Millennials: How do you feel about nostalgia pandering?
When I was a kid, I remember the soundtrack to the world being oldies. Stuff from the 1970s and earlier. Boomers were always being pandered to by nostalgia. Decades later that pandering shifted to the 1980s, something I'm sure the Gen Xers must have appreciated. A year or two ago I realized that the nostalgia train has been in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
It occurs to me that there has been nostalgic pandering going for a long time and I just hadn't realized it. I assume it's because a lot of the most notable ones have been pretty bad, particularly in the case of movies like the Space Jam sequel or the Jurassic World series. But music has had it's share too. I remember hearing a lot of references to 90s hip hop, and old bands like Backstreet Boys and My Chemical Romance have got back together. I've also been seeing a lot of references to old TV shows like Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though, to be fair, people never really stopped talking about Buffy).
Personally speaking, I'm not a fan of this. Yeah, the movies have been bad, but that's basically just the state of hollywood right now. But more than anything, I'm kind of disappointing by it. I'm more interested in new art, generally speaking, and more importantly, seeing all of these throwbacks is starting to make me feel old.
I don't mind a few plays at nostalgia as much. Though, I haven't noticed it that much either.
Well, you are getting older ;) I recently turned 40, in my early thirties I could still claim to be young, but now I am firmly in middle age territory. Which is okay, at least to me. Aging takes me to different places as interests keep changing and evolving. I enjoy doing things I wouldn't have done when I was younger and also am able to do more things.
Age is a number, old is a feeling, and "middle-aged" is half of however long you plan on living
You do you, and as long as you're okay with it, everything's good. It is not, however, something you're strictly forced into.
Like most things, I don’t mind it when it’s done well. The absolute best recent example I can think of is the soundtrack for the new(ish) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Mutant Mayhem. The trailer makes great use of A Tribe Called Quest and the soundtrack itself has some great 90s songs scattered throughout. TMNT itself could be considered nostalgia bait too. But even without that, it’s still a fantastic movie.
So whatever the thing is that’s doing the pandering, it has to be good on its own AND use the nostalgia well.
Exactly! You can tell when people love something vs. just trying to make a buck off of it.
The movie itself was also great fun. I think humans have an innate desire to recycle, reinterpret, and retell stories, and if corporations can let enough creative energy percolate through, we’ll get good stuff out of it.
Even new movies do this, Moviemakers sometimes slip in what they call an homage to honor the thing they're being a character or story on.
At it's most recognizable, there's the chosen one story type. We see it over and over and most people seem to love it. Well known examples are Superman, Star Wars, The Matrix, and Harry Potter.
Monkeys at a typewriter producing Shakespeare and all that.
Agreed. Do Revenge was also a great film steeped in nostalgia that referenced a lot of millennial touchstones, and I loved it.
Nostalgia pandering is a loaded term. It gives nostalgia a negative connotation. I think a more nuanced way to phrase it would simply be if people like nostalgia. And frankly even that is pushing it - is it nostalgia to not prefer the new way of doing things? If I don't want my simple website to have 600 dependencies am I being nostalgic? You say yourself that Hollywood movies suck right now. Has that always been the case or was there a time in the past where it was better?
Hollywood remaking old titles doesn't strike me as nostalgia. It strikes me as yet another way to avoid being creative. Sequels, remakes, etc. Frankly they do a terrible job at scratching any sort of nostalgic itch because they inevitably do not feel like the original.
Honestly, I think legacy IP movies that rely heavily on nostalgia are uniquely hollow regardless of which era it came from unless major changes are made to them. TMNT as a whole has changed a lot with the times because they have been continuing to try to reach out to the younger generations, so I would consider that franchise to be better than most. But then there are movies like Space Jam where the entire movie seems to be the producers saying “hey, remember this thing we own? Wasn’t that great?” And of course there’s Disney, constantly recycling their old movies wholesale. It’s especially ironic because the things that made those movies exciting was that they were unusual, different, and incredibly creative.
"Remember this thing? Wasn't it great?"
I love the South Park skit about 'member berries' where the whole town eats them and gets hooked on nostalgia for an episode. "Remember Star Wars and remember Chewbacca??" turn into "remember when there were no Mexicans?" and cue the downward spiral into this dream about yesterday being the golden age.
