The Bitter Truth of Growing Up

A Eulogy for Our Childhood Delusions

Jun 13, 2025

When I was a kid, I LOVED reading Marvel comics. I read as many as I could get my hands on, but The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man were my go-to heroes. I loved them as characters. They were real to me as anything in my life.

I read the comics, I watched cartoons, I wore the pyjamas, and I pretended I was one of them (usually Johnny Storm).

As I write this in June 2025, I’m faced with a first-world dilemma. There’s a new Fantastic Four coming next month, and I’m already anxious about it.

In my lifetime, coincidentally, there have been four full-length movies featuring Marvel’s first family; Roger Corman’s made-just-to-keep-the-movie-rights (it wasn’t released to the public, but I’ve seen it). Tim Story’s Fantastic Four and its sequel, The Rise of the Silver Surfer and then the abomination that was Josh Trank’s Fant4stic (or whatever it was called).

As an adult, I went into each one of them with wide-eyed optimism. Would I finally see my childhood heroes on the big screen, brought to life with all the quirks and qualities I fell in love with, ready to bring unbridled joy to my Marvel-loving heart?

No.

Every single time, I left heartbroken.

With the first widely released 2005 movie, I left the cinema with a battle raging between my head and my heart. My head knew it was bad (OK, maybe not ‘bad’, but it wasn’t great), but my nostalgia-filled heart refused to believe it. It held onto my childhood and protected it despite reality’s celluloid assault of Doom.

Will I ever see a great Fantastic Four movie in my lifetime? Maybe it’s just not possible to recreate it on the big screen. Perhaps my expectations have set the bar too high to clear…. Then I remember there is a great Fantastic Four movie, Pixar’s The Incredibles. I mean, how hard can it be!

I’m 54 now, and being an adult can be a callous mistress when it comes to what we loved as children. My kids watch YouTube. Is that going to give them the same sense of nostalgia when they’re older? Oh, remember that one video when someone fell over in the street? What about the one where someone thought just pretending to be outraged and screaming about something was funny? Good times.

With the sheer amount of content available to them whenever they want, I doubt they will feel the same about entertainment as when I held all those toys, comics, TV shows and movies close to my heart. That makes me a little sad, but I can’t help but see them in a nostalgia-fuelled light, but that is also a little dark at times.

I loved Blake’s 7 as a child, but when I rewatched it as an adult, I saw that the VFX that seemed so realistic to a 7-year-old me were just drawings, LITERAL drawings, being pulled across the screen to represent the Liberator’s space flight. Oh hell no. The childhood memory was worth more than adult scorn.

I bet we’ve all had that moment, probably while drunk-crying to a repeat of The Karate Kid at 2 am, when we realised our childhood was gone. Not just gone, but exposed.

Like when you rewatch your favourite cartoon and suddenly notice the plot holes, the cheap animation, or the fact that the villain’s plan made no sense.

This is also for those of you who grew up thinking Digimon was deep, only to revisit it as adults and go, "Wait, why are there dinosaur email monsters?"

For anyone who ever loved a toy that, in hindsight, was basically just cheap, plastic rubbish.

For the generation that was raised by Saturday morning TV and now suffers from trust issues because Fame promised us we could all spontaneously break into choreographed dance at college. Consider this your therapy session. A chance to laugh at the absurdity of what we once adored, to mourn the magic we can never unsee, and to ask the big questions: Were we just stupid kids, or was the world really that much cooler before we had to pay bills?

So grab your Wagon Wheels (if you can afford them after you’ve paid mortgage), settle into that existential dread we all know and love, and let’s take a trip back to a time when the biggest betrayal in life was when your Tamagotchi died because you forgot to feed it for, like, two hours.

Enjoy!

Dearly beloved,

We are gathered here today not in a chapel, not in a playground, not even in the queue for the Corkscrew at Alton Towers, but in the padded sanctuary of adulthood, surrounded by IKEA furniture, unmatched socks and a dull, humming awareness that we once believed a hedgehog could outrun a missile.

Today, we bid farewell not to a person, but to a period of blissful ignorance. A golden era when the world seemed infinite, action figures had souls, cartoons had morals and sugar wasn’t yet the enemy.

Let us pause in reverence for the innocence once held in our sticky little hands, for the plushy companions now mouldering in the loft, for the cartoons that shaped our moral compass, the movies that left us sobbing into cereal-stained pyjamas and then shattered it when rewatched as adults.

We’re here to eulogise these memories we once cherished. When adulthood rears its balding, tax-paying, soul-mortgaging head, we find ourselves asking: Was it all a lie?

Yes, friends, today we lay to rest the unshakable delusions of childhood, the toys that lied, the shows that aged like milk, the movies that gave us unrealistic expectations of love, heroism and space travel via bicycle.

