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’80s Nostalgia Is Sooo Yesterday
I just saw this store display a few minutes ago. This is after seeing a limited (thankfully) release of Crystal Pepsi a couple of months back. I’m still bummed that the wave of ’80s nostalgia didn’t also bring back New Coke and Max Headroom. This has me wondering what other oddities and trinkets we’ll soon see re-appear.
Does this mean that grunge music will briefly slough its way back into regular play (and does that mean I’ll have to endure the second coming of Nirvana)? I know the hipsters already like their plaid work shirts, but they wear them extra tight, and ironically at that. Will we have Seinfeld and Friends reunion specials? Will we have retrospective investigative reports on all of the Clinton scandals? What products or toys do we want to see make a comeback?
This leads me to a topic we hashed out in the PIT some weeks ago: the (alleged) inability of late gen X-ers and the follow-on Millenials to grow up. I have a theory. When I was growing up, my Boomer parents could wax nostalgic about their favorite childhood shows but could not revisit or rewatch them, much less inflict them on us as such shows were available only in syndication — you’d have to stay up late and maybe catch them just before ABC or NBC signed off for the evening. We did not have cable TV at our house (though we did have a satellite dish, if you know how to operate it) so we largely missed the cable channels that were re-broadcasting the bulk of the stuff.
They could not show us their toys either — most of those had been played to death or pitched into the trash. The clothing had long since gone to charity. The music, at least, was saved on vinyl, but we moved to compact discs rather quickly so the records lingered on the shelf and gathered dust (and besides, the turntable was so finicky at our house that if you breathed wrong the needle would jump). So the childhood of my parents was locked away beyond the recesses of memory, leaving us free to live our own. Except our own didn’t end. The 80s saw the rise of the perpetually renewing toy/TV franchises. We still have Transformers, My Little Pony, and Star Wars. We still have Legos. We have the Barbie behemoth. Our own childhoods are endlessly reformed and replayed before our eyes on a daily basis.
The internet has accelerated this. Now we can spend a few minutes on Amazon and Ebay and rebuild the toy sets we had when we were 12. Even more, we can order a plethora of art statues, posters, reprints, “collector pieces”, vintage toy re-releases, and more. Some of us are known to have miniature shrines, entire shelves, maybe entire tabletops or rooms filled with the preserved and reinvigorated debris of our past. Our childhood is omnipresent, and we can re-watch it on Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, and other sources. Our kids can and do watch it with us. We never have to move on.
Of course this aids the rights-holders to whatever was made 20 or 30 years ago. Developing a new product or brand is hard work, but you can often make a quick buck by just reproducing what you already coined, just as people start to reminisce about it. Hence the Zima I found today (yes, I bought a 6-pack — I have a sweet tooth). It’s even in the original style bottles (the ones with the triangular flutes, as opposed to the cheaper round bottles they used at the end of its run over a decade ago). Our past lives on with its promises of a happier and care-free youth, and even with our balding heads and graying whiskers it is just a few mouse clicks away. So tonight I’ll crack open a Zima with my wife as we sit out on the deck, and we’ll remember the first time we, newly engaged, drank them at that off-campus apartment I had in college, and we’ll remember what it was like to look forward to an unknown future. Sometimes nostalgia is sweet.
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You plan on ACTUALLY drinking Zima. I was hoping that God awful drink would have gone the way of dodo, but alas it is rearing it’s ugly head.
It isn’t just 80’s nostalgia, there was plenty of 50’s and 60’s nostalgia when I was a kid. They used to play reruns of old TV shows on Nick at Night in the 80’s. Then there is the oldies station where I was forced to listen to Cousin Brucie spin the hits. So I was subjected to my parents nostalgia as well.
It’s not the 80s without Bartles & Jaymes.
Nick at Night was a later addition, I think it started in the early 90s.
And I do (or did) like Zima when it came out, but at the time I didn’t like beer or whiskey or coffee.
