By Don Hall

Memories we hold of the past fall into one of two categories: baggage and nostalgia.

Baggage is comprised of those hurtful memories—that ex-girlfriend who keyed your motorcycle when you broke up with her, that time you woke up from a drunken bender with a busted lip and bloody knuckles, the scam artist who stole your Amazon account and bought eight hundred dollars in golf equipment.

Nostalgia is the other kind. The joy of watching the first Star Wars movie in a theater twenty-five times in one summer. Jamming out to Juke Box Hero with a friend at the public swimming pool. That feeling of invulnerability that comes with youth and the hope that accompanies impressing a girl or making that motocross jump in an abandoned construction site.

For the most part both baggage and nostalgia are bullshit. Most bad things that happen to us aren't as traumatic as we choose to remember them and most wonderful things we recall weren't really that amazing. Yet we cling to these feelings that moments in time tattoo on our psyches and when reminded of them by a song, a television show, or a movie it transports us to a facsimile of that one time when.

Some of the nostalgic pendants hanging around my neck are so completely unique, I'd guess they are specific to me and me alone. For example, on several roadtrips as a kid, I was incredibly into two things: Stephen King novels and the music of jazz trumpet player Maynard Ferguson. I'd read everything King wrote while listening to cassette tapes of Ferguson on my Sony Walkman® for hours traveling from Kansas to Arizona and back. To this day, any time I hear Maynard Ferguson's music, I get a sense of joy and dread that can only be connected to the fact that this specific music is the soundtrack in my mind for Cujo, The Stand, and Pennywise, the Killer Clown.

As a GenXer, I've started to notice what can only be called Nostalgia Porn as it is the practice of taking cherished memories of movies and recreating them with the same actors playing the same roles with a fresher coat of technological paint.

This is not the same as Fan Service I think.

My wife and her brother grew up watching Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters so often they both can quote almost any scene from it. Thus, when Ghostbusters: After Life came along, her brother saw it in a theater despite the ravaging respiratory virus closing the world. My wife waited, but when I could rent it on the Apple streaming service, we hopped right into the Ectomobile and relived that feeling of fun from back in 1984.

"Wow," I said. "They're bringing back all of the original equipment they used."

"That's a PKE Meter," Dana commented with a pleased smile on her face.

Early on we get a moment with Annie Potts. Later, there's Ackroyd in a scene. By the end, we are treated with the original Ghostbusters in full gear—Ackroyd, Murray, Hudson, and the digital Force Ghost of Harold Ramis (who had passed on in real life before the film was made).

Given that these actors are not really a transformative part of the plot but a gift toward the end, I'd call this fan service and a way to connect the new world of Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon with the world we remember from almost forty years ago.

Nostalgia Porn is a bit more involved.

Cobra Kai is full-on, lubed up, dicks out and throbbing Nostalgia Porn.

For those uninitiated, Cobra Kai is sort of like the writers said, "Hey. You remember Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence from The Karate Kid? I wonder what those two guys are doing now and if that pivotal moment with the crane kick has continued to affect them but in very different ways? Let's do a show about that!"

The incredibly popular episodic begins with these two men, played by the same actors (Ralph Macchio and William Zabka), as they grapple with their very GenX issues of aging and grasping at past success or failure to define their place in the 21st century. In the process, we get their kids learning the right lessons from the former villain and the wrong lessons from the former hero. We also get Martin Cove reprising the ultimate villain Kreese, a bit of Elizabeth Shue, and characters from the sequels throughout.

What makes it nostalgia porn is that these aren't cameos by the actors we revered but a continuation of the story forty years later. These characters are the drivers of the plot, transform within the story arc, and attempt to answer questions currently posed by those of us who were in high school when Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel San martial arts via washing cars and painting fences. It's also some of the best work either actor in the principle roles has done in years.

Including Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is fan service. Bringing in Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neil as legitimate protagonists in the upcoming Jurassic World: Dominion is nostalgia porn.

What about Stallone's homage to both the action movies of the ‘80s as well as the action stars of that decade with The Expendables trilogy? They have all of these titular heroes from a range of films. It feels like a high school reunion of badass, mouthy dudes who can miraculously shoot a machine gun with one arm while keeping their thinning hair perfectly coifed. Perhaps The Expendables is nostalgia soft porn? Not going all the way but enough titillation to keep the boner of ghosts past chubby?

Terminator: Dark Fate is nostalgia porn. After a decade or so of thinking that the T-800 Terminator was the hero of the story arc, James Cameron, Justin Rhodes, and Tim Miller realized that it was Sarah Conner who was the actual hero and pulled Linda Hamilton back into the mix forty years or so after the original.

The JJ Abrams Star Wars sequels were definitely nostalgia porn as each of the original actors return as the original characters and are also integral to the ensuing storyline. Also because so many of us GenXers blew our loads when Han Solo showed up in The Force Awakens.

The latest Scream is neither as the three main characters have been in every iteration of the same goddamned movie made five times over. Strangely, though, it also managed to make me go back and watch them all from the beginning and despite being the identical movie each time, each one is still ridiculously entertaining.

The cameos of Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian are fan service but really cool fan service.

And then we have perhaps the most pornographic example of nostalgia porn on record: Spiderman: No Way Home. Holy shit. Not only do we get characters from the Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spiderman movies by the digitally de-aged actors of yore we also get Maguire and Garfield as alternative Peter Parkers! This film is a smorgasbord of nostalgia, each of us wiping the smegma from our faces with every character arrival. I loved it when Garfield showed up but I became downright emotional when Maguire came onscreen. Far more than fan service, each version of Parker has a genuine role in the story and an indelible effect on the current Tom Holland version.

DC is getting in on the act with the new Flash movie. I hope Michael Keaton's Batman is more than a cameo because even though I loved Pattinson's emo-version, Keaton is the Batman of my youth. He’s my Batman.

With the incredible digital technology available today, my guess is that this new genre of bringing back the old folks to beef up the gravity of stories we other old farts loved when we were in the flower of youth is here to stay. Each generation is going to get old as will the actors of their favorite entertainment.

In a few years we'll have rebooted versions of movies popular in the 2000's complete with some of the actors in pivotal roles. Imagine 2004's Crash except that Matt Dillon plays his own dad or Matt Damon playing the mentor to a new Jason Bourne.

Some of it will be fan service but the stuff that couches itself in legends will be nostalgia porn and we will mentally masturbate to all of them.