Nostalgia is definitely IN
With Nostalgia being the IN word right now (pun intended), a handful of headlines crossed my path lately that I just can’t ignore. Hollywood digs into the 70’s and 80’s to resusitate Gen Z’s childhood with big screen debuts and sequels years in the making i.e. Maverick, Sonic the Hedgehog, Jurassic World: Dominion and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Streaming networks are trying to do the same with prequels to Lord of the Rings and re-imagining The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air but…y’know, serious this time. We are definitely living in a specific pop-culture bubble of kids who grew up in and around the 80’s who are busy bringing back what they knew then to what that want now.
With today’s technological advances, people are also manifesting their pure imaginations. What with 3-D printing, green screen, pocket super computers and a connected global communication we’re living in a real life “if you can dream it, you can do it.” Below I highlight a few stories that caught my eye recently which embody that very idea. The stories exist on a sliding scale of “that’s pretty incredible” to “somebody has too much time on their hands” and I’ll just let you be the judge of which is which.
The Full Sized Little Tikes Car that Could. A man in the UK has converted and modified a real car and turned it into a life sized version of the iconic Little Tikes Cozy Coup. It can get up to 70 mph. He put in about 1,000 hours of work with modifications costing around $5,000. It’s also recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Largest Cozy Coup. I just can’t get over how small the adults look while in it. You can watch a YouTube video all about it.
Spend a Groovy Night in the Mystery Machine. Film celebrity Matthew Lillard from the live action Scooby films of yore is hosting a special Airbnb listing to spend a night in the Mystery Machine herself. The listing goes live on June 16th but only for three nights, June 24, 25 and 26. The evening includes a ton of fun Scooby themed activities but if the van itself isn’t “haunted” by a rich tycoon whose looking to exploit Airbnb in exchange to recoup the inheritance that was rightfully his then is it even worth it? Find out more details here.
Enter a World of Pure Imagination. MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, is one of the world’s most popular YouTubers with over 95 million subscribers. So, you may have already seen this (though I hadn’t). To promote MrBeast’s new brand of chocolate bars named Feastables, he built his very own Wonka factory using the original book by Roaul Dahl and both movies for inspiration. Watch his entire video for yourself on his YouTube channel here. It’s pretty amazing.
Back From the Past. In Back to the Future, the best time travel movie trilogy to date, there were movie stars playing characters, but who could forget the real star of the show, the time traveling DeLorean? The DeLorean car company went out of business in 1982, but it looks like it’s back! The name DeLorean was bought by a different car company and they have released concept photography of a new fully electric DeLorean named Alpha 5 that screams retro cool with a modern upgrade. It looks like we’ll have to wait a few more years before we’re able to get a model with a Flux-Capacitor included. The specs on time travel are still getting worked out.