The business of nostalgia

Sorry it's bit a while since I've updated this blog. I try to write about things that interest me or things that are an event in my life that I'd like to keep a record of - preserving a great deal of my thoughts and memories for the ages. Unfortunately, for the last few weeks and months I've been in a weird state. I've been unable to transcribe what I wanted to write into words. In fact, as I type this, there are several posts sitting, unfinished as I suffered a block. I'm going to have another go now with a post about nostalgia.

In early January, the BBC showed a series of programs looking at the last decade and investigating the trends that emerged. One of the major trends was a reluctance of people to grow up and their desire to cling to their childhoods. Certainly nostalgia has become a big business as companies realise that money can be made from this desire. Weirdly this seemed to coincide with my time as an undergraduate. It always seems that trends have followed what I'm interested in. It may be that most of the time, it's in fact me following trends, but this time it definitely seemed the market trend followed on from my thoughts. Anyway, it's apparently commonplace to reminisce about your childhoods at university - it makes sense as everyone is roughly the same age so their pop-culture memories are likely to be the same. My friends and I talked about toys we used to play with and television shows we used to watch. Films aren't really included as they were available on video or on TV again and again. The real nostalgia-inducers were TV shows. In 1999, DVD hadn't taken off and was still expensive and there were very few TV VHS sets. Naturally we got talking about shows such as the A-Team, Knightrider and ThunderCats and other shows from the 80s. We even went so far as to set up a college society: Trevelyan Alternative Movie Plus Animated Cartoon Society (TAMPACS). At this point in history, several things were about to happen that would explode this nostalgia out of college rooms and into the mainstream. The first was the gradual rise of DVD. With it's simplified manufacturing procedure, the costs would rapidly fall so entire runs of TV shows became affordable. The second was the internet. For the first time, people could virtually gather in chatrooms and forums to reminisce and people began converting old VHS recordings into digital video and slowly, in this still pre-YouTube age of dial-up internet, it became possible to hear the opening and closing themes and even see the opening and closing titles of all those half-remembered childhood favourites. This was a chance to post your half-remembered parts of a forgotten show and Over the next few years there was an explosion of 80s tv shows released onto DVD riding the nostalgia wave. It wasn't just tv shows that enjoyed this collective desire to relive the past - retro gaming became big as a whole heap of 80s and 90s games came back onto the market in the various virtual console stores and retro compilation sets.

This is where the second part of this post comes in - how this nostalgia affects us. Most of these retro things such as forgotten TV shows, primitive video games and even music are from fairly sharply defined parts of our past. A further good example of this is magazines. In today's world, we have the internet with it's up to the minute news and information from around the world. However, back in the 90s I got most of my information about things I liked from magazines that, by their nature were out of date by the time they hit the news stands. I used to read a couple of console magazines religiously for about 4 years or so: Mean Machines (which became Nintendo Magazine System) and SuperPlay. They were published monthly and I used to read them from cover to cover, even if certain games didn't appeal to me. Although I still have the physical copies of these magazines, they have long since been boxed up in the attic. However, there is a Mean Machines archive and over Christmas I found a torrent for a complete set of SuperPlay scans. Reading back through these magazines gave me shots of pure nostalgia - and not just of reading the magazine, but memories of what was going on at that time. And it's occasionally some really random things that my mind has associated with these things. For example, when I see the November 1991 issue of Mean Machines, it really reminds me of the day I went to buy the magazine. I can picture walking into town (despite the fact that I have walked that same route thousands of times, I can still remember that day, for no particular reason) and buying it. It had the Megadrive game F22 Interceptor featured on the cover and came with a free model of MM editor Julian Rignall. I remember getting home and flicking through the magazine while I watched an episode of Star Trek: TNG. I can't remember what episode it was but I'd know it if I saw it again. Similarly, the issues of MM and SP I took with me to India are burned into my mind as they were all I had to entertain me over the weeks we were there. Moving on to TV shows, when I was about 9 or 10 there was a repeat of a show called Star Fleet on ITV every Saturday over lunchtime. I remember seeing it for the first time and going outside to play in the garden afterwards - it was when we still had a small rose tree on the small lawn. For months after that, I would try to make Lego models of the X-bomber and other ships from the show. Both times I remember it airing, I had the same problem - it finished its run when we were in India and our rubbish video could only record for two weeks (and it failed to do that most of the time!) so I never saw the end of the story. This would have been in 1990 at the latest. As the years passed by I forgot about Star Fleet, but eventually it came back to me at university and, thanks to the internet, I found the themes, intro videos and eventually the full series and all these memories came flooding back. In fact when I ordered the series as a series of VHS rips, when it arrived, I watched all 24 episodes in one go - something I'd never done before. Finally a rare example of a film. It was early December 1989 (I was 9) and one Saturday morning I began watching what I thought was a short animation. It started out in a small mining town and involved pirates and the government chasing these kids. Then we were shown a robot that had fallen from the sky which subsequently woke up. Eventually the action moved to a floating island and the pirates turned out to be good guys. It was epic at the time and it completely sucked me in. I didn't see that film again for over ten years. In fact it passed almost out of my memory except for occasionally remembering that sketchy outline, with the robot that fell from the sky being particularly memorable. Finally in 2002, I joined the DVD Forums and got involved in one of those "can you name this film?" threads. It turned out the film was Laputa: Castle in the sky - one on the early Studio Ghibli films. As luck had it the Studio Ghibli collection was in the process of being released in on DVD and within 6 months I had a region 3 DVD of Laputa winging its way to me. Watching it brought back all the memories: later on that Saturday, I went to see Father Christmas at the local village hall (which was odd as we normally went to a department store grotto with school) and I can still remember the small present I was given (a toy car). In fact, I could still pick that car out from all my others.

I've always been someone that can remember small things like this. On several occasions my friends have looked quizzically at me and asked "how do you remember stuff like that?" I don't know if other people experience the same experience when it comes to nostalgia, but I suspect they do. What makes it a completely unique experience from person to person, is that the memories triggered by nostalgia will always be different. Even people who experienced something together will have individual memories about it.

What is different in this day and age, is it's unlikely my story will be repeated - now there is such an abundance of retro and nostalgia businesses that everything from TV shows, to video games seems permanently available - from YouTube, through to DVD boxsets and virtual consoles means peoples' long-forgotten cult memories won't be so long-lost any more!