Dave's Hot Chicken sells nostalgia as fan collaboration

Dave's Hot Chicken is launching a meal tied to X-Men '97, Marvel Animation's recent revival of the 1990s cartoon that became a cultural event this year.

The chain calls it a collaboration "built by fans, for fans"—which should make you curious about what that actually means. It wraps a commercial product in the language of authenticity and participation without requiring any evidence that fans participated in building it.

No focus groups are cited. No fan council is quoted.

What's worth examining isn't whether the meal is good or bad—it's what the phrase reveals about how corporations now market to adults who grew up on IP they loved before IP became a strategy. The 1990s were the last moment when a cartoon could simply exist, run its course. Become a permanent part of how a generation understood storytelling. X-Men '97 existed because it was good, because the animators, writers, and network decision-makers made choices that happened to resonate.

When a corporation says something was 'built by fans, for fans,' what they mean is that fans will buy it. Whether fans built it is a different question entirely.

Now nostalgia has become a market segment. The same audience that watched X-Men in 1992 is now 45 to 55 years old and has disposable income. Makes them valuable—and that's where "built by fans, for fans" comes in.