The Return of 80s Cartoons - The Nostalgic Blitzkreig on Hollywood

It’s been a couple of decades or so since the glory days of the 1980s and the lunchbox, mass marketed commercialism of Saturday Morning Cartoons. I remember it as fondly as any child of that almost forgotten era. Thankfully, it’s impossible to stretch more than 20 years away from any given pop culture bookmark without bounding back to it and re-igniting fervor for something that supposedly died off half a generation ago.

None of this is any more prescient than right now with half a dozen 80s throwbacks bounding down our throats in the movie theaters these days. With the new Ninja Turtles movie opening at number one despite lackluster reviews, titled for some reason or another the acronym TMNT, and the Michael Bay destruco-fest Transformers film hitting us up in the summer, the 80s flashbacks are in full effect. Now, it looks like the geniuses behind whatever sloppy Mark Wahlberg vehicle is hitting theaters this month will be bringing us a big screen adaptation of GI Joe, yet another 1980s favorite.

Ironically, while sitting in the theater, watching the TMNT previews, I was greeted by yet another new flashback, though a bit older than the 80s, in Underdog. It’s been a long and tumultuous road since childhood, but it’s good to know that no matter how far I go, childhood will continue to follow me around.

What is it about those years and their goofy, over dramatized cartoon hours that make them ripe for the picking 20 years later? It’s a combination of a few things. First, off every kid who woke up at 7 am every Saturday from the age of 5 to 12 and took with them to school cartoon inspired backpacks, binders, t-shirts, tennis shoes, and lunchboxes is now graduated from college and has a bit of disposable income laying around.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from adults collecting baseball cards and watching The Simpsons religiously it’s that they are addicted to the vestiges of their own youth. Those magical hours after school or on Saturday mornings still stick with us in their original, shiny plastic coating, as beautiful and intriguing as those first glorious viewings 20 years ago. Were you to sit down a 25 year old who watched Transformers religiously and another 25 year old who has never seen it and show them the first three episodes concurrently, I guarantee you one of the two would not have a good time. Take a quick guess which one that would be.

So, it’s nostalgia, reaching back to the earliest days of our youth, trying to capture something of it and bring it back. Hollywood knows this better than anyone and takes full advantage of it. Just take one look at the horrible reviews for TMNT. It’s a bad movie. I’ll agree with that consensus. However, it is supposed to be a bad movie, and in its role as a bad movie, it does magnificently. TMNT is gloriously cheesy, in exactly the same manner the cartoon was 15 years ago.

Which is why these revivals can work, honestly. They don’t attempt to do anything new. That would be a risk, one in which old fans find themselves alienated and new fans uninterested. And it’s because the same 20-somethings who remember those days so fondly are the ones hopping on the bandwagon in Southern California and writing these new flashbacks. Kevin Munroe, the screenwriter, director of the newest Turtles outing is not so much older than generation himself and dozens more are probably hard at work on their Voltron and Thundercats scripts as we speak (which I would not be surprised to see announced within the next two years).

What really works though for this revival is not merely nostalgic flashback, it’s a commercially viable way for Hollywood to be incredibly lazy. They can claim that these films are great throwbacks for the children of the 1980s, but truly what are they offering other than a resurrected cash cow, complete with a million and one marketing avenues, more even than when they first appeared in the 80s, plus the promise of an instant international market.

As one of those aforementioned nostalgic 20-somethings, trying to outrun his childhood, but all too happy to glance back every now and then and watch, I’m a little torn. I always spurn the industry’s attempts to regurgitate processed fluff, storylines and characters that have been used more than once and have no where new to go. However, I love these characters, as hokey and underdeveloped as they might be. And no matter how bad I’ll admit TMNT was as a film, or Transformers will likely be, I am as excited as any 8 year old who just think they look cool or 28 year old who just dug his toy collection out of his parent’s attic.