Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with nostalgia

Where can I find this episode of 3-2-1 Contact?

Driph — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:13:45 -0800

Okay, longshot here. I'm trying to get ahold of an old episode of 3-2-1 Contact, specifically the segment where they visited the company working on the TRON arcade game. According to tv.com, it appears to be episode 104, titled Building: Modular, from season 2, and it originally aired on Thursday, November 17, 1983. The usual channels have failed me, so here's hoping that someone has a stack of VCR tapes in the closet (no not those tapes). Help me mefi you're my only hope.

What made your happy childhood memories happy?

onlyconnect — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:07:24 -0800

What happy memories do you have of being a young child that make you think either "those were good times" or "that was good parenting"? The younger you were at the time, the better. I can not remember too much from my young childhood, besides the warm feeling from sitting in a basket of laundry just come from the dryer, my dad teaching me how to ride a bike, and the days my mom would pick me up from grade school and we would eat and talk at Arthur Treacher's while we were waiting for my brothers to finish school. And I can remember one vacation with my family by the seashore when I was very young, when my grandmother showed me how to dig for clams, as well as a trip to Disneyland where we stayed in a loft with a circular staircase surrounded by orange trees. All of these memories leave me with happy, warm feelings about my childhood. I also remember playing with my brothers and reading in my room alot and other minor incidents, but these more mundane memories don't really carry the same emotional weight.

I would like to know if other people have more happy memories from their childhoods and, if so, what are they like? If your parents created loving memories for you, what sorts of things were you doing together? I guess I'm partly trying to understand why some things stick in our minds, to become happy memories, and others don't. As well as how to help create positive memories for a child. (Obviously, "be a good parent/aunt/sitter/friend" is the default answer, but beyond that, what makes the memory?)

Undeserved nostalgia?

Monochrome — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:06:15 -0800

When was the past better than the present? I'd like to know the word or phrase that describes the romanticism people have of the past, e.g. "In those days, children respected their elders!". I was watching the documentary Born Rich and Cody Franchetti mentions that the encyclopedia was better in the early 20th century. Why? This feeling that "old ways are better" is not exactly nostalgia, because often people expressing this sentiment didn't actually grow up in this utopian past. But their feelings toward this time are exactly like nostalgia. My memory may be failing me, but I recall learning in history class that people during the Renaissance had this love of all things ancient. Where did they get such an idea? It seems the opposite of the idea of "progress", which I associate with the Victorians, yet also associate with Enlightenment ideals which were born out of the Renaissance. Via searching Wikipedia, I find that this is the antithesis of "chronological snobbery". So what is it called?

Also, why is it prevalent? It's easier for me to understand the assumption inherent in Victorian's progressive ideas: we learn from the past's mistakes, so we don't make the same mistakes. But how does one intuitively decide that the present is decaying?

Trade you for your peanut butter

darksasami — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:23:28 -0800

How can I make elementary school spaghetti sauce? Remember school cafeteria spaghetti? The noodles were skinny and underdone in places, and the sauce was thick and full of some sort of cheap meat ground very fine. Anything it touched was left coated with strange orange grease that stained worse than Cheetos. Tomatoes were probably involved, but no identifiable parts ever appeared, and they seemed to be less a base than a seasoning.

I have all kinds of recipes for spaghetti sauce, but they all have the same problem: they're designed to be good. How can I recreate the horrible old school lunches I remember so well?

what is "home" when it isn't a place?

headnsouth — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:31:30 -0800

Define "home." It's where the heart is, it's sweet, you can't go there again, etc. I can google the quotes. But what becomes "home" if you didn't grow up in only one place, or if your family isn't the Norman Rockwell kind of family one pictures when conjuring up an image of "home"?

I'm about to relocate my kids just as they begin high school. They spent their younger years in one state, their coming-of-age years in another, and they'll become adults in a third. I feel guilty but it can't be helped and it's a good move for all of us for a lot of reasons. Our extended family is quite limited so it's pretty much just us. We've got holiday traditions and all kinds of routines that don't/won't change, so there's that.

But their childhood "home" isn't a single place, and it isn't memories of big loud cheerful family gatherings. So what is it? What does it mean to have shallow roots & a peripatetic upbringing? And what will it mean for them when I'm dead & they don't have either a familiar place or a person to come home to?

