The Problem with Nostalgia

With Marvel vs Capcom 3 out, I think this is a great opportunity to address something that tends to get overlooked or sometimes ignored altogether, and that is the negative side effects of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong taking a trip down memory lane from time to time and reminiscence, but we, and I include myself in this, tend to put these memories on a pedestal. This is best seen whenever a new movie or game comes out continuing a series that goes back many years and watching people rip into it because "it isn't like 'the good ol' days' of...". This has a reputation of ruining any chance that this new game or movie had of being any good or any chance it had of trying to live up to the former titles. I bring up Marvel vs Capcom 3 to illustrate this for the simple reason that there have been countless people saying how it doesn't compare to number 2 and how much better number 2 is. Most people that do this tend to have selective memories and forget the flaws and frustrations that this game had and only remember the good times they had with it. So with all the bad memories gone and only good ones remaining, it would only seem logical that Marvel vs Capcom 2 would easily be greater than 3, but this isn't realistic.

I also see this with movies, both in saying why new movies are not as great as older ones and the other way around. Just start up a conversation with some fans of Star Wars and you can easily see what I mean with nostalgia. Now am I saying that there aren't points made when people show weak points or just flat out shortcomings in movies? I am not, but to completely throw a movie out because a person set the bar so high for it that it was bound to fail only because the previous movie has a special connection with that person due to it being a childhood movie or whatever is not right.

This may seem like something that shouldn't matter on a grand scale since my two examples consisted of video games and movies, but there are real life applications for understanding this. Politics is a very easy place to do this. Many times a president, senator, congressman, or any other political person will be under fire from everyone because they aren't doing the job quite like (fill in name of person) or you hear, "Well (name) would of done it this way." and it just hurts that person before they even got a real chance to do anything. Another example is just in regular conversation about anything. Many times a person who puts something up on a pedestal while down cutting another is due to the memory they have connected to it, which bring it back around to nostalgia. 

In the end though, this does boil down to mere opinions. So I don't post this to encourage arguments, since arguments of opinion never end well and it just has people nit picking words and seeing who can come up with the more creative/cursing insults. I post this merely because I want to post a different point of view to consider next time something comes out or next time a conversation comes up that is similar to what I posted earlier.

Remember, Don't Panic and never forget your towel.