Nostalgia for pre-Ground Zero pop culture is a subject that comes up a lot on this blog. Pining for the awesome 80s and rad 90s is such a defining feature of Generation Y that this cohort is almost solely responsible for the glut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles retro action figures and G.I. Joe pre-faded tee shirts. Ys based their identity on the entertainment product they consumed in their formative years. And they’ve been unable to grow past it.
Author David Stewart and I have talked about the nostalgia trap that snares folks whose major developmental influences predated 1997. Retro fashion, endless cape movie reboots, and even the Funko Pop plague make sense when you understand Gen Y’s main driving motive. They’re desperate to retreat from the chaotic, nonsensical world of their adulthood into the secure, intelligible past of their childhood. By re-watching The Real Ghostbusters, playing Bart vs. the Space Mutants, and and wearing TNG-era Starfleet uniform hoodies, they hope to relive the same feelings that consuming those products gave them in 198X.
None of that will be news to anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while. But one crucial piece of the puzzle you might have missed is the profusion of kids’ TV shows among nostalgia trap bait.
And you may be thinking Of course Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Care Bears, and Punky Brewster are gonna be nostalgia fuel. After all, you just said that the whole movement is about adults trying to relive their childhoods through media they consumed as kids.
That’s all true, but it’s focused on the what. The new angle that’s the main thrust of this post seeks to examine the how and the why. In particular, how did the children’s TV shows that today’s adults watched as kids affect their current mentality, and why did these shows have the effect they had?
A breakthrough observation that bears on these questions was made by independence guru Dr. Luke Smith. He noted that one structural feature common to most kids’ TV shows of the past 40 years is episodic storytelling.
Watch him explain:
In short, Ys, Millennials, an Zoomers grew up stewing in elaborate fantasy worlds wherein the status quo ante was always restored after 30 minutes. Every change, however drastic, was temporary. Lex Luthor might destroy the Hall of Justice, but it’d be rebuilt with super speed. Master Splinter might get zapped into Dimension X, but he’d be back before the end credits. Mr. Krabs might fire Spongebob, but our hero would be right back at the grill flipping patties next time.
Take multiple generations conditioned to believe that whatever upheavals came, life would always return to baseline, and throw a full-scale civilizational collapse at them.
Yes, you can talk about how internalizing episodic storytelling led to the epidemic of snowflaking in the workplace and skyrocketing depression. But this conditioning has produced just as insidious an effect in the arts themselves – one that perpetuates this unhealthy cycle.
Call it the Nostalgia Jukebox Effect.
The same craving for repetition that Dr. Smith noted among his YouTube viewers; asking him to produce videos on the exact same topic over and over, runs rampant in the arts.
Being a novelist, I can sympathize – as many others no doubt can as well. It may sound odd, but authors do get frequent requests from readers to write the exact same books we’ve published before. And it’s hard not to notice a similar impetus behind a lot of the rapid-release, 20 to 50K style book series.
Because to people under 50, pop media really is a nostalgia jukebox they can load with quarters to replay their favorite half-dozen songs over and over and over.
Which would be fine if the motive was pure enjoyment of the song. But that’s not enough for Gen Y, who have a deep, pathological need to experience the exact same emotions they did as kids again and again.
What the nostalgia jukebox effect has done is turn Gen Y into middle-aged Marty McFlys compulsively punching the controls of a fake time machine. And it’s left Millennials and Zoomers trapped in a state of learned futility.
The answer, as David Stewart and Luke Smith explained, is to stop chasing the childhood dragon that can never be recaptured. Instead, seek out new and challenging experiences in the present. Not mainly to create new memories, but to broaden and deepen your character.
Because if there’s one trait that would raise Ys, Millennials, and Zoomers out of their ruts, it’s the attainment of character.
Give it a shot. You have nothing to lose but your mental fetters.
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I never thought of that angle before. It would explain the obsession younger creators of the past decade have had with extraneous lore over plot progression or satisfying endings. They can only imagine convoluted and overthought back story to get where the story started in exchange for barely moving the actual story itself forward.
It should probably also be a mark of the times that when certain stories were made things were much different. James Bond was made when there was an England worth preserving and the idea of a rough warrior fighting to preserve the baseline of society over and over was noble. Now even the movies can’t pretend he has a reason to fight for anyone but himself.
I do believe there is a hunger for episodic storytelling now, but I also believe it is for that hope of a state worth returning to more than anything related to stories. The issue is that no one can imagine what that is anymore, because anyone younger than Gen Y has no conception of a time and place like that. What people actually want and need is a complete tale where things that happen matter and lead to a conclusion worth arriving at.
We deserve more than comic book soap operas looping forever.
You just picked up the ball I kicked off and ran it for a touchdown.
A skill gap I see time and again among new authors is not knowing how to motivate characters. Or if the characters are said to have motives, the authors don’t know how to portray them taking action to pursue those goals.
