Kids' TV revivals seem to be for adults, as shown by the Full House and Legends of the Hidden Temple reboots

The Outline

Quibi's announcement Monday that it is making an adult version of Nickelodeon kids' game show Legends of the Hidden Temple is another example of the "explicit adultification of a property originally for kids," says Jeremy Gordon. He adds: "Our contemporary commercial culture fetishizes nostalgia and infantilization, not just revisiting and reappraising the past (remember the ’80s?), but resuscitating and reimagining content originally made decades ago (for children) into content made now (for kids AND adults). I can point to 1,000 emblematic examples, but a few notable ones are: Transformers (2007); Toy Story 3 (2010); Toy Story 4 (2019); the Boy Meets World revival (2014 to 2017); Fuller House (2016 to present); basically the entire superhero movie industry (2000 to present); the new Star Wars movies (2015 to present). This phenomenon is so common it’s almost not worth pointing out; but here I am, writing about how it is just the way commercial culture works for now. But one crucial part of the revival trend that irks me is that many creators of such entities have mostly attempted to keep up the pretense that they are still for kids. Thus the increasingly rabid adult fans of such entities feel the need to stress that anyone who dislikes the entities is taking them too seriously, that it’s just entertainment and my son likes it and let people enjoy things, okay?"