This is a eulogy for the things we loved before we knew better.

The toys that now look like they were designed in a fever dream, the TV shows that would never survive a modern social media backlash and the movies that lied to us about how adulthood worked.

We were young. We were dumb. We thought Rentaghost was just a funny show about ghosts and not a metaphor for how capitalism would eventually hollow out our souls.

Let us begin.

Farewell, My Plastic Friends: Toys That Lied to Our Faces

As children, our toys were our companions, our therapists, and occasionally, our chewable stress relief.

But let's be honest. Most of our toys were scams with glossy packaging.

Remember Polly Pocket? A 2 cm-tall woman living in a house smaller than a digestive biscuit. Ideal for swallowing, impossible to operate with human fingers.

Today, Polly lives on, but she’s had Botox, a mortgage and an Instagram account. She's now “Polly Tiny-Home Influencer.” #Blessed

Then there’s Action Man, our transatlantic GI Joe, a stoic, silently muscular figure who had a thousand careers but no internal joints. He parachuted, surfed, skied, flew helicopters, but could not bend at the elbow. You could pose him for battle or... death. Those were the options.

Stretch Armstrong? Sold as indestructible. Lies. One overly enthusiastic tug and he leaked like a stress sausage. Nothing prepares you for childhood’s first betrayal quite like finding your new elastic superhero oozing suspicious corn syrup.

Even Tamagotchis, those digital pets we were meant to love and nourish, turned on us. One missed feeding and they died. DIED. No warning. No forgiveness. A savage introduction to responsibility, without the option of therapy.

And let us not forget Etch-A-Sketch. Marketed as a drawing tool. In reality? A medieval torture device for budding artists. You’d try to draw a circle, end up with something resembling the concept of despair, and shake it like an angry deity hoping for salvation.

Television: Rewatching the Unwatchable

Before YouTube, limited channelled television was the sacred text of childhood. We worshipped at the altar of Tiswas, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Going Live and CITV.

We learned, we laughed, we believed. But now… now we revisit these relics and realise: Oh no. We were raised by maniacs.

Take He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. A show built around a tan man in ill-fitting pants yelling “I have the power!” without explanation or repercussions. A bit like President Trump.

His enemy (He-Man, not Trump) was Skeletor, a man with the body of a gym bro and the head of a Halloween prop. Every episode was an intense acid trip with a public service announcement bolted onto the end like an afterthought: “Remember kids, brushing your teeth is the real power.”

Then there’s The Magic Roundabout. What. Was. That. Show?

A dog named Dougal with the energy of a baked custard tart. A snail that moved faster than the plot. Rewatching it now feels like being trapped in a Kafka-esque fever dream while someone reads you a bedtime story through a tin can.

Even Power Rangers, which the world adored for some reason, feels suspect in hindsight.

A group of hormonal teenagers in Lycra using gymnastics and dinosaur-themed robots to fight an intergalactic witch with a cone bra. One villain literally lived in a trash can. Yes, kids, this was the blueprint for your moral compass.

There were British classics like Art Attack, bless Neil Buchanan, he tried, but watching now as a grown-up thanks to the joy of YouTube, it’s painfully clear: no adult has that much glue, time, or access to 400 ping-pong balls. And the Head, that disturbing clay bust, gave us a first taste of nightmares we couldn’t yet name.

Cinematic Disappointments: Childhood Films, Now With Adult Eyes

Oh, the films we watched. Again. And again. And again. We wore out tapes, learned lines and believed the magic.

Until adulthood arrived with bifocals and baggage.

Let’s begin with Space Jam. A glorious collision of NBA stardom and animated chaos.

As children? Pure gold. As adults? It’s 90 minutes of Bugs Bunny trying to coach Michael Jordan through interdimensional sports litigation. It has all the coherence of a court case written by a sugar-addled raccoon.

And Hook, the film that made us sob uncontrollably because “to live would be an awfully big adventure.” Robin Williams in leather trousers, Dustin Hoffman out-acting the entire film from inside a wig. Magical. Until you realise that this is a movie about middle-aged burnout with a flying subplot.

Let us not forget Beethoven, not the composer, the St. Bernard dog! Remember how funny it was when he ruined the house? Now imagine you’re the adult cleaning that slobbery chaos. Beethoven was a biological hazard wrapped in a family-friendly plot. Nothing funny about a mortgage and dog fur in the toaster, believe me!

And The NeverEnding Story? Try rewatching it. Go on. I’ll wait. What once felt like a grand fantasy now feels like the origin story of your abandonment issues. A horse drowns in sadness. A rock monster laments eating rocks. The villain is literally nothing. He/She/It is even called ‘The Nothing’. If that isn’t a metaphor for adulthood or Substack engagement rates, then I don’t know what is.

