What year is your nostalgia cutoff point?

[AnimatedFan01]

Having been born in 2001, I have a strong emotional attachment to the 2000s era and actively seek out cartoons, television series, movies, video games, advertisements, and archived content from that decade. My most frequent target is 2006-2008 because those are the years I most clearly remember and associate the best content with.

In my opinion, the end of childhood nostalgia for me would be 2009. I have a lot of reasons as to why this year was the point at which my childhood gradually declined, but I'll just cut to the basics, covering media first:

By this year, most of the shows I had been watching (the "Big Three" kids networks were the main ones I watched) had either ended or been cancelled.

For CN, this was their lowest point, as Foster's and Ed, Edd 'n Eddy, two of their greatest and most classic shows in my humble opinion, had ended. EEnE at least went out with a bang, but Foster's, not so much, as the finale felt rushed. The only good originals that were still going were Chowder and Flapjack, but it didn't help that they were going to end by the next year anyway. I wasn't caring for the Ben 10 reboots or the Secret Saturdays. Other than that, their lineup only consisted of Canadian and action imports, the only good one of which was Total Drama (IMO). But the ultimate ship sail this year was the introduction of CN Real. No further comment needed on that one.

For Nick, I wasn't really watching them outside of SpongeBob, but this was definitely the time SB hit its ultimate decline, around seasons 6-7, where the writing became atrociously bad and gave us infamous fan-unfavorites like Squid's Visit, Someone's in the Kitchen with Sandy, Pets vs. Pests, Slide Whistle Stooges, and the filler-waste 1-hour TV special Truth or Square. Most of the good kidcoms like Drake and Josh and Ned's Declassified had already long ended, and iCarly had already gone downhill with the infamous iMeet Fred. This was also the period where their logo changed from the classic splat to just orange letters. They were milking off Dreamworks spin-off shows and brought us arguably their least positively received cartoon, Fanboy & Chum Chum.

As for Disney Channel, the only good thing that stood with them was Phineas and Ferb (that was their only original cartoon left before Fish Hooks a year later). The Replacements and Kim Possible had ended, which gave me no reason to watch the network anymore. The Suite Life of Zack and Cody was replaced by On Deck, which I didn't enjoy and found rather boring. The rest of their kidcoms I had no interest in watching.

There weren't many movies I cared to see which came out, aside from Up. I saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in theaters this year and it didn't sit well with me I was just unimpressed and bored. Ditto for Monsters vs. Aliens.

This had also been the year where I made the transition to a new elementary school for Third Grade, which was a turning point that sets a divide between "Old" and "New" regarding memories. For the record, I don't regard content from 2009 as "old" (okay, old kind of, but not OLD OLD, if that makes sense) the same way people as old as me would, and for the record I don't even consider content from 2006 to 2008 to be that old, though I do get more nostalgia from it which sets a divide between how recent or not I consider something. In fact, I do find it hard to believe that 2007 was 15 years ago; when someone says "15 years ago", I think of the late 90s, not 2007.

I guess my loss of nostalgia at 2009 had to do with the gradual transition into "The New 10s".

 

[BlooCNBoy02]

My nostalgia era's decline was between 2010-2011.
Cartoon Network, in the sense of branding, started going downhill when they introduced the current logo. Same goes for Nickelodeon. The big two commercial channels of Hungary remained great as long as they were broadcast in 4:3, but by September 2011, both went to widescreen.
The total ending point for me was the year change from 2011 to 2012, when CN got removed from my cable service.

 

[Dr.Pepper]

Do you mean childhood nostalgia or just nostalgia in general? At any rate, I consider before the summer of 1998 to be a good dividing point between early childhood and tween years. This was when I started watching Nick and just before the release of Pokémon. This is also when I started Girl Scouts (for a non media example).

 

[AnimatedFan01]

Do you mean childhood nostalgia or just nostalgia in general? At any rate, I consider before the summer of 1998 to be a good dividing point between early childhood and tween years. This was when I started watching Nick and just before the release of Pokémon. This is also when I started Girl Scouts (for a non media example).

