The Beauty of Nostalgia

Television has come a long way in just a few short decades. I couldn't help but notice the difference between the fight choreography on last night's Alias and on the episodes of Knight Rider I've been watching. Things seem a lot more REAL now, but I wonder if I'll look back on today's shows and scoff at things like a bullet being aimed in such a way as to miss vital organs, or someone jumping several stories from a fire escape into a dumpster, getting up, and running down an alley. I find myself chuckling at many things on Knight Rider, like when Hasselhoff walks up to an old man sitting at a picnic table because K.I.T.T.'s scans reveal him to be heavily armed. With the trademark Michael Knight swagger, he saunters up and says, “Excuse me, could I talk to ya for a second?” Still seated, the man suddenly turns and delivers a rabbit punch from less than a foot away and at a bad angle, that still manages to fell a man half his age and twice his height. As the stocky assailant trundles off, Michael, on one knee, gasps into his wristwatch communicator and asks his sentient car to head the guy off. I laughed at the bit, but I loved it.

Today in a supermarket, father-to-be(again) Rey confided in a hushed whisper that he realizes the Star Wars® movies are bad, but he has to defend them. He's a big fan as am I, but we realize that the acting won't win anyone any awards. There's a reason why one man alone from the original trilogy went on to a successful career, but there's also a reason why Mark Hamill starring in a film is a selling point for me.

Last night I ordered the first season of Gargoyles on DVD. I hope it's as good as I remembered it to be. It was an interesting experience when I started watching The Transformers on DVD after not having seen anything other than The Movie in about 15-20 years. I loved the show when I was a kid and thought it was really heavy and serious. Watching it as an adult I still love it, but it's not because of deep dialogue and intricate plots. It's not even for the animation, which has a lot more characters colored wrong or important things disappearing like mouths than I recall. It's mostly because I remember the EXPERIENCE of watching it, of what the characters meant to me as a boy. If I saw it for the first time today, I'd probably write it off as childish garbage like the Robots in Disguise series. The comics, film, and Beast Wars series all treated the mythos with such reverence and importance, that I forgot what the original cartoon was like. I find it hard to believe that, at the age of 12 or so, I once argued with an older cousin that The Transformers: The Movie was superior to anything by Disney; what was I thinking?!

The people we are remember things fondly that the people we once were loved. We're NOT those people anymore, but the beauty of nostalgia is that it allows us to appreciate those things for what they provided our former selves and recapture those old emotions, even if time and aging now allow us to see the flaws. The shows, movies, and cartoons we watched shaped who we would become as much as anything else, so it's good to embrace them and smile, and look back every once in a while.

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On a related note, I watched Dickie Roberts; Former Child Star which surprised me by being smarter and cuter than I would expect from a stupid comedy. Though it wasn't great and they could have done more with it, and there was one element of the resolution that didn't sit well with me, it still had its moments. There was an IMPRESSIVE amount of cameos by real former child stars that had me rolling(especially Emmanuel Lewis.) Name someone at random from any sitcom you've ever watched, and there's a strong chance they show up, if not in the film then in the musical montage during the end credits. I found an (unfortunately)edited version of the video on IFilm so I can share it here. Don't expect the vocal quality of We Are the World, but watch for the proportionate star quality and a chance to see a lot of old friends again.