Personal and Cultural Nostalgia
Stories That Last
In last week’s video essay on The Little Mermaids, I talked about the Law of the Adolescent Window and how Disney missed the perfect time to remake their first animation renaissance film by about eight years.
There are two potential flaws with this theory—
What about all the people who grew up watching The Little Mermaid on VHS until the tape wore out?
Why were remakes of even older films, like Jungle Book and Cinderella successful?
Surprisingly, both have pretty much the same answer. It’s a surprisingly complex answer, though, so bear with me for a rather long article.
Not a Remake?
To start, I want to mention certain movies that are kinda-sorta-maybe considered live-action “remakes,” at least according to Wikipedia.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Tim Burton’s Production Designer’s Maleficent1 aren’t really remakes in any meaningful sense. Alice 2010 is actually a (sort of) sequel to the 1951 animated film, and Maleficent2 is a villainous perspective-flip. Neither were trying to re-adapt the source material, much less their Disney predecessors. The same goes for Cruella, Christopher Robin, et al.
These films did, however, try to capitalize on the name recognition of the earlier films, and so nostalgia was an element of their marketing campaigns. The original films had a cultural shelf life long past the time they were in theaters, as did The Little Mermaid.
The Long Tail
Not everyone fondly remembers the animated Little Mermaid because they saw it in theaters. Just one example: it’s a meaningful film to some married friends of mine because the late-90s re-release was their first date.3
But they’re not the norm. When we’re talking about box office impact, we have to look at averages of huge groups of people. There are of course people who first encountered The Little Mermaid at an older or younger age, on various media. But the core audience, the ones who Disney wants to take their kids to see the remake, are going to be people born in the late 70 or early 80s, saw the original in theaters (when it was the center of the cultural conversation), and then had children two and a half decades later.
You’ve probably seen a normal distribution (or bell curve) like this at some point in math class—
If you imagine the X axis is age and the Y axis is the number of people who were fond of the original, you’d expect the darker shaded areas to be in their 40s. Like I said in the video, someone in their 40s probably has a child who’s aged out of the target audience for the remake, so it’s less like to make for a mommy-daughter movie night.
But there’s another, nearly as famous curve that’s also relevant to our discussion—
This is the “long tail,” popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name. In Hollywood, the big, new movie sells the most tickets/DVDs/streams; that’s the “head” of the curve. More niche films—older, art house, foreign—still sell at the long tail of the curve. And since streaming service don’t have “shelf space,” streamers can offer the whole range of their film library. It’s worth it to keep older films streaming on, because it’s always new to somebody.
So, yes, people who were too young to catch the animated Little Mermaid at the drive-in in 1989 were able to watch it on VHS in the 90s or DVD in the 2000s, and Disney+ today. Little Mermaid will never again be at the head of that curve, but it’ll still float somewhere in the middle, waiting for the next generation to re-discover it. Not to mention buy new toys and t-shirts.
But surely those sales eventually drop off to zero, right? Not necessarily.
The Perennial Seller
In the book Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts, Ryan Holiday writes about works of art that continue to have fans decades or even centuries after they’ve been introduced to the public.
Here’s how he describes the concept on his website:
Hidden from view for the vast majority of public is a little page that explains the complicated methodology behind the famous New York Times Bestseller list. And buried mid-way through that explanation is an unusual phrase. It says, with matter-of-factness, “among the categories not actively tracked at this time” by the editors at the Times are so-called “perennial sellers.”
To people not in the industry, this is a strange phrase. Perennial sellers? What does that mean?
In fact, it’s an industry term for perhaps the most important type of book in publishing, one that some estimate is responsible for the vast majority of the revenue for the $70 billion dollar book industry: the titles published long ago that keep selling without fanfare and without attention. That’s what a perennial seller is: a product that keeps reaching new customers week in and week out, year in and year out.
Nor is publishing the only industry that has this trend or this concept. In 2015, “catalog albums”—albums 18 months or older—outsold all new releases. In Hollywood, it’s the “library” that funds the massive budgets of the blockbusters that come out each year (and keep the companies in business when the majority of these movies inevitably lose money).
Perennial sellers are books like What To Expect When You’re Expecting, Good to Great, The Great Gatsby, movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “A Christmas Story,” or songs like “Happy Birthday” or “Candle In The Wind.” It’s products like Red Wing’s 1907 Work Boot (which confusingly only dates back to the 1950s) or restaurants like The Original Pantry, which has been open every single day since 1924.
Disney cartoons used to try to go for the perennial seller thing, when the studio devoted the resources of the entire company towards making one great film. It’s why Walt based so many of his animated features on classic stories; he knew those stories would last because they already had lasted. It was also a business decision—people still buy Tinkerbell dolls and Cheshire Cat backpacks.
