The Age of “Hey, Remember When” Media
I’ve always had a great love for big fictional worlds. The kind that extend for decades of real world time over many different pieces of media. I love when you can explore a setting in that depth, and watch an imaginary world evolve over time. These days it feels like sprawling media franchises are more prevalent than ever, and you’d think I’d be happy, but I’m not.
Like anything, there’s a right way and a wrong to do a long-term media franchise, and I feel like these days most of them don’t grasp what’s appealing about these kind of big picture stories. Reusing familiar elements in a story is a tool, not an end unto itself, but I think modern media has lost sight of that. So many of the stories we see in these franchises today have nothing to say but, “Hey, remember when…”
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I was inspired to finally put virtual pen to virtual paper by a post by an old friend of mine from the GalacticaBBS days (gods, that was a lifetime ago). Over on his blog, he complains that the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spends too much time rehashing legacy characters and plot threads without any of the deeper social commentary traditionally seen in Star Trek.
This captures how I’ve felt about most modern Star Trek, and why I gave up on SNW after one season. I’ve often said that I don’t think the people in charge of the franchise right now don’t understand Star Trek.
When I say this, I often get pushback from people who will cite all all the callbacks to the franchise’s past throughout the modern shows, X Y or Z deep cut reference in the latest episode of Lower Decks or whatever. But that doesn’t really prove anything other than that the writers know how to read the Memory Alpha wiki.
There’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. It’s possible that the modern writers do have genuine love for and knowledge of the franchise and still totally fail to understand the heart of what it’s about. I’ve met enough far right Trekkies in the fanbase over the years to know how common that can be.
(I’m not saying the new writers are right wingers, just that it’s a common example of how you can be a diehard fan of the franchise while completely misunderstanding its essence.)
So much of modern franchise media is like this. Just an endless string of callbacks, references, and plays to nostalgia without any deeper thought behind it, without the understanding of what made these characters and stories special the first time around.
“Hey, remember how people loved this plot? Let’s do it again! Hey, remember this character people loved? Let’s bring them back! Hey, remember when…”
It’s not just Star Trek suffering from this, of course. A lot of Blizzard’s games have suffered from this in recent years. “Hey, remember how people liked the faction war? Let’s do that again! Hey, remember how the Dragons were cool? Let’s bring them back! Hey, remember the Skeleton King? Let’s throw him into the mobile game!”
There are other franchises that could be cited. Somehow, Palpatine returned…
There’s nothing inherently wrong with callbacks to the past. As I said at the start, I love it when it’s done well. Nostalgia is one of the most comforting feelings we can experience, and there can be plenty of beauty and meaning to media that’s based around it.
But you still need to do it with thought and creativity. For an example of nostalgia done well, I’ll again go back to Star Trek, and the one modern incarnation I actually liked: Prodigy.
The first season* of Prodigy is a fantastic example of a story that plays to nostalgia in an intelligent manner. Janeway is a familiar character, but she’s in a new role, an advisor and mentor rather than the ultimate authority on the cast. Tellarites and Medusans are previously established species, but they haven’t been main cast members before, and the other cast members represent new species.
The story also took place in a largely unknown area of space, and having the crew not be official members of Starfleet provided a new angle to the story. Initially irreverent to Starfleet’s many rules, they gravitate more and more towards living by its ideals as they come to understand it’s a better way to live. It was the perfect blend of familiar and original, capturing the spirit of what the franchise is meant to be while exploring its themes in a new way.
*(While I still found it more enjoyable than not, I think Prodigy’s second season did fall a bit into the “hey, remember when” trap, and that’s the main reason I rate it lower than the first season.)
After the blunders of Dragonflight, I would also say that World of Warcraft’s Worldsoul Saga arc is currently doing a decent of balancing the old and the new. Alleria has been around since Warcraft II, but they didn’t bring her back to fight Orcs again. She has a whole new role in the story as the face of Shadow as a force for good.
From what we’ve seen so far, the Midnight expansion is also shaping up to be a good example of nostalgia done the right way. We’re going back to Quel’thalas, but not to rehash the same story we had last time we were there. Instead of dealing with the Blood Elves’ magic addiction and their flirtations with demons, we will (hopefully) see a redeemed Quel’thalas uniting the world against the forces of the Void. It’s a familiar location, full of familiar faces, but it looks like it will be a fresh story all the same.
Cases like that are rarer than they should be, though. I think the problem is that in most cases the people behind these legacy franchises aren’t continuing them out of any passion for their stories, but simply out of a cynical desire to cash in on their name recognition.
You can’t make effective nostalgia bait if you don’t understand what made these things special in the first place. It needs to come from a place of genuine love.
It also needs to be said that a lot of people do genuinely just want more of the same. When legacy franchises do take chances with new directions, the fans often punish it, severely. See The Last Jedi, Stargate: Universe, Star Trek: Enterprise, and many other examples.
And even those of us who do complain often keep showing up anyway. We as consumers are culpable in the staleness of legacy franchises, and will continue to be so until we start being more discerning. Hence why I’m trying to be a bit more picky these days, and why I have up on current Trek shows beyond Prodigy (RIP).
With the executives of major media corporations more risk adverse than ever, I think the dominance of legacy franchises will continue for the foreseeable future. I can have the hope that we’ll see more cases like Prodigy and the Worldsoul Saga, which evoke nostalgia for the past while charting a new path, but I fear it’s going to be far more common to continue seeing media that has nothing to say beyond, “Hey, remember when…”