I mainly mean childhood nostalgia but nostalgia in general is also plausible if you can provide any examples. I just don't feel any nostalgia for anything past 2008 and have trouble viewing it as "old".

Having said that, other events from 2009 which set it as the end of nostalgia for me include the permanent shutdown of my local Hollywood Video store towards the end of the year, the death of Michael Jackson, and the decline of the PlayStation 2's popularity (after which I switched to the Wii gaming console). The only highlight of this year regarding media is that I switched from DISH Network to DirecTV, and got a few channels that I didn't previously have like Boomerang and Nicktoons, though that's not saying much since TV had already declined in quality for me at the time, save for the occasional good SpongeBob episode, Chowder, Flapjack, Total Drama, and some reruns of Eds, Foster's, and Billy and Mandy.

 

[Dr.Pepper]

I feel nostalgia not in a “dang that’s old” but “those were good times” kind of way. I’ve noticed that basically anything that came out after I hit puberty age, doesn’t feel that old. Movies like Finding Nemo and Lilo & Stitch are older than Encanto and Turning Red, but they don’t feel vintage.

 

[ATSFGuy]

I feel nostalgia not in a “dang that’s old” but “those were good times” kind of way. I’ve noticed that basically anything that came out after I hit puberty age, doesn’t feel that old. Movies like Finding Nemo and Lilo & Stitch are older than Encanto and Turning Red, but they don’t feel vintage.

For my railroad operations I have four:

Pioneer Era
(Sometimes)

Transition Era

Modern Era x2


I feel nostalgia not in a “dang that’s old” but “those were good times” kind of way. I’ve noticed that basically anything that came out after I hit puberty age, doesn’t feel that old. Movies like Finding Nemo and Lilo & Stitch are older than Encanto and Turning Red, but they don’t feel vintage.
My overall railroad time frames are as follows:

Pioneer Era: (1860-1910)
(I sometimes call this the “Beginner’s Era”)

Golden Era: (1910-1940)

Transition Era: (1940-1970)

Modern Era x2

(1970-1989)

(1990-2010)






TV time frames:

Nickelodeon: 1997-2012, 2013

Noggin: 1999-2009
(Periodically)

Nicktoons TV: 2002-2014

The N: 2002-2009, 2010

Cartoon Network: 1999-2010

Boomerang: 2000-2015

Disney Channel: 1999-2003, 2004-2007

Toon Disney: 1998-2006, 2007

 

[ATSFGuy]

I feel nostalgia not in a “dang that’s old” but “those were good times” kind of way. I’ve noticed that basically anything that came out after I hit puberty age, doesn’t feel that old. Movies like Finding Nemo and Lilo & Stitch are older than Encanto and Turning Red, but they don’t feel vintage.

Keep in mind some of the kids movies coming out today are a far cry from what we grew up with.

Lilo and Stitch was a good one, Haven’t seen Encanto or Turning Red.

 

[wonderfly]

I mainly mean childhood nostalgia but nostalgia in general is also plausible if you can provide any examples. I just don't feel any nostalgia for anything past 2008 and have trouble viewing it as "old".

In your original post, you said you were born in 2001, so you're in your early 20's now, right? What you're experiencing is childhood nostalgia, but give it another decade (or maybe two) and you'll probably have nostalgia for your 20's.

I think you can have nostalgia from around when you start to have childhood memories to around when you "get too old". Thus, I tend to be nostalgic for anything from 1982/1983 (when my childhood memories kick in) to around 2007 to 2009 (when I finally started "settling down", after I had turned 30 years old).