Frankly, I'll join you in calling it pandering. It's base-level business choices aimed at base-level feelings. "Remember the good old days when you were a kid?" Memories live on in this perfect, untouchable bubble for all of us, and the urge to bank off of better times is at best a chance to revise and update old works, and at worst the result of boardrooms, MBAs and a society chasing dollars over innovation.
It really depends on how it is being used. For the most part it does feel very calculated, basically nostalgia bait for commercial purposes. I think it really started to feel "wrong" for me was with Stranger Things. As these goes, not in any way the worst defender of this as it is generally very well done, but it was the first time I felt the producers trying to manipulate a certain target demographics with applying all the "right" nostalgic elements from the 80s. Like a machine learning output had given the script writers a list of elements to integrate into their story for maximum effect for a nostalgic hungry target demographic. That is how most of these things feel to me. If I am feeling nostalgic, I rather go back to the originals rather than new stuff drenched in references.
So the Duffers are 1984 boys, and it was fascinating to me to see a version of the 1980s that was sort of smoothed over/sensationalized just that little bit—because Seinfeld season 1 aired in 1990 and that was absolutely still the 1980s lol. Semi-unrelated (or very related depending on whether we're considering which target audiences media producers are targeting) it was also sort of eye-opening to realize that lower-class 90s = middle-class 80s.
Cool observation. Outside of Stranger Things and Seinfeld belonging to different genres, what Seinfeld does in those early episodes is make hallmarks of the decade functional rather than special. There's no close-ups of 80's memorabilia and objects or Pintrest-curated set decoration in Seinfeld. There was an early episode where Elaine, Jerry and George go to 'the movies' and you wouldn't even know where they were based on the scene backdrop -- 'the movies' was less of a cultural artifact, and more of a place where you shot a scene about Seinfeld's social issue of the week.
Again, they both come from different genres, production periods, film making conventions and most of all, time periods, but today, there's this hyper-fixation on setting and vibes that there wasn't then.
Adults weren't as steeped in fantasy and make-believe and didn't demand the flash and weird nostalgic details that we think are so important today.
Absolutely with you about going back to the originals, though I'm curious: is there a nostalgia example you can think of where the creators hit all the right notes and you were over the moon about it?
You mentioned using all of the "right" references from the 80s in a work to sell tickets and it made me think of how unrestrictedly I love Synthwave as a genre. Especially through The Midnight's work, the genre takes every last trope from 80s pop and makes art that's ar once super poppy and sugary but has this deep longing for time passed. Worth a listen if that's a point in time you'd like to revisit.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qIz-9CHVQUc&list=RDqIz-9CHVQUc&start_radio=1&pp=ygUSdGhlIG1pZG5pZ2h0IGphc29uoAcB
Not sure with "over the moon", but I actually think Clerks III hit some right notes in terms of both being nostalgic for the original, while doing something different with the Dante and Randal. Fitting as they are both stuck in time, but can't deny they have gotten 30 years older. The movie itself is hit and miss, and the first half is misplaced nostalgia bait, but the end still won me over.
Yeah, I really liked it too.
The fish out of water story can be so poignant - just look at Back to the Future.
Honestly it has been refreshing to see a shift to remakes/sequels/reboots from people who you can tell actually really love & care about the IP they're trying to make money off of, I think largely led by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie, Spider-Verse) and whoever convinced Disney to do that Rescue Rangers movie lol. Looking at, like, the 2009 Land of the Lost movie—which, ok, not a sacred cow of a property lol, but still—compared to say the new TMNT movie, there seems to have been a huge shift from cynical too-cool-for-school to genuine love and actual nostalgia for old stories and characters. It may also just be a response to how shitty everything else is getting lol, but it makes me happy so I'll take it.
My goodness I almost completely forgot about the Chip and Dale movie.
For what it’s worth, even though it wasn’t a good movie and nobody asked for it, I’m kind of glad it got made. A lack of creativity was not the problem for that movie at all.
Most 90s stuff being "retro" enough for nostalgia bait doesn't faze me at all. That makes logical sense to me in my late 30s. It's the stuff from my teens being retro that's throwing me for a loop. Particularly music...Emo, pop-punk, nu metal, etc. It doesn't feel old in the same way that a lot of other stuff does. Like I swear it was just last week that I was sitting in my friend's car in the school parking lot jamming out to System of a Down's Mezmerize album.
