The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (10 page)

When it did actually connect, the sending machine inevitably jammed, so all that spit out at the other end was a smeary Rorschach test. And good luck faxing a photo, which came across as a big box of black. (“Here's the shot I took during the eclipse.”)

I
f
information is power, then the dawn of the 3.5-inch floppy disk made us into gods. Suck it, pencil and paper! We could now fit a whopping 1.44 megabytes in our pockets. Okay, it seemed like a lot at the time, but today it's the size of a single, blurry photo.

And with great technology came great annoyance. Sometimes we'd pop the disks into the computer and they'd make a horrific
kak-kak-kak
sound, like a cat choking on a digital hairball. Or they'd get stuck in the drive and we'd desperately unwind a paper clip, poke it in the emergency-eject hole and hold our breath that our biology paper hadn't been wiped clean. And we'd inevitably knock over a huge stack of the brightly colored plastic squares before we had a chance to label them, spewing uncontrolled rainbow chaos all over the floor.

For a while in the '90s, computer games came on both 3.5-inch and the larger—but on-the-way-out—5.25-inch floppies. People would inevitably buy the wrong one, folding and cramming the thing into a too-small drive because they simply had to play
Trump Castle 3
or
Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist
right this second.

Hope sprung eternal with the arrival of the Iomega Zip drive in 1994. We could fit a whole computer's worth of backup on the
things. Too bad the drives we needed to use them set us back two hundred dollars a piece, and were quickly rendered obsolete.

W
e'd
already chuckled at Tom Hanks in flicks like
Big
,
Sleepless in Seattle
, and
Turner & Hooch
. (Okay, maybe not so much
Turner & Hooch
.) But with his southern-fried performance in the 1994 Oscar-winner
Forrest Gump
, Hanks shot to a new level of superstardom, wiping out every last memory of when he wore a bra and girdle in
Bosom Buddies
, or played Elyse Keaton's ne'er-do-well brother on
Family Ties
.

In the movie—a perfect blend of blow-your-nose-in-your-popcorn tear-jerker and punch-in-the-gut comedy—simpleton Forrest insinuated himself into just about every grainy piece of archival footage director Robert Zemeckis could unearth. Forrest, it seems, changed the course of history: He taught Elvis how to swivel his hips, started the ping-pong craze, exposed the Watergate break-in, and showed president Lyndon Johnson that he was shot “in the butt-tocks.” He left catchphrase after catchphrase in
his wake, as he pined for his childhood sweetheart Jenn-ay (“Run, Forrest! Run!”), befriended slack-jawed Bubba (“Shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad…”), and sprinted across the country (“Stupid is as stupid does”).

And we watched it all over and over again, until we could recite every line by heart. Every time we popped it into the VCR, unlike the box of chocolates Forrest carried around, we knew exactly what we were gonna get.

W
hat
Peanuts
was to the 1950s, Bill Amend's
FoxTrot
was to the 1990s. But while Charlie Brown and pals were oblivious to the pop culture of their era, dorky dad Roger and mom Andy's three kids bathe in it. Oldest son Peter adores Bruce Springsteen and Cindy Crawford, boy-crazy sister Paige decks her room with
90210
posters, and youngest kid Jason writes computer viruses and is obsessed with
Star Wars
.

Amend majored in physics, and it shows, especially in his
dead-on portrayal of brainy, geeky Jason. When Jason and pal Marcus plan a snow fort, it has twelve missile silos. After they see
Jurassic Park
, Jason writes a letter to PBS telling them Barney should be eating the kids. His diorama on the Great Depression features Kirk, Spock, and Bones jumping back through a time portal.

But you don't have to know Klingon to feel like the Foxes are part of your family. Jason may play Nintendo instead of baseball and own an iguana instead of a beagle, but like
Peanuts
,
FoxTrot
has a universality and a heart that defies time periods. And Jason's moved from loving
Star Trek
to
Star Wars
to
Avatar
, from iMacs to iPads, without batting an eye—or aging beyond age ten. The geek shall inherit the earth.

W
hen
the title of your movie makes an entire theater full of preteen boys collapse in a fit of giggles and snort Orange Crush out of their noses, you probably want to fire whatever focus group told you it was a good idea. 1993's
Free Willy
had one of the worst titles in cinematic history. They couldn't have come up with a different name for the whale? How about Steve? Steve is a good, middle-of-the-road whale name. And, most important, doesn't make people think of a wang.

Terrible title aside, the movie, about a twelve-year-old boy befriending a five-ton killer whale, had us all bawling out of our blowholes. The '90s were a good time to be a cute kid who could turn on the waterworks because of an animal friend, like Anna Paquin and her geese in
Fly Away Home
or Tina Majorino and her Hawaiian-shirt-wearing seal BFF, Andre. Jason James Richter, the kid from
Free Willy
, didn't exactly parlay his success as a child actor into a sustained career, though. Your acting gigs tend to dry up when you're best known for playing second fiddle to a giant pile of blubber.

O
ur
friends looked nothing like this. Forget Manhattan, even in Minneapolis no one had an apartment as spacious as Monica's. Or a hairstyle as trendsetting as Rachel's, sarcasm as sharp as Chandler's, or the sexy airheadedness of Joey. These were fictional “friends” for sure, but spending time with them was often hilarious and always entertaining.

Gorgeous they may have been, but like most twentysomethings in the 1990s, the “friends” were embarrassingly underemployed. How else could they spend so much time hanging at Central Perk, singing about a certain “Smelly Cat,” or watching embarrassing prom videos from the 1980s? Love was hard to come by too. The Ross-Rachel, yes-no, love-hate relationship wore thin, but just when it vaulted into cliché, the writers managed to save it. (
“We were on a break!”
)

But what really endeared fans to these “friends” were the little things. The trivia contest where no one knew what Chandler's job was, Ross bleaching his teeth so much they glowed in the dark, the Thanksgiving football game where Ross and Monica refought childhood battles. Through it all, though, ran a ribbon of devotion. The
Seinfeld
crew was one chocolate babka away from every man for himself, but the “friends” were truly there for each other, just as their theme song claimed.

I
n
the 1990s, Fruit Roll-Ups took a lesson from major-league baseball and started injecting themselves with growth hormones. They then gave birth to Fruit by the Foot, a yard-long version of the original 1980s snacking favorite.

The three-foot length made it as much of a toy as a treat. Who didn't paste a couple rolls together and use it to measure your height, or your dog's? Between this and the enormous roll of gum that was Bubble Tape, what was the message being sent to 1990s kids here? Snarf down twice as much junk food as your Gen X siblings ever did just to keep up? Was it all some giant corporate test of a new generation's self-control? If so, we failed. Deliciously.

Hippie moms bought food dehydrators and made their own, which went over about as well as when they tried substituting carob for chocolate. We universally preferred
the packaged stuff, although to be honest, they contained about as much “fruit” as they did “foot.”

I
t
was part Giga Pet, part Gizmo from
Gremlins
: Furby was the Cabbage Patch Kid of 1998, as desperate parents knocked each other down at the Toys R Us to bring home the hairy, animatronic alien for their mesmerized child.