Retro Recycling

Today we discuss passing on nerd hobbies, then a fun podcast called Daydream Instruction Manual. Finally the fabulous comic book Invincible. ----more---- It’s interesting how popular nerd hobbies are passed down to the next generation more now than they were in 60’s or 70’s. I find it fascinating how pop culture from the 80’s is and has been reused, some cases multiple times. You see retro podcast and even retro cons for various pop culture hits from the 80’s like MOTU, GI Joe and Transformers. It’s popular to collect everything from the 80’s like one guy who collects MOTU Mossman figures, only Mossman no others. One theory I have is maybe we and when I say we I mean Gen Xrs or people between 35 and 55 are more open about the things we played with as a child more than our parents did. We seem to be more excited about them than are parents were. It seems when they grew up and put them away they put them away for good. For us yes we put them away for a time, but got them back out when we got older. We aren’t afraid to talk about them in front of our kids, we aren’t afraid to play with them in front of our kids and encourage them to play with them too. Our kids know what we like. The other day my kids were helping an older lady clean out the house of her brother who died. For several days they were bringing stuff up from the basement and bedrooms out to the main room for her to go through. She had 3 categories to put the items in. Sell, give away and throw away. My kids being kids would look through the items. I wasn’t there, but my son was excited one day when I came home from work. He said dad we saw these old board games one of them was an old 1961 Stratego board game we thought you would like, we asked the lady if we could have them. For those of you who don’t know Stratego is a strategy board game for two players on a board of 10×10 squares. Each player controls 40 pieces representing individual officer ranks in an army. The pieces have Napoleonic insignia. The objective of the game is to find and capture the opponent's Flag, or to capture so many enemy pieces that the opponent cannot make any further moves. She said she is going to ask her son if he wants them and if he doesn’t then we can have them. A few days later they brought Stratego and two other old games home, because her son didn’t want them. I was excited to have these very old board games, then I thought how cool is it my kids know how nerdy I am when they saw something like that they immediately thought of me. And they thought of me in the first place instead of themselves That’s the good that comes from recycling things from our past, we can reconnect with our past and connect with those in our present. Of course as soon as they got the games home they wanted to play. And we did and had a blast. Some may balk at the re-booting of 80’s franchises and to some extent I agree. However the older generation may not like how it’s been redone, but it gets us talking to the new generation about our past. It’s like in Back to the Future when Marty Mclflys dad tells how he met his mom and when Marty goes back he finds out he met his mom because he was a peeping Tom. When these reboots come out we can tell our kids the truth how it was exactly done when we were young. We can tell them what we were thinking when we saw the original TV show or played with the action figure. How they made us feel and behaved, we can tell them what we did with our action figures and the stories that go with them. How we went to so and so house and setup a battle field in his back yard. What was going on in the world at the time we were playing with these things. Again it’s not just the item that’s important it’s the memories that are attached to the item. Yes, we sound like old curmudgeons when we say, “back in my day our Heman wore a fur diapers and we liked it.” Try to keep the negative comments to a minimum. How about “cool that they brought it back when I pl