed in your life?

[Brian63]

Over the course of your life, have there been any movies, shows, songs, books, etc. that you used to adamantly hate (figuratively speaking), but now really enjoy? Or maybe vice versa, where you used to really love it, but now cannot stand it? How have your tastes and preferences changed in your years?

One that springs to mind is that years ago I used to love watching some Conan O'Brien clips (particularly his nightly monologue at the beginning of his shows), as I thought he was the only particularly funny late-night host on T.V. Now though, I find him incredibly annoying, although I am still drawn to watch him sometimes for reasons that I cannot fully understand. His body mannerisms are so annoying though, like how he claps his hands together repeatedly throughout his monologue. During this 3:30 clip for instance, he does it soooooooooooooo many times, and he does it every single night. Yeah, the problem is more mine than his, but I just find it really irritating still.

In the other direction, back many years ago when the New Kids On The Block were together and extremely popular, I was just a kid that hated them, partly out of jealousy and partly just because their music was annoying. Now though, I listen to their songs sometimes for nostalgia purposes, and it has grown on me a bit. Fun to watch their videos. Heh. Especially noting the irony since one of them even came out years later as gay. Never would have even considered that a possibility, way back then.

How have your own entertainment tastes and preferences been dramatically altered over the years, for positive or negative?

Brian

 

[dystopian]

I don't think they've changed dramatically in the going from bad to positive department; just that things I pre-emptively dismissed in the past turned out to be pretty awesome after all. I've exemplified my generation's 'Meh' attitude when it comes to liking things, even today. "Ugh, lame. Lame. This sucks. I can't believe people like this shit."; it takes a fair bit of effort for me to look past that and realize that I actually like something.

 

[rousseau]

As I age I enjoy classic works of literature more and more. Dickens is outstanding, but I just didn't see it 7-8 years ago.

I also rarely watch movies or TV at all anymore, except for the best of the best works of art.

 

[prideandfall]

do i now like anything i used to hate: not that i can think of, no.

do i now hate anything i used to like: in the way that things you thought were awesome as a kid are now kind of intolerable, yes - i doubt i could sit through an entire season of the original TMNT cartoon, for example, and i kind of doubt i would find Howard the Duck as amazing now as i did when i was 9.

 

[Celldweller]

Slasher flicks. Used to love them, from a wee lad through college (university). Now, I can't tolerate them. Lost all interest in the gore-fest genre.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I used to like rock music. Now I can only listen to electronic, classical, or jazz. I just prefer more complex music.

 

[Unbeatable]

Started liking:
-My tolerance for black-and-white sequential art has increased, whereas I used to find it difficult to concentrate on a page of, e.g. manga(pretty much all of which is B&W) at all because the absence of color made the images flat and indistinguishable from one another to me.
-Doctor Who (the 2005 revival, not the original). When I first tuned in, I found the acting and overall mood of the show to be strange and off-putting, but I must have gotten used to it.

Stopped liking:
-Superheroes. Or rather, many of the genre conventions that other fans of the genre seem to hold dear. The conventions which began to grate on my nerves mostly derive from the ongoing nature of mainstream superhero comics as immortal multimedia franchises. Other fans seem content to see their favorite characters continue in perpetuity while I began to crave stories with endings, characters who could undergo permanent changes and permanent deaths, settings which could undergo permanent changes. Then there's the childish "good vs. evil" morality; though some level of moral ambiguity has been increasing over the years in the genre, it didn't increase fast enough for me. I've also lost a great deal of my suspension of disbelief and become prone to analyzing the plausibility of things like costumes, the side-effects of super-powers(I'm still willing to accept that an extradimensional energy source allows Flash to run faster than sound, but when Superman moves at the same speeds, shouldn't there be sonic booms and blasts of wind?), contrivances like 90% of extraterrestrials being the same size and shape as humans, etc.

-Playing video games. I lost my ability to appreciate the challenge of beating a level, making it to the end of a game, or any other kinds of achievement. It just became a frustrating chore with no point to it. In particular, I recall how eventually, I could no longer bring myself to play one of my favorite games, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, because it had started causing me intense anxiety.

-Chuck Palahniuk-- the patterns in his writing style got to me. All his characters sounding like the same person, the way he'd repeat little phrases throughout the novel, the way every character had some barely-if-at-all-relevant-to-the-plot area of expertise that they'd lecture the reader on for no reason to a degree of detail serving only to prove to the reader that Palahniuk had done his research.

-Conan O'Brien-- the things that got on my nerves were his self-deprecation, excessive loudness, and his tendency to monopolize the interviews.

-Various comic book illustrators' styles: Jim Lee, Frank Miller, John Romita Jr., Erik Larsen, J. Scott Campbell, Roger Cruz.

-Seinfeld.

-Babylon 5-- I used to think it was the best sci-fi program ever made. Of course, that was years before the BSG remake, but it's notable how badly B5 has aged in my eyes. The last time I saw an episode, it struck me as being full of overacting and overly melodramatic, sentimental, or pseudo-profound dialogue.

-Sarah Silverman-- I stopped finding her funny. Oddly, I'm still as much of a fan of offensive/edgy/tasteless humor as ever, so it's not as if I got tired of that overall style. It's just Sarah Silverman's jokes specifically which started to fall flat for me. I think her jokes are often too drawn out now, too inefficient.