Richard Linklater's career path is one that has often run close to my life experiences. Slacker came out when I was leading the meandering nomadic existence of the film's characters...if years later people wonder what was Gen-X, this was it. Pop cultural references suffused every inch of our existence and our identities were what emerged out from under all that junk and cynicism. His 2022 film Apollo 10 and a half is an autobiographical fantasy about being a child astronaut. But the parts about being a child of the '70s captured that mood as well as any film I've seen. It helps that it's animated so there's no issue with establishing verisimilitude in the clothes and hair and furniture or risky attempts at mimicking old film stock. The colourful drawings function as a kind of memory of the era's pop culture palette - Jiffy pop, big station wagons and antenna TVs  appear in stark primary colours like the ads and the decor of the times. It feels real but warmer than live action would be. The kids, like me, live in a sprawling new housing development with an endless horizon in the distance at a time when technology was promising to fix everything while poisoning us. The list of TV shows the film enumerates sounds like a catechism we all had to learn by heart. The whole world came to us through the living room box and it became the source of most of our future dreams and illusions. We knew another life was elsewhere and wondered how close it was to the fantasy the world was selling us.