Entertainment Weekly is celebrating “the new classics: the 1000 best movies, tv shows, albums, books, and more of the past 25 years” of pop culture. Genre titles are well represented on the various lists. Some of them include:
Movies: genre titles show up at #2 (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), #4 (Blue Velvet), #5 (Toy Story), and #8 (The Silence of the Lambs). They’re also sprinkled through the rest of the 100 entries on the list (some others: The Matrix, Edward Scissorhands, Aliens, Spider-Man 2, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Sixth Sense, and Children of Men).
Television: top genre titles include The X-Files (#4), Lost (#8), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (#10). Others making the list of 100 include: Star Trek: The Next Generation, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, and more.
Books: again, a sprinkling of genre titles, but this time including the #1 spot (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and #2 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling, which is the only Harry Potter book on the list). Art Spiegelman’s Maus comes in at #7, marking a decent showing by graphic novels, too. Other genre titles in the 100 include: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Neuromancer by William Gibson, and Sandman by Neil Gaiman.
Other lists of “the new classics” include music, style, tech, videogames, stage, as well as scenes of various flavors (romantic, death, etc.), posters, and book covers (which starts with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and includes Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). They also have ten “My New Classics Top 10” lists by various celebrities, including Samuel L. Jackson, Viggo Mortensen, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Neil Gaiman.
For your fix of EW‘s view on “classic” modern pop culture, check out the above links.