nostalgia

Where Has All the Millennial Pop Art Gone?

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The great, wide world of popular media has done its damnedest to make sure I am nostalgic for the Power Rangers this year.  Between seeing the original mighty morphin’ Rangers resurrected for cheap nostalgia pops in Netflix’s Power Rangers: Once and Always, seeing them spoofed for laughs in Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist horror anthology Smoking Causes Coughing, and seeing the vintage television aesthetics of their Japanese source material echoed in Hideaki Anno’s recent Ultraman reboot, the Power Rangers have been on my mind all year.  Of those relentless nostalgia stokers, Once & Always felt the most accurate to the schlock TV I loved as a kid, in that it’s mostly just subprofessional actors bullshitting around in open fields until actual martial artists who know what they’re doing jump into the frame to save the day.  It rides an uneasy imbalance between rushing out more anonymous background television for children under the Power Rangers brand and comforting those children’s parents with background garbage familiar to their own Millennial youth.  If the one-off reunion special were only 20 minutes long and broken up by toy & cereal commercials it would have been perfectly in step with the way I remember the Power Rangers as my 1990s mechadino babysitters, as if the original show were never cancelled and its teen stars slowly succumbed to death & wrinkles on air week to week for decades on end.  In some ways, I suppose the special itself is the commercial, in that its entire purpose is to re-spark interest in the Power Rangers brand, which has effectively been dormant since its excellent-but-failed franchise starter in 2017.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Netflix currently holds the streaming rights for the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers TV series, which officially makes Once & Always, as cheap & underdeveloped as it is, the most effort they’ve ever put into advertising one of their shows to date.  And since most exhausted, world-weary Millennial parents aren’t going to have the time, patience, or awareness to seek out niche, higher quality Power Rangers-adjacent media like Smoking Causes Coughing, they’re going to scratch that nostalgic itch in the quickest, most convenient way possible – never venturing outside what’s available on Netflix.  Not me, though.  I’m different.

Because I’m first & foremost a movie nerd, I had to scratch my mighty morphin’ nostalgia itch by returning to 1995’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.  To my shock, it was not available to stream through subscription, rental, nor library loan despite the opportunity for profit raised by Once & Always, and I had to blow the dust off my early 2000s DVD copy to watch it again.  In a way, I get why the Power Rangers movie would be allowed to slip out of general public access, since it’s getting just as old & dated as it is goofy & vapid.  I was eight years old when I first begged my parents to see Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie in the theater, and so it has always felt like a prestigious cultural event to me when compared to the more casual, tossed-off nature of the television show it was cashing in on.  Everything I loved about the show as a kid was given a high-end upgrade for the big screen, from the teenage superheroes’ regular-size power suits to their kaiju-size mechabeasts.  As a result, it remains an excellent time capsule of the niche bullshit only a 90s Kid™ could possibly care about, starting with a preposterous Star Wars scroll that quickly explains the Power Rangers’ lore as intergalactic teen crimefighters recruited by a noble space alien named Zordon.  Watching it as an adult, I was amused imagining my parents suffering through its endlessly inane babble about morphing, morphological beings, zords, megazords, ninja zords, ectomorians, and electromagnetic deadlock as if any of that means anything to anyone.  Its convoluted lore is all in service of incomprehensibly edited fight choreography, surreally dated CGI, eXtreme sports posturing, and rushed one-liner insults labeling the bad guys “Mr. Raisin Head” (because, as you will surely remember, Ivan Ooze is purple) and “dingledorks” (that one explains itself).  Power Rangers: The Movie is idiotic pop art at its finest, all sloppy live-action cartoon nonsense from top to bottom.  It’s a crowd-pleaser for a crowd of 8-year-olds and, presumably, an extreme bore for their baffled parents, a tension that only gets funnier as the decades pile on and no one age-appropriate is left around to care.  So few people care, in fact, that it’s been allowed to slip into distribution limbo so the only audience who can legally access it are the dingledorks who happened to fish it out of Wal-Mart’s $5 DVD bins two decades ago.

