Bubble trouble quest tv#

Bubble trouble quest tv#

Inouye’s work evokes a lost world of suburban homes and TV watchers, of middle-class stability and the Carter presidency, of an America absorbing and processing the cultural shifts of the early 1970s.

It is meaningful now to catch up with Fantasy Island as trickle-down Reaganomics and American conservatism has been realized in unexpected ways, with immense social upheaval and an economic reshuffling that dealt the middle class, the very demographic who might have been watching Fantasy Island in 1978, to the bottom of the deck. Airing weekly on ABC from 1978 to 1984 and continuing in syndication for many years after, Fantasy Island, the television show, served as a cautionary tale on excess, ego and desire - themes ripe for Reagan-era yuppies and more potently compelling today as fantasy islands proliferate our society from narcissistically circular social media bubbles to “fake news” to the survivalist island compounds of the economically super-elite in Hawaii, New Zealand and other remote locations across the globe. In Kelly Inouye’s timely exhibition Fantasy Island, they also provide a pop-culture parable to examine our own times: how fantasy writ large dominates our political lives and how nostalgia influences our perceptions of reality. These words, spoken by Fantasy Island’s host, contain prescient wisdom and Freudian-laced warnings. Roarke says, ominously, against the paradisal backdrop of Fantasy Island’s tropical foliage, blue skies and white sands. “I tried to warn you about the consequences of your fantasy before you started,” Mr.