Since when has it become cool to wear 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' shirts, reminisce about the days of 'Transformers' or brag to your buddies about 'up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start' (Nintendo Contra 30-life code), but it is completely un-cool to mention how you still watch 90s Disney movies?
I have no qualms with people who adore 'G.I. Joe,' 'Fraggle Rock' or even the girls and their obsessive love for Grumpy Bear, but when are people going to stand up and recognize the standard childhood foundation in all our lives, Disney?
So often in our pop-cultured existence, people join the bandwagon of nostalgia when they don't have a clue about the references.
Though I love 'Family Guy' and religiously watch it each Sunday night on Fox, I only understand approximately 30 percent of the jokes. While everyone else in the room is laughing at 100 percent of the old-school references, I keep it real and laugh at the jokes I truly understand.
If you are going to idolize people, characters and events that you don't remember, the least you could do is also recognize the things that really made an impact on your life.
Get yourself into a one-on-one conversation with a friend or even a complete stranger walking drunkenly past The Red Shed on a Friday night and ask them who Mufasa and Simba are.
I guarantee they will know they are characters from the 'Lion King.' Undoubtedly you will both end up laughing and singing the song 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight,' but will quickly stifle your laughs, thinking your other friends would call you a dork.
Most of the undergrads at UW-Madison right now were between six and 11-years-old when the great Disney movies came out. Disney was an important personality shaping tool used by our parents in the early '90s.
Imagine how you would have turned out if you hadn't learned about romance from 'The Little Mermaid,' what's on the inside is what matters from 'Beauty and the Beast' or the importance of a father-son relationship from 'The Lion King.'
When a friend of yours teaches you how to play the guitar, how to kick butt in beer-pong or how to steal wireless internet from your unsuspecting neighbors, do you say thank you? Do you brag to your other friends about how cool they are by helping you out? You're damn right you do!
So why do people hide in the shadows when the few people out there who actually didn't like Disney bash the cherished memories that shaped your life? It appears that so often people take the easy way out.
Of course nobody is expecting you to stay at home and study for a chemistry exam when the Badger hockey team is playing the No. 1 ranked team in the nation at home with a sold-out crowd.
But the choice to take the hard route and stick up for Disney will only get you laughed at for a few minutes. By doing so, you might make it that much easier for another person to come out of the closet and admit that they too cried the first time they saw Mufasa die in front of Simba. I know I did.
