The Point of No Return.

”I've passed the point of no return. You know what that is? That's the point in a journey where it's harder to go back to the beginning than to continue on to the end.”—Michael Douglas, Falling Down (1993)

Life offers all kinds of moments we can't return to, irreversible changes that are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but all part of growth. Over the weekend, I happened to see a commercial heralding ”Transformers: Cybertron”, weekday afternoons at 4:30. The last time I watched a Transformers cartoon in that time slot was over twenty years ago, when a ten-year-old MCF raced home from school with one thing on his mind: robots. Before I realized what I was doing, the VCR remote was in my hand and I'd programmed Monday through Friday. Last night, during commercials between ”How I Met Your Mother” and ”Prison Break”, I discovered that I can't go back. It's a sobering thing, but sober is often good.

It was bad. It blended animé with computer generated models, and the seams were painfully visible. The badly dubbed voices were irritating, even though some of the voice actors I'd enjoyed on other series. I would say perhaps ten minutes of the episode constituted actual plot, while the rest were elaborate sequences demonstrating the robots turning in to vehicles. They each announced their name, and changed one at a time while electric guitars blazed and a rotating glowing grid in the background threatened to give me seizures. Not only was the cel animation of the original series easier on the eyes, the transforming was fast, leaving more time to tell an actual story. This was the most blatant toy commercial I've ever had the misfortune to fast forward through. By the time a flying firetruck soared through the forest, I was already furiously deleting it from my program. I don't know what I was thinking.

Nostalgia has value. It grounds us, and common experiences unite us. Nostalgia tends to color the past in a different light, and we sometimes think things were better than they actually were. Tastes also change as we mature, but that too is a good thing. It's good to look back sometimes, realize we're not the person we once were, and gain perspective into who we are, and who we will be. I've come too far, further than I realized, and I can't go back. It's scary, but moving one step at a time is enough to take anyone forward.

That being said, one is compelled to question:

11 years of ER

Rocky VI

Joey

Police Academy: Mission to Moscow

Gung Ho the series.

Star Trek(this will definitely get me in trouble with some readers)

Susan Lucci(she's been playing the same role for 35 years)

The Golden Palace

Three's a Crowd

Kato Kaelin

Feel free to continue the list in the comments....