The Snack-Based Betrayal

Let us briefly pause for a moment of silence for our childhood taste buds, who were lied to by the food pyramid and marketing executives in cartoon form.

Sunny Delight was marketed as fruit juice. It was orange in colour only. It stained every surface it touched. It was basically tangy antifreeze.

Pop-Tarts promised warm, gooey joy. In reality, they were flaming roof tiles with sugar dandruff. One bite could take out a molar and your dignity.

And Turkey Twizzlers? Let us not forget the processed spaghetti of the poultry world. Banned by Jamie Oliver and mourned by an entire generation of school children who now understand why their digestion never developed properly.

Adulthood and the Death of Wonder

So what happened to us?

When did we stop believing in magic wardrobe portals, toys that talk and dogs that can play basketball?

When did laser gun noises become email notifications?

We tell ourselves we’ve grown. We’re rational. We have bills. We no longer believe a turtle can be a ninja, nor that friendship alone can defeat the forces of darkness. (Unless it’s corporate team-building day.)

But it’s a cynical trick. A self-inflicted amnesia.

We don’t stop loving those memories because they’re childish. We stop because we fear what they say about us.

We worry that rewatching Winnie the Pooh as an adult might expose how much we miss being loved just because.

To Cling or Not to Cling (to the Past)

So here’s the big question.

Is it better to let the illusion die and walk bravely into the beige of adulthood? Or do we keep a corner of our heart cordoned off for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, the Fantastic Four, and the Why Don’t You theme song?

I say cling. With both hands.

Cling like you're hugging your Teddy bear after a thunderstorm.

Cling like you're trying to catch The Crystal Maze prize tokens in a wind tunnel.

Cling because joy isn’t childish, it’s just been rebranded as “unrealistic expectations”.

Yes, maybe Thomas the Tank Engine is deeply disturbing when you re-examine the dystopian class system of the Island of Sodor, but it still gave you comfort once. That matters regardless of what that overweight megalomaniac says (The Fat Controller, not Trump).

The Toy Box Doesn’t Close, It Changes Shape

Here’s the twist in our tale. Those childhood memories? They don’t die. They evolve.

The toys? They live on in collector’s editions and oddly intense YouTube reviews.

The shows? Rebooted on streaming platforms, often with worse animation and better PR.

The movies? Remade until they resemble nothing but tax write-offs and our shattered dreams.

And yet… the feelings remain.

That thrill. That wonder. That magical time when happiness could be achieved with a blanket fort and a cheese string.

We don't need to kill the child within us to become adults. We just need to invite them along for the ride and maybe let them choose the film once in a while.

Yes, even if it’s Shrek 2… again.

Should We Just Leave These Memories Alone?

Here’s the truth, and I hate to break it to you, but nostalgia is also a liar.

It smooths out the rough edges, polishes the cheap plastic and makes us forget that half our favourite toys broke within a week.

But does that mean we should regret loving them?

No. Because childhood wasn’t about quality, it was about possibility.

That stick was a sword.
That cardboard box was a spaceship.
That Dairylea Lunchers was a gourmet meal.

Adulthood is just childhood with taxes, and honestly? That’s kind of tragic.

So let’s raise a glass (of Um Bongo, because we’re reliving the glory days) to the memories. They were ridiculous. They were flawed. They were ours.

Rest in peace, childhood. You were weird, you were messy, and we wouldn’t trade you for anything.

Final Words From the Toy Chest

So here lies our collective nostalgia.

Not dead.

Not even dormant, just living rent-free in the soft, squishy part of our hearts next to our login passwords and childhood trauma.

We mourn not because it’s gone, but because we know what it meant.

So go ahead.

Watch that cartoon. Rebuild that LEGO set. Rewatch Fant4stic. Hug that Teddy. Eat that cereal with marshmallows shaped like lies. And when someone calls you childish?

Smile.

Because you remember what joy used to feel like.

Long live the memories that made us.

And if you need me, I’ll be in my living room, reading The Fantastic Four, eating a Wham bar and sobbing into a cushion shaped like Spider-Man

Not because I’m sad, but because, for a brief moment, I’m eight years old again, it’s clobberin’ time and that, my friends, is the closest thing we have to real magic.

Rest in peace, childhood delusions.

Amen.

PS - Dear Kevin Fiege, I know your movies haven’t been hitting the mark of late, but PLEASE make Fantastic Four: First Steps reasonably good at the very least. My heart can’t take another disappointment.

What were your favourite toys/movies/TV shows as a child? Have you rewatched any of them as adults? What did you think? Did they hold up? Let me know in the comments. Let’s compare notes! I read and reply to all of them.