Because I am weak in will & intellect, my 90s nostalgia trip did not end there.  One of the major 90s-specific pleasures of the Power Rangers movie is its tie-in CD soundtrack, which includes contributions form artists as disparate as Van Halen, Devo, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Snap!.  As formidable as some of those names are in the music business, though, the soundtrack’s biggest get was “Trouble,” the international breakout hit of British pop duo Shampoo.  I vividly remember the song dominating kids’ media in the 90s, to the point where I still sing its delightfully obnoxious “Uh oh, we’re in trouble, something’s come along and it’s burst our bubble, yeah yeah” chorus to myself every time something minorly inconvenient happens in my daily life.  What I did not remember is that its initial promotion in America was tied so closely to the theatrical release of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.  Not only does it underscore a children-only block party at the film’s emotional climax, but it was also domestically marketed through the lost artform of the tie-in music video, featuring the Shampoo singers dancing in Deee-Liteful psychedelic voids alongside the Power Rangers and their neurotic robo-sidekick Alpha5.  A proper DVD release of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie would have included that music video as a Bonus Feature, but my Wal-Mart discount bin copy instead includes a useless “Behind the Scenes” advertisement for the film where Amy Jo “Pink Ranger” Johnson bravely compares her big screen debut to the special effects spectacles of Star Wars & The Wizard of Oz.  Thankfully, the Power Rangers version of the “Trouble” music video was at least uploaded to YouTube where, as of this posting, it can be enjoyed in glorious, grainy 480p.  This indulgence, of course, led me down an entirely new 90s-tastic pop culture rabbit hole as I allowed Shampoo music videos to autoplay after the sassy Brits were done dancing alongside their new intergalactic crimefighter friends.  What I discovered was that Shampoo has a deep, rewarding catalog of post-riot grrrrl, pre-Girl Power classics that never reached the US with the same ferocity that “Trouble” managed to, partially because they could not call on the power of the mega ninja zords to boost their signal every single.

The commonly accepted narrative is that Shampoo never made it as big as they could have because they were immediately eclipsed by an intense international obsession with the Spice Girls, who smoothed out the smaller group’s rougher, punker edges into pure bubblegum pop.  The real heartbreaker there is that Shampoo even had a single called “Girl Power” that debuted only one week before the Spice Girls broke out with “Wannabe”, which is a shame since “Girl Power” opens with the lyrics “I don’t wanna be a boy, I wanna be a girl. I wanna do things that will make your hair curl.  I wanna play with knives. I wanna play with guns.  I wanna smash up a place just for fun.”  It’s wonderful.  I don’t mean to mourn Shampoo’s premature downfall at the expense of shading the Spice Girls, though, who were just as substantial superheroes in my childhood mind as the Power Rangers, thanks specifically to the strength of “Wannabe” and to the group’s own cash-in pop art movie Spice World.  Tragically, Spice World is also currently unavailable to rent or stream through legal means in the US, so I again had to blow the dust off an ancient DVD copy from my modest collection – this time presented in a luxurious Full Screen frame.  Although my DVD copy is “guaranteed” to be “packed with girl power” in a way no streaming service would dare to ensure, I still find the state of the film’s availability to the general, streaming-service-reliant public shameful.  Way more shameful than the lost-to-time Power Rangers movie, even, since Spice World is a much more competently made, purposefully goofy artifact of 90s kitsch.  It plugs the Spice Girls into a high-femme variation on A Hard Day’s Night, sending the 90s pop group on episodic, for-their-own-sake adventures where they get to be immensely charming on camera while interacting with Elton John, James Bond, Bob Hoskins, Riff Raff, and other various space aliens.  Its most pivotal scene is a montage where the girls cosplay in different cute outfits that don’t quite fit their individual vibes and then switch around personas by cosplaying as each other in a playful pop art photo shoot.  Spice World is cute, it’s joyful, and the only reason it isn’t more beloved as an MTV era pop art classic, really, is that the MTV-produced Josie and the Pussycats movie bested at its own game just a few years later.  Well, that and it’s got a shamefully shitty post-DVD distribution history in the US.

