Slowly the kids came together, standing still long enough for the makeup artist to brush at them with foundation before taking their places in front of the cameras. The first AD, a skinny man in a headset, clapped his hands together fruitlessly. In an auditorium at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, a crowd of teen actors in white aprons and chef’s hats chattered and flirted, ignoring the increasingly distraught calls from the first assistant director.

It was in the midst of this run of revivals late last August-around the point my partner and I realized our friends were all having babies and time seemed to be lurching forward with an alarming sense of purpose-that I visited the set of a moderately budgeted made-for-TV movie based on the work of my childhood hero, the wunderkind of 1980s Canadian kid-lit, Gordon Korman. To be one of the creators-dusting off past work, bringing old versions of yourself into a new world and hoping to find the public’s affection-must be infinitely more bewildering. To merely be the target of this deluge of content is a weird sensation. The sudden reappearance of a once-loved TV show/book/slice of intellectual property forces you, the viewer, into an existential anxiety, wondering why, exactly, you had loved that thing in the first place, what the hell had changed, and-importantly-how that past self is in any way connected to the human being who is, today, begrudgingly tuning into an episode of the Muppet Show in which a puppet makes a dick joke. The sheer volume of revivals means that at some point a story small and forgotten enough to feel like a personal memory will be unearthed and dragged into the sunlight. If you experienced children’s pop culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the nostalgia cycle has caught up with you, and the entertainment industry has accelerated the process of harvesting even your faintest memories, repackaging them in an astonishing array of flashy, new, inevitably disappointing containers. You can, in theory, watch a feature-length version of Jem and the Holograms, though nobody has.

You can watch a thoroughly humiliated Macy Gray sing a duet from Dirty Dancing with a grown Stephanie Tanner, and see Jimmy Fallon ghoulishly recreate an episode of Saved by the Bell-cast members delivering ancient catch-phrases with heartbreaking enthusiasm, their faces spackled by overeager Tonight Show makeup artists to resemble macabre artifacts from some BuzzFeed-sponsored “11 Atrocities All ‘90s Babies Will Recognize” wax museum. Stine who literally hunts down and pacifies creatures the real R.L. During the great narrative revival of the mid 2010s, you can watch a movie in which Jack Black plays a kids’ horror writer named R.L.

Son of Interflux by Gordon Korman