I have a confession. I have never watched a single episode of Star Trek. So I never watched the 2009 reboot and I never got into Star Trek Discovery. As someone who loves sci-fi, my friends tell me this is a travesty and I need to watch Star Trek because it is such a classic. And my only line of defence is always that I never have enough time, thanks to the golden age of media.
As different generations of kids grow up into adults who create and produce and market for media, it is natural to see the emergence of nostalgia within that media, what Lindsay Ellis called (or…referenced?) as the 30 year cycle. But. The 30 year cycle of nostalgia talks more about nostalgic themes and trends being portrayed and interpreted in new era-appropriate stories. Which is something that at least I stopped seeing after…Stranger Things. When Stranger Things came out, media was rife with 80s themes and closets were full of 80s trends. And while we’re inching closer and closer to low rise jeans rearing its ugly head again (mush to my dread), 90s nostalgia in media has only been limited to reboots. And most of them…Disney.
Don’t get me wrong, I was one of the first to squeal with joy when I heard they were rebooting Lizzie McGuire. But with all these reboots, from the debated Lion King to Home Alone to The Princess Diaries (??) I feel like it’s beginning to feel like a bit..much. Which is why I wanted to talk about the perils of nostalgia and the price we have to pay as said consumers of it.
My first concern, very selfishly, is that of time. With the resurgence of the trends of a bygone era, it falls to us (the nerds who must know it all) to know all of the references and know all of the references within the references. With the 80s, it wasn’t too bad. Mainstream media then still has a lot of cult appeal and everyone knew Star Wars, even if they hadn’t seen it. Even so, it’s not easy plodding through decades of classics just to seem cool and with the in-crowd of today. Related to this, it also concerns me as to who these reboots target. Surely they’re meant for the younguns to get into the same things their parents were into.
But my question is, why reboot an old story when you could write a new one? The kids who would cherish the experience of a reboot as nostalgic have all but grown up and moved on to new things and ideas. And the audiences the new stories are targeted at could never understand the memories and the nostalgia that caused these shows to be rebooted in the first place. They could go back, and watch the old episodes of Lizzie McGuire, and they might enjoy the plots but they’d never understand not living without fast internet or even living without a phone. Some of the things in them will always be things of the past, to be reminisced about only by those from that time.
That’s not to take away from re-watching shows we watched when we were kids. We all enjoy re-watching old movies and TV and marvelling at how terrible it is but that doesn’t take away from its charm. Some of the themes might nit hold up as well as we thought they did as kids but there’s something about feeling like yyou’re 10 again, sitting on your parents’ bed with a bowl of cereal and watching Kim Possible (which holds up really well btw). But we still haven’t answered why reboots keep cropping up. Mostly, it’s because millennials are some of the most passionate fans of television and film, the campaign to bring back Vernoica Mars is proof of that. And we are also a very nostalgic bunch, having grown up at the cusp of the technological revolution, our lives went from kind of simple to hyper connected to everything in the blink of an eye. Which means the allure of telling a story with an already committed audience is far greater than building a new fanbase.
And that makes me sad. While I love my old shows, and will probably be one of the first people to watch the rebooted Lizzie McGuire, I will still feel like I..well if not me, the younguns are being cheated. Because we deserve to be told new stories and discover new ideas, not be sold the same thing in shiny new packages. Someday, deciding to rehash an old story (not as well if most of this years’ reboots are proof) will be the death of creativity. But that’s just me, the pessimist.
Dreamer of improbable dreams 