My rapid spiral into full 90s nostalgia was finally sated by the time I revisited Spice World (and then—full disclosure—rewatched all available Shampoo videos a second time through).  Although it’s heavily indebted to the pop art past of Swingin’ 60s London, it’s an aesthetic object that could have only existed in the period when I was most media obsessed as a child, which is where we all tend to retreat when we’re looking for comfort in cinematic junk food.  In the process of pulling out both my Spice Girls & Power Rangers DVDs, though, I did a quick inventory of what other childhood junk media I own that’s not currently streaming.  One title that jumped out at me was the movie version of The Worst Witch, which stars a young Fairuza Balk and features the heavily memed “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” musical number performed by Tim Curry against surreally cheap green screen effects.  You’ll likely always be able to watch that music video tangent out of context in low-res YouTube clips alongside your favorite Shampoo jams, but if you want the entire Worst Witch movie available to you at all times for a full warm bath of 90s Kid™ Nostalgia, you have to resort to illegal torrents or purchases of used physical media.  I was also reminded in this process that I ran into friends at French Quarter Fest a few weeks ago who said they had recently watched the animated Super Mario Bros movie that’s currently dominating the box office and were dismayed afterwards that they could not access the live-action adaptation of the video game that alienated the world when we were children (despite being a Power Rangers-level camp classic in my mind & household).  I, of course, offered to lend them my DVD copy, which was a service they could not even access through the public library.  Plenty of the other pop art novelties fron my youth I’m holding onto are currently streaming in higher quality than you’ll find on my used Blockbuster & thrift store DVDs: Howard the Duck & Teen Witch (Tubi), Big Time Pee-wee (Showtime), Barb Wire & Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze (VOD), etc.  Any of those statuses might change as soon as next week, though. The illusion that everything we could possibly want or need to watch will always be available to stream at home is being constantly undermined, but it’s especially absurd when titles promoted & regurgitated by contemporary nostalgia stokers like the new Power Rangers & Super Mario Bros movies aren’t conveniently offered to the consumers being targeted.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, is a deceptive work of broad commercial appeal that also carries out a wicked subversive streak just below the polite charms of its genteel surface. Fried Green Tomatoes looks & acts like a Normal movie aimed to stoke mainstream America’s nostalgia for “The Good Old Days” of the vintage American South. That bait-and-switch allows the film to constantly veer into abrupt bursts of absurdist humor, grisly violence, and heartfelt lesbian romance without much of an uproar from its Normie audience. It’s that exact clash between the conventional vs. an underplayed indulgence in the bizarre that makes the movie such a treat for me. It’s both proudly traditional & wildly unpredictable, paradoxically so.

It would be difficult to recommend further viewing for audiences who want to see more films that pull off that exact balancing act between tradition & subversion. Luckily, though, Fried Green Tomatoes is not the only film around that heavily relies on the traditional charms of fierce Southern Women to sneak its own hidden agendas & indulgences past mainstream audiences’ defenses. Here are a few suggested pairings of movies you could watch if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience more cinema that falls on the quietly dark side of Southern twang.

Crazy in Alabama (1999)

