So, things get popular once, and then the popularity fades, but then they get popular again via nostalgia.

Example: Back when Roy Rogers died, the material from his museum was auctioned off. One of the items was “Nellybelle”, the jeep his sidekick drove in the TV Series. The person who bought it sold it a few years later for about 2/3 of what he had paid for it. I presume a lot of 50s stuff that Baby Boomer fans would have paid decent $ for is of less interest to Generation X (like me) and even less interest to later generations.

So, what do you think right now that has a warm nostalgic glow that is j-u-s-t about to fade? I have to guess that “Saved by the Bell” is already well down the downslope. That 70’s show’s rebirth as that 90’s show seems likely to be “peak That 70s show” nostalgia. What else?

8 comments
  1. Muscle cars (60s-70s specifically). Most of that crowd is starting to age out, and the prices are already coming back to earth a bit (being replaced by 80s-90s nostalgia cars).

  2. 80s nostalgia and even to an extent 90s too. 2000s babies are starting to become the in thing now. Nostalgia for iPods, classic SpongeBob, GameCube, PS2, that sorta thing.

  3. This is cyclical. It will all come back at some point.

    Beanie Babies is my pick. They were huge. (There was an actual divorce dispute that made international headlines.) They were over and done in less than a decade.

  4. Woodstock. The original one in 1969 is a relic of the past, and now (especially thanks to the recent documentaries) people associate it with the trainwreck that was Woodstock 99.

  5. I think you’ll see the price drop for a lot of boomer collectables over the next decade as they die out and demand drops. You’ll probably see a rise in Gen-x and millennial collectables.

    As far a nostalgia reboots I think Gen-x won’t see many more, and the Millennials’ are probably at the tail end of theirs. We’re already seeing reboots for things like Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues so Gen-Z can nostalgia over those w/ their kids.

  6. Some specifics that jump to mind:

    M.A.S.H. was once a television staple. Now many have likely never seen it.

    Gilligan’s Island is another once-mainstream reference that is fading to obscurity.

    And does anybody still watch John Wayne movies ?

    All of these were once iconic things that have faded to collecting dust on shelves

  7. I feel like 60s-70s rock music nostalgia is dying out other than diehard fans. Like I remember being online in the late 2000s and 60s/early 70s rockers were considered the greatest musicians of all time, and it felt like every single current musician would get compared unfavorably to them (if you were particularly unlucky you might see people get overtly bigoted about it). Hell there’s a whole term for it, rockism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism)). These days I don’t see that as much, as now music critics are getting to be people who grew up with rap instead.

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