As my daughter (who I’ll refer to as W) has grown up over the past (nearly) three years, there have been a lot of moments for nostalgia for my wife. She grew up with a much younger sibling, so she watched and read a lot of things targeted to younger kids. Movies, books, songs and more.
But I, on the other hand, am the youngest. What I remember from childhood starts once I was old enough to form more solid memories. I have vague hints of places we went or things I did when I was truly little in the back of my mind. A family trip to Yosemite, where I was afraid of a steep cliff. Or riding an innertube on Lake Tahoe. But as far as media goes, my memories tend to start later, in elementary school. I know I watched Barnie, for example, but I have no nostalgia for it because I can’t remember it. That, in turn, has limited the amount of little-kid oriented media I feel nostalgia for.
Well everything changed this month, because W’s been getting into dragons. It all started with Dragons Love Tacos – maybe the strangest kids book we’ve read to her so far. But she loves it, and reads it every night. Which ignited deep within me a remembrance of watching PBS as a kid, and loving – what else? – Dragon Tales.
Dragon Tales is a classic. It sat amongst shows like Between the Lions, Zoboomafoo, and... (shudder) Caillou. It followed the classic trope of kids running off to a fantasy land to learn how to deal with their real-world problems. I have fond memories of watching it in my parent’s bedroom on their CRT on a rainy Saturday morning.
Thing is: it’s impossible to find now... except through the Internet Archive, where all the episodes are downloadable. I feel kind of bad for accessing it this way, but when there’s literally no other way to buy or stream it, what is a parent of a dragon-loving toddler to do?
Suffice to say, W is obsessed. Obsessed to the point of shouting “DRAGON SONG” at us until we play the theme song for her. On repeat. For hours.1
I remember as a kid, my dad would show us cartoons from his childhood. I grew up on Johnny Quest, The Jetsons, Wacky Races, and Underdog. I have nostalgia now for the things my dad had nostalgia for as a young parent. And as I share things from my childhood with my own daughter, someday she too will have nostalgia for the things I did. It’s a big ol’ chain of nostalgia all the way down.
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There’s another post I’d like to write sometime about the way kids love to repeat things that bring them joy. What is it about growing up that makes us need a constant stream of new things to carry us along? Why can’t we sit in something wonderful and enjoy it? Is it an attention span thing? Is it a cultural thing? ↩︎
