I have seen the future of television and it is made of television’s past. At least that’s how it feels some days, as one familiar character after another—Jesse Pinkman, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even Snoopy—gets disinterred and resurrected on our screens.

Streaming television is about to become a battlefield for media behemoths, as Disney+ and Apple TV+ launch this fall, and HBO Max and NBC Universal’s Peacock follow next spring. With Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu already generating a tidal wave of programming, it’s unclear how many streaming services the American market can sustain. So TV executives are betting that old characters and brands will help lure new subscribers. Welcome to the retro wars. “We’re leaning into the nostalgia,” says Agnes Chu, senior vice president for content at Disney+. “We are very much about responding to the depth of our fans’ love for our I.P.”

Déjà vu may be eerie and unsettling in real life, but on the small screen it’s comfort food. Familiarity breeds content.

Resuscitation is a delicate procedure, though; do it clumsily and you risk tarnishing fans’ golden memories rather than breathing fresh life into them. While some recent revivals have been warmly welcomed (see Will &Grace or Gilmore Girls), others have failed to reignite their original chemistry or sufficiently absorb the current cultural moment (Murphy Brown). The Roseanne revamp was intended to speak to a divided America, but the star just divided the nation further, forcing the network to re-remodel the show as The Conners.

The best reboots use an old property or familiar character as a springboard to create something surprising and vibrant that resonates in the contemporary context. Netflix’s Queer Eye update is a good example of a show successfully surfing the zeitgeist: A big warm multicultural and LGBTQ+-friendly hug, it attempts to prove that blue-state folks and red-state folks can at least agree on interior decor and facial hair.

Disney+ and HBO Max each have a lot at stake with the launch of their new streamers, and both are betting that their grip on pop cultural memory is the key to reeling in viewers. Disney+ crafted its initial announcement to tug on multigenerational heartstrings with series based on Star Wars (The Mandalorian), the Marvel Cinematic Universe (The Falcon and The Winter Soldier), the Muppets, and Monsters, Inc. Also in the mix is a revival of Disney Channel hit Lizzie McGuire, featuring a now-32-year-old Hilary Duff. McGuire might not be the most obvious TV icon, but Chu says the show “came up over and over again as something that had an indelible mark on people’s lives,” particularly for millennial women. TV and movie divisions will also collaborate closely so that Marvel movie figures, say, migrate directly onto the streaming platform. “Where Avengers: Endgame left off with characters like Wanda and Vision or the Falcon and Winter Soldier—those are now going to be series exclusively on Disney+,” content and marketing president Ricky Strauss explains. And the feedback loop continues, because what happens in those series will have implications for future films, which will also, of course, find an exclusive resting place on the streaming platform.

HBO Max is similarly ransacking WarnerMedia’s closet, crammed with franchises such as Harry Potter and the DC Extended Universe, and TV classics like Friends and Scooby-Doo. “All of these people are raising their hands about cool properties they have,” Sarah Aubrey, HBO Max’s head of original content, told me earlier this year. They’ve planned a 10-episode reboot of the Warner Bros. series Gossip Girl, focused on a new generation of private-school conspirators, and science fiction series Dune: The Sisterhood by director Denis Villeneuve, which will air in between Warner’s two forthcoming Dune feature films. Meanwhile, NBC Universal’s Peacock announced that it will revive several shows from its archives, including Battlestar Galactica and Saved by the Bell.