ABSTRACT
If you have seen television, magazines, or newspapers, visited websites, or heard music, you are probably aware that we are in the midst of a 1950s and early 1960s revival. There was a 1950s revival before, in the 1970s, when, for example, Happy Days was the number one television program in the 1976–77 season. That nostalgia was precipitated for different reasons than today's, due mainly to the turbulence of the 1960s followed by the disillusionment with the government following the Watergate scandal. 1 Today's nostalgia, if it can be called that at all, is more abstract, consisting mainly of the reuse of 1950s-early 1960s graphic arts styles (as we see in the cover artwork for this book), some dress styles, and, of course, some musical sounds as in films such as Pulp Fiction (1994), which featured a good deal of 1950s popular music. Today there are some more overt reuses of the 1950s and '60s than in the previous wave of fifties nostalgia, such as the film Pleasantville (1998) and the two Austin Powers movies, International Man of Mystery (1997) and The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), or Matt Groening's television program Futurama, which pokes fun at some of the fifties' and sixties' (and other) attitudes toward the future; or the series of lesbian detective novels by Mabel Maney set in the 1950s that insert lesbian detectives into the past while always poking affectionate fun at that era.
