For those about to Fraggle Rock, we salute you.

I’ve got a headache.  Anyone else?  Not a migraine, exactly, but more of a lingering ache.  A zit under the surface, threatening to pop but refusing to actually do so, just making you itchy and painful to the touch all day.  I’m mixing my metaphors.  (And grossing myself out.)  But I can’t be expected to be coherent when I’m boiling over with rage, can I?  (Again with the boils!)  See, more and more, when I go to the mall, which admittedly is something I do very rarely, I see today’s youths wandering around sporting relics from my childhood.  “Aged” Power Rangers t-shirts, things bearing the face of Red or Wembley Fraggle, and other such things adorn both the walls of the stores and the kids who shop there.  And it’s tearin’ up my heart, *NSYNC-style, because on the one hand, these are things I genuinely love, and I love being able to spend my hard-earned cash on the toys and merch my parents never would’ve let me have as a kid.  On the other hand, these are things I genuinely love, being tossed about by people who are just in it for the retro factor.  I know what this makes me sound like, that obnoxious kid who only listens to underground music and drops the band when they “sell out” by achieving a dream and getting actual radio play.  But, I mean, for a solid decade the Big Brain was receiving the mockery of its lesser-brained peers for its love of spandexed heroes kicking ass and taking names (names like Trakeena and Frax, and if you don’t realize I’m not making this up, then you’re kind of missing the whole point).  And now, that thing which has been much-loved since the Brain was twelve has come to rest on the ungrateful backs of the scorners themselves.  Where is the fairness in that?

I’ve never been in the habit of liking things ironically.  Go whole-hog or don’t bother, I say.  Even if the things in question are shameful.  This is a philosophy I live by, because trying to be cool is time-consuming and often insincere.  At the end of the day, it’s not cool to buy morphers at Toys ‘R’ Us, but it’s fun (especially when they make sounds!).  I think the point I’m trying to make is that I never stopped being twelve years old.

Then again, maybe I’m being terribly unfair.  Maybe that girl wearing Doozers on her chest (there’s a disturbing euphemism for you) is just like me, torn between wanting to be a consumer whore for all the right reasons, and not wanting to appear like a consumer whore for all the wrong reasons.  Maybe they’re twelve at heart, too.

So how does one retaliate against something like this?  It’s not like I can stop buying merch, it goes against my very nature.  (Someday they will finish the set with a Mokey plush, and my life collection will be complete!)  I guess my only course of action is to wait ten years, get a distressed Grey’s Anatomy t-shirt at Hot Topic, and wait for the fallout.