Some of it is rose-coloured glasses. Even my grandfather (born in the 1920s) once remarked to me whilst watching the news: "you know, this has always been happening; we just didn't used to talk about it", in response to some kind of crime/violence. It's also generally one of the goals of parents to let kids be kids and shelter them as best they can from some of the actual hardships and shit that is life, so a lot of us think back fondly on those times (at least who are lucky enough to have similar experiences; not everyone had adults in their lives that would or even could do that).

Spying has been around forever, but the creative jobs thing is apt. Instead, it was the threat of manual work getting taken over by robots, hating Japan because of their miracle economy basically made possible (at least at first) due to the US but then nearly overtaking the US, etc. that defined a lot of what I saw (which is humorous given that I have been living in Japan for the past decade).