I know you guys have it too. Something that, as a naive, innocent kid, you thought was amazing. You grew up remembering it fondly, then one day you decide to revisit your childhood - Barely able to contain the nostalgia, you finally decide experience that thing you once loved again, and then realise what a mistake you have made in doing so. That thing you loved is bad. It is very bad.
I don't just mean things that are cringey to you now because they're aimed at kids and you're not a kid anymore, I mean things that are
bad.It could be a TV show, a game, a film, a book, music, anything.
I decided to make this topic because of a TV series I loved as a kid called Cardcaptors. Cardcaptor Sakura. Whatever you want to call it. It's an old anime dubbed as a kids' series that ran from the very late 90's to early 2000s if I remember right. I would've been about four years old when I first watched it.
Back in the day we didn't have any of the big TV networks in our house, we only had the default UK channels 1 - 5. I didn't get to watch TV all that often because either my mum or my brother would be watching it, and even when I did get to watch TV none of my favourite programs ever seemed to be on. Finally catching one of my favourites on TV was like this huge monumental occasion for me, and because of how little I got to watch them I held them in this ridiculously high esteem, and even after growing up I still got this overwhelming feeling of awesome when I thought about them.
So my favourites were Digimon, Pokemon and Cardcaptors. Cardcaptors seemed to be on less often than anything else I liked to watch, so this made it even more amazing when I finally caught it. I remember loving so much about it. It's basically about a girl who finds this book, I don't remember many of the details but by opening the book she looses all these monsters on the world that were sealed in these 'Clow Cards'. By beating one of the monsters it gets sealed back inside its card, and she can summon it from that card to fight the other monsters. So you can kind of think of it as Pokemon meets Yu-Gi-Oh. It's episodic from there, each episode is about all these different monsters and spirits and stuff wreaking havoc in places, the main character fights them using cards she's captured over the course of the series and then gets a new card out of it when she beats it. It was great to watch it to find out what card she was going to be against this time, what it would look like, what cool powers it would have, and watching her get all these new cards as the series progressed.
So it sounds pretty interesting. As a kid it was epic to me. Eventually I sort of forgot about it, then one day adult me was watching a YouTube video about nostalgic animated shows, there was like a 3-second clip from Cardcaptors in it, and my brain just exploded. I remembered everything, and it was great. Eventually I finally decided to revisit it once and for all.
And... well... just look at it.
Now I wouldn't quite call the experience childhood-shattering, because I can see why I wouldn't have noticed or cared about the bad things about it when I was as young as I was, but my god. It is bad. It is so bad it hurts. Did they hire a fucking police siren to voice Sakura?
Still glad I watched it back then, Cardcaptors is probably the reason I ended up liking anime-style things, it's just a shame my childhood was built on a foundation of wrong.
Anyway, have you guys had any similar experiences? Anything you held in really high esteem as a kid, then as an adult learned to hate it with all your heart?