I would love to hear from army brats, adult children of divorce, adults who were foster kids, children of overseas workers, etc. All comments are welcome and appreciated.

What from the '80s was actually good?

Metroid Baby — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:24:08 -0800

I'm a child of the '80s, and I loved the '80s. However, I didn't develop a sense of good taste until about 1994, and as a result my pop-culture radar is completely jammed with crappy cartoons designed to sell toys, cereal commercials, and Ewoks. Can you recommend totally awesome movies/TV shows/etc. that will satisfy my '80s nostalgia, but are good enough to watch today? I spent my formative years reading endless volumes of Sweet Valley Twins and Baby-Sitters Club books and running to the TV every time Rainbow Brite or Captain N came on. A lot of the stuff I loved as a kid hasn't aged well, though; most of it is painfully unwatchable now. (I mean, Rainbow was whiny and boring, Starlite was a pompous jerk, and Twink was a wuss. I'm beginning to sympathize with Murky Dismal.) I'd like to revisit my youth while keeping the cringing and brain atrophy to a minimum.

Additionally, I know my mental catalog of '80s pop culture is woefully incomplete; being young, I naturally missed out on a lot. There's a whole decade of PG-13 movies I missed! But much like I couldn't tell a Trix ad from a real cartoon at the age of four, I'm having trouble picking out the stuff that's actually worth my attention.

So I am looking for recommendations of movies, TV, books, anything from the decade that is quintessentially '80s—as so totally '80s as possible—but well-done and interesting enough to be worth watching in 2008 and beyond. The medium and genre are not particularly important, though I'd certainly welcome anything that would have appealed to a kid back then.

(I haven't mentioned music because I listen to plenty of '80s pop and don't really need recommendations in that area. Plus, I have a feeling I already know what you’re going to say.)

ex girlfriend past memories nostalgia

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:10:58 -0800

When will I stop thinking about my ex? She's starting to pop up in my cavernous head again. I broke up with my first long term girlfriend in January of last year after a tortuous last few months. In the end I was glad it was over and didn't care if I heard another word about her again. I started seeing my current girlfirend about nine months ago. My current relationship is going well. The only complaint I have is a lack of sex and general affection that was present in the beginning. I don't want to complain too loudly because my girlfriend has been amazingly stressed lately. We have discussed it a couple times and I'm doing my best to be patient.

My current relationship is definitely more serious in tone than the one with my ex. We have tons of fun but the ex and I had a little goofball streak going. I'm not sure if it was the age difference though. My current girlfriend and I are 28 and my ex was 24.

For the past week or so my mind wanders back to my ex. I haven't really thought about her for about eight months give or take a little and all of a sudden it's like a big wave of what I can only describe as nostalgia hits. I haven't been able to figure out if I'm missing her or just the good parts of the relationship that I don't exactly have now. I can't help but feel a little guilty when my girlfriend and I are watching a movie and the ex pops into my head for a second or two.

Is this unusual? If it's not will this lessen over time?

Disney channel movie

leotrotsky — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:55:27 -0800

Movie on Disney channel in late 80s early 90s. Involves boy with crush on girl who turns out to have magical skills, she lives by a lake in cottage with her ?grandmother? who is a witch. Perhaps in England? Anyone? I picture the girl as having long dark, slightly wild hair.

old toys & industrial waste

xz — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:46:21 -0800

yesterday, my neighbor was talking about that stuff we had as kids that was basically a little tube of awful smelling plastic gunk and a small straw. you put a glob of plastic on the straw and blew weird, oily bubbles. anyone remember what that crap was called? what was it?

Studio One on the Mac SE.

Sticherbeast — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:35:23 -0800

OldMacFilter: I have fond memories of using a program called Studio/One on my Mac SE to generate monochrome bitmap art and animation. It was a straightforward, user-friendly program with a very solid System 6 vibe. I also seem to recall other programs from the same company - I seem to recall Studio Eight and Studio 32 as being the other products. My question is, where could I find more information about this wonderful program, to fill my nostalgia for old-school Mac-ness? What company made it, and how could I most easily create animations similar to what it produced? And what were Studio Eight and Studio 32 like? Does anyone else remember this stuff?

Working PC version of old "Virus Wars" game?

