The more I think about it, the more I think most entertainment misunderstands nostalgia. They understand that "people liked a thing" and therefore "want more of it," but seem to focus on the trappings.
But I don't think nostalgia is a wistfulness for past things.
Nostalgia is a wistfulness for the way those past things made you feel at the time when they were new.
This is why cameos are often just empty, even a little pathetic.
Merely existing, just seeing something, is pretty unlikely to produce the feeling of the old experience, because existence is not in itself evocative.
You can't evoke the feeling of watching Season 2 of Teen Wolf by getting all the characters who were part of it together and filming them standing around. Not only is standing around not what they were doing the first time, the first time they were doing something for the first time.
The reason doing reunion episodes is hard, I think, is because the tendency is to want to trot out all the old objects associated with the old experience, thinking this will create the old feelings. But when you do that, it's more like a museum tour.
The je ne sais quoi of Teen Wolfness is something like, horror but sometimes funny. Colored wolf eyes are cool. Scott is obliviously earnest. Derek is quiet, tortured, and well-meaning. Beacon Hills is the worst place on earth, but no one living there seems to notice.
If you want to make an actual new thing that evokes the same feelings as the old thing, I think you have to... actually do something new. This makes the nogitsune choice the worst choice possible. It's trotting out something old for the sake of it being old because old = nostalgia.
It should have been an entirely new threat. The feeling of watching the original show was watching them face new threats, adapt to new circumstances.
It should have resisted the urge to place everyone on screen like "hey, remember them! Remember when they were cool!" and only used whoever was organically going to be relevant, because the feeling you're going after doesn't come from the observation of totems of past experience but the creation of new experience.
A 2-hour movie, especially, should be as self-contained as possible, or else you're trying to do too much and leaning too heavily on a totem of past experience as a substitute for current experience because there simply isn't time to make the new experience happen.
The more I think about it, the more I think one of the fics I wrote, What You Can't See, is a better Teen Wolf the Movie than Teen Wolf the Movie. It's an ensemble cast, an original baddie, and a complete storyline.
