lookaloona

Enhanced with Disney's FastPlay

  • any/all

I'm a nostalgia blogger working on a video series about Air Bud Entertainment. Follow for behind-the-scenes updates and random musings about cartoons, art, music, etc.


Contact
lookaloona@proton.me
My Art Sidepage
cohost.org/lookas-arts

A neat thing I like to think about sometimes is how childhood nostalgia lags behind actual contemporary advancement and pop culture, and how this effect is magnified if your family wasn't well off enough to update constantly.

I grew up on VHS tapes long after the market deemed them defunct, and my media memories involve several 80s and 90s movies, despite me being a 00s baby, because those are the tapes my parents had collected up to that point. We didn't throw out the VHS tapes until 2014 when the VCR broke and wasn't sensible to replace. After that point, my then 5-year-old sisters had access to a full bookcase of DVDs of 00s kids' movies and whatever 80s/90s classics my parents felt the need to rebuy occasionally. This is around the time when DVDs were safely declared a dying market due to streaming services. We wouldn't get Netflix until around 2019, long after it had been declared a household staple by pop tech standards.

I have fleeting memories of playing with a Sega Genesis in 2009, and then we got a Wii in 2015, a near decade after release, and that was the core of my gaming experience until we sold it in 2020. I had several hand-me-down toys, and my new room decor and clothes were determined by older people not entirely on board with contemporary style until I could choose such things for myself. The music in the car was always tuned to the classic rock stations because that's what my parents liked, and that in turn shaped my music taste.

I like to think this sort of thing is why nowadays younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha are fixated on late 90s and Y2K aesthetics, despite not being conscious or even alive during those eras, and maybe it'd even explain the eternal cultural phenomenon of feeling 'born in the wrong generation.' It would certainly explain why I'm personally so drawn to 80s and 90s media, at least.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lookaloona's post:

I'm glad I could articulate that! It has been odd to hear people my parents' age believe we can't know about or relate to their cultural experience at all. Like most of us were raised off our parents' stuff in one way or another.

Pinned Tags