In my mind, the clearest parallel to Fried Green Tomatoes‘s clash between the conventional & the morbidly bizarre is the 1999 black comedy Crazy in Alabama. The only major difference is that Fried Green Tomatoes is subtly subversive, while Crazy in Alabama is gleefully over-the-top. Melanie Griffith is flamboyant as the anchor to the film’s violent side, playing a kooky Southern Woman who poisons & decapitates her abusive husband so she can run off to become a Hollywood star (a straight-up trial-run for her future role as Honey Whitlock in John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented). Lucas Black costars as her favorite nephew, whom she left back home to deal with the exponential civil unrest of the Civil Rights 1960s. These two disparate storylines—one where an over-the-top Hollywood starlet regularly converses with her husband’s severed head (which she carries around in a hatbox) and one where a young white boy becomes a local hero by bravely declaring “Racism is bad” and attending fictional Martin Luther King, Jr rallies—are only flimsily connected by occasional phone calls shared between these two unlikely leads. It’s the same bifurcated, traditional vs. absurdist story structure as Fried Green Tomatoes, except that there’s nothing subtle at all about what it’s doing. Everything is on the surface and cranked incredibly loud (which suits my sensibilities just fine).

If you need any convincing that these movies make a good pairing, consider that Fannie Flagg, the novelist who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, has an extended cameo as a roadside diner waitress in Crazy in Alabama. Flagg’s entire purpose in her one featured scene is to cheer on Griffith’s crazed, wanted-murderer protagonist out of admiration for her breaking out of an abusive marriage in the way she personally saw best (sawing off her husband’s head). The audience has to share that baseline appreciation for wild Southern Women at their most hyper-violent to be fully on-board with either of these titles, which is partly what makes them a perfect match. Just don’t go into Crazy in Alabama expecting the same quiet, controlled hand that doles out the absurdist tangents in Fried Green Tomatoes. It’s the first feature film directed by Antonio Banderas and he eagerly allows the space for his then-spouse, Griffith, to run as wild as she pleases.

Now and Then (1995)

This suggestion is something of a cheat, since Now and Then is technically set in Indiana. However, it was filmed in Georgia and looks & feels entirely Southern to my Louisianan eyes. Like Fried Green Tomatoes, its story is bifurcated between two timelines: the increasingly cynical days of the 1990s and a rose-tinted view of a simpler past that was both more dangerous and more romantically Authentic. It even begins its feature-length flashback to “The Good Old Days” by explaining that children used to have to go on adventures & get into mischief to entertain themselves “in the days before MTV & Nintendo . . .” While the adult versions of our central group of childhood friends indulge in a distinctly 90s brand of Gen-X sarcasm (especially among Rosie O’Donnell & Demi Moore’s moody banter), their childhood versions purely ascribe to a gee-willickers coming-of-age adventurism that’s purely heartfelt & sentimental (as portrayed by child actor superstars like Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, and Gaby Hoffman). From the crisply uniform tableaus of freshly built cookie-cutter suburbs to the sequences of young girls singing Motown hits in unison while riding bicycles down dirt roads, the nostalgia on display here is lethally potent, to the point where I genuinely could not tell if this is the first time I’ve seen it. Now and Then is the exact kind of VHS-era lazy afternoon comfort viewing that feels as if it’s always been part of your DNA.

Unlike Fried Green Tomatoes & Crazy in Alabama, Now and Then doesn’t use this nostalgic charm as a cover for extreme dips into subversively morbid subject matter. If anything, it ultimately plays more like a softer, safer variation on Steven King’s nostalgia-classic Stand By Me, complete with the wistful narration track from a jaded adult who’s “seen it all.” The childhood friends at the center of the picture do launch their own D.I.Y. investigation of an unsolved murder from decades into their town’s past, one that invites ghostly seances, potentially dangerous strangers, and brief moments of lethal peril into their otherwise safe suburban lives. Mostly, though, the threats that arise during this murder mystery aren’t meant to elicit a genuine in-the-moment danger so much as they’re meant to highlight the conflicts & insecurities that haunt the girls’ variously troubled home lives and internal struggles with self-esteem. I’d most recommend Now and Then to Fried Green Tomatoes fans who’re more into that film’s nursing home visits & nightswimming intimacies than its freak train accidents and wild swerves into cannibalism. It’s a much better-behaved film overall, but an equally nostalgic one in its scene-to-scene details (including the ultra-specific 90s Girl™ fantasy of getting to smoke cigarettes with a young Brendan Fraser at his beefcakiest).