I don't particularly care for lazy reboots of 90s/00s properties, but I don't mind "period pieces" that use that era as a backdrop to tell a story. Those are fun because I can point to them and tell my kids about my childhood. Eventually they'll age out of caring (as I did with my own parents), but for now I enjoy it :)
I think we'll continue seeing period pieces for a while, writers will eventually have to figure out how to make stories work in a world where someone is always filming and whatever changes AI might eventually make to our everyday lives. I was really surprised that the latest Superman was set in the present and think they did a good job handling facial recognition. You just know in that world there's a whole swath of people doing nothing but trying to figure out who he is.
I realized it was happening when I started hearing songs from my childhood in tv commercials.
I understand it from a business perspective since we're in the prime earning years of our lives, but I don't care about what earns money for them. Thankfully I've managed to escape most of it by virtue of pop culture never really appealing to me, then and now.
When it comes to bands reuniting, I actually don't mind it that much since I never got to see them live and music is a big part of my life, but I definitely agree with you that being forward looking is interesting.
Finding a path away from pop culture has been way more gratifying in the long run too. Sure I don't get a lot of references, but I've found so much thoughtful art that I never would have otherwise.
I very much agree with you in terms of bands getting back together. There is something amazing about live performance that I feel that our digital world tends to hide away. As @nonethewiser had mentioned, “pandering” is a loaded term and so it might not apply here. But on the other hand, I’m not really hearing about any new music being made from these bands, so maybe it is close to something if not entirely accurate.
I'm usually the first to say I'd rather see a new work of art created instead of another sequel but when it comes to dated cultural references I do find myself enjoying them when it's done well. If it takes no risks and just picks the most popular and obvious things from a given era then it's going to sound pretty lame. If it brings up some niche things that only a particular fandom might recognize however then it can feel pretty good to be in on the joke.
Sometimes it can be completely over the top like Ready Player One (the book at least) and that can be fun once in awhile too but it would definitely get tiring seeing that done everywhere.
Nostalgia can be good, but in pure form it's never as good as the past itself.
I'm nostalgic for software and the internet of the 2000s, and people who grew up before me are probably nostalgic for software and the internet of the 1980s. But 2000s-style software and websites today aren't the same, because the culture surrounding them is different, and because we've been desensitized.
Instead of just trying to recreate the past, I think people should combine the best of the past, present, and experiment (for the future). The best "nostalgia" isn't pure nostalgia, it's integrating aspects from the past that have temporarily gone out of favor but are once again useful, and combining them with something completely new.
Personally, I hate it and I'll totally call it pandering. While I too would love to see new takes on old properties, I think that in most cases, it's not the artists making the choice to bring something back. Nostalgia is bankable business and a great way to soak up money from an audience longing for a time when everything felt fresh and new, but are either too busy, bored or tired from adult life to seek out *actual new experiences.
Magic and imagination is not just the purview of the young, but to me, nostalgia bait isn't exactly delivering on either. It's a sugary, updated repacking of what the culture remembers about a thing. Gone are the rough edges and expansions on ideas that are too previous to remove from the IP. What also bugs me is that young people are inundated with artifacts from their parents' childhoods - something that I found so nauseating growing up. My major point of contention was classic rock. It wouldn't die -- it was everywhere all the time, and while I enjoyed it, more contemporary, age appropriate music for my generation was way harder to find.
This was a stream of consciousness rant, but (hopefully) evidence that I love a good conversation about the subversive aspects of our culture, consumerism and what it means to age. That all said, I'm a sucker for...
Sega nostalgia: Blue sky arcade titles, their classic RPGs and everything surrounding the Dreamcast launch and demise. I was the ultimate superfan.
My old neighborhood: I'll always take a chance to slow drive through, peer in my school windows (at night - is that less creepy?)
Actively seeking out school pals for reunions. Getting the old crew together is amazing, I just wish people weren't so ambivalent about it.
Tech and internet yesterdays: I picked up a B4 ENG TV lens to use with my ZCam cinema camera because I love the versatility of a tool that's so mechanically amazing. The image is fair, but even today there's nothing quite like shooting from the shoulder with a servo lens. You feel like a goddamned hero.
It works on me sometimes, for good or bad. I realize I am susceptible to it, both in positive and negative ways.
