It’s strange what you can find yourself being nostalgic for.

I would love to say we live in a time of endless nostalgia bait, and while that’s not untrue, it’s not like we recently invented it. People have longed for an imagined ‘good old days’ since around the time we had enough human history to be nostalgic for, and there’s plenty of ways to capitalize on that.

Old movies get new HD transfers, video games get ported or remade for newer systems, fashion trends come back every 20 years or so, and the vicious cycle continues. I’m not complaining, and would have no real room to complain given the contents of this blog, but it is worth considering exactly how much pop culture is recycled and reused in a modern context to remind us of our pasts.

But what if something gives you nostalgia that didn’t exist then? I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of “hiraeth”, a Welsh term regarding a general sense of nostalgia, and more specifically referring to a “longing for a homeland that you’ve never visited” (and, full disclosure, I only found out about this word because I spent two years listening to nothing but vaporwave).

There’s a lot of ways to unpack this term, but think about the last thing you saw that reminded you of your childhood. Sure, it may have been an embarrassing high school photograph or an old commercial you watched on YouTube, but more often than not these days it might be something that didn’t exist beforehand.

An awful lot of content exists to try and document and re-create something the creator remembers from childhood but can’t express concretely. Movies like mid90s and

The Magnificent Ambersons, video games like Shovel Knight and Dusk, blogs like this one (and much better versions of this blog like Dinosaur Dracula and Broken Chains) – all of them attempt to explore a memory from earlier and presumably simpler times in the creator’s life using whatever means and emotions they have in front of them. It’s a fascinating way of seeing a past brought back to life using whatever resources they have today, all with the goal of making you feel it too even if none of us were there and this particular thing didn’t exist at the time.

Pretty flowery so far, right? The punchline here is that I was recently made to feel this because of a toy robot I bought on the internet.

For those of you reading this who aren’t interested in Transformers, this guy’s name is Combat Hero Megatron. Let me start at the beginning.

In the early 90s, when I was old enough to own toys that I could be expected to not chew on, the current Transformers line was called Generation 2. The series was half gaudy, neon-colored repaints of toys from the previous series (retroactively referred to as, you guessed it, Generation 1) and half gaudy, neon-colored brand new toys either for old characters or guys they just made up. As every Transformers series needs a bad guy, Megatron was brought into the fold, but since toy guns were already kind of on their way out by 1992 he would spend the next few years of his life getting remade into hilariously garish tanks and military vehicles. At the time I didn’t bat an eyelash, even if he didn’t turn into a gun like he did in all the Transformers video tapes I would rent, and at the time I didn’t appreciate how funny it was that a dude who had to disguise himself as an American military tank would choose to make himself either bright green or bright purple.

This specific Megatron would have been named Combat Hero Megatron, he would have been released in 1995, and he would have come with an air-powered foam missile that would’ve been too long to pose a choking hazard but just long enough to irritate my sister when I zinged her with it from across the room. You’ll notice I’m using past-tense here – while another toy with the name Combat Hero Megatron would be released, it wouldn’t feature this weird tiger-stripe arctic camo paintjob, and eventually Generation 2 would give way to Beast Wars, a series I never liked as much but politely tolerated while it was here.

Here’s where the whole hiraeth thing comes back into play. Recently, Hasbro released a version of the Megatron from the current series (called Siege, and it absolutely rules) that had this paintjob as an online exclusive. And the funny thing is, they nailed it. The tiger camo is just as ugly and kid-appealing as it would’ve been in 1995, the little details like how he has the Generation 2 logo and his own name emblazoned on his chest (a weird detail most Generation 2 toys shared, since they presumably gave up on being robots in disguise) are exactly what they would’ve been, and for a man that buys a lot of toys it made me feel like a kid again.

Which is maybe the most impressive part. It’s one thing if the act of buying toys makes me feel like a kid, or even if I re-buy a specific figure from my childhood, but this dude is not only technically a brand-new toy, he’s based upon a figure that never came out that I would have no way of knowing existed back in 1995.

And yet I hold him and I feel like my mom is about to take me to Blockbuster to rent some Genesis games before she calls the one lone Domino’s in my hometown. In the same way that successful throwback games like the aforementioned Shovel Knight or Mega Man 9 do, it takes things that you remember experiencing and helps you experience them again without the baggage of knowing “wait a minute I’ve seen/watched/played/heard this already”.

It’s sort of freeing, in a way. I don’t have any other memories or knowledge of having owned this toy once already to weigh me down – instead, all I have is a cool new robot toy to hang out on my shelf and help me remember how excited I used to get about stuff as a kid, even if this specific figure never existed for me to get excited about in the first place. By capturing a specific aesthetic similar to how indie figure lines like Nuke Beach root themselves in a particular look and era, it helps ground itself in a specific time without seeming manipulative or falling victim to ‘reboot culture’. Heck, if we had more toys and media like this, people might not get so mad about ‘reboot culture’ all the time.

You see how many words this was about a toy robot that most of you reading this won’t buy? This is why I try not to let myself talk about this stuff too often. Thanks for indulging me, you’re free to go. Until next time.

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