Craig of the Creek, and How to Do Nostalgia Right
I grew up in the DC suburbs in Virginia. Though some areas certainly fit this mold, the neighborhood I grew up in wasn’t your typical post-WWII “lets tear down all the trees and build identical houses” style suburbs. They weren’t little boxes on the hillside and nobody ever filmed a plastic bag. Rather, they were “let’s only tear down some of the trees and build around them so we can drive up real estate prices” style suburbs. A privileged-but-not-evil-rich (provided you think there’s a distinction) neighborhood in the woods where the residents skew Democrat and the electricity goes out every time there’s a thunderstorm because trees and branches always fall on the power lines.
Until seventh grade, I went to a tiny private school about fifteen minutes from my house. Right at the entrance of the school rests a small creek, surrounded on both sides by a thick set of trees. If you follow the creek north, it runs through the local park where we’d have cookouts and birthday parties, past many a shopping center on one of the major roads in the area, and eventually, it led to a bigger creek which emptied out into the Potomac River. I never saw in person where it leads if you follow it in the opposite direction, but a quick search on Google Maps shows that it simply stops a few miles south in another neighborhood.
Save for the occasional science class or event, we were rarely allowed to go near the creek during the school year. (And most of the time, we didn’t want to. Especially in the winter.) However, when classes let out in the summer, the school converted into a summer camp and the bored counselors would take us out for creek walks. We walked, we played, we threw temper tantrums because the counselors took us out too far and we didn’t like walking that much, we cried because we would get scared of the local fauna, and then we grew up and now we suffer through the Coronavirus. (By the way, this is the first article I write to you from Ronaworld. Good to be here, I guess.)
All of this is to say that I was uniquely positioned to love Craig of the Creek, a show on Cartoon Network about a suburban neighborhood in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area (the DMV, to us locals) where all the kids have formed a kid utopia in the local creek. After school, they go there, the play, they live by their own rules and laws, they hang out with their respective friend groups, then they go home for dinner when the clock strikes 6:00 PM.
I grew up on the east coast in a DMV suburb, and I technically have played in a creek. This, among many many other reasons we’ll get into, is why it’s rapidly become one of my favorite shows currently on television. It gets every detail right. The games we played. The toys we were into. The kinds of shows we liked. Even the granular details from the architecture of many of the houses to the hue of the sunlight on the grass in the summer months.
However, one need not have grown up in the DMV, or even the east coast, to appreciate what Craig of the Creek has to offer. Ever since I started watching it, it’s made me think about nostalgia, a concept I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog dumping on in petty articles that make me sound joyless. Specifically, it’s made me think about how to do it right.
Nowadays, when we say the word “nostalgia,” most of the time we’re really talking about intellectual property. What we played with, and the fleeting joy of seeing those things brought back to life again for a movie or a TV show.
What Craig of the Creek understands, however, is what was actually important about your childhood in the first place. It doesn’t matter what specific toys you played with or games you played. What matters is how they made you feel and what they meant to you at the time. It understands the emotional moments that matter, be they big ones that stick with you forever or the small ones that don’t, but felt big at the time.
To my adult self, Craig of the Creek is nostalgic in the true sense of the word. It makes me profoundly happy, but it also hurts, and it makes me long for other times.
I had friends exactly like Craig’s friends, and Craig himself for that matter. Though Craig’s family is black and his parents are together and I’m white and my family is a tangled web of divorce and remarriage, I see a lot of similar dynamics in his family and mine. However, I want to focus on more universal examples. Examples that apply to everyone, whether you grew up in a suburb or a city or a farm.
Craig of the Creek has something to offer everyone. And not just because of its diverse and inclusive cast, a quality that makes the show even more beautiful and fun to watch. (Much has been written on this topic by writers better than myself.) It is, to put it simply put, one of the most relatable shows I’ve ever seen. At least when it comes to childhood. Examples!
Spoilers below!!!
Pretending to be into what your friends like.
There was a brief moment in my lower and middle school years, somewhere between the late ‘90s and the early 2000s, where yo-yos were a thing again. And it wasn’t just playing with a yo-yo like you normally would, but trying to do fancy yo-yo tricks with certain prized brands of yo-yo. I don’t know why. It was a trend so fleeting I barely remember it. I even searched around just to make sure it was real thing and not just some isolated incident at my school. It was real. And all of my friends were into them.