LairBob — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:42:17 -0800

I'm looking for a XP-friendly version of the old "virus war" games. I've got an eight-year-old who's now entranced with the idea of the old "virus war" games I used to play when _I_ was a kid, where you could program your own little algorithms, and see them "battle" graphically against each other. (I've explained to him several times that you can't program it to use a "Power Fist Attack" or an "Invincibility Shield", but he wants to prove to me that I'm wrong. And yes, I'm the kind of dad who regales his kids with stories of the computer games we used to play "back in the day". Thank god he cares.)

Anyway, since he's actually been getting into LOGO and other simple programming teaching tools, I thought this would be another fun thing to expose him to. I've tried Googling, but unfortunately the phrase "virus wars" has become such a cliche in tech journalism that it's pretty futile.

Any thoughts? As I recall, there used to be a bunch of variations on this theme, on Apple, PC, etc., and I'm hoping I can find one that's modern enough to run on XP. (Or maybe an emulator, I guess.) Thanks in advance.

Can you help me find a children's record player from my youth?

mamessner — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:26:11 -0800

I'm looking for a very specific (Fisher Price?) record player from my childhood. It looked very much like the clamshell-type Fisher Price Record Player of the late 70s/early 80s, but here's the thing: it had small glass lightbulbs and something like bike reflector tape along the inside of the top shell, and when you played a record, the lights flashed and reflected off the decals, throwing flashing rainbows around the room if you had the lights off. At least, that's how I remember it.

It was sized for 45s, but also played LPs (like the Fisher Price model). It may very well have been a Fisher Price model - I'm not sure. I probably got it in 1983 - no later than 1985.

I like the Fisher Price models, but I'm looking for this one in particular, and after months of searching, am about to give up.

How do we know if food used to be better?

L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:02:33 -0800

Were produce and meat really better in the old days? How can we be sure? The most recent Achewood got me thinking about food. Seems to me that in my youth, the tomatoes at the supermarket used to be more red. I've heard people of my mother's generation say that beef used to taste better, the way only the best beef does today. And now we have the idea that chicken used to taste more chickeny, at least to cartoon cats.

Here's my question: is there any way to determine objectively whether this is so? Sure, lots of people will tell you it is, but lots of people will tell you that teenage crime and pregnancy are higher than ever, even if it's not true. Can we be sure this isn't just a rose-colored -- or red-colored, in my case -- look back at the foods of a mythical youth?

It's been 24 years. I give up.

mecran01 — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:03:06 -0800

My geometry teacher in high school in 1984 showed us this puzzle. I was only half paying attention, but I believe the goal was to draw a line that intersected each segment only once. I was only half paying attention, but I believe the goal was to draw a line that intersected each segment only once. The line you drew could intersect itself. I have been doodling with this thing, off and on for 24 years.

Does anyone know the origin of this puzzle? I saw it in an IQ test. AFAIK, the solution, if there is one, has something to do with drawing a line that crosses the point(s) where two different segments meet, and there being some sort of indeterminacy about whether the line one drew intersected one point or another.

Anyway, I'm giving up. I need closure.

Mr. Farrer, who taught at Alta High School in Sandy, Utah: you win, and I apologize for not paying closer attention.

They kept it in the bath, but didn't make a movie about it

subbes — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:59:18 -0800

Help me identify this UK children's book about a sea monster kept in a house! It's not The Water Horse! Vague nostalgia-filter:

An ad for The Water Horse (the movie) reminded me of a similar book. I cannot remember the title, but I owned this book and never owned The Water Horse.

Brief plot line:
- Children buy an ornament/memento from Angelsey (while on a school trip?) with a stone as a base. Maybe some other seaside resort? I have it in my head as Anglesey.
- The stone turns out to be an egg, which hatches into a sea monster.
- Part of the plot includes the monster moving to the local canal because it was too big for the house.

Salient points:
- The book would have been bought in the 1990s, in the UK (probably through one of those pamphlets that school kids were given with an order form for books that would then be delivered to them c/o the school).
- The title may have been "A gift from Angelsey" (A Google and an Amazon.co.uk search revealed nothing with any similar title).

My partner suggested I imagined the whole thing. Help me prove him wrong!
Once again: I am very sure that this is not "The Water Horse" by Dick-King Smith.

Looking for a certain book about a mole

snarfois — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:10:43 -0800

Childrens' book filter: I'm looking for a story about a mole, in which he tries to escape from a digging machine. Like many people, I'm trying to trace the books that I liked as a child. Problem is, many were translated into Afrikaans, so googling the titles rarely works. (And others I can't even remember the titles.)