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Our one major stipulation for Movie of the Month selections is that they must be films that no one else in the crew has seen. Because bits & pieces of Fried Green Tomatoes were constantly looping on television when I was a kid, I honestly wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it all the way through before or not. Once I got into the lesbian & cannibal tangents that distinguish the film from its fellow works in the Southern Women Nostalgia canon, though, it was clear that I hadn’t actually seen it – at least not as a complete picture. In fact, I had been mistaking my memories of the title with another, unrelated work that similarly got the round-the-clock television broadcast treatment in the 1990s: Steel Magnolias.

Having now watched Fried Green Tomatoes & Steel Magnolias back-to-back in their entirety, I can confirm that they’re really nothing alike, except that they’re about the lives of fierce Southern Women. I much preferred Fried Green Tomatoes out of the pair, but Steel Magnolias was still charming in its own way. Adapted from a stage play, the film is mostly centered on the life & times of a small clique of heavily-accented women who frequent the same beauty shop (run by matriarch beautician Dolly Parton). Like a hetero precursor to Sordid Lives, much of the film’s humor derives from the Southern idiosyncrasies in the women’s mannerisms & idle banter as they gossip in the beauty salon between dye jobs & perms. The darkness that creeps into the frame springs from the women’s lives outside the salon, particularly the medical drama of a fiercely protective mother (Sally Fields) and her severely diabetic daughter (Julia Roberts) who pushes her body too far in order to live up to the Southern ideal of a traditional housewife.

The details of the medical melodrama that drives Steel Magnolias fall more into tear-jerking weepie territory than the wildly violent mood swings of Fried Green Tomatoes, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. The most outrageous the film gets in any one scene is a moment of crisis when Sally Fields has to force-feed orange juice to a deliriously over-acting Julia Roberts in the middle of a diabetic seizure. Her repeated shouts of “Drink the juice, Shelby!” had me howling, and I’m sure that scene is just as iconic in some irony circles as “No wire hangers, ever!” is in others. All told, though, that storyline is too sobering & sad to mock at length, and you have to genuinely buy into the dramatic tragedy of the narrative to appreciate the film on its own terms. I won’t say it’s as convincing of a dramatic core as the unspoken lesbian romance of Fried Green Tomatoes, but it’s effective in its own, smaller way. Anyone with endless room in their hearts for Southern Women as a cultural archetype should be able to appreciate both films enough for Steel Magnolias to survive the comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling (2019)

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You hardly have any time to adjust to the updated look & feel of the 2019 reboot of Rocko’s Modern Life before the movie makes fun of you for struggling to adapt to the change. In the new series timeline, the titular cartoon wallaby has been floating in outer space with his three animal besties (a cow named Heffer, a turtle named Filbert, and his pet dog Spunky) while watching the same rerun of their favorite cartoon, The Fatheads, over and over and over again. This absurd state of preserved, perpetual stasis is clearly coded as a comment on the real-life audience’s nostalgia for an ancient, deeply silly cartoon show from the 1990s – right down to its vintage orange VHS cassette packaging that all Nickelodeon shows were immortalized on in their home video form. Rocko is perfectly happy in his rut of watching the same show on loop for decades, asking “Isn’t it great how some things never change?” Obviously, a lot has changed in the 23 years since Rocko’s Modern Life has been on the air, which is immediately apparent in the crisp digital look of its updated 2010s animation style. Acknowledging & confronting those changes head-on quickly becomes the entire point of this straight-to-Netflix sequel to the show, which smartly interrogates the necessity of its own existence in a way that justifies the entire exercise beyond its value as a nostalgia stoker.

