If you’ve paid any sort of attention to Hollywood summer blockbuster lineups over the past few years, there is no doubt you know of the trend going on. Remakes and sequels galore! You remember this vague product from your childhood? Here’s a movie about it! You remember this book or story you read in your youth? Here’s a movie!
This trend isn’t entirely new, but the new evolution of it is; 1980’s nostalgia.
Take a look at this year’s summer movie lineup and you’ll have to agree. All the tentpole features are either remakes or sequels to nostalgic films. "Mad Max: Fury Road," "Terminator: Genysis," and "Poltergeist" among them, including the kickstarter funded "Kung Fury." This level isn’t restricted to just movies either, TV shows are getting in this nostalgia wave too. There’s Comedy Central’s "Moonbeam City," ABC’s "The Goldbergs," and Netflix’s "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Summer," being part as well. Not to mention the various music subgenres taking inspiration from '80s synthesizer music.
Where’s the original material? Why has this nostalgia taken over?
Well, here’s some news to people complaining about this craze: There’s always been material exploiting people’s nostalgia of their past.
Hollywood remakes have been commonplace ad nauseam. In the '70s there was a "King Kong" remake where instead of the empire state building, he climbs up the World Trade Center towers. There were two original musicals, "At Long Last, Love and Xanadu" that in some way tried to harken back to musicals of the past.
The 1980’s had horror remakes of 1950s b-movies like "The Fly" and "The Thing." There was a film called "Monster Squad" that pitted the famous Universal Monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, the Mummy) against some suburban kids.
The '90s gave us movies based on classic TV shows, like "The Brady Bunch," "The Addams Family," "Lost in Space," "Leave It To Beaver," and "Giligan's Island," followed by the likes of "Charlie's Angels" and "Starsky and Hutch" in the 2000s. And I shouldn’t really mention the phenomenon known as "Transformers."
With each generation of adults that grows up, there are always those memories they have of their childhood that they wish they could hold onto for just a little while longer. Mostly it has to do with the media they consumed and grew up on. I knew when I was growing up, I lived off of Nickelodeon shows and my family’s VHS tapes, and laserdisc with the likes of "Wallace and Gromit," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," the newly CGI-ed "Star Wars" movies, and of course plenty of Disney movies. Adults obviously want to pass on what they loved growing up to their kids and hope they get the same reactions. I would want my kids to love "Thomas the Tank Engine" and "SpongeBob SquarePants" the same way I did as a kid. And who better to capitalize on that than the makers of Hollywood movies?
Yes it sometimes feels that we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to original movie ideas (i.e. "Jem and the Holograms"). But as long as people feel some sort of nostalgia to their past, people will try to put out products to capitalize on that feeling. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But nostalgia is quite the powerful force to overcome.
