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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.
Published in General
OK, so I was just poking around YouTube looking at some videos and this came up in the list of those recommended for me:
Coincidence or does YouTube know what I’m reading on Ricochet??
What, the clear gravy commercial? I thought that one was hilarious.
Isn’t bad enough that Roseanne is coming back on the air?
Since I don’t watch TV I can pretend it’s not happening.
The page comes up but the video doesn’t play, for me anyway.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/crystal-gravy/n10459?snl=1
Zima was popular on our campus (with women), probably 1993 or ’94. Therefore, we bought and stocked it in our mini-fridge (our beer went in the cooler, or vice versa, I really don’t remember). As far as toys go, I have no idea what you’re talking about…
How can we become nostalgic, and be retrospective, when the scandals never went away?
I don’t know. Just the idea of it makes me want to get hammered – and I’m a teetotaler.
I hope so. God be thanked for grunge music.
My kids (17 and 15) listen to music from many eras. With their music coming from XM radio, Spotify, my old record collection (for example my daughter is now into the Psychedelic Furs after finding an LP from the 80s and playing it the other day) regular radio, itunes playlist and youtube. They don’t have a concept of old or new music like we did. They can access it all.
BTW the new coke was developed because Pepsi was winning the taste tests. Pepsi was sweeter, which was good for the first sip or two. But, when you drank a whole can, Coke was preferred. That is why they made the change. Article from Slate.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/pepsi_paradox_why_people_prefer_coke_even_though_pepsi_wins_in_taste_tests.html
Mass culture ended around 1997. It’s been narrowcasting and remix culture ever since. If there’s ever nostalgia for the Oughts, no one will know what characterizes the decade.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Star Wars is current again, but it’s good. The Transformers movies are stroke-inducing catastrophes, but as a sign of our ability to conjure extraordinary excess from the thinnest of material, they’re a cultural historian’s dream. Bad retreads like The X-Files get scorned; affectionate and imaginative reboots (like the aforementioned My Little Pony) are rewarded. I like the fact that the media of my childhood is available again; it was locked away for decades. Now we can study it and learn more about the era.
The appetite for more and more and MOAR means we’re freed from the old Three Channels of Yore, and much of the new TV competes with other channels by providing something better. Smarter. Different. It’s not 100 channels of Baywatch. Twenty-five years ago, Twin Peaks was shaped by network pressure; now the media environment has changed so much a network tosses the keys to an experimental filmmaker and lets him drive for 18 hours, wherever he wants to go. (And it’s fantastic.)
The problem is the number of people who experience existence through intermediary devices, but that’s another post. And also the whole future of the culture, alas.
Nick at Night was a later addition, I think it started in the early 90s.
Funny you said that because I thought so too, but looked it up: 1985.
You might both be thinking of TV Land, created as a result of the success of Nick at Night.
Fresh Off the Boat? It’s a Taiwanese family. Why wouldn’t it count? It trades pretty heavily in 90s nostalgia for jokes.
They are still being held in a locked room in @mikelaroche‘s basement.
I’d guess they are all Brunettes, but one does not bleach her hair.
Edited because I have not had enough coffee for this to make sense the first time around.
I guess the fact that I regard that as a very good year doesn’t merely have to do with the fact that I graduated from High School, then? Coincidentally, that’s also the year South Park emerged, so put that in your pipe and smoke it while you contemplate the fact that it’s still on the air.
Is that only because the Mulder/Scully thing is played out (Duchovny’s head looks like an overripe melon and Gillian Anderson is looking a little bit worn even though I was in love with her in 1995) or is it because the X-Files worked because what Mulder and Scully was doing was secret, and ostensibly hidden from the public. It was the best show on television for 5-6 years (competing against ER, really) while also being the most transgressive television of its day. That realm has been totally overwhelmed by what’s going on on your average scripted show on a random cable channel now, so its services are sort of superfluous given that it’s tied to being on the Fox broadcast network.
Maybe if they put it on FX in the Fargo or Americans time slot it could become genuinely scary or gory… Hmmm…
The only issue that I have with this is that any period piece is hilariously ham-handed in its delivery of PC tropes to modern audiences. Everybody is a closeted gay or a repressed minority (see Manhattan for this problem) and the need that they have to beat us over the head with this distracts from what might otherwise be good story-telling.
Actually, it rarely is to make a quick buck. In order to maintain ownership of the brand (trademarks), they must make at least some ongoing sales.
Wow – forgot about them. Zima was more of the 90’s anyway. I remember people drinking it in college (mid-90’s). The golden age of alco-pop.
My take is that it was a semi-charade.
Pepsi tasted different from Coke. The consensus is it was sweeter. Pepsi was marketing “The Pepsi Challenge” where Pepsi beat Coke. As I get to below, my theory is that was because non-cola-drinkers liked Pepsi.
