For the 'childhood inspirations' blogwagon that Havoc kicked off - I wrote mine last September - because I cheated by starting at 12 so my Appendix N conformed already.
More interestingly - I recently spent a weekend gaming with my original gaming group from back in the day and among the topics of conversation was that in that time and place it was possible to be a universal geek. So little content made it as far as us that you read or watched or went to see all of it. This ties to the open and closed systems thought that Grumpy Wizard laid out - by the time we all sat to a gaming table in the early 90s we had a pretty common open-system to bring to the closed system rules of AD&D or WHFRP.
Through grim curency exchange rates for the punt and shipping costs, things were expensive and often just not available - a seventh TV channel was a big deal as I recall. VHS players and the one video rental store in town meant we'd all seen the same stuff. Even though we had the luck to be reading in English so were not further bottle-necked by need for translation, books were slow to make it as far as us. For these and other reasons, there was not a huge amount of what we would now call 'content' sloshing around and thus there was a much greater overlap between what any two folk interested in the genres would have encountered.
By comparison, since then three great new 'pools' of stuff have opened up -
* Geographic
* Archive
* New creations
Geographic constriction
The choke that existed long after it was not true for others was the choke effect of living way out in the hinterlands of Ireland in the 80s/90s - there were only so many TV channels, we had more than most with cable TV but still, it was six until it became seven with Sky One.
Collectively it meant that of the whole of media available in the world, we got a subset - and as the internet arrived and then got too fast to notice, those geographic restrictions mostly went away.
Access to old stuff
VHS was expensive and capacity on the few TV channels was constrained so old, niche shows were things spoken of in legend. Original Star Trek, Doctor Who, even films you might have missed in cinema - these could be tricky to get your hands on and pricey even if you could. Libraries were your best bet for diving old materials so books were much more available - but even then trying to find something specific from a while ago was much more tricky without the internet marketplaces of ebay or the like.
As a whole there were fewer geek properties and those were far less fleshed out - just the three Star Wars films plus books for example, Lord of the Rings was just the books. It meant there were more blank spaces, lots more room to insert your own campaigns in around the few canon pillars which was often helpful from a GMs perspective.
The past was not instantly accessible the same way it is today, some stuff was whispered legend, spoken of but unavailable so not worth worrying about.
The torrent of the new
For a few years I recall there were still strongly shared references, the volume of content was possible to stay on top of. Matrix hit like an asteroid in 99 - became the aesthetic for World of Darkness, then the Mummy, Star Wars Episode I, Sleepy Hollow, and Galaxy Quest all also dropped that year and it marked a shift to more stuff of the kind one might feed into ones games.
Then 3e came out alongside Fellowship of the Ring - and what became known as the d20 glut and it feels like the volume of stuff rapidly ramped up to impossible to keep your arms around. As bandwidth began to ramp up so did availability of new and interesting media - anime, previously unavailable american series - and things started to become diffuse.
More than anyone can manage
Seems bizarre today but everyone would watch Living Planet, have David Attenborough tell us about wildlife, and then talk about it the next day at work, school, wherever. Shared, immediate frame of reference.
I would not dare to presume what someone who sat to my game table grew up watching now - could be the freshest of memetic weirdness, could be their parent's childhood VHS collection. What people watch and read is unmoored from time, they could be dipping into all sorts of wells of great old stuff - all the while oceans of new stuff are flooding out.
When I started we could get away with assumptions of what folk had in their Appendix N because you *knew* there was no way people had much access to stuff you have not seen. Now you must assume folk have a different set of references through the sheer unlikelyhood that they happened to stumble across the exact same stuff as you.
From the point of view of your tabletop games - a chat about your references, baselining your 'open system' is probably worthwhile for a DM so you know what colours you have on your palette to paint with, so to speak.
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