Maybe it’s the impending shadow of graduation looming over everything I do this semester, but I’ve been unintentionally returning to shows, music, movies, and even themes in my art that had been figuratively boarded up and put away for several years. For me, I was much more unapologetic about my interests when I was in elementary school. In some ways, this resulted in an immeasurable amount of retrospective cringe, but I’m realizing that maybe, just maybe, my younger self was onto something.Â
It all started in my 9:30 AM painting class when a friend of mine mentioned she’d found a playlist on YouTube of all the old original Barbie movies, which are at least 45% percent responsible for who I am today. That night, sketching my thumbnails, I put on objectively one of the best Barbie franchise movies, Barbie in a Mermaid Tale, and transported myself to a world of sparkly pink dolphins and magical ocean society politics (my dream evening). If you ignore the fact that Merliah shouldn’t have been complaining about getting to be a mermaid, that movie is an absolute blast. My elementary school self had phenomenal taste.Â
This has snowballed into putting on several other shows of my childhood, fully conscious of the fact that the rose colored glasses of nostalgia painted these storylines in the brightest of colors. Don’t let the cringe demons make you halt here, whatever gets you through the semester.Â
The purest form of our imaginations is rooted in childhood. Then, our minds aren’t yet hindered by the crushing reality of what isn’t really possible. You might still be optimistic about the sharpener on the back of the crayon box, even though it just leaves your crayons in an even worse state. Summer doesn’t have that hazy vignette of nostalgia yet. Unarchiving the beloved media of my youth has reopened those old bins stowed away, tapping back into that whimsicality, an openness to the future.Â
The most surreal part of this archaeological dig has been realizing, from an outside perspective, just how much impact those shows really had on my humor, my other interests, and my future taste in media…Scooby Doo to Criminal Minds pipeline anyone? It’s revitalizing, to return to those shows and find an additional level of enjoyment from them. I’ve started seeing their unintentional influence in my work, what I’m more inclined to draw, and the characters I’ve designed.Â
I’ve had shows in recent years that have impacted me, books that have rewired my brain so completely I don’t know quite who I was before experiencing them, but upon the unintentional vacation to visit the ghosts of media loved in the past, it’s clear that it had more of an impact than I could have ever understood. If you’ve had the urge to rewatch a show you used to love or an album that helped forge your love for music, I recommend you grab that shovel and dig up those old interests. There might be more of a treasure trove than you anticipated.Â