Dumber than "Pokemon is satanic witchcraft"?
That was a lot of noise, but it was mostly cranks no one took seriously. The DnD Satanic scare of the 80s was wrapped up in a larger "Satanic Panic" that had to get the FBI involved. The hubbub over Pokemon never reached those levels.
As a father of a newly 16-year-old, I'm seeing for the first time a lot of how the world has changed for kids/teens for the first time, too. I think what was lost was the idea that you left home to go do fun things with your friends (and/or family.) Like you said, a lot of what is gone now was ALWAYS crass/commercial. Arcades, movie theaters, convenience stores, and restaurants were always 100% designed to separate us from our money, but you were doing it outside the home with other people. "Kids these days" don't seem to just go out and do things anymore. Well, they do, but not nearly to the extent that we did. Kids can communicate by texting / on-line video games / etc. You don't have to call someone's house on a landline and talk to their parents while your friend was located.
It's wild to experience. Being a teacher has been eye opening in a lot of ways. I have kids who I know are friends, in the same study hall, who are texting each other. Like... go over to him! Have a conversation! Like a person!
And I do think there's a distinction there between just getting old and noticing a very real shift that isn't necessarily for the better.
Like... when I was fifteen my friends and I had our inside jokes our teachers thought were dumb, and likewise my students have their inside jokes my colleagues and I think are dumb. And it's always kind of funny to catch myself thinking "that's stupid" to realize that was me way back when.
But then there's this whole other thing about how kids just don't know how to socialize. It's not just about going out with friends to do stuff, though that is part of it.
When we did that as kids it forced us to learn how to interact with our peers and even *gasp* GIRLS!
Now, kids go to school and then straight home, where they then log on, often to talk to their friends from school. They don't go out to meet, they don't bump into other peers of theirs, and it's bred a generation that's frankly less socially adept than we were.
Like... I hear teenage boys at work constantly complaining about how hard it is to get a girlfriend, and it's like... you don't know how to talk to girls! You barely know how to talk to each other!
The knock-on effect of all of this is that places that served as fun hangout spots for teens- malls, department stores, restaurants, movie theatres- are withering and dying. Which means communities shrink and rot, and shared social experiences die off.
Back when I was fifteen/sixteen? We'd all go see a movie together. And that simple experience was more healthy for my development than if my friends and I had just streamed it over a Discord call.
The war on fast food will someday be remembered as the dumbest moral panic since the Dungeons and Dragons nonsense.
Supersize Me will go down as a borderline fraudulent piece of sensationalist journalism. Sure, eating multiple supersized meals a day leads to weight gain. Whodathunk? The premise is flawed though.
One, I don't even think McDonalds tried to push "eat a supersized meal for all three meals a day." At a certain point personal responsibility has to enter the discussion.
Two, if all we're concerned with is weight, it's a matter of counting calories. I could eat nothing but supersized meals and still lose weight, or at least stay steady at my current weight, if I stayed below or at my caloric limit per day.
Of course McDonalds isn't healthy eating, but the moral panic around it in the early 2000s wasn't justified and had some not so great repercussions culturally.
