Cops: Reality TV nobody wanted to be on

by mr.zoltanblack | July 10, 2008 at 10:15 am

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20 Years is long enough to disappear, collect a little dust and then make a miraculous comeback to hordes of young fans that likely never experienced the initial mania.

Scooby Doo, Punk music and Apple computers have all tested the waters of infamy, trolling for twenty years spans, only to make a triumphant return to the eager masses.

Scoob and Shaggy’s hippy hi-jinx earned them a mass share of the television Scooby Snack Pie during the seventy’s before fading into the eighty’s with a never-ending list of rewrites and spinoffs.

In 2002, twenty years removed from anything that even resembled peace, love and flower power Warner Brothers reached back through the greed of the eighty’s and the turmoil of the seventy’s to bring back something for the masses. The 2002 live action movie Scooby Doo was a marketing juggernaut far surpassing the $275,650,703 in gate revenue with cuddly plush puppies and Scrappy Doo baby jumper sales.

The Scooby factor doesn’t take a rocket scientist

A nation of children raised on the same Saturday afternoon television taffy passed twenty years dating, waiting and mating only to find their favourite plush pup making a return just in time for the terrible two’s of their own toddlers. Bingo. Warner wins.

An article by Scott Brown in the July issue of Wired magazine got me to wondering?

Now he's a busy molecular biologist, but he agreed, for the sake of science, to help me determine the perfect "nostalgorithm" — a differential equation that will determine a pop object's nostalgic potential while explaining why a Thundercats movie intrigues, but the X-Files sequel leaves me cold. Let's begin with the simplest factor: Time (t). As any former Giga Pet owner knows, stuff peaks, then gets old. Thus:

Popular velocity (ΔPopularity/Δt) = -L x t
where L = probability of lameness.

Off its peak, we see exponential decay in Popular Velocity over time:
Popularity(t) = exp(-L x t) = e-Lxt

Translated crudely from the calculus, this simply means pop properties have expiration dates

First, who or what will be the next blast from my past to make a return to the big stage of relevance? And, Second, Who is currently in the best position to capitalise on their twenty-year hiatus? Unfortunately I got a little long in the tooth with the whole Scooby Doo analogy (well worth it, of course) so I will have to limit my q&a to only the latter question.

The X-Files, one of the '90s more overexposed phenomena. But as Noah points out, non-awesome pop objects are primed to become awesome again. The X-Files is solidly non-awesome — so perhaps a popular re-awesomeness awaits it, è la Grunge, Trump, and Steel? Perhaps — but probably not this month. While what's old is eventually new again, it takes about a generation (tgen = 20 years) for kids to pick up what their parents discarded. And so:

And so, Who or what is currently in the best position to capitalize on twenty years away from the limelight as we move into the year 2009?

Hope for the best

Rap music with a positive message (De La Soul, Public Enemy)

Afghani peace (Russia ends nine year occupation of Afghanistan)

Michael Keaton as Batman (Hopefully more believable than an aging Indian Jones)

Expect the worst

David Hasselhoff’s singing career

Look who’s talking (John Travolta, Kristie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis)

Live in the Now

Tetris (mindless Russian puzzle game/the internet generations version of chess?)

Cops (Reality TV that nobody wants to be on)

War Movies that are less propaganda and more reality (Born on the 4th of July, Casualties of War)