Inflicting Nostalgia & The Part You Keep

I bought a lot of Simpsons comics in my childhood, even though they rarely made me laugh. Recently, I keep eyeing a Treehouse of Horror collection I had as a kid, wondering if I should pull the trigger on that $15 purchase and see if this comic I didn't find particularly funny, but read every word of a dozen times, has gotten better since I was 10.

I used to buy Simpsons comics for two reasons, I think. There was the convenience factor, which can't be overstated. Even as Marvel and DC books were sequestered to comic shops, Simpsons comics remained accessible on the magazine racks at supermarkets and book stores. I got that Treehouse of Horror book at a Fry's Electronics. I got an issue of Radioactive Man from a smoke shop and cigar odor was pressed so deep into the pulp I couldn't stand to keep the comic in the bedroom I shared with my sister. I was not a gracious older brother, but I did keep our room from smelling like a farting tree.

The other, more important reason I got Simpsons comics because they were a part of The Simpsons that I could own. The Simpsons was the greatest thing in the world, but I was only really able to engage with it in reruns, five days a week around dinner time. God bless the United Paramount Network. I'd later get a 3-VHS box set, where each tape had two episodes and one of the garbage Tracey Ullman Show shorts. We went to the Del Monte Shopping Center's Suncoast Video and I spent all of my money and whatever my parents spotted me in the moment for a pound-and-a-half of plastic and the ability to watch something like 90 minutes of The Simpsons on-demand. I also owned the episode guide and a pack of trading cards transcribing jokes from episodes I'd never seen.

I wanted to keep and hold the things I loved.

The VHS box set came out in 1998, at which point The Simpsons had been airing as its own show on Fox for nine years. It's now been airing for 37 years. The Simpsons is one of the few reliable bets on TV, even as programming keystones like late night talk shows are threatened by mergers, politics and streaming services. Last year, it was renewed for an additional 4 seasons and a handful of Disney+ shorts, which is more of a commitment than CBS has given 60 Minutes, which means The Simpsons is more secure than the news. The New Simpsons Movie comes out in 2027. And I'm not watching any of that stuff, but its existence affirms The Simpsons will always be a thing you can access.

Other media of my childhood was more fleeting. The cartoons I liked would go away and they wouldn't really come back, and I had so few things to care about that their going away mattered to me. Animaniacs was there for years and then it was gone and you couldn't access it in any way and six months later, I felt nostalgic for it. In 2000 or 2001, the prize display at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's big arcade included packs of 1995 Fox Kids trading cards. I'm sure they'd been discovered in the corner of a warehouse, these little paper ads for X-Men and Eek! Stravaganza, and putting them in the prize case was easier than unwrapping individual packs to recycle the cards, but they were gold to me. They were a portal to a thing I'd enjoyed five years earlier and I cashed every ticket I had in for a couple. I hadn't enjoyed Bobby's World when it'd been on the air but it was something I, a 10-year-old, associated with being 6, and I was thrilled to have a trading card with Bobby's uncle Ted. The text on the back of the card noted that Ted called Bobby "Bobbo," and I probably thought, "Yeah, that's right, that's a thing he said!" You would have to nail my feet to the floor to get me to sit through an episode of Bobby's World today. My family didn't have cable when I was growing up, meaning there were only ever a half-dozen channel options, and even then I'd flip away from Bobby's World if it came on. The show never meant anything to me until it came back in trading card form and could serve as a portal back to my childhood. I just wasn't capable of understanding I was still in my childhood.

I've been thinking about this because I'm always thinking about it. I can't pretend it's novel for me to think about how much of my brain is, depressingly, a nostalgia carousel.

But also, my friend Nate McDonough posted a great comic about how his pre-teen daughter is engaging with nostalgic content. I'm sure the comic will make its way into a future issue of his series Grixly, which you can subscribe to here. Nate's very good at thinking. I love the whole piece, and me quoting captions isn't a substitute for actually reading the whole thing, and I'm only discussing a slice of it, but I'll quote some lines.

Writing about talking with his daughter, Nate says, "I've been taken aback by semi-frequent allusions to her childhood being over/gone/past/etc."

Later, "There also seems to be a lot of media/culture about mourning your childhood relationship to media."

Later, "The 'dreamcore' music and backrooms meme seem like a strange fit for a kid, but make sense when I squint. Unsurprising. Ambient music, aesthetics from prior decades, 'trauma' (the girl uses this word mostly as a punchline), liminality, dreams, the subconscious, polka dots..."

I don't know the kid, though I once had a conversation about Pom Poko with her and Nate via voice memos and feel safe in my assertion she's on the level. Trust me, this 10-year-old is legit.

And this struck me so hard because I don't love how nostalgic I am, but I'd assumed the kids would be less likely to feel the same way, now that you keep the whole thing or you keep none of it but you're happy.

I loved those so-so Simpsons comics because they were the only way I could have a Simpsons thing that wouldn't go away, but today, if you've got an internet connection, you're three clicks away from every episode they ever produced of that show. You can call up and watch early 90s Simpsons Butterfinger BBs ads. This isn't just something that airs once every weekday for 22 minutes. Unless you printed this newsletter off– which, shame on you, do you not read the italicized little eco-conscious words to live by at the bottom of corporate emails?– you're reading this while connected to the archive of everything.

And because it's all available, I also assumed people might not get hits of nostalgia from whatever their Bobby's World equivalent would be. Because aside from the stuff companies dump off their streaming services for tax breaks, everything that was available five years ago is still available today. When The Animaniacs slid off the WB's calendar, I couldn't do much more than remember it, but, for better and worse, we're all still knee-deep in the standing water of what we've always enjoyed. You don't need Fox Kids trading cards because you can watch all 76 episodes of X-Men cartoon right now. You don't need to settle for looking at a picture of Wolverine and thinking "Yep, that's Wolverine."

Some of the remaining elements of nostalgia will always be there. Even if I'm still hanging out today with the same people I was hanging out with a decade ago, we're all older and I wish I was younger and I don't need to explain the concept of time to you. Kids will always miss the recent past. But, again, my hope was my son wouldn't grow up wishing it was yesterday. The trade-off was brutal. he wouldn't wish that because the world would have stagnated, or at least he'd be able to force part of it to stagnate on command. If the world was being made to stagnate anyway, there'd be that small upside. My kid grow up with the longing.

Of course, people Nate's daughter's age aren't making dreamcore yet. They're having nostalgia inflicted on them. We can't escape nostalgia and even if future generations had the ability to do that, they'd still have to contend with the feelings we're putting into their world. We're still modeling this behavior. You don't need to hold onto things because they'll always be here, but I'm telling you I hold onto things, operating like a person who grew up before the internet was the full monster it is today.

We should stop that. No nostalgia in front of the kids. They've got enough shit to deal with.

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