Nostalgia

I've recently discovered a couple of American tv shows from the nineties. I'd seen a lot of pictures of the main character from Daria with quotes from the show circulating on sites like tumblr, but never actually twigged it was a real show. I thought it was just some cartoon that someone had done and put funny quotes over the top.

Turns out Daria is real

And Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is great - I've only managed to watch one episode the whole way through so far, but basically the storyline of being trapped out in space by an woman (awesome evil lady-villain) who wants to see how long it takes for someone to go mad by forcing them to watch awful old B-movies is a thinly veiled premise for the characters to make silly and funny comments all the way through stupid old films that are out of copyright. If you have a spare hour or two, give it a watch. The guys who did this show now do rifftrax, which are commentaries you can download and sync to films which you watch, with the same stupid and funny comments. I've only listened to the one for The Room, that infamous film, and it made me laugh through it all over again.


There's something really nostalgic about both these shows, even though I've never seen them before. Even though they're old and dated, the image quality and the sound quality aren't as good as shows today, there's real warmth and humour in these shows that I feel is missing from a lot of tv today. Sure, tv shows today look flashy, but there's nothing at the heart of them.

The only thing I've found recently that is as fun is Flight of the Conchords. I bought the first series in a charity shop, and me and my sister watched all of them back to back in a whole day in a woozy haze when we were both ill. I love how it's just a show about two friends messing around and being silly.

Flight of the Conchords, doing their thing

Incidentally, I only found out about Daria from watching Nostalgia Chick videos, which I found from a link on Feminist Frequency's twitter page. Nostalgia Chick talks about how there are a lot of great bromances in tv shows (e.g. Scrubs, Flight of the Conchords), but not so many of the female equivalent, and the relationship between Daria and her friend Jane is one of only a few examples. I'd love to see more of that in tv shows today, rather than walking pink stereotypes talking about shoes and shopping. What I think we really need to see is more of people just messing around and having fun, doing stupid things (a la FotC). That sort of thing appeals to everyone with a sense of humour.