Now, I followed my friends down some pretty dumb rabbit holes. Toys like military themed Micromachines that were constantly lost or stolen. Shows like SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron, about two vigilante “kats” who had a fighter jet. (I don’t remember if the show was actually bad, but I trust nothing I liked during that age. Coincidentally, the only reason I remember it is because Craig of the Creek name-checks it in an episode.) Habits like mixing Surge and Mountain Dew to make a super caffeine drink. But I couldn’t get into yo-yos. At all.
But goddamn did I try.
I dragged my mom to who knows how many malls and toy stores trying to find specific colors and brands of yo-yos, I pestered my friends until they agreed to teach me new tricks (the only one of which I remember is a trick called “Walk the Dog”), I blew off homework to fruitlessly practice said tricks at home. The whole nine yards, and the entire time, I couldn’t give less of a shit about yo-yos. But my friends liked them, so I soldiered on until we all moved on to the next thing.
I’d be willing to bet that every kid had their own version of this cycle growing up. As easy as it is to say, “Be yourself” and “Like what you like,” and as many episodes of television have been written about this subject, we tend to forget that at that age, there are tangible consequences to going against the grain. Pokémon was, by far, the biggest toy craze of my childhood. I had friends who liked it, and I had friends who didn’t, and I spent way more time with the former group than the latter. There were times were I was on the receiving end of that dynamic as well.
One of the factions who hang out in the titular creek of Craig of the Creek are Mackenzie, Melissa, Maney, and Marie, a group who calls themselves The Horse Girls. These are a group of kids who are, as you may have guessed, super into horses. They pretend to be horses, they wear horse related attire, they try to do things like a horse might when they can, including using their mouths to pick things up and run around on all fours. They commit to the horse life hard.
I knew a group of kids at my second summer camp, the one I went to after the school one, who pretended to be dogs and do much of the same stuff. The Horse Girls are a very real thing to me.
All of the girls are really into horses in a way that only a kid can be. All of them except Marie, who clearly doesn’t give a shit about horses.
From left to right: Mackenzie, Melissa, Maney, and Marie.
Marie, as you may have guessed, is the one all the way to the right. Though she’s smiling in the picture, we rarely see her looking anything other than bored and over it. She barely puts any effort into pretending to be a horse, she tries and fails to get her friends into different things, and she’s perpetually miserable.
If I remember correctly, this is the first time we meet the Horse Girls.
Though we don’t get to see Marie often, she’s one of my favorite side characters on the show. I wasn’t as outward in my disdain for yo-yos as she clearly is for horses, but I certainly had it in the inside. Even though, at this moment in time, she’s a one joke character, she’s one of the more relatable people on the show.
In fact, this dynamic is still true in my adult friendships. Only these days, I feel like Marie pretty much from the moment I wake up to the time I go to bed.
That said, I’m also in a Discord with a bunch of my east coast friends and my roommate who lives in LA with me. All of us enjoy playing Stardew Valley with each other. All of us except my roommate, who couldn’t be less interested.
We’ve all been Marie, some of us are currently being Marie, we all had a Marie in our past, and we all have a Marie in our present. We are all Marie.
Also, the decision to draw Marie in a baggy grey hoodie was genius.
The first time you take on an adult responsibility that feels like a huge stressful deal at the time, but in reality, couldn’t be more routine and boring.
I hate being on the phone.
As someone prone to mumbling, I have to stay vigilante to make sure I’m speaking clearly to strangers, I hate how transparently phony my phone voice sounds, I’m slow to react if who I’m talking to does or says something unexpected (a joke out of nowhere or something like that), and like most aspects of my life, I’m prone to overthinking the absolute fuck out of each and every encounter. In my head, phone calls are as substantial as chores and qualify as “doing something” if and when I recount my day to someone.
All that said, it was substantially worse when I was a little kid, and to this day, I remember the first time I ever ordered delivery food.
There’s no particularly special story here. Everything went fine and nothing embarrassing or memorable happened. My mom was busy working from home on something, and she told me to use her card to order a pizza. At the time, I had very little phone experience, and I was flooded with anxiety. A million questions ran through my head. “Am I allowed to order with a card that isn’t mine?” “Am I too young to order at all?” “What if the person on the phone laughs at me because I’m a kid?” “What if my mom was in the bathroom when the delivery guy came and she wasn’t there to give him the tip?”
But everything went fine, and eventually, I got used to it. Of course, it shouldn’t really have to be a thing one “gets used to,” it’s the pizza place’s job to talk to you, and they have no reason to be a dick so long as you’re not rude. However, I was a very little kid, and every aspect of it was a big deal. I’m used to being on the phone now, but that kid, on some level, will always be inside me.