Instead there’s excessive focus on world building to the exclusion of anything in that world undergoing significant, permanent change.
The proliferation of episodic storytelling leading audiences to fixate on lore is a knock-on effect I overlooked. Which is all the more reason for aspiring authors to read books, ideally books written before 1980. You can’t be influenced by what you have no experience of, and Millennial writers mainly influenced by TV haven’t seen how to do continuity.
This might also explain the fascination with slice of life/moe anime over adventure and action anime among younger audiences today. They want nothing to change and to be left in relative comfort, not go on a journey with consequences and progression.
You see a lot of complaining over “shounenshit” from that crowd, but you also see those mocked audience members very excited to indulge in stories with stakes and escalation and, eventually, an ending.
But really, diving into older art is always the best way to escape modern traps. They didn’t have the same hang-ups we do.
Remember when anime could be about anything from master assassins to extraterrestrial wars to dragons dueling for the fate of humanity? I checked out when the choices were reduced to Gundam/Eva Ripoff #53,817 or Cute Girls Doing Cute Things in perpetuity.
A recent, popular series to do things right was Attack On Titan. Not only did it meaningfully progress the plot (which the author painstakingly orchestrated from the start), have massive, literally world-altering elements, and character development, it also managed to eschew Good Guys vs. Bad Guys in a meaningful and non-subversive way (generally summarized as “holding on to grudges and failing to reconcile with those who have wronged you leads only to perpetual chaos and suffering,” which is also a surprisingly Christian moral observation.)
That is a position with which I must respectfully disagree. Having watched Attack on Titan, I find it falls on the Eva side of the Gundam/Eva vs CGDCT binary that’s gripped post-Ground Zero anime.
In terms of character, it commits the now-ubiquitous storytelling sin of opening character arcs while maintaining an aversion to closing them.
The world building is pretty cool, though.
I like that you use Gundam/Eva as points of reference, as I’ve long thought AoT was actually a mecha series. Just with mecha of a fantastical nature, you could say.
I could see how someone might think AoT is a morally relative world where everything is meaningless and nihilism reigns supreme, but I guess I had a different take on it. It felt more like a study in how good, heroic people can make mistakes, and neither side in war is generally Pure Good Guys vs. Evil Guys.
The people we initially take to be the villains aren’t evil, but essentially thrown into an impossible situation as the weapons of opposing sides in ongoing generational grudges. It felt like a much more realistic portrayal of war that what I’m used to seeing in modern fiction. Take, for example, the Civil War, or World War I – which the setting/technology level strongly evokes – for familiar real-life points of comparison. Seeing the series as a war drama, rather than the heroic fantasy it initially seems to be, dramatically reframes things. Especially in light of the Current Year cultural morality promulgated by SJWs of Oppressed Good, Oppressors Bad, which the series totally rejects in favor of a drastically more nuanced narrative.
So in other words, Isayama isn’t subverting fantasy by turning the tropes upside down – ala GRRM – but rather subverting the reader’s expectations by feigning shonen action, but actually telling a war story, where this kind of narrative is more conventional. Eva, on the other hand, was very much about deconstructing shonen tropes and dancing cynically amongst the ruins.
These are all my original observations, and not a take I’ve ever heard of anybody having on this series, so I could be totally nuts and imagining it all through my Dissident-colored lenses. Anyway, the series is far from immune from criticism (I’m with you on the sometimes shaky character arcs, and the more magical elements emphasized in the final act can also feel a bit ad hoc and uneven), I feel like this is one place where my particular perspective might actually contribute to the conversation.
A generation who’s been raised to believe there is no future (climate change crisis) is incapable of conceptualizing a future to write about. A generation who feels worked to the bone in the market place, who is burned out on the daily “world revolutionizing” changes, would seek some status quo and pause.
A question I asked myself, back when we were talking about the infinite feedback loop of 90’s hell, was if we would ever be able to break free by creating something new? What does the next generation or era of culture look like? My answer: I don’t know because I don’t think people (in my generation) are mentally capable of generating that new cultural identity. I’ll admit myself, I lack any innovative ideas, I don’t care too much about setting my art in the present or future because I’m far too fascinated with the past.
Even Churches weren’t immune to the Doom ‘n Gloom. In certain shades of Low-Church Protestantism, the Rapture’s still pushed pretty hard. Difficult to encourage people to plan for a future when The Tribulation is always around the corner.
I believe the nostalgia for the past is super prevalent due to a couple of factors. One, as has been noted here and numerous other blogs and media, the past really did have superior entertainment. As you have noted Brian, all media took a nosedive after 1997. I have looked for new stories to enjoy but have found slim pickings. Mostly I just watch anime and play indie games now.