Everyone has their own cutoff. Sometimes the nostalgia "cutoff" is more fixed on certain media. Fox Kids nostalgia for me ends around 1995 (around when I graduated high school and they lost the rights to Animaniacs, around when new episodes of Batman ended). I loved cable TV until around 2008/2009 (that's around when Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi Channel, G4 TV, started to go downhill, and I cut cable in 2010). I love Kids WB until around 2002/2003, though sometimes I can go to 2006 (when Kids WB lost the rights to Pokemon). I like the WB before it became "The CW" in 2005.

On the flip side, even though my personal memories start in the early 80's, I do like the late 70's. A few years back, IGN on YouTube did a nostalgia series titled "The History of Awesome", and their starting point is in 1977 with the launch of the original Star Wars film. And that's around when video game arcades starting becoming popular, that's around when the Superman films were premiering and the Incredible Hulk was on TV. Also, McDonalds started using "Happy Meals" in 1979. I got to thinking about it, and yeah, I agree: Late 70's is when the "good" pop culture really started to take off. Everything before 1976 is more for the Baby Boomers and they're fondness for their childhoods in the 50's and 60's, and then in the early 70's it was all about Nixon and Vietnam and the only Sci-Fi culture we had was "Planet of the Apes". That's not MY type of nostalgia.

Speaking broadly politically, sometimes I think the media culture went downhill around 2006, sometimes I think it's more around 2012. And that's not tied to who's in Washington DC, but just the divisive landscape that's been toxic for the last 10 to 15 years. I'm still debating where the cut off point is for when it all went wrong, but I think it's around when social media took over.

All I know is that Saturday Morning cartoons ended in 2014 (when Vortexx ended) and that's around when McDonalds stopped using Ronald McDonald as a mascot, and that's when I put my foot down and say "It's not good anymore".

EDIT: I'm beginning to think the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012 wasn't signaling the end of the world, but the end of people being happy with our present day life. Everyone's bitter about everything now. I mean, I like the current Marvel movies, and I like Disney Neo-Renaissance animated films, but I can't escape the feeling that it was "better" before 2012. Or maybe before 2009. Or maybe 2006. I mean, "Justice League" and "Teen Titans" ended in 2006, and that's gotta signal some sort of "cutoff", right? Wasn't it all "better" back then?

 

[Darklordavaitor]

I feel like 2013 is a good place to signify the end of the monoculture and a logical nostalgic stopping point for many, as that's when Netflix first started releasing original series. There was definitely a feeling of change within the previous 5-10 years, but it feels like when House of Cards and Orange is the New Black dropped, the landscape largely hasn't been the same since.

Or maybe 2011, as that's when Spotify launched in the US? Legal streaming somehow obliterated purchasing AND pirating at the same time, and now that we have the history of music available at our finger tips for a small price, it does feel like new releases don't matter as much as they used to?

I definitely feel that there's been a shift in our culture over the past 10 years, and these have contributed to at least why that is for media.

 

[Pooky]

Personally, I can be nostalgic for as recent as 2019. There were some fairly major life changes for me in late 2019, so that's part of it, but mostly, given how the 2020s have been, can you blame me?

On the flip side, even though my personal memories start in the early 80's, I do like the late 70's. A few years back, IGN on YouTube did a nostalgia series titled "The History of Awesome", and their starting point is in 1977 with the launch of the original Star Wars film. And that's around when video game arcades starting becoming popular, that's around when the Superman films were premiering and the Incredible Hulk was on TV. Also, McDonalds started using "Happy Meals" in 1979. I got to thinking about it, and yeah, I agree: Late 70's is when the "good" pop culture really started to take off. Everything before 1976 is more for the Baby Boomers and they're fondness for their childhoods in the 50's and 60's, and then in the early 70's it was all about Nixon and Vietnam and the only Sci-Fi culture we had was "Planet of the Apes". That's not MY type of nostalgia.