My theory is further that someone at The Coca-Cola Company came up with the reasonable idea to introduce a second cola that was sweeter than Pepsi in order to bracket Pepsi with Coke and the second cola.
Then someone else came up with the plan to make the second cola temporarily replace Coke. There were good reasons to do so. First, it created buzz and interest. If they just introduced the second cola they might get few takers. By making it a replacement, everybody would try it and potentially get used to it. Then they could bring back Coca-Cola Classic and by bracketing Pepsi’s taste crush Pepsi. Second was that by making it a replacement, they could kill The Pepsi Challenge. If the second cola was announced under another name and sold alongside the existing Coke, Pepsi could continue the challenge against the existing Coke.
Where they failed was in overestimating the number of people who would stick with the second cola as Coke when Coca-Cola Classic was brought back. This gets back to the first part of my theory that the sweeter taste was liked by people who did not drink cola but still participated in tests or who simply drank low volumes. Thus, the new Coke died off.
You are entitled to your opinion on that, but it is tainted with JJ Abrams.
JJ Abrams didn’t get within a mile of Rogue One.
Maybe so, but Star Wars is something I put aside a long time ago.
There was the Power Ranger movies, so 90s nostalgia has made the big time. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a grunge revival, though I don’t look forward to it. Speaking of music I’ve been aware of bands reaching back to that decade for awhile now. For some years there’s been bands meticulously recreating Swedish death metal of the early 90s. Sure, this goes back to the early 00s with bands like Bloodbath and Repugnant, but recently the imitation has dialed up, with bands mimicking the style right down to the logos, cover art and chainsaw guitar tone courtesy of the Boss HM-2 distortion pedal.
I’d think revisiting some of the things you loved as a child would be enough to wipe away a lot of nostalgia, but considering people still love Transformers and Ninja Turtles while being able to actually watch them, your theory seems plausible.
New Coke never went away. It lives on and even thrives. It has always been with us, for years and years. It’s still with us today. In fact, you may be drinking a New Coke right this second as you read this. You simply know it as…
In brief: When Coca-Cola created a diet soda in the early 1980s, they didn’t think a diet version of their original formula would be successful, so they created a different formula for Diet Coke. Diet Coke was – and still is – such a huge success that they thought their regular product would be more successful if they took the lighter, sweeter formula created for Diet Coke, added sugar, and sold it as regular Coca-Cola.
The introduction of Coke Zero – the diet soda made with the original Coca-Cola formula – confirmed that there was more difference between Diet Coke and Coca-Cola than just calories; Coke Zero and Diet Coke taste very different. (In fact, the introduction of Coke Zero did little to eat into Diet Coke’s sales.) Diet Coke was New Coke before New Coke existed, and it is still around long after New Coke has gone. And given the extraordinary sales success of Diet Coke both in America and around the world, I’m disinclined to think the New Coke incident was a fix-up by Coca-Cola.
Going to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills here in L.A., it’s been clear that the 1990s have been the latest wave of inspiration for a few seasons now. I think it all got a real kickstart when Hedi Slimane took a knife to the belly of
YvesSaint Laurent, and now all the stores are selling $500 versions of the shoes girls wore when I was in high school.Versace
Prada
Gucci
It’s because Gillian Anderson was bored and spoke in her Madonna faux-English accent and didn’t seem to want to bring Scully back. The scripts were bad; Chris Carter still doesn’t know what to do with the big arc, and had the gall to end it on a cliffhanger.
All of this is granted. The premise Carter set up couldn’t conceivably be paid off in a remotely credible fashion – but add to that the fact that eliciting an emotional reaction from Duchovny is basically impossible and Gillian has grown tired of the whole enterprise.
I guess I’m shooting at a different thing in general. The principals of the show are simply beyond the point of viability given what their characters have been through. Their lives have been thoroughly explored. Bill Davis has more lives as CGB Spender than a passel of cats. We’ve seen enough of that. It crosses over into soap opera territory if we know too much about them.
There remain plenty of good stories to be told through this medium, but it requires shifting to a newer generation and (likely) the very thing you were talking about: narrowcasting.
That means you can still have Mulder and Scully, but they almost have to show up as the elder statesmen/guides or in a role similar to the Lone Gunmen in order to maintain a veneer of mystery.
A noteworthy difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke is sweetener. In the US, Diet Coke has only aspartame. That makes it taste like diet soda. Of the traditional artificial sweeteners in the US, saccharine had a brutal taste. Aspartame was a significant improvement, but still had problems.
Zero has an aspartame-acesulfame potassium mixture. This greatly reduces the diet sweetener taste. Acesulfame potassium has a unique effect of not being a good sweetener alone, but allowing a dramatic reduction in the amount of another sweetener when used in a mixture
They have tried to push a non-aspartame version of Diet Coke having a sucralose-acesulfame potassium mixture.
Foreign markets have some other combinations due to availability of other sweetners.
Seagram’s and Battles & Jaymes had the sales, but California Cooler had the commercials.