80s & 90s Nostalgia

It's weird being the children of immigrants. Even more so being the child of refugees. The thought occurred to me (but obviously not for the first time) as I was watching television last week and on came an advertisement for ancestry.com. A sort of quasi-Facebook/Friendster type service, ancestry.com encourages their users to upload and maintain their family tree, allowing users to map out their family history. Watching the 40 year old WASP actor in the commercial feign excitement at discovering his grandfather was a World War II hero, I couldn't help but feel empty knowing that for me the exercise would be completely futile. After a war, a forced escape, trying to go more than maybe two generations deep would be a pointless exercise. It's not a unique experience for those of us who are the child of immigrants. In high school, history lessons never felt like they applied to you. After all, this wasn't my history.

Which may explain the disproportionate popularity of 1980s and 90s nostalgia. Sites like Torontoist and BlogTO have made a cottage industry out of posting videos of commercials and cartoon introductions of television shows just broadcast twenty years ago. Could it be because a city like Toronto, where immigrants make up more than fifty percent of the population share no other collective past? RetroOntario, a channel on YouTube has become the standard bearer for 70s to 90s kitsch. Some of my favourite vids?

NIGHTMARE the board game.

In an era of Playstation 3s and IPhones, its hard to believe that a board game with a VHS tape could cause such a stir, but it did. I still remember playing this at the birthday party of this site's founder and editor, and him cheating so shamelessly to win.

Was there a more endearing/creepy figure than the War Amps robot that got its arm torn off? And how is it that this commercial more than twenty years ago has better production values than most ads today?

Twenty years later and two things still bug me about this commercial.

1. There's no way any one would ever forget their teacher looking like that. I still remember all of my 'attractive' high school and grade school teachers, and none of them probably ever ranked above a 6.

2. With all the cool helicopters, suave British accents, and improbably good looking people, the best name they could come up with for the pilot was 'Bugsy Brown'?

Catch the taste!

Living in Toronto means not having sports teams that... well, win. But for one brief shining moment, the Blue Jays were the greatest team on Earth, and Roberto Alomar was king of the city. "Catch the Taste" become as iconic in Toronto as 'He shoots, he scores"

Considering I spent most of my formative years in front of the television, I probably could use a message to get up and move around a bit. It would have been nice if they picked a couple that looked like they worked out themselves every now and then.

Now that I think about it, that stupid log never really did lead anywhere, did it?