As a regular poster for the Insert Credit forums, it shouldn’t surprise any of you to learn that I have some thoughts on nostalgia. On the one hand, I’ve always found the aesthetics and culture built on mainstream video game nostalgia to present a very limited image of the time and place they describe. The short version is that mainstream nostalgia serves commercial interests more than it does accurately map out the history it describes or help us understand the styles/perspectives that were prevalent at the time. The long version is it never ventures too far beyond the commercially successful games and styles (especially those that are still marketable today) and tends to espouse an over-simplified, written-by-the-victors narrative that didn’t actually exist at the time. (Ashens discusses this exact problem in his video on the NES Mini.)
So my interest has always been to break away from that by going out to the margins of that nostalgia to consider what it doesn’t pay attention to or simply can’t contain. What light do these forgotten works cast on the trends that defined their era? What other perspectives might we bring to bear on those trends? What possibilities could they make possible either back then or in our present moment? Those are the questions I really like to explore when critically obsessing over older video games.
Of course, this is just my perspective as an individual critic. In terms of the larger culture, I see something much different taking place. Mark Fisher quoting Frederic Jameson’s observation that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism might have become something of a cliche, but I think it’s useful for highlighting an increasing inability on capitalism’s part to ideologically justify itself. The cultural inability to imagine a future beyond capitalism eventually becomes an inability of capitalism to maintain itself in the present, leaving only the past for us to retreat into. The culture is metastasizing, and corporate nostalgia is playing a significant role in that.
To provide a concrete example, Birdgirl is supposed to be a follow-up to Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, but watching the premiere last night, I couldn’t recognize anything relating to the source material in it. Which isn’t to say that it should be bound by the source material. Just the opposite: in engaging with an adult animated comedy from the same era as Stripperella, Birdgirl would be forced to engage with what Birdman really was; expressiveness, idiosyncrasies, warts and all. It would have to ask what it should keep in translating that property into the present moment (or whether there’s really anything desirable in such a task) and, ultimately, what it itself wants to do. That Birdgirl largely uses Birdman as window dressing tells me the show isn’t really interested in that. They’re there largely to affirm the nostalgic longing for an expended childhood (with maybe the occasional noncommittal gesture to a depth of character that childhood can’t capture) more than anything.
I should clarify this isn’t the only recent show I’ve felt fails to grapple with these kinds of problems; I remember having similar problems with the Animaniacs reboot. Writing this, though, I have realized that Birdgirl might be one of the more appropriate shows to discuss these issues throguh, considering how much the first episode centers on Judy having performed her Birdgirl identity to impress her dad for so long that she no longer knows how to be Judy, much less a functional adult.