I think the advent of movie theaters killed it. With today's special effects you can see trains or boats or spaceships crashing into each other in close up for a reasonable price. It's not "real" of course, but probably fills the need.
It grows a need in me to see the real thing - because I know the special FX crashing is invented, and I'd like to know how it would look (and sound, and smell, and feel) in reality.
I remember watching the twin towers collapse on 9/11, and the part of me that wasn't thinking "Oh God!" was thinking "Wow, that looks just like a special effect".
When I first stumbled upon reports from 9/11 when channel surfing (I think it was before the second plane hit), I thought I'm seeing some weird thriller movie, and continued switching channels. Only later that day I learned it was all real.
I would love to see a slow-motion recording of such a crash.
Special Effects are cool, but the interactions between different materials, pressure waves both in the structure and in the air as well as the influence of heat are fascinating and hard to model, and Hollywood has little incentive to even try. Only in the last two decades have we even started to properly simulate cgi explosions (the helicopter crash from Matrix is the earliest example).
Basically cinema and YouTube have me spoiled to demand more than what I can perceive. But special effects can't mimic the real thing.
Speaking of the Matrix, the first time I remember I started paying attention to what you mention was a collision scene on the highway from the second Matrix - the CGI there pictured a pressure wave moving through the two colliding trucks.
Movies didn't kill it, rather the Great Depression:
> By the 1930s, staged train wrecks were starting to lose their popularity because wrecking old but otherwise useful locomotives was seen as wasteful at the height of the Great Depression.
Also:
> ...staged train wrecks were a popular—albeit destructive—event at fairs and festivals across the U.S., long before anyone ever thought of wrecking old automobiles at a demolition derby or monster truck rally.
Not to mention the various incantations of robot wars. People still want to see things in real life go boom.
No doubt you can find contemporary journalists saying "wasteful in this depression!" if you look. And probably others saying "wasteful!" in every decade... how can we tell whether this was the reason?
I know stunts with WWI surplus airplanes were a common attraction in the 20s, maybe trains just started to seem old-fashioned?
Movies also sounds likely, to me, they were coming of age. In fact IIRC booming, as cheap entertainment.
I don't know, there are experiences that just can't be replicated on video. Even something as simple as fireworks are a completely different experience in person than in a theater (even IMAX). One of the spectators described the crash as more frighting than Gettysburg! Granted that crash was far more dangerous that would every be permitted today, but I'd imagine that even smaller ones were more earth shaking than you can get in a theater.
