You know you're old when...

[Nigel]

"I grew up with the original Rescue Bots." So said one of my customers just now.

[Fortmax2020]

A friend says Beast Wars are the toys he grew up with.. which is challenging enough and then someone at the Minicon described them as vintage toys from before his time. 😬

[legios]

Eh. This has been happening to me since the mid-late 1980s when people talked about Space:1999 not having been on the television in their lifetime. Or folk who didn't remember Secret Squirrel Cartoons.

I take a certain pride in my longevity - I mean, Before Cybertron Was, I Was. Before Super Sentai Were, I Was (quiet AkaRed, 2 years on Gorenger is still seniority). I have lived into my fifties, this is a thing I feel pleased about.

Besides, isn't it nice to know that there are multiple cohorts coming along behind us, so that when we exit Transformers fandom in our turn there are newer faces to take up the banner?

Karl

[The Doctor]

No.

-Ralph

[Fortmax2020]

Super Squirrels?

[Benn]

Sentai Squirrel.

[Nigel]

Apr 7, 2024 13:40:54 GMT legios said:

Besides, isn't it nice to know that there are multiple cohorts coming along behind us, so that when we exit Transformers fandom in our turn there are newer faces to take up the banner?

I did actually find it something to marvel at, last time I was at TFN, to look around and see those of us whose hair may be greying or receding, or waistlines growing, alongside the turbo revving young punks about the same age as we were at our first Transforce or Botcon Europe. (And, come to think of it now, whose parents may not even have met back then.) All of us playing with toys in the bar, of course!

I've heard people say things like the quote in my opening post a few times over the years and they don't really make me feel old. It's more a feeling of surprise that the actual time since the line was released is a lot longer than it seems. Except, perhaps, for the first time I heard something, which did make me feel old. One time while selling at AA, a young man picked up a loose Bantor from my table and said to his friend, "I used to have this when I was little." What!? As it happens, my eldest nephew turns thirty this year and he had Beast Wars as a child.

I do sometimes like to mull over the quirks of perception of time. Like how the first moon landing always seemed like a long time ago yet was less than ten years before I was born. Or how I am now further in time from my own birth than my birth was from the start of World War II. Or how some of the Star Trek that I watched first-run as a teenager is now older than the original Star Trek was when I watched it, too, at that time.