Popular Nostalgia

Popular Nostalgia specific to Australia & (or) New Zealand. These are either events which took place in Australia or New Zealand, or those remembered by people who were in Australia or New Zealand at the time…

Donatello, Michaelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo -the heroes in a half shell. Their mentor Splinter is a mutated rat and Shredder and Brains their enemies. Owing to the controversy surrounding whether these cretins were Heroes or Ninjas I have left the title ambiguous for now. Now all together: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles […]

Everyone was jealous of those hallow’d few who had a Soda Stream maker. Make you own lemonade! Amazing. My next door neighbour had one with a pump action. They’ve come quite some way since then. Inordinately expensive when compared with the price of just buying a bottle of lemonade from the shop, but infinitely more […]

Wayne’s World was a movie phenomenon in the league of Ferris Beuler’s Day Out, Grease, Dirty Dancing and all the other coming-of-age-films. Except Wayne’s World was cooler. I once gave myself whiplash trying to re-enact Garth’s blonde head-banging to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. This film is single-handedly responsible for a whole generation ending every sarcastic […]

At the end of the 1980s, in 1989 to be precise, Nintendo released the Gamboy, which was to become one of the greatest selling hand-held games consoles of all time. Looking back, the monochrome colour scheme and basic games – such as Tetris – seem quite quaint and antiquated, but at the time, we were […]

Yo-yos have always been around, though for some reason they become faddy every now and again. In my school, during the early 90s, the yo-yo fad came back hard. All of a sudden, everywhere you looked was someone “walking the dog” or doing a “cats cradle” or some other yo-yo move. There was always a […]

During the late nineties, somebody started a rumour that got old the middle-age technophobes into something of a bind. Fear spread like the plague that everything electrical would explode when the countdown reached 2000. Just as people were buying revamped copies of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (or squiggle) ‘s “We’re gonna party like […]

Together with long hair, roller-skates and Bruce Lee, flared trousers epitomised the 1970′s. I heard a rumour that my next door neighbour once owned a pair of bright orange bell-bottoms and a purple velvet cape. Yeah baby! Groovy to say the least, these fashion assets weren’t complete without a waistcoat, granny glasses and a disco […]

I remember watching this event on TV and not really understanding what was going on . Too young to realise the symbolic importance of jumping around on a concrete wall, I thought there was some sort of riot going on in Germany. Furthermore, I couldn’t understand why all of my family were standing around and […]

Fights in the playground, swizzed out of pocket money, Pogs were the currency of the 90′s playground. Players would gamble their cardboard discs to try and win a more valuable addition to their collection. As competitive and addictive as football card trading, Pogs were banned in many schools after fall-outs and tears relating to the […]