Where's the nineties nostalgia?

                I am a nineties child. I was born there, raised there, and that’s probably where you’ll find me in the next fifty years. Perhaps it was because then I was a child still fully innocent, but even now I can’t help but marvel at that wonderful decade which –even though it ended all those years ago –seems still fresh in my memory.

                But why exactly were the nineties so great? Was it because of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope? The end of the Soviet Union? Pagers, beepers, and other prehistoric-looking devices? The hilarious fear of Y2K? Nope, I didn’t care about any of those things. For me, it was all about the toys. Very few things in this world compare to the ingenuity of nineties entertainment. It was a golden age for a little fair-haired six year old boy looking for entertainment –me. Let me just describe to you of a few things of my childhood, things which were so perfect that I can only assume will be lining the streets of heaven.

Videogames

Watch out for Blue Turtle Shells.

What better to satisfy an energy-filled boy than handing him some of the most classic videogames ever known to mankind. Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario Kart 64, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Super Mario 64, GoldenEye007 (Perhaps the epitome of the N64), Donkey Kong 64…I could go on, and I didn’t even include Gameboy games. Nineties videogames were so impressionable that even now, fifteen years later, I can vividly remember playing these games with my brothers.

Yes, I actually have this card.

Pokémon

Basically my childhood in a nutshell. I can remember getting up at like six in the morning just to watch Pokémon before elementary school. I probably didn’t even understand most of it, but that didn’t matter –it was Pokémon, so I was drawn to it. But as cool as the show was, there was much more to Pokémon than just that. Pokémon was a card game. It was videogames. It was everything great about the nineties. I probably own like a thousand Pokémon cards, and I find myself often opening up the giant grey bin they’re in just to look at them and breathe in the nostalgia.

Toys

Deadly at ranges up to 52 feet.

I didn’t just spend all my time inside playing card games and video games. The nineties had some pretty sweet toys to play around with. Nerf guns, Super Soakers, action figures (Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Board games were popular then too. I can still remember the cheesy “its fun gettin’ into trouble!” slogan for the Trouble board game. And of course, toy cars. I remember having a bin full of Hot Wheels. I used to race them around tracks with my brothers. Even more, there were books, like Goosebumps and Animorphs, which still jangle around in my head from time to time.

So there you have it –my childhood in but a few paragraphs. From time to time I can’t help but think back on the good ol’ days. I must admit that every now and again I turn on the N64 or look through the bin of Pokémon cards (in fact, my cards are here at school. Funny story about that). I was thinking about all this stuff of my childhood, and I noticed something. Where is all this stuff today? Brandwashed specifically told us that companies should be playing on my nostalgia, yet I don’t see very many commercials with twenty year olds playing Pokémon or any advertisements appealing to the kid in me. I have to say, maybe nostalgia is a selling point to a man buying food for his family in Whole Foods, but I hardly see the appeal to our generation. Regardless of this, I still feel that Nostalgia is innate to people. Something about childhood appeals to our humanity. Personally, I believe Heaven to be the fulfillment of our nostalgic longings into wondrous pleasures, and I think our earthly nostalgia to be a longing for when humanity used to be perfect. Or maybe I just really want to play Pokémon. Who knows.