Okay, so as soon as I wrote what I wrote below, I came up with something a lot more thorough and having to do with things that are in my face all the time. So, case in point, nostalgia. I understand that there is this huge surge of merch coming through the stores that is marketed to people of my age group: the 20-somethings. This is not new. Even more so, the merchandise isn’t really “new,” either, it’s leftover from the ‘80s.
I saw a Skip-It at (horror of horrors!!) Wal-Mart the other night, and thought of how I wanted one really really badly when I was 10, and when I finally got it, I realized that it wasn’t really as cool as I thought it was, and it hung in my closet until my house burned down. Well, my house really didn’t burn down, but I don’t know what eventually became of the Skip-It.
There’s plenty of crap on the market that’s just plain shit. Some people wax mournfully at their lost childhoods, and feel the need to overestimate the coolness of everything back then. Take teevee: I, bowing to the masses, was watching some olden-day teevee that I was so fortunate to have downloaded off of ye olde interweb. So, I’m sitting, right? And watching “Greatest American Hero,” a show I remember liking when I was young, and it was lame. Lame. Really badly horribly grinding my teeth at the horror of it all lame. Like not even haha this is lame, but also cool because it’s nostalgic, and nostalgia and vintage campy shit is cool, but just plain stupid.
I began thinking about my youth and all the things that I loved that I could love again, with the magic of modern technology, and, well… money. I realized it was all lame. It sucked. You remember “Saturday morning cartoons” like The Smurfs and Voltron and He-Man? They all sucked, badly. I couldn’t force myself to watch more than 5 minutes of each, so badly was my brain rejecting all information my eyes and ears were serving it.
We need to take a stand against cheap merchandising and forced nostalgia! It’s not as good as it used to be, folks, but we need to understand that nothing is going to bring back the “good old days” of 9 year old bliss. I may sound extremely pessimistic, but the fact remains that it’s necessary to move on with our lives and let the past go. It’s great to have memories of fun times and whatnot, but we don’t need to materialize it all – if anything, it dishonors the memories.
Of course, I’m a total hypocrite.
Everybody wants to cash in on "retro" so badly that "retro" is becoming "five years ago." People are already having 90s nostalgia, which, I suppose, makes sense in a way, since the 90s were so "prosperous" and "care-free," if everyone forgets what was really going on.
At any rate, I have nostalgia for times before anyone I know was alive. I want nothing more than to drink tea on the lawn and watch Lady Turkberry and the Earl of Floppington play croquet.
And I betcha that anyone who actually ran around in corsets and pretended that her husband wasn't lynching black people and didn't have aspirin to take for her cramps would say I'm just as foolish as I say the 90s nostalgists are.
Posted by: Auntie Sarah at June 8, 2004 3:04 PM