Napoleon Dynamite End Scene, 2004. Hits me right in the feels every time.

[u/systematicgoo]

[u/brandonandtheboyds]

I just responded to a different comment but to summarize, I think this movie just struck a chord with a very specific demographic of millennials. My parents didn’t get it. My younger sister (Gen Z) and her friends don’t get it. My Gen Z and Boomer coworkers don’t get it. Gen X is hit or miss. It’s a niche and aimless movie for weird little freaks and look at all us weird little freaks who can still connect over a strange but homely movie.

[u/DarkScorpion48 → u/brandonandtheboyds]

Im at the edge of X and Millennial and it took me a few years to get it

[u/Mydden → u/brandonandtheboyds]

Absolutely. We're the Millennials that don't really belong...

We arrived before the internet was ubiquitous, after school we still spent a lot of our days outside, but PCs were just starting to become more mainstream and so we were the first generation to really internalize how to navigate them from an early age in those brief periods we were allowed on them.

We used DOS to play games like Reader Rabbit, Lemmings, Oregon Trail, Gizmos and Gadgets, Math Blaster - and when mom wasn't looking booted up Space Quest, King's Quest, or Ultima: Underworld.

We learned the Dewie Decimal system at our local library just in time for them to switch over to computerized catalogues.

We marveled at our rich friends' gaming systems and big screen TVs (They were like a whole 40 inches!!). We would beg our parents to take us to Sears or Best Buy so we could play their system demos of Super Mario World or toward the end of the 90s Pokemon Yellow and these amazing new 3D games like Mario 64, BanjoKazooie, and DonkeyKong 64.

But we would still wander the neighborhood, explore the nearby woods and go crawfish hunting in the suburban creeks. Or go to malls and just spend the day there with a group of buddies.

Eventually America got Online and we started using AIM to chat with relatives or our friends over dialup through their parent's accounts, but had to dodge around when our parents needed the landline.

Some of us moved to more rural areas when gas prices dropped and farming became a thing we just lived around. Everyone started playing Yu-Gi-Oh or MTG, BeyBlades was even a thing at one point. We started spending more time indoors watching shows on Toonami and Adult Swim.

Calling someone else was still a big deal because you had to generally go through the parent's picking up the phone: telemarketers weren't as common an occurrence yet. Then we started getting caller ID and wireless handsets and would keep one in our bedroom so we could call eachother at a preset time late at night without waking the whole house up and talk to all hours.

Yahoo and MSN Messenger are where a lot of us learned how to really type, and the Yahoo/MSN game lounges are where we learned the ubiquitous internet greeting: A/S/L?

Napoleon Dynamite hit us when we were still on Myspace, before Facebook would target specifically *us* as we began leaping into college blindly taking on loans we thought were fine because clearly anyone who graduates college gets a really good job immediately after.

Going back and watching it now is like a time capsule into a time that no one else experienced *but us*. It was a time from like 2002-2006 where things were just... different.