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What i find most interesting is the accelerating cycle of nostalgia and how it will affect younger franchises.

It's been known for a while that nostalgia comes in 20-year cycles. After about 20 years, a person tends to forget anything bad about a time period and look back on it fondly and want to go revisit that thing again.

But it seems, to me at least, like hollywood and TV are rapidly consuming any core, primo nostalgic media well before that 20-year gap. I've heard from friends in the entertainment industry that it's basic practice if you're a creative type, to try and figure out if there's any way to slap your idea onto some old dead franchise that didn't have much in the way of characterization or deep lore for you to have to contend with - which is why a lot of shows tend to lean hard on the 1980's "This Is A Cartoon Show To Sell Action Figures" genre, where most characters just existed as a silly shtick to show up on screen and do whatever the action figure could do.

The eye of the needle is just that much wider if you can pitch your idea as an original concept OOOOOOOOOOOOR as a reboot of this other thing people might remember and recognize and you might be able to buy the rights for on the cheap.

That's part of the reason you will often end up asking 'hey, did they even fething WATCH the original thing?' when you watch a reboot. The answer is often "no, the reboot was actually just pasted on sloppily to a completely unrelated film or TV project that couldn't get off the ground if it couldnt be pitched as a reboot to something the studio was sitting on."

But we still seem to be kind of hanging in the 80s-90s for that nostalgic media, and I suspect there's something twofold going on. First and foremost, you've got the wealth gap - the generation of people now hitting what used to be 'prime spending years' have a comparative sliver of the wealth of previous generations, and secondly, you've got the fact that what was popular in the early 2000s....basically never left. We've had a steady diet of comic book movies, star wars, reboots, retreads, and rehashes. An entire generation that was just raised on the boomers' hand me downs.Do you just...reboot it again? Do you start digging up what few original projects there were in the 00s?

new she-ra is the perfect example of the phenomenon of 'you cannot get anything made unless you can graft it to a nostalgic property somehow.' All my friends who are in the entertainment industry (and weirdly, I have several) complain about this continuously. They talk about how everyone makes fun of them for not having 'original ideas' when everyone has original ideas but they just can't fething get past the suits who don't consider anything safe enough if there isn't at least some nostalgic element that will get people in the door.

I have 0 doubt that many of the ideas for new she-ra were utterly unrelated to she-ra originally, and the original idea was just to make an ensemble cast young adult cartoon in the vein of avatar where you can market it as a kids show but adults will watch it for snappy writing and good characters, and "it can also be a she-ra reboot" was added on six months after being turned down 500 times.

Any time you watch something and ask 'what the feth, did they even watch the original?' what you're probably watching was never intended to be a remake in the first place.

There are also a few instances you can see of 'Filing off the serial numbers.' for example there have been a recent spate of movies that were probably originally intended as Five Nights at Freddies movies, and got dumped out in 2020 with the serial numbers filed off or hastily re-branded when studios were just trying to keep people aware of their existence while not wanting to risk any kind of substantial investment. That would be the 'nick cage punches puppets' and the 'banana splits' flicks.