I think at times it can be okay if consumed/approached carefully. Occasionally it can be used to make creative and good things. We can appreciate art/works/etc from the past and new works that reference those or are based on them. We can fondly look back at some good days we had in our youth, or whatnot, as long as all of this is done with restraint and not let it poison our approach to the future, but rather inform it. If we get to the point where we're solely running on the fumes of nostalgia and not able to appreciate anything current, I think that's dangerous
I do think there's a subversive nature to some nostalgia that is used to lure us into a sense of feeling like there's a "good 'ole days" to which we should return, which can be a very dangerous sentiment. It can sometimes lean towards a rose-tinted-glasses view of the past that actually romanticizes consumerism too (like vaporwave aesthetic's fondness of Pepsi or other brands). I don't necessarily want to veer this commentary far down the road of talking about fascism/politics/etc- but there are some parallels to "longing for the past" and I do think nostalgia is intertwined with some dangerous thinking
I also think that it can often be weaponized as a cash-grab by exploiting peoples' love of particular things without providing them something solid in return. It can also then water down existing properties with its infiltration.
I think there is a middle, and careful, way to approach all of it, in ways that can appreciate experiences, products, and artworks of the past while remaining self-aware of the bigger picture.
Ultimately, I find nostalgia not necessarily inherently bad, but exploited, complicated and not without its dangers.
There's some interesting discussion to be had here of a type that I haven't seen much of. I'm in my mid-late 30s and while I'm not sure I want to return to the 90s, I do find myself sometimes lamenting that I wasn't able to experience that period of time as a gainfully employed young adult. So there's acknowledgment that the past can't be brought back, but also regret that I was able to see it only through the eyes of a child of a relatively poor working class family. I wonder if such sentiment is as "dangerous" as a bonafide desire to go back to "the good 'ol days".
It's hard to register it being nostalgic when I've not stopped consuming the same media this whole time. It's only 20 some years old, I've never put it down.
Our family just started re-re-re-rewatching the Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003). I've never stopped watching it, just put it down for a few years at a time and it's still there.
Hobbit
Hobbit 1 I didn't dislike too much. Saw trailer for 2 and noped out. Watched the fan edit of 1-3, completely ignored Ring of Power. It's not nostalgic: it's been presenting tense ongoing for 25 years.Ditto Futurama (1999-) and SouthPark (1997-): they're still present tense for me. Others have concluded, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-2021) and Phase 1-3 of MCU (2008-2019), but that's very much "just last year" and "just the other year", respectively.
Even Farscape (1999-2004) and Community (2009-2015) were "just a while ago".
So with that worldviews, (bad) pandering remakes are "recently subpar garbage" without any nostalgic bonus point value because they're happening in the same time space as the originals.
That's not to say I don't have nostalgia, but we gonna go way back:
Doraemon: Nobita's New Dinosaur (2020) is a remake/rewrite of the 1980 manga/film. (It's technically before my time, but it's what I grew up reading.) The original companion ancient animal was a plesiosaur (futabasaurus), which was commonly lumped into dinosaurs in the 80s. So in the new film about feathered raptors, when a plesiosaur makes a dream-like cameo appearance, that hit me right in the nostalgic feels. Was that pandering? Probably not: Pii-suke wasn't overpowered, it wasn't selling tickets, nor toys, Pii-suke just appeared silently and left quietly.
As the Hobbit goes, I'm such a fan of the Rankin and Bass animated film. The Glenn Yarborough original soundtrack is pure magic.
Six seasons and a movie!
Seems fine. Like you said, there's always been "nostalgia bait" mainly aimed at a people of a certain age (middle-aged). Always has, always will be.
Not everything needs to be high brow genre defining. Nostalgia content is entertaining for the middle aged geezers, and that's all it needs to be to justify its existence.
It would be pandering with nostalgia, not *by nostalgia.
I don't think it is pandering either, which would be providing something a group wanted, though it may not be a good thing to do so. Buttering them up.
The generations go through a phase of life where they enjoy listening to and watching old things.
IMHO nothing wrong with that as long as people don't get stuck there.
Nostalgia is like candy. A little bit brightens your day for a few moments. More and it makes you sick.
I'm not a particularly nostalgic person, so it doesn't feel different than in the past. Although I prefer my childhood being the point of nostalgia vs before. I was born in the 80's, but I'm a 90's kid.
