Millennials take a trip back to the good ole’ days

Flashbacks to childhood weekends have begun. After much demand Nickelodeon came out this week with a rerun schedule (The 90's Are All That) of some of their best shows from the 90’s - All That, Clarrisa Explains it All, Doug and Keenan and Kel are on weeknights at midnight as of this past Tuesday. Are they directing this toward their current teen demographic? Nope! They are directing it straight to us, the Millennials that once upon a time thought that Pierre Escargot was really teaching us French in a bathtub while eating Chinese food.

Now that I am and old working girl, I of course don’t last past 11:00pm on weeknights, but I DVR’d the episodes and went back to watch All That last night. There is a certain nostalgia going back and watching the kids you idolized when you were just a kid. I remember having a huge crush on Josh Server and never really understanding what was so funny about Vital Information with Lori Beth Denberg.

I started comparing current TV shows that are now on Disney and Nickelodeon compared to what we watched back then. And I was almost sad to think that kids now won’t get to experience the creativity that came from our 90’s favorites. These new shows like iCarly, Zoe 101, SpongeBob Squarepants lack the creativity that we were able to ingest growing up. The teen queens now are short on the comedic spontaneity that was present on All That or The Amanda Show. Most of the shows that pre-teens and teens watch now are based in a high school with some kind of drama/romance and are no where near what high school actually turns out to be.

The shows back in the 90’s were created outside the typical high school drama box, we had Salute Your Shorts, Hey Dude, Are you Afraid of the Dark and Guts. Instead of sitting inside hoping to bee the next Selena Gomez, we really wanted to practice going through obstacles so that we could prove how easy it was to put together that damn monkey on Legends of the Hidden Temple.

I, like many other millennials, started today with a smile, just remembering how funny these simple, low budget shows were back in the 90’s and how exciting it was to come home from school and turn on Nickelodeon. Now, if only they would start reruns from TGIF (Family Matters, Boy Meets World, Step by Step, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clueless), that would definitely call of a 90’s party.