There's a somewhat popular theory that we are actually most nostalgic for the decade prior to our birth (proponents include Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb and in particular Tom De Haven, three writers/artists born in the 1940s who consider the 1930s to be the peak of American culture). I think you can expand this to "the decade prior to our earliest memories"; I for one have always been somewhat fascinated by the 80s, and I have only one very specific (and very late) memory of the decade (my third birthday in December 1989) and the rest of my memories kick in in 1990. It does help explain a lot of the nostalgic trends of the past 50 years or so, when you consider that teenagers are effectively the "gatekeepers" of what's cool, e.g. the 50s revival in the 70s, the extreme reverence for the 60s in a lot of 80s pop culture, the 70s nostalgia in the 90s, the 80s suddenly becoming cool about ten years ago, the current 90s/early 00s nostalgia. In most of these cases, the driving force was probably people who actually lived through these decades, but they probably couldn't get as far as they did without getting teens and young adults on board.

Of course a wrinkle here is that there's a lot of bleed over between decades. A lot of 80s stuff was still in my orbit in my early childhood, so while I didn't really "live through" the decade, it does kind of feel like I did. I got into a lot of new wave and synthpop music in the early 00s, so when I listen to it now, there's often a weird sensation of nostalgia on two levels; nostalgia for my own teens when I first listened to them, and "cultural nostalgia" for a period I didn't actually live through.

In terms of the actually decade before I was born, I do like a lot of 70s stuff, but I don't think (despite my disco hair!) I would quite be considered "a 70s guy". I do have nostalgia for the 20s-mid 60s, but it's kind of a generalised nostalgia for a world of black and white movies and TV shows, cartoons in the theatre, radio comedies and so forth, I don't extensively distinguish between the decades.

In terms of decades I do actually remember, 90s was my childhood and there's a lot about it I love and a lot I don't. I never liked the "Extreme/Attitude/Gross Out" elements that were so prevalent in marketing at the time, and I still don't now, even if I liked/like a lot of what they were advertising. The stereotypical "Gen X/Slacker attitude" is not something that ever particular appealed to me, and I'm not hugely fond of some of the stuff that was key to that demographic (Grunge music etc). The 00s were a mixed bag for me and I thought and continue to think that most of the mainstream culture was either pretty bad or "not for me"; I have some nostalgic fondness for 00s stuff, but mainly as kitsch. I had a lot of good times in the 2010s, but I don't really have any cultural nostalgia for it yet. Occasionally I'll catch something from then and think "wow, 201X was longer ago then I realised!"

To add, I do think in the big picture, while we may have had a bit of a setback in the last few years, in the big picture I think the world as a whole has mostly gotten better and better over the years. You can recognise that and still have nostalgia for a lot of the small picture elements.

 

[AnimatedFan01]

I think the reason why I have trouble feeling nostalgic for the early 2010s is because some of the things that were deemed "new" back then are still going today or only went out of fashion not too long ago.

For example, the Nickelodeon orange letter logo from 2009 is still present today. Additionally, even though Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Gumball premiered 12-11 years ago, they only ended a few years ago and Gumball is still reran today and is getting a movie. Teen Titans Go! is still airing new episodes. And to top it all off, the CN logo is the same as it was when they rebranded into the Check It era in 2010.

To me the 2020s are basically the 2010s 2.0.

 

[Pooky]

I get what you're saying, but I can think of some pretty big differences...

 

[Red Arrow]

I am 25 years old and when it comes to media/entertainment, my current cut-off point seems to be 2013, when I was 16 years old. This makes me pretty nostalgic.

 

[wonderfly]

Personally, I can be nostalgic for as recent as 2019. There were some fairly major life changes for me in late 2019, so that's part of it, but mostly, given how the 2020s have been, can you blame me?

I don't think anyone can be nostalgic for any time period that's less than 5 years old, but I get that "life changes" can force that hindsight into a nostalgic view.

