#nostalgia

#nostalgia

There are some days when the only thing that can lift your mood is seeing a man in a top hat play the flute to summon a jodhpur-wearing Oompa-Loompa. Luckily, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has plenty of that and a lot more besides. I don't care if you've just received a terminal diagnosis or found out your wife's been having an affair with Chris Martin, you stick this film on and you'll smile.

The 1984 original, from German band Alphaville, was a gloriously histrionic ode to cold war anxiety. But in Youth Group's hands, synths were replaced by mellow guitar and the song was set to footage of kids skateboarding in Sydney in 1978. It was pure sun-dappled nostalgia that shot to No 1 on the Aria charts in 2006 after it was used on The OC.

Growing up, my family traveled to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for one week every summer. It was the quintessential family vacation: sun, sand, surf, lots of food, and too many things to do to ever get bored. But you know how it goes - I got older, moved away, had kids of my own, and life just kind of took over. So, decades after my last visit, I recently headed back to North Myrtle to see if it still

It's the same at virtually every wedding I attend. Friends and family sit at tables throughout the reception tent, sipping wine and snacking on duck confit while the red-hot band on stage blasts out a festive wedding playlist. As darkness falls outside the tent, guests begin to migrate two by two from their tables to the dance floor until just about everyone in attendance is out there pounding the parquet to the beat of the band.

Growing up is weird. One day you're playing hopscotch and trying to land on your crush in MASH, and the next you're in your late 20s, trying to hit your daily protein goals, saving up for a $200 pillow, and wondering if you should start leash-training your cats. The things I once thought I'd never care about are now constant thoughts in my mind.

They say three is a trend, the rate of occurrence upon which one moves past the threshold of randomness and into the realm of fixed preference that we often identify as "taste." Levi seemed to like older movies and TV. Levi seemed to dislike newer movies and TV. I sat down to watch an episode of Pee-wee's Playhouse with him, and a hypothesis about why this is the case took shape.

For the generation that grew up in the '90s, it can feel like it was worlds apart from how we live in the present. Steeped in nostalgia and a general sense of optimism about the world, it was the decade that holds good, or perhaps romanticized, memories of a time gone by. Along with the music, the style, and the retro technology that marked the '90s, the food also played a huge role in so many of our memories.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the United States on 18 October 1985: about a year after I was born, and 40 years ago today. It's as if the company sensed that a sucker who'd spend thousands of dollars on plastic toys and electronic games had just entered the world. Actually, it's as if the company had sensed that an entire generation of fools like me was about to enter the world. Which is true. That was the time to strike.

Welcome to the retro reset, where '70s, '80s and '90s aesthetics are getting a second life. It's not just in fashion and film but in home décor and tech. Whether you actually lived through it or long for a past you never experienced, nostalgia is fueling a surge of interest from Gen X to Gen Z in throwback styles that blend vintage charm with modern convenience.

I hate to say it, but they just don't make teen movies like they used to. To this day, if I have girlfriends over at my house in the evening, I still feel the urge to put on one of the best sleepover movies from the 2000s, ones that made us feel like crushes could really like you back, you might actually get that big-city job, and that friends could really be forever.

Backstage, the "Bape" rapper spoke with VIBE about teaming up with fellow viral sensation, Druski, the hold he still has on Hip-Hop, and his newest surprise album. "That's my boy," he said with a grin about the social media comedian. "I've been rocking with Druski... he's funny as hell. When he reached out, at first, it was just one show... we rocked out in Atlanta, and it was so crazy, we knew we had to run the whole tour."

Nostalgia, that longing for what was and the happy memories we associate with it, may seem particularly keen when our daily lives - both personally and in the wider world - are less than ideal. Indeed, according to a 2025 study by CivicScience, more than 60% of Americans feel nostalgic for the past. Furthermore, the same study also found that nearly half of adults in the U.S. would spend money on something that conjures up feelings of nostalgia.

Unless you're a Maple Nut Goodie fanatic, you may not have noticed that the candy mysteriously disappeared from shelves recently, with an emphasis on the mysteriously. Even today, it's difficult to precisely pinpoint when or why these beloved candies were taken out of production. A petition published to Change.org in November of 2022 speculates that the discontinuation of the candies may have happened in April of that same year. Brach's has confirmed that the candies were discontinued indefinitely in a Facebook post in 2024.

The concert was a collective exercise in nostalgia - that powerful emotion triggered by the intersection of experience and memory. Some people think of nostalgia as a sort of bittersweet feeling, an aching reminder of what we have lost. It is joy tinged with sadness, but primarily a positive emotion that is part of the human experience. It is a feeling that sneaks up on you, and not just at massive concerts.

If you've ever melted shredded cheese directly onto tortilla chips or thrown a hot dog into a slice of bread, no toppings, congratulations - you've eaten a struggle meal. Thanks to this here economy, struggle meals are trending on Tik Tok, from people joking about going back to eating nothing but Hamburger Helper and cinnamon toast, to other creators curating grocery lists for super cheap struggle meals that'll feed an entire family.

A long time ago, in a retail store not that far away, there sat an Airfix model of the Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer. And I wanted it. Back then, I was a Star Wars devotee long before it became the global pop-culture monolith it is today. I was also a keen model maker - mostly assembling the very earliest White Dwarf and Warhammer kits. But the Airfix Star Destroyer - that was the dream kit. The Holy Grail.

A study published by JMIR Serious Games, a peer reviewed journal focused on how gaming is connected to education, health, and social change, looked into how the brain responds to both watching films produced by the Japanese animation studio and playing the open-world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The researchers gathered 518 postgraduate students and divided them into four groups.

Once a sprawling restaurant chain in the Southern states, Quincy's Family Steakhouse is now more or less a relic of the past. Without noticing, you might think it only exists in distant memories, but that's not entirely true. There are still two Quincy's locations left, one in Monroe, North Carolina, and the other in Florence, South Carolina, where you can still step in and feel as if you are transported back in time.

When he filmed Stand by Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Body, River Phoenix was only 14. In 1990, the year my middle-school friends and I watched a rented VHS copy of that movie at every sleepover, we were 13. If you'd asked us at the time, we wouldn't have been able to explain why Phoenix's character, Chris Chambers-the brave, wrong-side-of-the-tracks leader of the boy gang on a quest to see a dead body-did it for us.

The film's protagonist, Ed Saxberger ( Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That's how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

"I don't want to spoil the connection I have to the place by visiting too frequently," she says. "For me, once every few years seems to be about 'right.'"

When people ask me what it's like to live as an American in the U.K., I often use the example of going to '80s night in London. One minute I'm dancing along, singing all the words to "When Doves Cry," "Thriller," or "Material Girl," and the next minute Heaven 17's " Temptation " comes on and all the British people lose their minds shouting every lyric to a song I have never heard in my life.

While stores touting trendy clothing, knick-knacks of every imaginable variety, and video games are all very well, there is nothing quite like the epicenter of the mall: The humble food court. One mall food court chain we wish would come back got its start in the early 1920s and grew to become synonymous with mall culture in its heyday before sadly vanishing.

Released on Steam, Switch, and Playdate (the small yellow handheld famous for its crank controls), it strains the fundamental definition of a video game. Instead, it's more of a simulation of TV channel-surfing in the late '80s or early '90s, a kind of interaction younger generations actually have no experience with. It's a game whose target audience would seem to be very few people at all. And yet, because I enjoy exceptionally weird experiences, it delivers.