Get Your Own Nostalgia
At this particular moment in time, the vast majority of humor out there, or at last a sizable percentage, is based completely on nostalgia. Specifically, nostalgia about 1980s pop culture. I can understand why this is. First, there was truly unprecedented trend in cross-marketing (which went unmatched until Pokémon came along). When really little kids spend all day watching cartoons based on toys, with said toys being their only other means of recreation, that's going to cause a fair number of life-long obsessions. Then couple that with some really surreal stuff to get nostalgic ABOUT, simmer for long enough for these kids to become comedy writers, and tada, here we are today.
Now, I'm not here to do bash our culture's current over-dosing of nostalgia. Not today at least. The issue I'm currently taking issue with is the growing number of people who are trying to retroactively get nostalgic about the 80s. If you keep your eyes peeled these days, it isn't very hard to find things like bad radio DJs trying to get a quick laugh out of the "Konami code" in totally inappropriate contexts (and getting it wrong to boot), 15 year olds waxing nostalgic about Mr. T's saturday morning cartoon, and just generally trying to reminisce about things they clearly don't have any childhood memories of.
This is wrong on several levels. First off, as previously mentioned, the people whose minds were legitimately warped by these things are plentiful enough that all the potential jokes are covered many times over. There's also just something deeply deeply sad about trying to make yourself look cool by poking fun at SOMEONE ELSE'S childhood memories. I mean, even doing this about stuff you legitimately grew up with is pretty freaking sad. Plus, and this mainly applies to the aforementioned teenagers talking about Mr. T's cartoon, there is a huge untapped well of cartoons, movies, and games from the early 90s you could be poking fun at. It's honestly a better source if you know where to look, as the cartoons and videogames from that period were, on the whole, far better and more sensible. That makes the screwed up nuggets of craziness and terrible premises that much better in comparison. Let's see some web pages dedicated to, for instance, the terrible final season of Gargoyles, or Boogerman, or how about Tiny Toon Adventures? Each one is a gold mine if you have even an ounce of wit.
The biggest problem I have though with this trend of fake nostalgia is just the simple fact that, quite frankly, when you're getting your frelled up memories second hand, you're going to get things wrong, and that's just infuriating.
"Hey everybody, remember Zero Wing! The All Your Base game?" No. Nobody remembers Zero Wing. I have never in my life come across one single person who ever really played it. It wasn't some huge hit, it wasn't even a cult classic. It was a lame game in an over-saturated genre that was purchased by a handful of people, which would never have entered the public eye if one of those few people who bought it didn't upload images from the intro to a website dedicated to bad translations, where it was arbitrarily selected to become a doozy of an internet meme. I could easily list 50 games off the top of my head which were both several orders of magnitude more popular, and several orders of magnitude less coherent.
"Don't forget guys! 'Dodongo dislikes smoke!' Hehehehe..." There's a good example right there. The original Zelda. The thing to remember here though is that all those zany Zelda quotes weren't just silly mistranslations. They were silly mistranslations of very important hints. Plus, the most quoted ones (like the aforementioned) aren't even that bad. Some of the most memorable nuggets of Engrish from NES games were downright vital hints you needed to interpret to proceed. You had to do it yourself too, because there wasn't an internet to look up hints on back then. You had to do it yourself, talk to your friends, or possibly check an issue of Nintendo Power. The point is, things like "HIT DEBORAH CLIFF WITH YOUR HEAD TO MAKE A HOLE" don't get chuckles from people because the grammar is stilted. They get chuckles from people because they remember tearing their hair out over it for weeks, only to figure out through trial and error they were supposed to duck by the edge of a lake.
"Hey guys! Up down up down A B A B! Hahaha..." I had some idiot shout this at an audience during an orchestral concert. Everyone was dressed formally, politely clapping at the end of long violin solos etc. This is not a place to be grabbing a microphone and making any sort of pop culture references. While videogames in general weren't entirely unrelated to the events of the day, old NES Konami action games weren't at all relevant. What's more...
It's up up down down left right left right B A start. If you're going to make inane references like that, at get them right. I should also stress that this is not just some wacky thing people who play videogames all have memorized. This is a sequence of buttons that Konami, way back when, habitually used to activate cheat codes that were pretty much required to ever stand a chance of finishing some of their more abusive games. So, unless, say, getting 50 lives per continue in Contra is relevant to the conversation (and most people still can't finish with those), shouting this isn't clever.
