If you ever go on social media, then chances are you follow an account related to 80s/90s nostalgic content. It seems like every generation spends at least some part of their middle age wistfully remembering their childhoods.
In this cultural moment, millennials are getting the opportunity to see the things we loved in childhood reborn for our own kids. And while there are certainly some trends we wish would have stayed in the past (low-rise jeans? Steve Madden platform sandals?), it is a special pleasure to share the joys of our youth with our kids and find that they like them too!
Turn on any streaming service on your TV, and you’ll see the same characters you grew up with living out new lives on the big screen. The first Toy Story movie came out in 1995, and Woody and Buzz are still getting new friends and storylines.
In our house, we spend hours playing the same video games that we mastered with our siblings, only now they’re on a giant screen rather than the little black-and-white monitor. There’s a singular joy in crushing your child in a race on MarioKart’s Rainbow Road, a feeling that is only surpassed by the pride you feel when they beat you for the first time.
Millennials have reached the moment in our lives where we’re the studio execs, writers, and designers in charge of crafting content. And we have chosen to use those positions to live out our dreams.
Take the new Super Mario Brothers movie, for instance. The graphics! The story! Things we could have only imagined when we played the 8-bit version almost forty years ago.
While our kids experience all these characters anew, we get to relive those glory days of our youth. Who knows? Maybe they’ll introduce these same characters to their kids in forty years!
