The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (13 page)

This much we know: If you read a kid a
Give a Thing a Thing
book, pretty soon she's going to ask you for another one. And if you read her another one—well, you get the picture.

T
he
Doublemint Twins were annoyingly perky. The creepy identical ghost girls in
The Shining
freaked us out. But in the 1990s, the set o' lookalike siblings that most people wanted deported were the pasty, bespectacled Scottish brothers Charlie and Craig Reid, better known as The Proclaimers. Their crime?
Unleashing the earworm to end all earworms on an unsuspecting nation with the 1993 hit, “I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles).”

You know the song—and your therapist probably does too. “Buht
Ayyyye
wouhld walk fah-ve hundred miles ahnd
Ayyye
wouhld walk fah-ve hun-dred moooooore…” Romantic, sure, but actually, that's a terrible idea, sure to give you hospitalization-level blisters and a scorching sunburn.

The twins may have sung it, but we have Johnny Depp to blame for its 1990s ubiquity. The bouncy tune hit the charts—and burrowed its way into our brains—as part of the soundtrack to the Depp film
Benny & Joon
. The song was kind of like haggis: It must have seemed like a good idea originally, but about thirty seconds in, you wanted to squeeze the singers' heads like bagpipes.

R
emember
when it was supercool to stand on the front of a boat, spread your arms wide, and yell, “I'm the king of the world!” like Leonardo DiCaprio famously did in 1997's
Titanic
? Yeah, it never was. But supercool or not, everybody who had seen the movie struck the pose, no matter if they were on a luxury liner or in a canoe.

It was as if we were compelled: Water + boat = an uncontrollable urge to inappropriately call attention to ourselves by screaming lame dialogue from a movie. (In 2004, it was voted the cheesiest movie line ever, even beating out “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” from
Dirty Dancing
.)

Little known fact: There's actually no such thing as the king of the world. The reality is that Earth is made up of many countries, each of which has its own leader. One person doesn't actually govern the entire thing. Although with the wind in his face and a sweet job like coal shoveler in the bowels of a ship on his résumé, it's no wonder DiCaprio's character truly felt like he had the world at his feet. Too bad he also had an iceberg looming in his peripheral vision.

W
e
couldn't roller skate, we couldn't ice skate, and suddenly in the 1990s, we couldn't do both at the same time. Inline skates like Rollerblades combined the wheels of roller skates with the one-single-blade design of ice skates, supposedly to let hockey players stay in shape in warm weather months. Most people, however, wore them to flirt with cute strangers around city lakes and parks, ticking off bicyclists and occasionally going head over wheels straight into some oblivious mom pushing a stroller.

Inline skates worked pretty well if you were capable of getting them moving, but heaven help you if you ever wanted to come to a complete stop. There was a chunky brake included, but that worked about as smoothly as Fred Flintstone putting his feet down to stop his prehistoric car. Everyone we knew was able to stop only by stumbling headfirst onto a patch of grass, or worse, straight into a tree.

Fortunately, whoever sold you the blades probably also upsold you on some knee, wrist, and elbow pads, plus a helmet. Unfortunately, they were probably still sitting in the box in your closet, since it was much cooler to risk a concussion than to look like a bubble-wrapped dork.

Y
ou
remember. Old Mrs. Fletcher wipes out in her bathroom, hollers the now-infamous line, and presumably is saved by medic-alert service LifeCall before she's eaten alive by her (certainly thousands of) cats. From the Dolly Parton–esque hair of the concerned daughter to the whiny diction of the star (“Oi've
Fawwen
!”), the spot offered more cheese than a deli.

The phrase became the 1990s version of “Where's the beef?” There were musical remixes, endless parodies, a mention in a Weird Al song, a
Roseanne
reference, and mocking shirts (“I've Fallen and I Can't Reach My Beer”).

Sure, old people taking dives isn't funny, but damn, this ad was.

Q
uick,
who's the U.S. attorney general? In the late '90s, every kid in the country knew—thanks to Will Ferrell's impersonation of a certain A.G. with a mannish 'do, deep voice, and bright blue outfit. On
Saturday Night Live
's recurring “Janet Reno's Dance Party” sketch, Ferrell portrayed the first female attorney general as a defensive, clench-fisted, karate-choppin' force of nature in pearls and sensible pumps—who also happened to be throwing a party for local kids in her unfinished basement. Amid the crepe paper, balloons, and disco ball, Ferrell would stop to interview students, and quickly accuse them all of lying (“Shut your mouth, you dirty liar”), or dive into the crowd (“Here comes 180 pounds of pure Reno!”).

