People love to reminisce and nostalgia can create an incredibly emotional response from an audience. As a society, our love for ’90s and 2000s culture certainly isn't going away any time soon. And yet, is our pining for this bygone era being overdone in media and marketing? Are people feeling their favourite childhood heroes are being overly commercialised, or are they loving the extra content?
Jonathan Izzard shares his thoughts with MediaCat below...
"As Don Draper put it in his single biggest pull-it-out-the-bag moment, nostalgia is “delicate but potent…a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone, [that] takes us to a place where we ache to go again." That’s why Gladiators’ return to Saturday night schedules has worked so well. It reminds the previous generation of a time when Saturday night telly really was a family affair, and rekindling the warmth of that experience with their own clans. Is it creative or original? No. Does it matter? Not really. This is an issue when it comes to storytelling, however. While Lord and Miller’s 21 Jump Street showed that nostalgia and creativity can make very comfortable bedfellows, the list of failed Hollywood call-back projects is long — from Baywatch to The Dukes of Hazzard. A reminder that the emotional pull of nostalgia can risk it becoming a lazy substitute (rather than a powerful stimulus) for creativity, requiring Draper’s subtle hand rather than the brute force bludgeoning of the South Park ‘member berries‘."