This book was called "Skopman die mol", and the part I remember is where the mole digs frantically to escape the claw of the earthmover, but is scooped up anyway. But it turns out he was being rescued rather than trapped, I think, and the earthmover releases him again.

Recommend a bomb-shelter restaurant in Elkhart County, IN?

dirtdirt — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:16:47 -0800

In the early 1980's there was a pizzeria/bar near Goshen, Indiana called Das Keller that was in an underground bunker... ...what happened to it?

There was a teeny-tiny building, almost like a small gazebo, in the middle of a small plot of grass in a sleepy downtown area. You'd enter the little building and it was just slightly bigger than the stairway going down to a surprisingly large bar/restaurant. It was dark, but not at all dank. There were a few booths and a handful of tables. A jukebox, a pool table and a couple of pinball machines.

It was not actually in Goshen, but it was in the general area, within maybe a 15 or 20 minute drive. Elkhart? Syracuse? Warsaw? The only places near there I am sure it isn't are Goshen (I'd remember if it was Goshen) or New Paris (we lived in New Paris). This was in maybe 1980 -1982.

Obviously this question is an effort to reconcile current reality with my childhood impressions. Google has nothing. It seems like if it was still operating under that name it would be easy to track down. If there is something else there now that would also be easy(ish) to track down. How many former bomb shelters turned restaurants could there be in greater Elkhart County?

It seems unlikely that they filled in the underground space and built a Walgreen's or something there, but I guess it is possible.

My brother remembers this all just as vividly as I do, but is of no real help.

(interesting: Googly reveals the Underground Restaurant in Richmond, IN. Sounds good! Right distance from New Paris, even says they sell Pizza! But wait, it is in a Holiday Inn, and the review does not mention that it is in fact ACTUALLY underground. Hmm. Maybe the owners saved the name and got space in a Holiday Inn built over top of the old Das Keller? I hope someone reading this knows...)

What should we watch after Gargoyles?

shanevsevil — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:25:09 -0800

On a whim my girlfriend started us watching the 90's cartoon series Gargoyles together. For some bizarre reason this has turned into a fun little bonding ritual. Unfortunately we've almost reached the end of Season Two: Volume One, which is all that has been released on DVD (When's the rest coming out?). What should we watch next? She had the idea to watch the old X-Men cartoon series. What other retro shows have a little bit of that little kid fun, and a little bit of all-ages appeal?

I think I still have some healing to do.

milarepa — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:52:56 -0800

Last weekend I saw Darjeeling Limited. While the movie was okay, I absolutely loved one of The Kinks songs featured in it, "This Time Tomorrow." Can anyone recommend other songs by other artists that have that same big, happy, melancholy mix? I am pretty familiar with other Kinks stuff, and frankly I am not that big of a fan. But, this song, and one other featured in the movie, "Strangers," are really great. I am looking for music with a similar big, sad, happy feel to it.

Elliot Smith's album XO had a similar feeling, as did Nas' Lost Tapes. I am open to some indie rock or hip hop, but bonus if the songs suggested are from the same time period as the Kinks songs mentioned. Extra bonus if I can get them from itunes.

I am not really looking for sad songs...I am looking for songs that are happy and sad at the same time. Magnetic fields had a lot, but I can't listen to them anymore :( I guess you could say I am looking for songs that sound the way Wes Anderson's movies feel. Excessive nostalgia welcomed.

kthanxbye!

Yo se que te gusto

bluejayk — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:33:44 -0800

Where can I find lists of the most popular Spanish top 40 music from summer, 2002? I danced the summer away in 2002, and to a lesser extent, the fall of 2000 in Salamanca and Madrid, Spain. Now I'd love to get a hold of some of those songs somehow. Problem is, I don't know what they're called, who sang them, or what the words were. I speak decent Spanish, but I can't make out lyrics in any language, especially not at three in the morning. So, I just have a few songs in mind, like the one that went "da-da-da, waaahh!!!" and other incomprehensible, unhelpful tidbits, but only a couple actual names.

So, where can I find a list of what was popular on the radio or in clubs for a specific time for Spain? General dance clubs, like Capital in Madrid. I'm not looking for the best songs of the year, some of these songs were really horrible. But they make me happy, so I want them. Ideally, a sight that would stream, or let me listen to 10 second samples would be perfect.

