Hey y’all,
Last weekend I spent a day at my mom’s house sifting through my childhood. Among the artifacts I saved or discarded from the first two decades of my life: a hundred pounds of notebooks and binders from high school, random junk like chem lab aprons I never returned, letters from former girlfriends, bank statements, rental agreements, brochures, ticket stubs, wristbands, notes, old sketchbooks, a stack of song lyrics and guitar tablature several inches thick, tuition statements, computer manuals, hint books, baseball cards, floppy disks, and best of all, toys. A glorious batch of toys from my youth, including He-Man, Ghostbusters, Robo Cop, G.I. Joes, and even one lone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
I had been thinking about these toys ever since I read an advance copy of Box Brown’s comic book, The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood. (It comes out in July, and is available for pre-order. I think it’s his best one yet.)
A major theme Brown writes and draws about is the power of nostalgia. Memories of the past can provide us great feelings of comfort, safety, and meaning, but they can mess with our vision, by both cropping and distorting the way things really happened and blinding us to what’s in front of our eyes in the present. Nostalgia can also be manipulated and used to sell things to us — everything from tickets to Disneyland to presidential tickets to fascism.
One of the most powerful depictions of this idea comes at the end of the first season of Mad Men, when ad man Don Draper delivers a brilliant pitch to Kodak executives for a new wheel-like slide projector they’ve developed.