Loading ...
I remember when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the show Happy Days was a big deal. Happy Days was a sitcom set in the 1950s, and that appealed to people that had been teenagers back then but were now grown adults with their own families, and perhaps more importantly were old enough to have a yearning for the bygone times of their youth.
Nostalgia. It’s a powerful force. A money-making force if you can tap into it. Let about 20-30 years pass, enough time for there to be an entire generation with no personal experience of what their forebears experienced, and you can strike gold by digging back into that recent past. You don’t even have to be subtle about it, as evidenced by That ’70s Show. More recently, Stranger Things unabashedly hit me right in the proverbial feels (as the kids say) because yes, now I’m old enough to have the nostalgias. I would have been pretty much exactly that age at exactly that time, and you better believe I had a bike and blew through quarters at arcades and had my red boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons.
Although weirdest thing? The guys who wrote Stranger Things — The Duffer Brothers — weren’t born until 1984. So they are of that newer generation of whippersnapper Millenials that only know of the early 1980s by proxy.
But I digress. Last week I had Dawn draw something she had no personal experience with, a Mold-A-Rama souvenir machine. I renamed it to Mold-O-Matic because I think that rolls off the tongue better and hey, maybe we’re protected in the <0.000001 chance the makers of the Mold-A-Rama were to get testy about trademarks. Hey, don’t laugh, when I looked them up I found out that a) they’re still around, and b) they seem to be at every frickin’ zoo in America. Also Choose Your Own Adventure recently sued Netflix. Sometimes nostalgia bites back.
But anyhow I won’t lie, it kind of floored me to see a Mold-A-Rama machine when looking up recent images of the San Antonio zoo, lookin much the same as I remembered from little Clint at the L.A. Zoo putting in the coins for his very own overpriced, freshly produced plastic animal, warm and waxy from the bin.
So Dawn’s problem wasn’t that the machines were gone, the way a five year old these days looks confused at a CD — Dawn’s problem was her family never took her to the zoo.
I wonder if that’s why she was much more impressed by the concept of 3D printers than I ever was. I think I might be stuck in thinking of a 3D printer as being nothing more than a programmable Mold-A-Rama.
It tickles me though that while Dawn may not share my memory, more than a few of you readers did. And while I don’t have a kid, I’m pretty sure that if I did and I took them to the zoo I’d want to give them the money for a Mold-A-Rama souvenir and watch them watch the mold press together at their command. Would they be as fascinated as I was? I feel like the fact the machines are still around means some things are just weirdly timeless like that. Probably the best kind of nostalgia of all is the kind you can pass on.