I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia of late. As a pre-teen I was a huge fan of Transformers (particularly the weekly UK comic). Those comics are in the process of being reprinted as humongous books (1200 or so pages each), and I’ve read the first volumes of the US and UK compendiums. Through eyes four decades older, I was struck by how the handful of excellent stories still held up, but also quite how commercial the US plotlines were (an endless barrelthrough of new products to sell to the kids). The UK stories, constrained as they were by needing to fit in between the American overarching plot, focused more on character and inventive twists, and was where most of the stuff I remembered fondly lay. Eitherway, they’re really only for the fans or for those looking to relive their youth.
Sometimes the reboots hold their own. The first couple of Paddington films managed to toe that line between scratching the nostalgia itch and keying into modern storytelling perfectly.
A somewhat overlooked reboot that also achieved this was Static Cling – a short special that rebooted Rocko’s Modern Life. As a parent, as my son grew up, I inflicted all manner of things I’d loved in my youth on him. My shonky way of cultural grounding him in the same references that I knew.
It was a mixed bag. The Mr Men books are great for merchandising, but the stories are poor. Paddington held up. Dogtanion and the three Muskerhounds has a killer theme song, and is good, but glacially slow. The slapstick of early Roadrunner and Bugs bunny cartoons still raised a chuckle from us both. Films like When Harry Met Sally and North by Northwest landed well, and Back to the future had him perched on the edge of the sofa as the storm rolled in and the lightning brewed.
Nestled in amongst all of this was the Nicktoon, Rocko’s Modern Life. A quirky little cartoon that came from a similar place to Ren & Stimpy, but warmer and with more heart. The story behind the original series was interesting in itself. Showrunner Joe Murray had been recently bereaved when the show was picked up, and assembled a motley collection of unlikely animators, artists, comedians and voice actors. It seems odd in these Netflix days where shows are designed and sculpted to within an inch of their life through demographic profiling and test groups, but he was given seemingly completely free license to create this anarchic kid’s show. What was unique was how they worked seemingly mundane things (likely from the stuff they were dealing with in their own, early 20s, lives) into the plots of each episode and somehow managed to walk the tightrope between making fun of the absurdity of life but also keep the heart.
Memorable episodes covered Rocko getting his very first credit card, “A sad crying clown in an iron lung… I’ve always wanted one.”, the joys of travelling economy airlines “welcome to the loving arms of D-Reg air” and his neighbours’ corporate life at the all-encompassing Con-Glom-O (with their catch phrase “We own you”).
The writers always had a keen eye to puncturing the absurdities of modern life and so, perhaps better than most, it was a vehicle well placed to cast an eye over the current world and pick up where it left off.
Alongside easy targets of ubiquitous coffee chains, endless phone upgrades and envy, and hipster food trucks, the plot goes full metatextual, by hinging primarily around how Rocko, dumped unceremoniously back into the current world after 20 years away, can’t cope and so seeks refuge in wallowing in his old favourite cartoon, only to find that it has been cancelled.
What follows is a genuinely heartwarming tale of reconciliation and coming to terms with change, and while I’m sure that all involved would have been perfectly capable of churning out further rebooted episodes, this serves as the perfect coda to a show that was formative for many of those who worked on it (laying the groundwork for SpongeBob apparently, though that was a little after my time).
The psychology of nostalgia needs more space than I can give it here, although I may revisit it at some point in the future. Broadly there are several lines brought out by modern studies which suggest that it goes beyond a maladaptive longing for the past and that while it is often triggered by disruption and uncertainty it can help to strengthen a person’s core identity, aiding them in maintaining a coherent sense of self as they get older, which in turn can increase optimism for the future.
Where it can go awry somewhat is when it becomes focused on a selective, idealised view of the past which can encourage a person to focus their energies on trying to recreate a version of the past which either never existed or was heavily context dependent (that context having moved on).
I think that it is a useful concept to hold in the process of coaching, in which we often encourage people to look back at periods of time in which things were going well for them. It’s incumbent on us to try and dig towards a clear eyed view of what underpinned that period of the coachee’s life, so that the useful stuff can be examined and adapted towards what they’re facing now.