"On the topic of reversing changes to appreciate their absurdity: movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien to me than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes."

Most people do not know enough history (or rather, the specific parts of history) to even realize how absurd the past was. If you read a high-school level history textbook, which is the most information 99% of the public will actually remember (if that), history seems a great deal like the modern day: people had politics and governments and wars and good guys and bad guys and issues and so on, just like they do in the movies. The absurd parts get subtracted out, or added on as "irrelevant" trivia.