Once their outer space hiatus inevitably ends, Rocko & crew rejoin the citizens of Earth to find that a lot of change has transpired here in their absence. While Rocko can overlook his buddies’ fascination with the food trucks, smartphones, and 3D printers that define this new normal of the 2010s, he struggles with the revelation that his favorite cartoon show has been cancelled while they were gone. Most of Static Cling concerns Rocko’s campaign to Bring Back The Fatheads as a 2010s reboot, a Sisyphean effort to preserve just one thing as it was 20 years ago instead of accepting that everything changes with time. Mishaps in bringing back the series’ original creator, fighting off corporate directives to cut corners by having it computer-animated, and preventing the original show’s central dynamic between its main characters from shifting at all drive Rocko mad as he attempts to control just one aspect of his life in a constantly changing world. Those struggles also directly reflect the effort to bring back Rocko’s Modern Life in a meaningful way, of course, so it’s for the best that the movie eventually settles on an “Embracing change is the key to happiness” message, even if it pauses to make fun of 2010s concepts like “going viral” and to adjust to modern concerns like the evolution of modern transgender identity politics before it can get there. It’s wonderful that the return of the show found a way to be about something instead of merely skating by as an empty nostalgia exercise, even if that Something was empty nostalgia exercises.

It’s worth noting that Rocko’s Modern Life hasn’t changed so drastically in this modern iteration that it’s no longer recognizable. Its proto-SpongeBob hyperactivity and grotesque dedication to gross-out details like booger jars & prehensile nipples remain intact, as do the basic character traits & vocal performances of its main cast. The movie just doesn’t pretend that the world is exactly the same as it was when we last visited the show, instead adjusting its purpose for existing to address that exact cultural shift. It works both as a 90s nostalgia generator and as a meaningful work of modern animation in its own right, which is more than anyone should have reasonably expected from this straight-to-streaming novelty.

-Brandon Ledet

If You Enjoyed Dope (2015) You Should Double Back & Watch The Wood (1999)

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EPSON MFP image
Although the recent coming-of-age teen comedy Dope felt like the emphatic debut of a just-out-of-film school youngster (in terms of energy, not competence) it was actually the work of a director who’s been lurking in Hollywood for more than 15 years. In that time, Rick Famuyiwa has only been able to get four feature films off the ground, which, judging by the two I’ve seen, is a total shame. Famuyima has a smart, authentic, straightforward lens through which he examines youth & nostalgia, both in his most recent effort Dope & in his actual debut, a small-scale charmer made for MTV Films 15 years ago called The Wood.

The Wood & Dope have a lot in common besides the name in the director’s credit. While Dope is set in the present it looks back to 90s music & fashion for inspiration. The Wood splits its time between (the then present) 1999 & flashbacks to the 1980s, equally conscious of reconstructing the styles & sounds of a bygone era as Dope. The flashback chapters of The Wood are introduced through spinning vinyl records, Jheri curls are hilariously abundant, and the high school age protagonists wear clothes so dated that they’ve already had their vintage cool heyday and have gone back to tacky again. Both Dope & The Wood feature protagonists speaking directly to the audience, follow young teens getting into heaps of trouble trying to shed their virginity, happen to include a disgusting puke gag, and discuss the small changes of course that can turn a young nerd into a perceived-violent criminal in the particularly hazardous social minefield of Inglewood, California, where both movies are set. As if that weren’t enough of a solid connection, both films also feature a character named Stacey played by actor De’aundre Bondsl, who are ostensibly the same person (although Dope doesn’t make that connection explicit).

Of course, Dope & The Wood aren’t exact copies of each other and if I had to choose a favorite of the two, I’m inclined to lean towards the more energetic cartoonishness of Dope. The Wood does stand up quite well on its own, though, and helps to reveal a director with a keen eye for nostalgia & growing pains instead of the out-of-nowhere youngin’ with something to prove that I assumed directed Dope when I first saw the trailers. With these two films Famuyiwa establishes a genuine, confident voice that allows him to both tackle the intricacies of gang violence & the inconvenience of public boners. If you enjoyed Dope, I highly recommend giving The Wood a look for context. If you’ve already seen & enjoyed both, maybe just keep an eye out for Famuyiwa’s other films, both past & future. That’s what I plan on doing, anyway.

-Brandon Ledet