In the first season of Craig of the Creek, there’s an episode entitled “The Takeout Mission.” In this episode, Craig is at his friend Kelsey’s house with his other friend J.P.. It’s a particularly rainy day, and Kelsey’s roof starts to leak in the kitchen. Thus, not having time to make dinner, Kelsey’s father tasks them with ordering in. They stress out over what to order and whether or not to try to use a fake adult voice when ordering, and when they finally call, they learn that the restaurant’s driver is stuck in the storm and they’re only taking pick-up orders. On impulse, they agree.
No longer is this just a phone anxiety adventure. Now they have to *gasp* navigate to the restaurant and pick up the food! This requires such hardships as crossing major streets not losing the money.
It’s easy to make fun of them, but keep in mind that the oldest member of this friend group is ten year olds. To many little kids, these are, in fact, scary obstacles. They’re not used to navigating adult realms, and this includes everyday things we take for granted.
Moreover, the show does a fantastic job of weighing these challenges on each of these character’s insecurities. Craig, an inventive and creative type, is prone to overthinking, while the fantasy obsessed Kelsey can only solve problems is she frames them in a needlessly grand scale and J.P., who’s… not that bright is, well, not that bright.
However, the writers also do a great job of showing how these challenges play to each character’s strengths. When it turns out the restaurant forgets the side order of rice, it’s Craig who thinks to make their own. When certain parts of their journey seem too hard to handle, it’s Kelsey’s tenacity that pushes them forward. When his friends need support, J.P. is quick with a helping hand.
Eventually, they complete their mission, and everyone eats together, content in what they’ve accomplished. When I watched it for the first, I suddenly remembered eating my pizza and feeling the exact same thing after my first telephone order. The world felt more open, and I was less reliant on adults, albeit in this one simple way. It’s dumb, and maybe the internet has made this process less stressful for little kids. But at the time, just like in the show, it felt like a big step forward. The world outside of my house was more accessible, even if that only meant getting a stranger to bring me food.
The difference between an informed recommendation where you’ve considered the other person and their interests and selfishly recommending something because you like it.
I used to have an impulse to try and shove all the music I loved down everyone’s throat.
One could argue that this impulse never really left me. After all, I started this blog in part to shove all the stuff I love down everyone’s throat. But it was significantly worse when I was younger. The first artists I ever liked were the boy bands of the ‘90s. They were what was on the radio, and they were the first artists I heard when I had the mental faculties to understand that I liked music. Then I discovered nu-metal, and I immediately tried to get all my friends to listen to Limp Bizkit and Korn instead of The Backstreet Boys and ‘Nsync.
To be fair, the nu-metal bands used swear words, and swear words make you cool.
That habit took a long time to die out. In middle school, when I first discovered neo-soul and conscious hip hop, I tried to convert all my hip hop fan friends away from what I now saw as sellout mainstream shit to this new political sound I found, despite the fact that I was listening to and loving the exact same stuff as them mere weeks earlier. For some strange reason, they didn’t budge. It’s almost like telling someone that what they like sucks and what you like is great is a bad way to prove your point.
Kelsey, as we briefly touched upon, is mega fan of fantasy literature. In that previous example, I don’t think I properly communicated the extent of her fandom. She wears a cape, she carries around a homemade sword she made from a PVC pipe, she often narrates her actions and thoughts in her head with a fake fantasy style English accent, and she models a lot of her behavior and identity on the concept of being a knight. Fantasy literature is a cornerstone of Kelsey’s identity. It doesn’t strictly define her, but it’s a huge part of who she is. (We’ll addrsss where that fantasy love comes from in the next section.)
In the episode, “Secret Book Club,” Kelsey reads a new fantasy book about a young knight who can travel through time by eating pudding. (I love the show’s parody of bad YA literature.) She becomes obsessed with it, but neither of her friends want to put in the effort to read it. Thus she recruits her friend Stacks, her friend who hangs out at the library and does book reports for money, to help set up an elaborate secret club with weird rules and rituals for the sole purpose of coercing her friends into reading the book. Eventually, the pseudo secrecy of the club overshadows the reading itself, but Craig and J.P. come around on the book and learn to appreciate all of Kelsey’s efforts to get them to read it.
It is, to put it simply, a story about trying to shove what you love down all your friend’s throats. Maybe it’s more a reflection of my own childhood and personality than it is a universal childhood rite of passage like the previous examples.