Which brings us the Jungle Book and Cinderella. These weren’t just popular films in their time;4 they continued to be popular for decades.
A bell curve would no longer be an accurate representation of generational interest in these movies. Someone who saw Jungle Book on its initial release would be in their 60s now; someone who saw Cinderella would be in their 80s.
For most younger people, there was no initial burst of popularity. These movies have just always, perennially, existed in our childhoods. There was no need to catch a wave of nostalgia with remakes of these classics. At any point for the last couple of decades, they would’ve hit the nostalgia button for some parents.
So, is the animated Little Mermaid a “perennial seller”? It’s hard to say. For this last section, we’re going to take an even longer view.
Love What Lasts
So far, we’ve mostly been considering the nostalgia of individual moviegoers. But there’s also a kind of cultural nostalgia for works that the entire society deems worthy of remembering and passing on.
I first heard about Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity when the author, Joshua Gibbs, appeared on an episode of the Classical Stuff You Should Know podcast. (I highly suggest giving it a listen, even if you don’t read the book.)
Gibbs divides cultural creations into three broad categories: the Common, the Uncommon, and the Mediocre.5
Something that’s Mediocre is wildly popular in the short term, but becomes unpopular in the long term, like disco or Ed Hardy t-shirts or dancing on top of flagpoles.
Common6 works are those that last a lifetime, about seventy-five years. After that three generations or so, they start to lose their cultural value because they stop making sense to the great-grandchildren of the generation who created it.
Uncommon art is resistant to such corruption, and even seems to grow and deepen with time.
Things often go through the three categories, but not always. While Moby Dick and It’s a Wonderful Life weren’t popular upon initial release, and had to undergo a critical re-evaluation for various historical reasons, Psycho and Huckleberry Finn were hits from the start, and stayed that way. Romeo and Juliet has been popular for hundreds of years.
Most kids’ movies come and go. They’re Mediocre.7 But some, like Cinderella and Winnie the Pooh, will likely continue to enthrall children for as long as images are played on screen.
So, is The Little Mermaid a perennial seller? Common or Uncommon? Hard to say.
You see, there’s only so much room in our cultural memory, just like there is in your personal memory. For any new film (or book/song/etc) to enter The Canon of Art, something else will have to be forgotten.8 It’s impossible to know if The Little Mermaid (or Beauty and the Beast or Lion King or Aladdin) will be able to supplant Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in our cultural heritage.
For now, though, I think The Little Mermaid is in a weird, middle stage. It definitely proved itself beyond Mediocre, but it’s not been around long enough to definitively call it Common. And so our collective nostalgia for it wasn’t able to push the remake to the heights of The Jungle Book.
Time is the final arbiter. Which films will we pass on to our children? Which will our grandchildren remember? Film history is so short, very few films have been around long enough to even face the test of crossing over from Common to Uncommon.9
I want to leave you with some words from Gibbs, on how he came to write this interesting book—
In August of 2018, I went to a cinema and bought a ticket for Jurassic World 2. I knew it wasn’t going to be any good. I knew that when the movie was over, it wouldn’t be worth thinking about or talking about and that I would summarily forget everything about the film before the following day. I knew that I should have instead purchased a ticket to see First Reformed, which was also playing, and which I had heard was quite good—but I didn’t. Jurassic World 2 was as vacuous and stupid as I knew it would be, but days later, I couldn’t shake the frustration I felt with myself for wasting my time and money on the ticket.
Love What Lasts is the book which grew out of this frustration. Why had I seen a stupid movie when I could have seen a good one? It wasn’t a matter of cost, time, or convenience. It was a matter of laziness. And bad taste.
It’s okay to enjoy The Little Mermaid, or even The Little Mermaid. But we should consider what art we’re feeding our souls. Don’t settle for Mediocre or Common. Look for something Uncommon, instead.
TIL “maleficent” is a real word, not just a cartoon villain:
/məˈlefəsənt/
adjective
causing harm or destruction, especially by supernatural means.
I also learned it’s spelled with two e’s and only one i…
As a very important aside, this family (they have three kids now) have been kicked out of their home due to rising rent, and are trying to find a way to survive. If you have any ability to help out a family in need, please consider their GiveSendGo page.
Adjusted for inflation, the 1967 animated Jungle Book made nearly twice as much as the remake did 50 years later!
Interestingly, he doesn’t have a category for stuff that’s just bad, which is odd, because ‘mediocre’ implies both works that are better and works that are worse.
Again, I’m confused about the terminology, because art that fits these criteria isn’t that common.
Yes, even the ones you enjoyed as a kid.
Don’t believe me? Just look at the evolution of the AFI and Sight & Sound “greatest films” lists.
Judging from my short experience as a teacher, older classics like Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane just don’t resonate with young adults coming of age now; silent films are nearly incomprehensible to them.