Now, now -- I think most adults still know who John Wayne and Bogart are. It's not all that dire.
Oh, I think it is. Look at how kids watch Star Trek today. Look at the Abrams movie. They just don't get it. They see cool (or "cheesy") spaceships and laser beams, not literary writing. It really bothers me. "Dumbing down" is a real, generational phenomenon. It's not that kids are dumb. They aren't. But they're uneducated. Hell, I'm a lawyer, and very few of my peers can even write a gramatically correct sentence (let alone use a latin phrase or quote Shakespeare).
Seen the same thing myself.