There's a somewhat popular theory that we are actually most nostalgic for the decade prior to our birth (proponents include Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb and in particular Tom De Haven, three writers/artists born in the 1940s who consider the 1930s to be the peak of American culture). I think you can expand this to "the decade prior to our earliest memories"; I for one have always been somewhat fascinated by the 80s, and I have only one very specific (and very late) memory of the decade (my third birthday in December 1989) and the rest of my memories kick in in 1990. It does help explain a lot of the nostalgic trends of the past 50 years or so, when you consider that teenagers are effectively the "gatekeepers" of what's cool, e.g. the 50s revival in the 70s, the extreme reverence for the 60s in a lot of 80s pop culture, the 70s nostalgia in the 90s, the 80s suddenly becoming cool about ten years ago, the current 90s/early 00s nostalgia. In most of these cases, the driving force was probably people who actually lived through these decades, but they probably couldn't get as far as they did without getting teens and young adults on board.

I think it depends on when you were born - if you were born in 1988 or 1989, I have a hard time imagining you being fond for the 70's, but for the 80's, most definitely. On the other hand, if you were born in 1993, yeah, considering how much 80's reruns slipped into the 90's, I can picture a person born in 1993 having nostalgia for the 80's.

 

[Dr.Pepper]

Personally, I can be nostalgic for as recent as 2019. There were some fairly major life changes for me in late 2019, so that's part of it, but mostly, given how the 2020s have been, can you blame me?

I was just thinking the other day, I’m nostalgic for 2019 too, especially the summer. That year started and I declared it as “my year” and I wanted to improve my personal life by making new friends and furthering my career. I was hyped for Pokémon Sword and Shield, Steven Universe The Movie, Toy Story 4, Lion King remake, and Disney +. I went to the zoo with a friend from work and it was the last year I worked at a more traditional summer camp. Then 2020 rolled around, and shot everything down the crapper. Thankfully, I’m now starting to pick up where I left off.

 

[wonderfly]

I was just thinking the other day, I’m nostalgic for 2019 too, especially the summer. That year started and I declared it as “my year” and I wanted to improve my personal life by making new friends and furthering my career. I was hyped for Pokémon Sword and Shield, Steven Universe The Movie, Toy Story 4, Lion King remake, and Disney +. I went to the zoo with a friend from work and it was the last year I worked at a more traditional summer camp. Then 2020 rolled around, and shot everything down the crapper. Thankfully, I’m now starting to pick up where I left off.

Every generation seems to have that. A "time before Covid". A time before the 9/11 attacks. A time before Vietnam.

 

[Peter Paltridge]

To be truthful here....if you set a "cutoff date" you will eventually turn into that old man who's always stuck in the past. You don't have to necessarily be a child at a point in time to remember something fondly from it. Find something to like about every decade you're alive in.

 

[wonderfly]

To be truthful here....if you set a "cutoff date" you will eventually turn into that old man who's always stuck in the past. You don't have to necessarily be a child at a point in time to remember something fondly from it. Find something to like about every decade you're alive in.

I agree with the sentiment, and I did say in the post above that I like many modern pop culture elements - I like the Mandalorian, I like the Marvel movies, I like the theatrical Disney films of the last decade.

But I miss how much Batman: The Animated Series meant to me, how much Gargoyles, Pokemon and Justice League meant to me, and then I contrast it with how difficult "being an adult" is and raising kids, and something eventually snaps inside of you. I wonder: why does the premiere of "Batman the Animated Series" mean more to me then the premiere of "The Mandalorian"?!? Because back then, Batman and Fox Kids was the only thing that needed my attention in life.

 

[Pooky]

I think it depends on when you were born - if you were born in 1988 or 1989, I have a hard time imagining you being fond for the 70's, but for the 80's, most definitely. On the other hand, if you were born in 1993, yeah, considering how much 80's reruns slipped into the 90's, I can picture a person born in 1993 having nostalgia for the 80's.

