“They are destroying my childhood”! It is something I and many of you have said in the past whenever a film studio wanted to reboot or add another sequel to an old franchise. There was a time where I will fight and whine about how Disney ruined Star Wars or how Michael Bay didn’t understand Transformers. I will scream, “you’re not respecting the roots!”, at them, while wearing my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s shirt and with my Walkman in hand. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and I know how it feels when it hits you hard. You just want another hit of that good childhood feeling that we all lost when we grew up. However, if we take a good look at our childhood, most of the shows we grew up watching, they were not very good in the first place. My old CD collections are just a reminder of the bad music taste I once had, and candy was way too sweet back then. Let stop kidding around and let the past died.

I understand when we become adults; we get buried with bills, maintaining relationships, juggling careers, studying hard to finish school and all the other things that break our backs. Sometimes, we all yearn for an escape back to a simple time. When life is seen to be a lot easier. When the present is filled with uncertainty, drinking back a warm glass of nostalgia will always make you feel better. The release of the endorphins when we turn on a show I watch as a kid, amazing. Unfortunately, those shows that we love and grew up with such great fondness, were made for sinful nature, with kids in mind. They made many of them just to sell toys to kids’ parents to buy. The simple story, colourful characters, and predictable ending were made so children can understand. At the end of each show, kids will run to their parents, begging them to buy the toys. Even music back then was not only terrible but made to be so cookie-cutter bad. So they all sound the same thing. If you ask me the difference between a song from the band 98 degrees and O-Town, I couldn’t tell you. With sweets like jawbreakers and Airheads were once a great treat when a little me. Now, it just too sweet for me. Going back and re-watching these shows, listening to music from that generation, and eating childhood sweets, will only remind us how truly bad they were.

I watch my old DVD copy of “Super Dave: Daredevil For Hire” a few weeks ago, one of my all-time favourite cartoons shows. I remember waking up on a Saturday morning, running downstairs in my PJs and turning on the old tv, and watching this show. Staring the late comedian Bob Einstein, I thought I was in for a fun-filled drink of nostalgia, but it ended with a foul aftertaste of disappointment and regret. With the bad animations, predictable ending, and terrible voice work, not only I wasted my time watching this old cartoon, but it was a glorious reminder that I am no longer that kid anymore. My taste in entertainment has changed. I need something more depth in the story than what I got watching Super-Dave blow himself up repeatedly. Will an updated version of this show be better? No. It’s okay to like the things you had as a kid, whatever it was, well made or not. But realize, mostly, these things are franchises. They are going to keep making them and changing it in order to fit with today’s generation’s taste. That is the most, unfortunately, the thing about nostalgia. If we keep wanting the past to return, We will never get the new stuff that we deserve.

Shows like Full House, Ren & Stimpy, and She-Ra: Princess of Power, are all coming back because people in my generation are now adults, who can buy everything that didn’t get as kids. I don’t know why people want She-Ra to come back, it wasn’t a good show to start with but if we keep going back to the well of the past, television series like, “House of Cards, Game of Thrones, and Rick and Morty”, new IP shows will never be given the chance to be made unless we give up living in the past.

There is good nostalgia, in fact, it may provide a way to learn from our own past mistakes. If someone remembers an old television show or an actor from an old movie and used that to be a better version of themselves, why not? It is when we keep wanting to live in the past is the problem. As much as I or anyone else what to go back as kids will just end up missing out on all the new stuff in the future. This is Yuji Hyde, Thank you for reading.