This does not mean that all previous media was good. There was a lot of dredge even then. And even entertainment that was considered excellent in the past can be seen as less than stellar once the rose colored glasses have been removed. Case in point, my little brothers and I went to watch the original Thundercats one day and realized that it was just as stupid kids cartoon. Nothing profound, nothing to base one’s life off of like so many of the pop cult fanatics want to do with entertainment.
Another reason the past is such a trap of nostalgia for my generation and younger is there was stuff to do back then. Modern shopping malls and shopping districts, alongside having ghetto Americans and other minorities crimping the style, don’t have anything for a young boy to do or a man to do. Once upon a time such places had bowling alleys, pool tables, arcades, or something else. Just as fast food restaurants used to be inviting with bright colors and colorful mascots to keep the kids happy and give everyone a breath of fresh air. Nowadays all shopping areas are ugly looking and are meant to just get people in and get them out just as fast. We are a merely commercial people now, nothing more.
And then of course, there is another reason for the nostalgia. One that has been brought up on many dissident communication networks. Demographics are destiny. As the meme says, the world we grew up in is gone. All European values, all Christendom, is gone from all but small pockets of America.
I’ll only add the bit of trivia that the Thundercats theme song was written by James Lipton of Inside the Actors’ Studio fame.
Always enjoy Luke’s content. He’s come to my church a couple times and I had some nice discussions with him.
Anyway, as a younger Gen Y (about the same age as Luke) who grew up with many of those series he mentioned, it’s worth pointing out that the episodic model was so universal that things which broke the mold tended to be a big deal. (Something like the X-Files, which had an overarching plot, but especially LOST, comes to mind.) We really didn’t know anything else but status quo, it was basically universal in almost all the entertainment we consumed – but especially things like cartoons/kids TV series. When Avatar: The Last Airbender showed up telling a continuous story, it felt truly revolutionary for kid cartoon storytelling.
An interesting study in this is Samurai Jack, an excellent series in its original run, which uses the episodic nature as a means of in-built tension; with the titular protagonist trying in vain to achieve his goals. The show is as much about his character development as a result of dealing with his own failures, which balances out his astounding competency as a warrior. In some ways, it feels like it’s a bit of a reaction to the conventions of the episodic kids show; everything returns to a rather negative status quo at the end of the episode, compared to some of the examples above.
Then, when it was revived for a final season in 2017, it completely ditched the episodic storytelling format and dealt with major, ongoing changes, ultimately ending up with a pretty satisfying conclusion.
“Always enjoy Luke’s content. He’s come to my church a couple times and I had some nice discussions with him.”
Delightful. It’s always welcome news to learn that online personalities are down to earth in real life.
P.S. Samurai Jack is a masterpiece.
Tartakovsky always used the episodic formula in the best possible way.
His first series, Dexter’s Laboratory, was essentially based on old pulp serials mashed with classic cartoon shorts. Simply put, Dexter is either done in by his own hubris or simply being a kid and must either fix the problem or deal with the consequences of his mistakes. And it’s always something you never quite expect. It’s one of the last series that used the Mad Scientist trope in a clever way, but the main character also learned from it as the way the series ended (we don’t count the revival he had nothing to do with) with a movie called “Ego Trip” where Dexter faces his future and learns to put aside his, well, ego, in order to grow up.
This was then followed by Samurai Jack and the Clone Wars miniseries where he, again, used the episodic format both for one-off ideas and actual character growth. He really came into his own here.
After those two, he was led into Symbionic Titan, a mecha series which mashed together John Hughes with space opera super robot anime from the 1970s. Though there were episodic threats (what new threat will they face today?) it fed into the ongoing narrative in the background that was promising to come into full fruition with season 2. Unfortunately, it was abandoned by Cartoon Network before it could reach its full potential.
I think it was at this point he decided to push full on ahead into serial storytelling, because Samurai Jack season 5 and Primal followed this period. I’m still hoping he will eventually get to complete Symbionic Titan, but I still hold that he is probably the most talented creator in the mainstream right now. No one in it right now has quite the track record he has, nor half the ambition.
Tartakovsky is what the Pop Cult overhypes JJ Abrams as. If Disney had been serious about the Star Wars sequels, they’d have hired him to direct TFA.
Way back during his Clone Wars run, I was saying that Tartakovsky should have been given the big chair by Lucas. He showed a better understanding of Star Wars – including its pulp roots, as evidenced by Dexter’s Lab – than its creator.
I view Tartakovsky not directing the Force Awakens as akin to David Lynch not directing Return of the Jedi. Would their takes on a mainline Star Wars movie been great? Yeah, probably. (Tartakovsky obviously has his Clone Wars cartoon and Lynch’s Dune shows that he has more than enough visual imagination for the Star Wars universe.)
Would I trade the things they actually made for these theoretical Star Wars movies? Not in a million years. There’s no way that we would have gotten something better than Primal or Twin Peaks (among other greats from both creators).