Ailee Jones

When I was younger, Saturday afternoons were a very special time. When the clock struck 3 p.m., my twin and I were finally granted our treasured few hours of TV time. But it wasn’t Nickelodeon or Disney we watched (although our eventual discovery of “Liv and Maddie” was revolutionary)—instead, Dolores and I had a wide selection of Turner Classic Movies DVDs to choose from.

But let me be clear. These weren’t just any “classic” movies we were watching—they were Golden Age musicals. Dolores and I were enamored with films such as “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Sound of Music” and “Guys and Dolls,” with a special penchant for films that featured our favorite singer, Frank Sinatra’s, music (our dad would pick the music for us whenever he drove us) such as “On the Town” and the lesser-known “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” But we also found some niche ones, as the collection of TCM sets at the metropolis Amoeba Music grew slimmer and slimmer.

For instance, Dolores and I had a perpetual fight between watching “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” The former, my sister’s choice, followed a female sharpshooter as she met her match in the gunslinger Frank Butler, featuring the classic song “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” (a song the two of us were apt to perform). My vote was always for “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” a film that followed a group of, you guessed it, seven brothers desperate for wives. They kidnap seven women from the local town, trapping them at their cabin for the duration of winter by triggering an avalanche. Of course, the women all eventually fell in love with a different  brother, singing and dancing about it the entire time.

Though perhaps the last two films are not the best examples of the magic of these movies, they are truly special. Made just after the advent of color in movies, they’re often vibrant and vivid, with grand sets and beautiful costumes. In these colorful cinematic worlds, characters, without any prompting, randomly break into song and dance. And these aren’t like the songs and dances from movies like “La La Land”—these films feature incredible dancers such as Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor who are accompanied by huge ensembles, singers such as Julie Andrews (or the voices of great singers when the actual actor may not be so talented, such as Natalie Wood in “West Side Story”) and composers such as Leonard Bernstein and Irving Berlin.

However, there is no denying that my love for these films goes beyond (what I consider to be) the objective reasons as to why they’re so good: It’s the fact that these are the movies of my childhood, and they evoke the uniquely powerful emotion of nostalgia in me whenever I watch them. For example, hearing Frank Sinatra sing “New York, New York” from “On the Town” transports me back in time to my childhood—that magical time of life when the anxieties of the world had yet to set in.

In difficult times, and this present moment is essentially a ceaselessly difficult time, tapping into that feeling of nostalgia can be deeply soothing. For instance, the summer before my junior year, for no particular reason, I found myself in need of such comfort, and for the first time in years, I decided to return to some of these musicals I had been weaned on. Though some had undeniably been better in my memory, these films allowed me to tap into the positive feelings I always associated with them, helping me get out of the negative hole I had dug myself in.

Yet, as my dad is quick to remind me, the road of nostalgia is a hard one to go down. Though diving back into childhood memories through the rewatching of comforting films can be fulfilling, it is always important to keep on looking towards the future and find the things in this current moment that, maybe in a few decades, one can look back on as a way of eliciting a similar nostalgic feeling.