Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

What is it about those nostalgic feelings that are so satisfying?

It’s like taking a big swig from a bowl of soup that just reached the right temperature and feeling it flow all the way down to your stomach. It’s covering up to your chin with a warm blanket on a cold and rainy day. It’s getting a hug from that old friend who knows the exact right amount of pressure for a welcome embrace.

They transport you back to a more comfortable time where the world seemed easier, and everything made sense.

As intoxicating as a nice healthy dose of nostalgia can be, it can also oftentimes blur our sense of reality and blind us to the decline in quality of the relics of our past.

Movies seem to be where my memories most often skew my opinions on what’s good or bad.

I recently went to a 35th anniversary showing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the 1990 film that saw the half-shelled heroes transitioning from their Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities to a slightly darker yet still appropriately goofy live-action interpretation.

The turtles themselves were a product of the Jim Henson workshop and, despite the limitations of some of their movements and one slightly terrifying scene where you can briefly and unintentionally see the performer for Donatello’s teeth through the mouth of his costume, considered innovative for their time.

My first exposure to the film came in the form of a VHS tape that my brother and I would watch relentlessly. The fact that the tape held up and may actually still exist in working order somewhere with all of our old movies that are stowed away baffles me.

For an extra little dose of nostalgia, the tape starts with an old advertisement for Pizza Hut set to Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Right Field” featuring a youth baseball team who celebrate a win by going to the pizza chain.

The movie itself is a perfect time capsule for the era that it came out in. You can feel the change in the culture to the grungier tones that shaped the early 90s. A lot of the jokes are slightly cringey and most of the corny dialogue includes words that probably haven’t been regularly spoken in over two decades.

It’s one of my favorite movies.

Properly nestled into my seat to enjoy a 90-minute blast from the past, I noticed a group several rows in front of me who seemed to be a little too young to have the same warm feelings towards the film as me and the other moviegoers do.

I shrugged it off, though.

“Good on whoever showed these guys this classic film,” I thought.

As the movie progressed, I noticed this group laughing a lot. Now I find the movie funny but only the parts that are supposed to be. The film works to achieve a darker tone than one might expect from a Ninja Turtles movie. There’s plenty of jokes, but there’s also a fair share of more serious moments, as well.

Those seemed to be the parts they were laughing the most at.

It soon became clear that they were watching the film for the sheer pleasure of making fun of it, turning a beloved part of my childhood into a laughingstock. They were “watching it ironically.”

How dare they!

While I would have loved to have gone down after the movie and explained to them that they missed the point and didn’t fully understand certain nuances because they wouldn’t have had the context of living through the time that the film was set in and therefore couldn’t fully grasp the deeper meaning of it, I couldn’t.

I try not to confront larger groups of strangers in public if I can at all help it, but on a more personal level, I couldn’t go and try to explain the merits of the film to them because in the smallest part of my heart there is a truth that I often try to ignore: it’s not a great movie.

I’ve been a part of several conversations trying to defend the quality of the film and explain how funny the jokes are and convince others that they “just don’t get it,” but I know that it is a futile effort.

You can’t expect others to have the same feelings for something if they don’t have the same history with it that you do.

Nostalgia is a joyful feeling that everyone experiences in their own unique ways. It makes you feel like you’ve made it back home after a long and arduous journey.

But it can also cloud your opinion on the vessels that deliver those joyous feelings.

You can’t dictate someone else’s feelings based on your memories. Not everyone is going to feel as attached to those holdings that you have in your memory bank.

That’s okay though. “Best” and “favorite” aren’t synonyms.

I can fully acknowledge that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably isn’t ever going to make it onto the Library of Congress’s Film Registry for historic preservation while also simultaneously and unironically watching the film and enjoying it just as I did in my youth.

And you better believe I’ll have a seat in the audience when the 35th anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze rolls around in March.

Cowabunga!