Duly Noted | Nineties nostalgia comes of age

The ’90s nostalgia that showed its first signs with the unfortunate plaid comeback of late has reached its pinnacle. Your childhood is coming back to a television near you.

Nickelodeon recently announced that a slew of scrunchie-era TV shows will air on the late-night block starting this fall on TeenNick. Remember when that time slot used to air I Love Lucy? When did the ’90s become so old?

Nick doesn’t have a monopoly on ’90s love; it’s just been quicker to package it. Quality shows like Boy Meets World, The Wonder Years and Saved By the Bell have appeared on the rerun loop of cable networks since their cancellations. But they’ve almost always been at odd times, stuck among decidedly less cool shows like Doogie Howser, M.D.

Nick’s approach is doing what it does best — catering to a niche market. Instead this time, rather than the 8-11 year old bracket, they’re targeting the 18-25 group. It’s like TV Land for the younger set.

The changing culture of TV in the last few years, with current shows available online, sometimes the next day, might explain the intensity with which college students cling to their fifth-grade entertainment. College freshman Matthew Feldman said that, with options like Hulu and network-supported online episodes, people have lost that “ability to look forward to something” on a given night, at a given time.

Maybe that’s why we hold on to Cory Matthews and Kenan Thompson in his pre-Saturday Night Live days. Because at that time, they were part of our routine, of our daily lives, instead of something squeezed in between classes.

The thing with nostalgia in 2011 is that it doesn’t just age in the crevasses of memory, gathering that little retrospective twinkle of idealism, never to be seen again. With a bit of virus-dodging online video searching, ’90s kids can relive just about anything from our childhood — anything that was broadcast, that is.

I was one of those weird kids who didn’t get cable until high school. So my memories of Hey Arnold! (now available on Netflix) and Are You Afraid of the Dark? (status unknown) also bring me back to after school visits to my grandmother, whose love of Spanish soap operas necessitated Cablevision. So for me, ’90s TV is like double nostalgia. I know, it’s all very overwhelming.

In retrospect, there were a good number of tropes in ’90s kids TV — the alcoholic parent best friend, the goody-two-shoes-goes-angsty teenage girl, the ubiquitous annoying kid sibling. This whole mess of JanSport backpacks, high fives and the word “like” all seem to blend into one, making it easy to group gems like My So-Called Life together with the lowbrow like the television adaptation of Clueless. Here is where our memory fails us and the miracle of modern technology steps in.

The growing availability of so many of these shows, both live-action and animated, slime-covered and educational, makes nostalgia almost curable. But is that such a good thing?

College freshman John Lu remembers a time when “TV Guide was a more important aspect of life.” He said that our generation’s culture of instant gratification has made things like TV shows “less important.” There’s a chance the shows of our childhood will be similarly cheapened by increasingly easy access.

What will happen now that we can watch so many of our shows and slip back into the days of spelling tests and Tamagotchis? Will All That be as rad as it was back in the day, without the cereal commercials and preteen audience? Will we find that Clarissa really did explain it all? We may realize something truly sad — it wasn’t as good as we remembered.

Rachel del Valle is a College freshman from Newark, N.J. Her email address is delvalle@theDP.com. Duly Noted appears every other Friday.

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