I think before global release dates became standard, there's also an element that a lot of pop culture sensations hit, peaked or lasted until a later date in other countries. In my case, a lot of nostalgic US kids' touchstones from the 80s got going or peaked in the UK in the 90s. The Ninja Turtles were pretty much launched in the UK in 1990 and peaked a little later; the second and third films actually outgrossed the first here. Nintendo and the Mario characters didn't really kick off here until the early 90s (Master System had outsold the NES in the UK in the 80s). Transformers had almost certainly peaked here in the 80s, but it hadn't come to a standstill like it had in the US; new Gen 1 toys were released until 1992, and the UK comic was still going strong, it was still a current brand when Gen 2 was launched. Real Ghostbusters toys were still prominent on shelves until about 1993/4, and the cartoon was still showing on one of our main channels until at least 1996. At the time importing shows could be highly scrutinised, so our 4 main channels would often get as much out of their imports as they could; BBC was still showing Thundercats until 1995, and ITV was still showing Hulk Hogan's Rock N Wrestling until 1994, which seems truly bizarre in retrospect! (And not 80s but Channel 4 was still showing Hammerman in 1997!) And of course before Streaming and even DVD it was still a big deal when a famous/popular film got its premier or sometimes even second/third showing on Mainstream TV, so a lot of mid-late 80s films were still a big deal.

I feel like 2013 is a good place to signify the end of the monoculture and a logical nostalgic stopping point for many, as that's when Netflix first started releasing original series. There was definitely a feeling of change within the previous 5-10 years, but it feels like when House of Cards and Orange is the New Black dropped, the landscape largely hasn't been the same since.

Or maybe 2011, as that's when Spotify launched in the US? Legal streaming somehow obliterated purchasing AND pirating at the same time, and now that we have the history of music available at our finger tips for a small price, it does feel like new releases don't matter as much as they used to?

I definitely feel that there's been a shift in our culture over the past 10 years, and these have contributed to at least why that is for media.

It's interesting you say that, because the idea that "the Monoculture is dead" had been around for a good while before 2011; indeed in 2011 I remember the Salon article Why I Miss the Monoculture getting a good deal of attention and being cited as something people found very resonate. Of course from our vantage point the pop culture landscape of that era seems relatively quaint and easy to assess. I know someone who thinks it's very poignant that the Simpsons episode And Maggie Makes Three suggests it's sad that the only time a 90s family would spend together is watching TV because the idea of getting that many family members all watching TV in the same room at the same time now feels like a dream.

It could be said there's still a monoculture, just about. The MCU would be the most obvious example of something everyone at least knows about. On the flipside you could say the Monoculture theory had long or always been flawed. In the 1970s a Christian documentary film like In Search of Noah's Ark could be in the Top 10 for the year at the Box Office, but it's clear it was mostly a very specific audience going to see it. In the 90s Country artists could rack up amazing sales figures while being barely known out of the South. And that's just talking about the US, not the world (or even just "the West") as a whole.

 

[wonderfly]

It's interesting you say that, because the idea that "the Monoculture is dead" had been around for a good while before 2011; indeed in 2011 I remember the Salon article Why I Miss the Monoculture getting a good deal of attention and being cited as something people found very resonate. Of course from our vantage point the pop culture landscape of that era seems relatively quaint and easy to assess. I know someone who thinks it's very poignant that the Simpsons episode And Maggie Makes Three suggests it's sad that the only time a 90s family would spend together is watching TV because the idea of getting that many family members all watching TV in the same room at the same time now feels like a dream.

Wow, that article is such a time capsule of 2011. The writers says "Avatar" and "Harry Potter" failed to bring America together the same way "Star Wars" and "The Matrix" did (that's....an opinion. But it's true that this was before "Avengers" in 2012 cemented the status of Marvel films in pop culture). And he makes the comment that "Facebook's not political" (wow, that didn't last).

Darklordavaitor is correct that this was before Netflix's original programming really took off (and America was just coming out of the Recession in 2011). I had already cut cable by that point, but streaming was in it's early years (I personally mostly used Hulu to watch reruns, and I was still going to the local "Hollywood Video" to rent DVDs of TV series). Yeah, that article is vey "moment in time"....