Yep! I saw and rewatched tons of movies this way as a kid. We had two VCRs and my stepdad copied most of what we watched for a handful of years, but I can’t remember when exactly it started. We had Road House on a copied tape, so it was likely in the early 90s.

He also had some copied Betamax tapes from the 80s too, so he was a pretty early adopter of piracy. I first saw Labyrinth on Betamax!

They started embedding them into the back windows of cars in the mid-1990s! It’s usually kind of a zig-zag toward the top.

There are a few similar interpretations!

tl;dr: aliens (with an old standard radio antenna!) broke down or abandoned their vehicle on the side of the road… and they either got a ticket/notice or they are coming back to get their vehicle later.

First, maybe a dumb cop saw they were parked in a breakdown lane, wanted to ticket them, but they didn’t have windshield wipers. Antenna it is! On to the next “car.”

Second possibility: in the U.S. when someone breaks down on the side of the road and has to leave their car, for some reason it used to be (and still occasionally is) the custom to put something on it to indicate “I’m coming back!” Sometimes I’ve seen a cloth hanging out the window or something.

Similarly, police or road maintenance will tag seemingly-abandoned cars in the U.S. with stickers nowadays, so a policeman may have been marking an abandoned “car” as well, mixing the two scenarios.

Just to confirm, I also double-checked the Disqus comments before commenting here, because older people tend to use it. And the scenarios above are the most commonly mentioned!

I didn’t get this at all, but urban dictionary tells me it’s from the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

A phrase from the 1946 movie “Its a Wonderful Life”. The petals belong to Zuzu Bailey, the youngest daughter of George Bailey the main character. Zuzu had brought a flower home from school. When she was upset that a few petals had fallen off, George pretended to reattach them and secretly slipped them into his pocket.

Towards the end of the movie, after being shown what the world might be like if he had never been born, George is given a second chance by God. Changes that had occurred while he didn’t exist, were returned. He is initially made aware of this, in part, by the fact that Zuzu’s Petals were again in his pocket.
“Zuzu’s petals…Zuzu… There they are!”

As an aside, the username that created that entry in 2009? ZuzusPetals.

Totally agreed.

Also seems really fun to watch?? What a grouch!

It’s a reference to old (1930s) cartoons!

A lot of old cartoons had silly animals dancing to band music. Here’s an example, from Crystal S. In the Disqus comments, and here’s one I found from Getty Images.

The Disqus link has a lot of people older than me that, thankfully, confirmed it, because I had no way to describe it other than “old cartoons with silly dancing cows.”

I personally have seen it mostly referenced on Simpsons episodes from the 90s. I think Homer’s brain has had 1930s dancing animals in it at least once.

I think the implication might be that it’s either a lame party or they have to play really dumb old tinny music

Oh never mind these Evanescence hits are on airplay! Ignore this

Billboard has counted streams for years. Sales, streams, and airplay.

News this year was that Billboard stopped counting YouTube streams because Google was trying to throw their weight around to affect the charts. Which I thought was interesting.

Is the original joke that Evanescence is actually still popular in rock, so asking makes you look silly?

Evanescence literally had two #1 hits over the past two years.

People who listen to rock music have definitely heard of Evanescence.