Author Jeremy Robinson in his piece at io9 dealing with conflicting feelings about the resurgence of 80s pop culture treasures in modern media really hits on a common truth for many of us of a certain geeky vintage.

GI:JOE. Transformers. Battlestar Galactica. V. The A-Team. Voltron. Thundercats. The Smurfs. It’s everywhere.

Everything old is new again: the pop-culture of my childhood is being strip-mined and sold back to me. At first glance, looks like it might be a good thing – the world is, on some level, catering specifically to me, and that feels empowering. Plus, given that I never quite grew up, I share a lot of these fun bits of my childhood with my kids…which makes them the go-to experts in their peer groups when something like Doctor Who comes back around, which is actually also very cool for me in it’s own way.

Few of these reinventions and revivals live up to our memories, and often leave what made the originals so endearing out of the adaptations. For every BSG, there are a dozen instances of Transformers 2, which, as Robinson posits, cheapens the coolness factor of the original iteration for many of us.

It’s an interesting place to find oneself: on one hand, all the stuff you held dear as a kid is being embraced as worthy and cool, though at the same time, the modern variants of our beloved pop culture icons will never live up to the memories we’ve nurtured and developed over the decades.

And, it robs our once obscure TRON gag-logo t-shirts of their coolness factor…both because everybody recognizes it now, and because the public at large associates it with the lesser copy. It’s a conflicting feeling for those of us who get into this sort of thing.*

But that doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to play along, and line up for the next big tenpole picture based on one of our beloved childhood playthings, and continue to hope that it will, this time, live up to the lofty standards we’ve set for it in our own heads. For some of us, these delicious feelings of anticipation are worth it, even though we know it’ll never be as good as we’d hope.

Well, except for the Star Wars prequels…that let-down totally overshadowed the anticipation.

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* – Yes, it’s a completely irrational and elitist thing that some of us feel about something losing a lot of it’s appeal once EVERYBODY decides they like it. Those fun little nods of recongition from fellow travellers are actually quite rewarding, and if everybody’s in on the joke, it’s not as much fun for us. To our credit, some of us trend-dodgers are aware of this affectation/flaw, and can poke fun at ourselves for it.