An Essay on Nostalgia

By Sylvia L.

I will admit, I do fall into the nostalgia trap from time to time. I mean, I just bought a controller that’s mimicking a Sega Saturn controller from the 1990s. But my sense of nostalgia is like... Whenever I watch old commercials or listen to them as background noise, usually while stoned, I often find myself going “Haha, wow! This is dogshit!”

One example is when I was listening in on a recording of commercials-- Wait, hold on. Let’s just unpack the fact that I even watch old commercials. Commercials, and advertising in general, is an utter nuisance. Ads are annoying and shitty now, and they were 10, 20, 30 plus years ago too. Hell, I distinctly remember recording Dragon Ball Z off of Kids’ WB as a kid, part of a rather short-lived collab with Cartoon Network’s “Toonami” in 2001, and feeling so smart when I realized I could stop the recording on the VCR whenever commercials came on, so the tape was just ALL ACTION, with none of those pesky ads taking up precious tape time. There’s only 6 hours in SLP mode, after all, and tapes cost money.

So why the hell am I watching them on purpose now?

Well, mostly, it’s because it feels nice and warm to witness things from my childhood. I mean, that’s what nostalgia is! Kind of. I’m pretty sure actual nostalgia is like, what ancient warriors felt when they were injured and traumatized in a land far far away from their home, wishing they could just go back to their more peaceful earlier years. So, yeah, pretty much exactly what I feel when I see a commercial for the Game Boy Advance.

The funny thing is, in the mid-2000s, I started to fall into the nostalgia trap without an ounce of nuance. Man, the Dreamcast? The Super Nintendo? N64 games?! Sitting on the floor, eating snacks, playing games, watching cartoons, having to thunk the cartridge into the console… Those were the days! ...Weren’t they?

Well, yeah, I guess. The thing is that I can do all that stuff right now, if I wanted. Hell, I could do all this stuff in the mid-2000s, too, when I first started feeling these pangs of nostalgia. I wasn’t even an adult yet! Hell, I was barely a teenager! But there was just… something missing.

I often looked at eBay listings for old consoles, wishing desperately to get a Sega CD or a Sega Saturn. I even owned a Genesis and NES that I got at a pawn shop, right before the owners realized that they could get way more for stuff on eBay, ironically enough. I had a bunch of NES games, but sadly good Genesis games were few and far between, unless you wanted a copy of literally any sports game made for the system, which you don’t, since people rarely want to play a 20-year-old sports game.

I liked the collecting more than anything. Sometimes I would pop in my copy of Dragon Warrior or Mega Man 3 into my toploader NES with the dog-bone controllers, and play it for a few minutes. Eventually, I would bristle at the gameplay, and turn it off, or at least change games. At least it all looked nice on the shelf. Funnily enough, a lot of the games I had wouldn’t catch a high price with an actual collector, since they were all loose cartridges, and the owners of that pawn shop smoked inside, so anything from there permanently smelled like burning wires. But hey, the games were cheap.

I digress. I was talking about how much I didn’t like the very games I was collecting. While there were some great titles in the NES’s library for sure, like Super Mario Bros. 3 or River City Ransom, most of the games on the NES just… aren’t very fun to me. And it’s because, and don’t judge me too harshly for saying this, but like 85% of games from the 1980s suck ass.

I know, I know! How dare you say that about the golden era of North American video games, you say. Well, hypothetical reader, don’t be offended. Because like 85% of the games from my childhood also suck ass. My childhood was spent playing games like the Need for Speed series, or GTA, or even downright shit like Go!Go! Hypergrind or whatever horrid third-person Mortal Kombat action game we had for PS2. I wasn’t exactly playing meaningful, artistic, masterpieces of game or anything. I still haven’t played a lot of well-regarded games that released during my childhood. Because I was a dumb kid! And that’s a key point for a lot of people’s nostalgia, I think: We were dumb as shit back then.

One set of commercials that sticks out to me in the various videos I watch is a string of ads for Apple Jacks from… I don’t fucking know, like 2003 or 2004. The “story” of the ads is that the manufacturer decided to make Apple Jacks “look and taste like real apples!” instead of what it normally looks and tastes like: a bunch of red and green Cheerios that taste like pure sugar, with a vague cinnamon aftertaste.

So, kids find this out and are furious! But the people at the cereal company say that kids wanted that! But they didn’t! Fucking adults, always ruining everything! That’s a key part of many ads for children’s stuff: “Adults suck and will ruin everything you love, and that’s why they’re not allowed to get Wendy’s Kids Meals.” But this is all so funny to me now, because 1. I’m an adult now… well, most of the time. And 2. All of this is just very transparently weird marketing bullshit. The cereal company itself is putting out ads, with the help of a marketing department and probably some ad agency, where the gist is “Hey kids! We’re ruining your cereal! Tell us to stop!”

