Arrested Development POP CULTURE AND VHS NOSTALGIA IN BRIGSBY BEAR
Long before they were the respective writer/star and director of Brigsby Bear (2017), comedian Kyle Mooney and filmmaker Dave McCary grew up on the same street in San Diego. Mooney was a little geekier, and McCary, sportier, but from the fifth grade on they were tight friends, united by their pop-cultural obsessions. There were comic books and baseball cards, TV shows and figurines – their early childhood defined by Star Wars, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ThunderCats, Transformers. ‘I grew up in a household that encouraged fandom,’ recounts Mooney. ‘My mother is a Trekkie, and we’re from San Diego, so I was going to Comic-Con when I was like 7 years old.’1
As Mooney grew older, his fandom only broadened, deepened. He grew particularly obsessed with old VHS cassettes, buying up big when video stores divested their shelves of the archaic format, then spending endless hours over the subsequent years trawling eBay for more.2 His vast collection began as a work of nostalgia, Mooney out to re-create the childhood thrill he felt browsing video-store shelves. But, as he got older, he became like a record collector, drawn to increasingly obscure artefacts. He developed a particular fondness for VHS tapes of local cable-access kids’ programs that he’d find in thrift stores. ‘I love the line a lot of children’s shows from that era draw, where the happy-go-lucky and positive meets the creepy, weird, and psychedelic,’ Mooney explains.3
The ‘Holy Grail’, McCary says, is ‘finding stuff’ that’s so obscure that it doesn’t even exist online. When Mooney first discovered – which, at the time, hadn’t yet found digital immortality on YouTube – he was struck by how it was trying to be accessible but felt bizarrely specific, and how, like so many of his treasured VHS vestiges, it felt left behind: a
