A Return to Retro

by Amy Majerowicz

I remember my one and only pair of underroos with mixed emotion. In my Wonderwoman underroos I felt transformed from a skinny six­year­old to a courageous superhero. I felt invincible; one day in kindergarten, believing that I could fly, I launched headfirst into a pile of huge wooden building blocks. This accident left me with a permanent bump in my forehead and ended my delusions of superheroic grandeur. From that day on, I have harbored a resentment of all things involving Linda Carter.

The older I become, the more the nostalgia seeps into my childhood memories. There are hundreds of little things that trigger these memories; to help all who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s remember those little things we thought we had forgotten comes the book RetroHell: Life in the 70s and 80s from Afros to Zots.

RetroHell is brought to you by the editors of Ben is Dead magazine and overflows with nostalgic artifacts from the recent past. It reads as an encyclopedia, an A to Z guide of the pop culture that has dominated life over the last 20 years.

Not just a mere documentation of the recent past, it examines a generation's fascination with all things retro. The notion of recycling the past has always been a hip one, and now the 1970s and 80s are getting their moment in the spotlight. This fact becomes undeniable as fashions return to bell­bottoms and platform shoes. Fashion magazines even predict a shift back to the big­shoulder, bright look of the 1980s.

Retrohell has its finger on the pulse of this cultural phenomenon and serves as a user friendly handbook in navigating a retro world. Ranging from the obvious to the obscure, the editors who compiled this book reminisce about it all, adding personal histories to the factual material. Many pages are graced with photographs of pop culture icons like Farrah Fawcett and the Jackson 5, games like Operation and Dungeons and Dragons, personal illustrations, and so on. You get the idea. In fact, the A­Team van makes a pictorial appearance on page 284 (under V for vans).

Most people can remember such things as pop rocks, lite brites, and glam rock, without delving too far into their unconscious mind. There are some things, however, that are very personal and play out like childhood melodramas. Remember eraser burn? Unless you have ever vigorously erased the flesh on the top of your hand during some bout of childhood boredom, these sort of entries would mean very little. Still, it would probably stir a laugh and a comment like "Gosh, kids are dumb!"

We live in a fast­paced culture full of stuff. And it is that stuff, the stuff we need and must have, that is constantly changing. By the time I had caught on to the Garbage Pail Kids craze, they were nothing more than a dirty, half­peeled sticker on the inside of a fliptop school desk. I noticed the same thing happened about four years ago when my little brother and all of his friends collected every pog under the sun only to slam them into oblivion by the summer's end. Pogs will probably resurface after a healthy ten­year shelflife. Until then, we'll just have to wait.

RetroHell documents these snippets of youth and gives them a historic point of reference while paying homage to their short­lived yet phenomenally popular moment in time. It reads as an amusing stream of anecdotal tales and cllever, biting thoughts reveal scathing commentary. As each person replays his or her own E.T., monster truck show or After School Special experience, we witness a portrait of innocence, or the loss of innocence.

It is not surprising that a generation described as "cynics" or "slackers" would treat nostalgia realistically and satirically. Yet, there are some romantic interludes in the book that will open a floodgate of memory, washing over you with all those things you thought you had forgotten. It is the closest thing I have found to traveling back to a time when, just for a second, I thought that if I leapt into the air high enough with my arms outstretched and with the power of my Wonderwoman undies, I might actually fly. MR

This article was published in the 11 February 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 16, Number 7).
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