The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (2 page)

Sure, each decade is technically just ten years, but we feel confident saying that the twentieth century seemed to gain speed as it neared its end. Starting in the 1990s, technology jumped on a roller-coaster-fast track that changed everything. Mobile phones went from brick-sized behemoths that only Gordon Gekko carried to slim little numbers that everyone from nannies to nuns popped in their pockets. Televisions used to be so clunky they might have singlehandedly made you refuse to help a friend move. After the '90s technology revolution, they morphed into sexy flat screens that hung on walls like paintings.

Before the 1990s began, you may not have received a single email. By 2000, the dude who lived in your AOL inbox was barking “You've got mail!” every couple of minutes.

It's not just that the 1990s introduced us to a boatload of new stuff—all decades do that. It's the fact that items we first encountered in the '90s didn't just come and go. Computers, mobile phones, electronic news and communications—these things may keep changing form, but they're never going to fade out of our lives completely, not now. They'll get better—or weirder—but for good or for ill, they're here to stay.

Also in the '90s, many of the things generations had grown up with started to slip away. Photographic film. Landlines. Newspapers. You almost don't notice when those things start to slowly roll out of your life, but when you look back at where you were in 1990 versus where you were in 1999, it's mind-blowing.

Technology aside, it was a decade of rich creativity and downright crazy inventions. Just think about how the 1990s loved to play with form.

You think you had candy, previous generations? We have super-sour candy that will rip a layer off your tongue! Think T-shirts pretty much can't be improved? We have shirts that change color with the temperature! Thirsty? We have clear colas and beverages
with weird floating pearls in them! You've seen dozens of movies and watched a million hours of TV? We're going to hit you with Quentin Tarantino's pop-culture-flavored violence and the whole bizarre reality TV universe. What's that Al Jolson said as Hollywood moved into talkies? You ain't heard nothin' yet, indeed.

As advanced and futuristic as we thought we were back in the 1990s, we look back on it now as a decade of innocence. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union imploded, and for a brief moment the nuclear fears that haunted '80s kids almost fell away. We had no idea, as we sailed into airports an hour before a flight, cruising through metal detectors with shoes and belts on, tweezers and giant bottles of mouthwash stowed in our carry-ons, what the 2000s would bring.

What happened to the gentle memories of our youth? Some vanished totally, like the craze for clear colas. Some stayed around, but faded from the spotlight, like
America's Funniest Home Videos
and the bungee-jumping fad. Some temporarily disappeared, were revised, and reintroduced…but you'll have to read the book to find out which ones. Not everything we remember here was invented in the 1990s, but it was important to us then. And since you're flipping through this book, we're guessing it was important to you too.

So don't let anyone tell you it's too early to remember the 1990s. Smear on some body glitter and put some fresh batteries in your Big Mouth Billy Bass. We're heading back to the era when clear cola seemed somehow cool, we all knew how to fix a cassette tape with a pencil, and TGIF and SNICK ruled the airwaves.

Grab some Dunkaroos and pump it up, Kris. This is your so-called life.

A
mbitious
cast members on
Saturday Night Live
always find new ways to stand out. In the 1990s, Mike Myers had
Wayne's World
, Chris Farley played lovable chubby losers, and Adam Sandler, long before he was a movie star, hit the right note with his own original songs.

Sandler's topics were truly off the wall. His “Thanksgiving Song” mixed completely random pop-culture lines with tales from Turkey Day itself (“Turkey for you and turkey for me/Can't believe Tyson gave that girl VD”), while his “Hanukkah Song” listed famous Jews who celebrate the holiday. (“Guess who eats together at the Carnegie Deli? Bowser from Sha Na Na and Arthur Fonzarelli!”) And he wasn't afraid to rhyme “Hanukkah” with “marijuanica.”

Perhaps Sandler's best-loved
SNL
song is the one Farley helped him perform, “Lunch Lady Land.” Farley was perfect as the mole-sporting, hair-netted worker who's the Simon Legree of cafeteria food—until the pizza and pudding came out for revenge. On a show where sketches often run groaningly long, seeing Sandler bring out his guitar meant a guaranteed two minutes of the purest and most joyful laughter.

B
efore
Yo Gabba Gabba!
, the show every indie hipster wanted to guest star on was
The Adventures of Pete & Pete
. And no wonder—if you were Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, or Michael Stipe, wouldn't you kill to be on the coolest, weirdest, most surreal program of the '90s? Ostensibly about two carrot-topped brothers, Big Pete and Little Pete (“Get a life, jerkweed!” was one of the littler Pete's favorite put-downs) the Nickelodeon show was like nothing else on TV—and certainly like nothing else on Nickelodeon, which had traditionally run more, uh, lowbrow fare. (Cough—
Hey Dude
.)

The Adventures of Pete & Pete
was an oddball offering about school, suburbia, and subversion. Little Pete was an anti-authority nut with a tattoo of an adult woman (Petunia!) on his forearm. The boys' mom had a metal plate in her head. They hung out with the neighborhood superhero, Artie, who described himself as “the strongest man…in the world!” Luscious Jackson played at their prom. And it kept getting weirder. And better than 99 percent of anything else on TV. In the immortal words of Little Pete, “Read it and weep, fungus-lick!”

