You don’t need to be a ’90s kid to know: Millennial nostalgia is now driving culture
You don’t need to be a ’90s kid to know: Millennial nostalgia is now driving culture
A generation that was once ridiculed for its pop-culture preferences is now both being catered to and calling the shots, from reboots to concerts to Happy Meals.
It’s a good time to be a millennial. At least, it is for anyone who enjoys being the cultural marketplace’s new favorite customer.
On the same day that you bought your tickets to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—the 36-years-later sequel to a bugnuts late-‘80s classic—you might have learned that a docuseries about Lisa Frank, the foremost purveyor of school-supply psychedelia, is coming to Amazon Prime, and that the J. Crew catalog, a preppy-chic staple of yesteryear, will soon be darkening mailboxes once more.
The world is your oyster—or, more accurately, the world is your menu that reads like a BuzzFeed listicle about things only ‘90s kids will remember.
Once ridiculed for their interest in avocado toast, along with their habit of brutally murdering everything from diamonds to mayonnaise, millennials have since graduated to positions of power. (One of them is even running for vice president.) They now appear to be the target audience for just about everything—when they’re not shaping culture in their own image, that is.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the two biggest movies of 2023—Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie—are based on IP popular with kids born in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and were even made by some of those kids. Now, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice follows Twisters and other such recent “legasequels”as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire into theaters.
Pretty soon, they’ll be joined by a new Transformers movie, a new Sonic the Hedgehog, and a live-action reboot of Masters of the Universe. But millennial nostalgia in movies isn’t restricted to the titles themselves—it’s also oozing off of Deadpool and Wolverine’s winking use of *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” in both its marketing and the film itself. (The seminal boy band also happened to reunite last year, making their first new song in 20 years for the soundtrack to Trolls Band Together, a series based on a children’s toy beloved by kids in the late ‘80s.)
Bringing back old IP for movies is obviously nothing new. Lest we forget, the ‘90s themselves were actually riddled with more nostalgia remakes than most people probably remember. Along with the hits The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family, and Mission: Impossible, there were dismal duds like Mr. Magoo, The Mod Squad, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
It was a moment when studios were chasing the landmark success of 1989’s Batman and willing to try anything. IP rejuvenation was more of a novelty at the time, and studios took a scattershot approach to testing the boundaries of what might be possible. Now, it’s just standard practice. And what we’re seeing lately in the revivals of Super Mario Bros. and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers (starring John Mulaney and Andy Samberg) is a sustained appeal to a specific demographic.
Nostalgia for every medium and genre
Netflix has the millennial nostalgia-bait TV market cornered, with the shows Stranger Things and Cobra Kai, which are steeped in ‘80s lore, along with That ‘90s Show. Meanwhile, the company Original X Productions is bringing millennial comfort TV of Friends and The Office into the real world with live “experiences” that recreate the sets of those shows.
But of course the top live experience that hinges on millennial nostalgia has to be music festivals.
While Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo always throw some millennial fare into the mix, a whole cottage industry has lately sprung up in the festival realm with this market in mind. There’s the R&B-centric Lovers and Friends, featuring Ashanti, Ja Rule, and Nelly Furtado; the indie-heavy Just Like Heaven, which hosts both Death Cab for Cutie and frontman Ben Gibbard’s side project, The Postal Service; and the rather on-the-nose titled When We Were Young, featuring emo kings including My Chemical Romance and Dashboard Confessional.
As further proof that music beloved by millennials is having a mass-market push right now, consider that Lil Jon performed “Turn Down for What” this year at both the Super Bowl and the Democratic National Convention.
The nostalgia gold rush goes far beyond stage and screen, however. Pretty much anything millennials once craved is now ripe for a resurgence—whether it’s Dunkaroos, the ‘90s snack that returned a couple years ago, or Sunny D, which got a grownup twist last year as a vodka seltzer.
Never underestimate the marketing power of Hey, remember this? It’s why McDonald’s released a Happy Meals for Adults last year, Tamagotchi revived its infamous egg for the smart toy era, and grown adults threw a fit recently when a revamp of Capri Sun added single-serve bottles to the iconic pouch from the target demo’s childhood. (Like true millennials: They want it that way.)
The endless cycle
This backwards-glancing fixation amounts to something more than just the typical trend-cycle, where old becomes new again 20 years later. The current return of Juicy track suits and Von Dutch hats is something else entirely.
What is happening is that the kids who watched Saturday morning cartoons in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are getting into their late thirties and early forties. Many of them now have money to spend and children of their own to incept their own childhood memories into. They’re both the market for faux-vintage T-shirts celebrating BookIt—Pizza Hut’s ancient literacy program—and the market for helping to bring BookIt to a new generation.
And since millennials are now old enough to be established filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Emerald Fennell, expect more movies about the millennial experience, like Lady Bird’s depiction of high school in 2002 or Saltburn’s interpretation of college in 2006. It feels like we’re about 10 seconds away from a movie that’s nostalgic for the dubstep era!
Millennials came into cultural prominence as an object of ridicule for baby boomers, and later endured a couple years of being made fun of by Gen Z for loving Harry Potter and the concept of “adulting” too much.
Now that they’re old enough to represent a formidable financial force, though, and could probably trick a studio into making Avocado Toast: The Movie by making enough TikToks demanding it. They just might be getting the last laugh.
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