Here are a couple of the songs that I did manage to remember: 'Asereje' by Las Ketchup, 'Torero', 'Brinca, Salta, Bailalo' by El Simbolo and 'Baila Morena' by Zucherro. Stuff like that is what I'm looking for. And I could never admit to it in person.

Thanks, you'll be helping me relive a really great time in my life!

How to best sell my father's old-school collectible cards?

Ufez Jones — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:41:09 -0800

So, my father has a ton of old (50's-60's) baseball/football/collector cards and is nearing retirement. I'd like to help him sell them. I've a lot of questions here. We're talking the heyday of baseball, especially for the boomers. Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and the like, many of them rookie cards. There's also a lot of old football cards and those weird monster/comic book cards in his collection. When I last dug through them (several years back) there were a *lot* of impressive cards. They've been stored in shoe-boxes for a long, long time, but last I saw them, they were still in pretty good shape. We've talked about this before, but I'm headed up to see him this weekend, and would like to discuss this with him.

I know the market for collectible cards has taken a bit of a downswing, but I believe there's still a lot of value in these. My questions are:

1) What's the best avenue to sell these? I'm assuming there will be some variance between selling the individual classic cards vs. a grouping. Is E-bay the best resource? How would I value the lot of them as a whole to a big bidder?

2) What would be a fair commission on my part if I were to help him do this? This is something that we've brought up in the past, and we have a good relationship that I'd like to keep intact through it all. He's already talked about giving me a percentage of the take, fwiw.

3) What would the tax implications on my end be (assuming he doesn't just pay me under the table)? He's got a CPA that can take care of his side of the income from this.

For those that have specific questions about the cards and the best of the bunch, sorry, but I won't be able to answer those until Saturday afternoon at the earliest, but I'll post the best updates I can figure out both here and shoot you an e-mail (provided you have one in your profile).

Thanks.

A Father's Time Capsule to his Daughter

jonson — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:49:00 -0800

What should I put in a time capsule for my daughter? I'm increasingly obsessed with how time keeps moving faster as I get older, and with my daughter's 2nd birthday approaching at the end of this year, I thought it would be fun to bury a time capsule in our yard for her, to open in 2026, on her 21st birthday. I have all of the sentimental items, (for example, a letter I wrote her when I found out my wife was pregnant), but I really want her to get a feel not just for who her parents were when they were (semi)young & (semi)cool, but what life was like in America when she was too little to take notice of it. For reference, similar items the from same time in my own childhood would have included, for example, the original Washington Post Watergate scandal reporting or an 8 track tape of Led Zep IV. So what things should I consider that will help commemorate the times?

Nineties nostalgia: kids in charge!

coolhappysteve — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:36:05 -0800

NostalgiaFilter: Early nineties kids show in which the kids ran the cameras, the sound booth, and possbily sang? Possibly on Saturday mornings on PBS? You know how it goes, I am caught up in a fury of trying to remember this show. It was like a news program, and the kids ran the whole thing, supposedly.

I know someone will be right on this - thanks!

He Shot, He Scored! (Way Back When)

YamwotIam — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:08:38 -0800

I'm looking for a table hockey game (rod hockey, not air hockey) that I played as a wee 'un back in the 80s. It featured a super-slick surface, 3D players, an electronic timer (and goal counter), and a behind-the-net left winger. I believe it was Swedish--it may have been a Stiga game--but can't seem to track this game down. I've checked the Stiga sites, as well as TableHockeyHeaven and the like, and no luck.

I ask, of course, because my son has reached the age where this would make a plausible gift for him (but an even cooler one for me).

BTW, this painfully beautiful wave of nostalgia was inspired by a (deleted) MetaFilter post.

Console cats!

archagon — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 11:29:27 -0800

When I was growing up in Russia, one of my friends had a nifty 2D console (at least NES-era, possibly better) that we played every now and then. In one of his games (a side-scroller), you controlled several humanoid cats, each with a different body shape, color, and speciality. I'm fairly certain that one of them could dig. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all I remember, save for a large-headed sideways-moving creature that had musical notes or bubles floating above its head -- but that might've been from a different game. I also faintly recall a boss stage in which the boss (positioned at the top of the screen) dropped spider-like creature onto the player at the bottom of the screen, and into pits which the player may or may not have dug.

Ring any bells?