B
efore
YouTube, the only place you could check out embarrassing real-life video footage was on
America's Funniest Home Videos
, which kicked off in 1989 and quickly became
the
water-cooler show of the '90s. “Oh, man—did you see that one of the kid smashing his dad in the nertz with a golf club? Classic. I wish I could post that on the Internet.” “What's the Internet?” “No idea, but someone should totally invent it so we can watch that video over and over again.”

Pretty soon, everybody with a camcorder—at that time, the giant kind you had to balance on your shoulder—was aiming it at any remotely dangerous or adorable situation, hoping to capture a pyramid of people collapsing into an alligator pit or a baby juggling Tasers.

Host Bob Saget and, later, folks like Daisy Fuentes and Tom Bergeron, delivered terrible patter in between clips, all set to an
uncontrollable laugh track. Why? To make the often lame, overlit, grainy, and blurry videos more appealing? Good Lord, get to the deck collapse already.

Much has been made of the show's penchant for featuring people getting smacked in the groin. So much, in fact, that we won't belabor the conversation other to say the reputation was absolutely, rightfully, and painfully deserved. If the nutcup fits…

I
f
aliens on their way to invade Earth had caught a few minutes of
American Gladiators
, they would have turned their ships around and headed right back to their home planet. Because who wanted to mess with an army of muscle-bound mutants, especially if they were armed with giant Q-tips? That was apparently the reason we all tuned in to the syndicated 1989–1997 hit: to watch regular Joes get their spandex-covered butts handed to them by freaks of nature with names like Nitro, Laser, Turbo, and Zap.

Contestants bobbed and weaved while Gladiators shot at them with one-hundred-mile-per-hour tennis-ball cannons. Why, it was just like the Olympics! Only not at all. But the commentators
(including, in the first season, Joe Theismann) took this goofy game just as seriously, trying to keep a straight face while they interviewed a contestant who just got pulled off a rock wall by a shaved and oiled bodybuilder. With the breathless commentary, squeaky-clean heroes, and mwah-ha-ha villains,
Gladiators
pulled out all the stops to artificially amp up the drama wherever it could. But we all really knew it wasn't much more than a cut-rate pro-wrestling match mixed with a cheesy obstacle course. And that's exactly why we never missed an episode.

H
ickory
dickory dock…” Trust us, you don't want to hear the rest. With jet-black sideburns slashed across his cheeks and a cigarette permanently dangling from his lips, shock comic Andrew “Dice” Clay shot to national attention in 1988 with his stand-up comedy versions of nursery rhymes so obscene, they'd make Mother Goose lose her tail feathers.

He'd punctuate every punch line with a delighted “Oh!” like even he couldn't believe he'd said it. The Brooklyn-born comedian quickly gained a rep as a rude, crude misogynist, sparking protests
from every possible angle. MTV banned him and his leather jacket for life in 1989, when he let loose a few of his expletive-packed poems on the MTV Video Music Awards. And when he was scheduled to host
Saturday Night Live
the next year, cast member Nora Dunn and musical guest Sinead O'Connor sat out the show in protest. Note to Dice: When someone who rips up a picture of the pope on national TV calls you out for being too controversial, you might want to dial it back a tad.

F
ast-fooderies,
know your place! McDonald's really shouldn't think of itself as an adult eatery. After all, hoity-toity steakhouses don't try to build locations in food courts or give away toy Smurfs.

In 1996, McDonald's decided to market certain food items strictly to grown-ups. Headlining the new sandwich line was the Arch Deluxe—kind of like a quarter pounder, but featuring lettuce, tomato, a mustard-mayo sauce, round bacon, and a really bready potato-flour bun.

The chain reportedly spent $100 million on a campaign straight out of your mom's reverse-psychology book. Kids hate these burgers, grown-ups! Doesn't that make you want to order a couple dozen? When those ads didn't bring customers flocking in, the company switched to commercials showing Ronald McDonald engaging in adult activities. Get your mind out of the gutter—he was golfing and nightclubbing. The less said about the carrot-topped clown boogeying down at a nightspot, the better.

The Deluxe line was reportedly one of the biggest corporate flops of all time. Wash one down with a New Coke while surfing your WebTV and you may have the perfect trifecta of capitalistic failure.

O
nly
twelve episodes of
Austin Stories
were ever shown, but viewers too lazy to turn off MTV after
The Real World
ended discovered the 1997–1998 show and made it a cult classic.

Texas comics Brad “Chip” Pope, Howard Kremer, and Laura House played three friends of various degrees of Slackertude. Nerdy Chip couldn't hold down a job and mooned over the girlfriend
who dumped him. (“Shhh, Angie's sleeping!” he scolded pals. “With that guy!”) Lanky Howard was always working a scam, from hawking candy he found in the trash to selling his girlfriend's blood to get his impounded car back. Alt-weekly journalist Laura was the most responsible of the three, but even she wasn't above calling the Czech Republic on the newspaper's dime.