I've had enough Gen X nostalgia and it's everywhere at the moment. Shows and movies like Stranger Things, Axel F, and, most recently, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have been big hits on the best streaming services and at the box office and frankly, I’m over it. Or more to the point, I was never really with it. Listen, I’m firmly entrenched in Generation X: born in the mid-70s and I came of age in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I still love the music and the movies of the era, but I’m done with the neo-nostalgia.
Here We Are Now, Entertain Us
In the last few years, we’ve seen sequels or reboots of so many classic Gen X films that it’s hard to keep up. Top Gun: Maverick, Blade Runner 2049, Coming 2 America, Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiousa, Bill & Ted Face The Music, and more. Then there are the hit shows, like the aforementioned Stranger Things and The Goldbergs, but they aren’t alone. That ‘90s Show, Young Sheldon, and Yellowjackets all trade heavily in ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia. Looking ahead to the rest of the 2024 movie schedule, we’ve still got Gladiator 2 (OK a 2000 film) and Karate Kid on the way, not to mention another season of Cobra Kai on the 2024 TV schedule.
The ‘80s and ‘90s were replete with successful shows from the ‘60s getting rebooted for Gen X. This pattern has repeated itself today with shows from the ‘80s and ‘90s like Magnum P.I, MacGyver, Dynasty, Beverly Hills 90210, Rosanne, Quantum Leap, and more. In the ‘80s, I remember being fascinated by The New Leave It to Beaver, but I'm less enthusiastic for more recent revivals like Fraiser or Fuller House.
The early ‘90s were all about rejecting our parents’ pop culture touchstones. In early 1992 Nirvana’s Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous out of the top spot on the Billboard Top 40. That represented a seachange, ushering in a new sound, one by and for Generation X. Grunge and Hip Hop became chart-topping music when just a couple of years earlier, Roy Orbison’s final album Mystery Girl was in the top 5. Gen X was claiming its spot and we weren’t going to keep looking back at the hippies and the yuppies for our pop culture heroes.
I Feel Stupid, And Contagious
We were never supposed to look back, either. We made fun of movies like Forrest Gump and TV shows like The Wonder Years, which, by the way, was also rebooted in an Inception-like level of nostalgia. It was all about the new, and rejecting the old. Now that Gen X is where the Boomers were 30 years ago, we’re doing the same damn thing!
It’s not that I think these movies and TV shows are bad. Many of them are great. Stranger Things is objectively one of the best shows on Netflix. In theaters, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is almost breaking records at the box office. They just don’t do anything for me.
Maybe it’s as simple as me grappling with my aging and coming to terms with more of my life being behind me than ahead, but I don’t want to look back. Sure, I still listen to the music I loved as a teenager, but I don’t want new music to sound like it’s retreading old ground and I don’t want what I watch to do that, either. I don’t want to think that the best years of my life were decades ago when hopefully I have plenty more years to tread new ground.