By the way, spoilers: The mastermind behind all of this was Ms. Habeas, the prim proper lawyer-type that works at the Apple Jacks factory… for some reason. I only know this because one of the tape uploads features ads from the very end of the campaign, where she is successfully sussed out as the culprit, and she... straight up gets arrested, I think? Imagine going to federal prison for trying to fuck with a sugary children’s cereal.

I can’t imagine she was written as the culprit from the get-go. I assume that the poll was either rigged for the campaign, because who cares, or that anyone that won the popular vote of “whodunit” would have been the one that did it, although an ad campaign for sugary cereal delving into the topic of locking someone up for a crime they didn’t commit sounds kind of awesome. What was I talking about again?

Oh right. Old commercials. While a part of me does kind of miss being able to see ads for crappy plastic toys and awful snacks that try way too hard to relate to the viewer every Saturday and weekday afternoon, and I do feel bad for kids these days not really having a proper place to watch cartoons and shows anymore, since I feel like YouTube shit isn’t cutting it. There’s one throughline with all of these commercials: They all reveal just how fucking terrible the era they’re in is.

For example, commercials from around 1998/1999 feature the movie Mulan a lot, since it was new. Ads for the movie itself, toys, Happy Meal tie ins, and like. Wow! Disney was really really racist with marketing this movie! If I remember correctly, one Mulan-themed doll commercial uses the stereotypical “Chinese riff” as part of its jingle.

I can’t comment on the movie itself, because the only time I ever saw it was part of a school assembly, so it was on a 28-inch CRT put in the front of the gym while we all sat on the hard floor. But god, the ads relating to this movie seem really poorly aged to me. Also, one of the commercials for the movie itself has brief 60 hertz black-to-white flashing in it, because a ton of old commercials and TV stuff just doesn’t care about epileptic people at all, and then a lot of US media made fun of Japan for letting that one Pokemon episode air, like we’re any better.

And sometimes they’re just straight up propaganda. Don’t even get me started on GI Joe commercials, I think we all know how transparent that shit is. And it’s always funny to me whenever the video I’m listening to while stoned and playing a video game starts warning me about smoking weed and becoming a useless dreg of society. But one upload of a block of commercials from a tape recorded in 1998 has a PSA with, of all people, Barbara Bush blaming pollution, deforestation, and lack of trees and greenery on “urban sprawl,” and I can just tell what she actually means by that from the disgust in her voice while saying that. I know you don’t actually care about nature, you monster. Rot in hell.

Sorry, got carried away. I guess my point is, I feel at a weird place with my enjoyment of old media. Moving away from the topic of old TV commercials, recently I clicked on a video someone took of a mall circa 1996. I found it very interesting, I grew up in a period where the mall was still a place that was worth a shit, and I remember the two I went to often as a child fondly, which is a pathetic thing to say. So I was interested. I like seeing pictures and footage of old malls. I’m a total sucker for a place that’s themed, and I’m a bit of a maximalist, so 90’s-era malls are fun to look at for me. But the top rated comment on that video started with “If only we knew we were living in the last of the best times.”

I looked at that comment and thought “Wow, thank god I’m not that guy.” Because I personally think that’s a really sad, dismal look on the world. Hey, I miss malls too, but I mainly miss the sense that it was a big area that everyone could congregate at, not the fact that it was a giant building packed with stores full of expensive, mostly useless, garbage. Looking at you, Spencer’s. And even then, that latter thing is what malls really were at their core. Even the idea that malls were public communal spaces where you could congregate is pretty much rose-tinted nostalgia-bait. There’s a reason “mall cops” exist, after all.

I dunno where I was going with all of this, to be honest with you. I originally was going to post about that YouTube comment on Cohost after reading someone else talk about how nostalgia has a weird fascist stranglehold on a lot of people in modern times, but then decided to spin it into all this. Also, I was supposed to wash some clothes and am procrastinating on that. But, I guess the main thing I wanted to say is, our childhoods all sucked, regardless of era. And if you look back on them fondly, it’s probably just because you were a kid back then, and being a kid made most things awesome.

Remember what I said about 85% of games from the 1980s sucking, and then I said the same went for games from my childhood? I feel that applies to everything else from our childhoods. The thing about nostalgia is that it makes you crave an era that never existed. Everything was perfect and peak in our childhood. But in reality, much like the videogames; a large, large part of eras gone by was bad. Really bad. And sometimes the things that we remember were good were merely okay, or maybe even only good in the eyes of its target audience: children.

All of this has been said before by someone much better at wording it, but oh well. Don’t get too stuck in the past, because you’re only half-remembering a lot of that stuff anyway. There’s new and exciting things to see, if you just turn around. Now I gotta go wash those clothes. It’s been like an hour. Uh-oh.