Adam Carolla had an interesting riff on this at one time. He said that in your youth you like things that are “yummy”, and you’d never describe good scotch with a quality cigar as “yummy”. Nor would you describe black coffee that way. So in your youth you go for the fruity drinks, you play around with clove cigarettes, and you get the overly complicated frappicinos and sugary drinks. But you do eventually put those things aside in favor of the complicated and subtle, the things that take time and experience to appreciate (and that don’t dose you with 1000 calories of sugar).
Also, the box does say “Limited Edition” – so it’s just a one-off, like Crystal Pepsi.
A weird thought struck me the other day about New Coke.
What if the whole reason that thing happened was so Coke could successfully switch from cane sugar to High fructose corn syrup as the sweetener in their drinks without anybody noticing? In fact, when “classic Coke” came back people were just so happy and relieved that they didn’t notice or care that it tasted ever-so-slightly different.
Plenty of people I know think that Coke just tasted better when they were growing up, and having had Cane sugar Coke in foreign countries I can report that it is different.
Food for thought?
I think back in the day Crystal Pepsi was trying to complete with Sprite and 7 UP. It didn’t work.
I’ve often thought that too.
Coke sales after the switch back from “New Coke” were massively higher than they were before New Coke. The whole thing, if it was just a charade, has to be ranked as one of the most brilliant marketing ploys of the 20th century.
And you can find cane-sugar coke for sale in lots of places like Costco, or in groceries in the Mexican food aisles. Still in bottles too.
I observe that they haven’t brought back the nemesis to Bud Bundy’s libido: The Zima Dude.
Speaking of which, when’s the Swedish Bikini Team coming back?
They were laughing all the way to the bank.
That seems like a fairly recent innovation if I’m not mistaken. Worth noting is that it isn’t necessarily “better,” but it is “different.”
We’ve been occasionally buying cases of the stuff around here for at least a decade now, maybe more.
Press conference:
“Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we’re not that dumb and we’re not that smart.”
We thank you for your support.
What if? I thought that had been generally understood for 25 years or so.
The whole thing worked out very well for Coke though. Up until New Coke, Pepsi had been steadily gaining market share on coke for years and was (IIRC) approaching parity.
They’ve been a distant second ever since.
I can do both.
You’re still young enough to get away with it. I can’t.
IMO it’s not so much things that are “yummy” it’s never trying anything outside of that area. It’s the flavor equivalent of the safe space.
Maybe they’ll bring back “Dry” Beer, although I think that was more of a ’90’s phenomenon.
At your service:
Maybe I should add these:
That’s why I doubt it was planned that way. I can buy that there are individuals clever enough to think this up and struggling companies that would be willing to take the risk. I don’t buy that an entire executive team in a company like Coca-Cola could back it. Collectively, they’d outsmart themselves at some point in the planning, and declining sales wouldn’t be motivation enough to take the risk. There are reasons why innovation occurs at small and struggling companies. When companies like Coke want market share they don’t innovate with their flagship products, they buy their competitors.
My guess is “the” Swedish Bikini Team won’t look as good in those bikinis today.
Remember when diversity meant having a brunette on your bikini team?
They haven’t come out with 90’s nostalgia sitcoms yet (Wonder Years 60’s, That 70’s show, and The Goldbergs for the 80’s, I am not sure if that show about the Korean family that takes place in the 90’s counts), so we know that we are not yet at peak 90’s nostalgia.
The way things are headed in Sweden these days, we’re more likely to get a reboot as the Swedish Burquini Team. I can’t see them selling as much beer though.
I’d never heard of Zima but I did see for sale recently.
I can’t speak for other cartoons, but at least My Little Pony is actually good this time around.
But I suspect that there is something to what you suggest.
I have never heard of Zima. Honest.
I did read that the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever was up for auction the other day and fetched 1.2 million. I wept that I could not afford it, since it would set off my white suit very well. I know it’s not ’80s, but imagine your very own disco inferno in your very own rec room. Timeless.
You know I have begun watching entire NFL games from the 80s and early 90s on YouTube. It does rekindle the old feelings I had when I was a kid.
Oh and I couldn’t resist:
I couldn’t find the SNL parody commercial of this. Warning if you do find it, it’s pretty gross.
For a while there if someone asked me to spell my name I would say, “Like in Bartles & James but without the s.”