Watching “Reno” herky-jerk to “My Sharona” or slow dance with then–Secretary of Health Donna Shalala (Kevin Spacey!) blew our minds, but it was seeing her in a boxing match with the real Rudy Giuliani that pushed the skit into classic territory. Ferrell
kneed Giuliani in the groin, and then, when accused of boxing dirty, crazily flailed his arms and uttered one of the best retorts ever to come out of SNL: “Then how comes my conscience is so clean?!”

Taking a cue from her fictionalized self, the real-life Janet Reno hosted a dance party as a campaign fund-raiser when she ran for the governor of Florida. She didn't win.

J
ell-O
wasn't the first gelatin company to make their product into wiggly but firm blocks that were easy to shape with cookie cutters—Knox Blox had been around for decades. But when marketing manager Dana Gioia helped launch a promotions blitz for Jell-O Jigglers in 1990, the colorful finger food was suddenly everywhere.

In a 1991 TV ad, Jell-O spokeslegend Bill Cosby advocated making Christmas-shaped Jigglers for Santa in place of milk and cookies. Egg- and jellybean-shaped molds encouraged Jigglers as an Easter treat. Kids loved them because it was suddenly okay to eat Jell-O with your fingers. Jell-O loved them because they required
four times as much Jell-O to make as a regular pan of the stuff, plus they could keep cranking out holiday-themed molds.

For some kids, Jigglers were the first step into mom and dad's kitchen. They were tasty, easy, fun to eat, and the variety of colors and shapes kept things interesting. If only all foods came in every color of the rainbow and required the use of cookie cutters.

A
re
you a pregnant prostitute? Having an affair with your cousin? In love with a phone-sex operator? Proud to be a homewrecker? Cheating on your boyfriend with his identical twin? All of the above? There's one place for you, and it's center stage at
The Jerry Springer Show
, the spawned-in-the-1990s phenomenon that all but invented tabloid TV.

Springer's show was a revelation when it launched in 1991. Sure, TV hadn't exactly been all
Masterpiece Theatre
for some time, but we didn't see this tasteless talk show coming. The swearing! The punching! The blurred boobies! Security guard Steve—who
soon became a star in his own right—diving bravely into a cartoon-like ball of flying fists and hair-pulling! Jerry's insipid “Final Thought,” a weirdly discombobulating statement that was about as relevant to the hillbilly guests as toothpaste!

Springer
faded from the spotlight for many reasons. Once the dialogue became completely incomprehensible thanks to the necessary bleeps, it wasn't as much fun to watch the fights. And eventually, there was just no way the show could top its latest insane topic. Really, after the transvestite who cut off his/her own legs with a power saw, even boob-flashing grandmas and self-proclaimed vampires felt tame by comparison.

R
emember
when Jim Carrey was known only as the White Guy on
In Living Color
? For a brief time in the early '90s, the lanky comic's claim to fame was off-kilter characters like Vera de Milo and Fire Marshal Bill on the Fox comedy-sketch show. But then, in 1994, three of what would become his signature flicks hit the big screen, and—ssssomebody stop him!—he became a household name. (Although in many households, the conversation went: “Isn't Jim Carrey annoying?”)

In
The Mask
, Carrey's “ssssmokin'!” human cartoon character romanced Cameron Diaz (in her first role) and ate up the scenery with his giant choppers. In
Dumb & Dumber
, he teamed up with the Farrelly Brothers and fellow goofball Jeff Daniels to unleash a whole new level of sophomoric—yet undeniably hilarious—humor onto cineplexes from coast to coast. (“What is the soup du jour?” “It's the soup of the day.” “Mmmm—that sounds good. I'll have that.”) And as
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
, Carrey showcased his Big Boy pompadour and talked out of his butt.

Aaaall righty, then.

F
or
Jim of comic strip
Jim's Journal
, buying a scrub brush is a pretty big day. The big-headed, mouthless Wisconsinite wanders through his comic strip like many folks do through their own lives. Hardly anything major happens in his four-panel strips. In one, he sits at Dairy Queen idly watching an ant crawl across the table. In another, he ruminates about how a sore throat gets better as the day wears on.