There's definitely plenty of good nostalgic pieces and plenty of "safe choices". Like Disney for example
Good
Christopher Robin
Lion King, Lilo & Stitch, Aladdin, etc.
But like I said, this isn't different than in the past. I'm sure there were good nostalgic pieces for 80's and 70's and a lot more just for profit. Ultimately it's just about being open to what the present has to offer. There's a lot more art nowadays. So sometimes good and great things are harder to find.
I don't enjoy generational language but I'm gonna do a lot of it for a minute while I ramble.
In principle I don't think there's anything wrong with drawing from and repeating a bit of the past. I'm always happy to check out an earnest effort - if someone loved something enough to try to do it themselves, I'm up for seeing their effort. I vastly prefer when folks go their own way, but also recognize that sometimes it's the act of trying to pay homage what leads to that path taking shape.
I don't think there's hard rules about stuff like this, but for millenials in particular I think we do have a problem with accepting/indulging nostalgia too much. The permanent record and algorithmic behaviors of the internet connected world means having to be more intentional with what we engage with, including intentionally ending our time with things when they've run their course. If we don't disengage, they don't stop. Things won't end "naturally", we broke the pattern our elders had developed of being pretty different decade by decade because we have the permanent record as a central feature. It's more than being able to record a tape or keep some cd's, what we enjoy literally keeps returning because we keep rewarding it even when the attempts only barely resemble what we liked. We have to end things ourselves, by ending our engagement. Our burden as millennials is of having to Old Yeller the things we love for the sake of the future, is kinda how I've come to see it.
Yes the last bit is arbitrary, there is no concrete way to determine when something should be over. But we should think about it, and put things away when we feel they're done. Stop indulging the new show, get the remake movie on sale months after release (or better, torrent it), break the consumption patterns so the companies will stop thinking our nostalgia matters. I don't mean a consumer boycott, I mean individuals deciding to disengage, trusting that if we adopt this kind of attitude of impermanence, eventually our nostalgia will stop being important. I want it to become unimportant, because I want to see what comes next. The elders had an advantage here, of their media and entertainment being unable to be kept forever until after their time. Yeah, tapes and stuff exist, but that's not the same as the online communities we got to have, and plenty of the boomers' stuff kept on too because it was there in time to be swept up. We can keep things going because folks remain silly enough to think being loud on the internet is enough to justify investing in production equipment. They're silly to think it but rational to do it, because we keep saying shit to ourselves like "well maybe it'll be better than the last one", or "its only X bucks why not", "maybe they'll get it right this time", and so on.
Too, while I'm on this train of thought - drop the idea that someone younger must experience what you experienced to get what you got. They don't. Folks after us can have their own stuff, with their own sensibility, theming, etc, and they should because their world isn't the one we grew up in. They reckon with things we did not have to reckon with. Our idols and heroes can't serve them quite the way they served us, our sensibility isn't from the same place. The folks coming after should be able to develop those things unburdened by a need to appeal to folks who aren't from where they're from. We can accelerate their coming to prominence by forsaking the relics. I'm not an accelerationist but I guess I might be in this one respect.
New things do take shape, in fairness to reality, but I do think we Millennials can take up trying to help that along in our own specific way. We know well how false our visions of the future were, derived as they were from a past imagined. In this time perhaps our role isn't to bring forth one of those visions, but rather pave the way toward having such vision again, by performing a burial ritual for our old totems. Maybe that's some nihilism creeping in, I'm not sure. There's more to it, I'm not done thinking about it. Gotta cut the post somewhere so I'll leave it at that.
Maybe they'll finally release another season of Haruhi. :-)
Every single sitcom revival I watched was complete shit. The X-Files revival was good -- some people complained, but every issue with it already existed in the original. It felt like real X-Files. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is cool. The Orville is good.
Nostalgia pandering can be good sometimes, but it is often bad. I guess that is my opinion.
Personally, I'm find with some pandering so long as it isn't the kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge 'in on it' reference bonanza or something entirely surface level, like an aesthetic style. It's fine if I know it's pandering, but I'd rather it be more straightforward. Make me a movie or game that completely apes late 90s noir themes, or a throwback to Skate. Just no meta narratives or anything like that.