Is retro a longing for your past or just the past?

For reference: CollegeHumor Picture: “NES Beer Pong table for my brother’s 21st.”

I was wandering in and out of a daydreaming state at the UConn / Notre Dame game last night and a brassy cover of Michael Jackson’s Thriller drifted into my ear by way of the UConn Pep Band. Ah, the live college sports experience. Seeing kids at these games that I know are in college and that look younger and younger to me made me realize something. College freshmen this year (2005-2006) were born in 1988 or 1989. I’ll let that fact alone sink in for a second before I move on. There. The Nintendo Entertainment System debuted nationwide in America on October 18th, 1985.

These kids have never known a world without an accessible family-room style video game console. These kids probably never actually played much of the original Nintendo either. Considering the average income of a family that sends kids to college and the power of a child’s whine for the latest, greatest, most advertised via product-shaped cereal bits, these kids would’ve been playing the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES debuted in the states on August 13, 1991, when they were just reaching the age where you think about moving up from plush ninja turtles to controlling a digital sprite with buttons and a d-pad.

So, why, looking back do they look fondly to the NES? Maybe because the SNES hardly has the retro value of the NES; just look at the 1UP t-shirts in Hot Topic. Thriller was released on December 1, 1982. Why aren’t they reminiscent for SWV’s Right Here, which sampled Human Nature off of the Thriller album in 1993 instead of Thriller? It’s a song they might actually remember from their own lifetime.

It reminds me of something Augustus Hill said on Oz (Michael from Lost? The guy with the dreads from the Matrix sequels? Mercutio from Romeo + Juliet? C’mon, he’s an accomplished actor, people.) The gist was that people are reminiscent for time they never knew. How many people look at a Norman Rockwell painting or watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and think, “Things were simpler then…”? More importantly, people are reminiscent for times that never existed. Norman Rockwell didn’t paint Jim Crow. Jimmy Stewart didn’t slap Donna Reed. We glamorize and falsify the past. All for the sake of having roots, common cultural reference points that we can all agree on as our shared heritage.

Does Nintendo, especially the original NES, really span generations, as current college students seem to think it does? Are 80′s pop songs from before you were born the way you place yourself in the American timeline? Perhaps I’m way off-base. Maybe retro isn’t about fondness or a recapture of a time in one’s own life, but about kitsch. A nod to a sillier time than a person had to be subjected to in their own lifetime. History becomes legend, legend becomes myth. This is recognition that although this has passed, we aren’t done with it yet. We reuse and recycle it. Hey, remember recycling?