However, there’s an important takeaway from this episode. Not only is it a good “Hey kids, reading is fun” message, but it’s also an episode about empathy and considering other people. Kelsey’s goal in the episode is to make her friends read the book not because she thinks they’d love it, but because she wants to be able to talk about it with others. Though good comes of it, it’s still an act driven by selfishness, and that’s something Kelsey comes to terms with by the end of the episode.
Nowadays, I’m not as aggressive in my recommendations. I don’t need everyone to like what I like or dislike what I don’t. In fact, I’d rather people have their own tastes than hang on anyone’s word, let alone mine. When I do recommend a movie or a show or a book, I try to think of the other person first. What do they like? What do they hate? Of course, I don’t always know whomever I’m recommending something to that well, but in those cases, I always use my “I” statements and I leave open the possibility that they won’t be as into a thing as me.
It’s a small issue in the end, and one that may not apply to everyone. But it’s a nuanced take on how to be considerate, and it resonated incredibly well with me.
Learning how to revel in the bliss of being alone.
I don’t mean to keep picking Kelsey arcs. In truth, I find all the characters on this show relatable in one way or another, and they come with a laundry list of relatable examples I could’ve chosen. Despite the fact I never wore overly long sleeve shirts, J.P. essentially looks like me when I was that young. Like J.P., I have red hair, I was tall for my age, I had way too much energy, and I was really dumb.
However, there’s one more short Kelsey arc I want to discuss. It’s in the last episode of season one, entitled “Alone Quest.” (It was also a coincidence that I only picked season one episodes as well.)
The episode has a simple set-up. Craig eats too much pudding and has to shit, and J.P. helps Craig find a bathroom, leaving Kelsey alone to entertain herself. While the boys are off having poop related misadventures, Kelsey has an entirely plotless day to herself. She does some work on the fantasy book she’s been writing in her spare time, she gets distracted and chases a squirrel through the forest and whacks the leaves it jostles loose with her sword, she breaks into a neighbor’s backyard to feed her bird Mortimer, then she comes back and finishes her book. Before she can think of a new thing to do, Craig and J.P. return.
The only part I left out was this moment where she briefly talks to her mother, who died before the beginning of the show.
In case something happens to this video, as Kelsey pretends to sharpen her sword, she follows the squirrel, but ends up getting caught up in the beauty of the nature around her and the solitude it provides. Eventually, at the height of her bliss, she rolls down a hill, lays in the grass, and says to the heavens above, or maybe just an image in her head, “It’s a beautiful day, Mom.”
Part of the pain of true childhood nostalgia, as many have pointed out before me, is the realization that you rarely realize that you’re in the good times while you’re in them. If you had known what it was like to be an adult before you got to enjoy being a child, you’d appreciate your days as a kid much more. Of course, if you actually understood adulthood, you’d never be able to enjoy your childhood for what it was. But the larger point is that looking back, I’d bet that most people wish that they could’ve appreciated it more in the moment and did more with their time.
In this scene, Craig of the Creek does show us a rare moment where a kid understands that she’s in the good times, or at the very least, a very good moment. I don’t believe we know how old Kelsey was when her mother passed, but it’s clearly had a huge effect on her. Not only is she being raised by a single father, but all of her favorite fantasy books originally belonged to her mother.
Kelsey knows real pain, and thus has the capacity to be able to appreciate bliss when she sees it. However, as someone who in his head has four parents (shout out to divorce), I still found the moment incredibly impactful because it’s a scene that articulates the root of all true nostalgia: The fact that there was a time in your life when you were happier, you didn’t appreciate it, and now it seems like those days are long gone and never coming back. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like you felt when you were a kid again?
I write this during day whatever of the Coronavirus quarantine, and I’ve been thinking about this scene a lot. Sure, part of it has to do with the scene being outside and in a time of normalcy. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot because it reminds me to try to stay sane. To hold onto those moments when you’re not in a completely shitty and terrified mood. To try to enjoy the movie or the show you’re watching, or that album or that book. To find an indoor activity to enjoy with your roommate who you just moved in with. To join a Discord with your friends. To find a center.
Despite all the craziness, generally speaking, I feel okay lately. I’ll admit that it takes some effort, but I’m trying to be more like Kelsey laying in the field, appreciating the peaceful moments when they come.
Also, there’s an episode that’s just a big Deltron 3030 reference.
I know I spent the beginning of this article talking about how fawning over a childhood IP isn’t the same thing as true nostalgia. But guys… there’s a whole Deltron 3030 episode. They even got Del to act and rap in it. it made me stupidly happy.
