[Insert Leyla talking about a bunch of 80s cartoons here]
Me: ....you are not nostalgic about 80s cartoons. You were two.
Okay. Okay. That's kind of a dick thing to say, and I did overlook the part where she admitted most of them were shitty and I meant to put it more jokingly... anyway. Yeah. I am a dick and sorry about that, but I still think I have a legitimate point to make here.
There's a difference between legitimately remembering the mundane things you did as a child, like what shows you watched and whether or not they were good, and researching them later in life and then forming an opinion on it. Thanks to the monstrosity that is the "I Love the [Insert decade here]" series on VH1, my generation (people born in the late 80s) has decided that they are the authority on all things pop culture that happened when we were two or three years old. There's science that says "No" to being an authority on that subject by "memory" like so many of us love to claim. Until you're at least three or four at the very least you're brain is too busy learning things like motor skills and the language that all the people around you are spewing to vividly store things in your long term memory like mundane details about what crappy TV show our parents sat us in front of to make us shut up.
But all of a sudden you sit some celebrity in front of a camera who's younger than I am talking about this stuff and you get an entire generation of "Nostalga-ists". Just because you sit someone like Hillary Duff in front of the camera and have her say, "That whole Iran-Contra thing that happened when I was like six months old was crazy as hell. People were like totally freaking out!" Doesn't mean you're an authority on the subject by memory. That's not to say you can't do later research on it and form an opinion or in the case of TV see it in syndication and then form an opinion, but the trendy attitude that it represents our childhood is absolutely silly. The first TV shows I can vividly draw from my own long term memory are Animaniacs, X-Men, Spider Man, and Mega Man. All of those are from about 1993 at the earliest. I was a solid seven or eight years old. I had a long term memory that could store the fact that I would come home from school and those shows were on FOX from 3 PM till 5 PM. That is nostalgia.
But to defend Leyla's comments from earlier, there is also reinforced memory that can be indoctrinated into us by the people around us. For example, I only remember specifics about Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure because the show returned to syndication on Adult Swim a few years back and I continued to watch the movie until I was seven or eight and then recently watched it again a few years ago. But I have an understanding that I have a "memory" of those things because my parents and older sisters would constantly tell people while I was growing up about how much I loved Pee-Wee Herman when I was two or three years old because it's funny to tell your friends about how your son loved the show with the guy who later got caught jerking off in a porno theater. After hearing that I liked those things so many times I sort of decided I remember it... but I can't honestly remember a specific instance about how scary I thought Large Marge was from before I was six or seven years old. I don't remember it the same way I remember waking up to watch Mega Man on Saturday morning at 7:00 AM because I was such a nerd that I loved to see anything Nintendo related come to life.
And it's based on THAT argument that I apologize to Leyla for my earlier comments. You may indeed know that you were in fact sat down in front of the Thundercats before you had any concpet of memories because of family stories or an action figure left over from a sibling or something and that I understand. That's fair. But to compromise, I'm just saying it's not the same as something you may legitimately be nostalgic about like, I dunno, Power Rangers. That came out when you were like eight or so right? Were you into that? I wasn't. It sucked... just like almost every other children's show that isn't Sesame Street.
...but those Spider Man and X-Men series' are still pretty awesome.
And to any fan of those stupid VH1 shows... there's a difference between thinking some joke a comedian makes about a crappy show that first ran when you were an infant is funny and "nostalgia".
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