Reality bites: why He-Man, Care Bears, and Miami Vice are making a comeback

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Courtney Rubin

FOR THREE DAYS EACH JUNE, NEW York's cavernous Jacob Javits Convention Center becomes ground zero for an annual confab known as the Licensing Show, in which several hundred food, film, and toy companies convene in an orgy of T-shirts, dolls, trinkets, and practically anything else that can be licensed, franchised, marketed, or sold. Between the crowds and the costumed characters (Big Bird, Mickey and Minnie) prowling the aisles, the show is like Disney World for marketers and retailers. It also has more than a touch of Tomorrowland: It's the place to go for a preview of pop culture.

Yet there was something oddly familiar about this year's offerings: Hasbro trotted out a Godzilla-sized Tonka Truck; Mattel reintroduced Hot Wheels cars; and the Cartoon Network touted its $20-million resurrection of the '80s cartoon smash "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe," along with 25 new He-Man toys aimed to coincide with the cartoon's comeback. Fox Broadcasting plugged upcoming revitalizations of such dubious 1980s fare as the Cabbage Patch Kids and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, while Yogi Bear, the Jetsons, Strawberry Shortcake, and the treacly Care Bears were ubiquitous on T-shirts.

Elsewhere, the story is similar. In August, People magazine paid homage to '80s country-club chic, showing photos of Matthew Broderick and Natalie Portman in Lacoste shirts. People's sibling In Style breathlessly reported that Kate Hudson was snapping up '80s inspired guitar pick earrings, which feature song titles such as "Lucky Star" and "Call Me" imprinted on hideously mismatching bright pink and orange picks. Television airwaves are also returning to the '80s: NBC's "The '80s Show" vies with Nick at Nite's "Threes Company," and "Facts of Life" (and coming soon, "Family Ties" and "Cheers"). Movies in the works for 2003 and beyond include Ang Lees remake of "The Incredible Hulk," plus big-screen versions of "Starsky and Hutch," "Hogans Heroes," "I Dream of Jeannie," and even that '80s stalwart, "Miami Vice." A poster on display at the Javits Center that displayed the hirsute former sitcom star A.L.E (currently enjoying an unlikely comeback alongside fellow '80s relic Mr. T in television ads for 1-800-Collect) neatly captured the prevailing ethos: "Retro is in. Just stick with me, boys--this Spider-Man thing is just a phase" Indeed, retro--Generation X retro, specifically--is back. For what was most notable about this year's glimpse of the future is how much it looked like the past.

Chances are if you're already intimately familiar with these figures--if your Christmas list once included Cabbage Patch Kids, if you idled away your pre-adolescent afternoons watching "He-Man" and "Starsky and Hutch" reruns, if there was ever a time in which you unselfconsciously wore Izod shirts--you came of age in the 1980s. And chances are if any of the above elicited pangs of nostalgia, you, like me, are a member of Generation X--one of the 46 million Americans born between 1965 and 1978. (Or, if you prefer, anyone too young to remember the Kennedy assassination and too old to have had a cell phone in college.) For a few brief years, before the dot-com boom eclipsed them, Gen Xers were a staple of nationwide media coverage, known chiefly for their irony, ennui, and general self-loathing. That and their visceral hatred for the self-absorbed, self-important Baby Boom generation that preceded them.

So it's more than a little, er, ironic that a generation unified by its disgust with the Baby Boomers' nauseating glorification of its youth culture should now be wallowing in its own. But after scanning the Licensing Show lineup of what will soon constitute pop culture's next big things, one can't help but notice a curious difference: Unlike earlier strains of generational nostalgia, Generation X chooses to celebrate not the best of its youth, but the worst.

Scooby Doo-Doo

Why the sudden revival of the sort of schlocky '80s culture best left in the attic--or the dumpster? Like many trends, this one is driven in part by Hollywood's marketing groupthink. If Charlie's Angels hit it big at the box office two years ago, it must follow that America is starving for big-screen versions of "Scooby Doo" and "Starsky and Hutch." And now that Xers are hitting the age when they're able to call the shots at movie and television studios, they want to mark their own territory--and it doesn't hurt to do it in ways that stick it to their elders. On Nick at Nite, the all-reruns-all-the-time cable channel launched 15 years ago as a way to milk Boomer nostalgia, "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Mary Tyler Moore" have been shunted to TV's equivalent of a nursing home: the TV Land channel. After all, Nick at Nite had to make room for '80s vintage cornball shows like "Threes Company" and "The Facts of Life."

Xers are also having kids, and movies like the new Scooby Doo are calculated to appeal to the whole family: Xer parents can reminisce about the many episodes in which some haggard old villain nabbed by the gang grumbled about "you meddling kids," while their kids are kept happy with that age-old preteen pleaser: flatulence jokes. The same fun-for-the-whole-family ploy is at work in Old Navy's fall ad campaign. A takeoff on the "Brady Bunch," complete with theme song, the ads lure media-savvy Gen X moms and dads into the stores--"It's a Sunshine Day" playing in an endless loop--to buy Old Navy rugby shirts for their kids. (It doesn't hurt that Xers are also the ones who can spot '80s icon Morgan Fairchild as Mrs. Brady in the commercial, which makes us feel in on the joke.)