The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (24 page)

Whether you called it light brown, tan, or “that color all M&M's turn once they get a little sweaty in your pocket,” tan M&M's were few people's favorite and always an also-ran to big brother dark brown.

So in 1995, Mars decided to stop tanning for good, holding a nationwide contest to replace the color. Ten million candy lovers called 1-800-FUN-COLOR to vote for either pink, purple, or blue. Blue washed away the competition with 54 percent of the vote, and the tan treats vanished. Never fear. You can still get them back if you just lick a handful of the dark brown or red ones for a while.

Y
ou
know the audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents, with his metal skeleton and creepy robot eyes that have just a glint of life to them? He's a close cousin of Teddy Ruxpin. Although the bear robot was even freakier. Because when was the last time Abe Lincoln mauled you while you slept?

The battery-powered bear robot initially came to creepy life in 1985, moving its eyes and jaw in synch with the cassette tape in its backside. When its original manufacturer filed for
Chapter 11
two years later, though, Teddy went into hibernation. In the '90s, Hasbro picked up the license—and invoked the technological black arts to raise the unholy bear from the dead. Now, instead of cassettes, it used higher-tech cartridges. But it still
ran on batteries, and also, we're pretty sure, on children's nightmares.

Didn't humanity learn its lesson when it built Skynet and gave the machines self-awareness? With Teddy Ruxpin, society is just a microchip upgrade away from bear-shaped Terminators roaming the Earth, reading bedtime stories while they enslave us all.

S
omewhere
deep underground, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles must have had one heckuva marketing machine. For a certain age group of boys in the 1990s, if you didn't carry a Turtle lunchbox, sleep on Turtle bed linens, or at least have a fistful of the action figures stuffed in your cubby or locker, you might as well quit school and go live in the sewers yourself.

Heroes on the half-shell Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael,
and Donatello leapt from indie comic books to their own TV cartoon in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, their images—and their action figures—were everywhere. It wasn't hard to see why. They combined so many things that we loved, it was as if they were created by a group of kids who threw every awesome idea they could think of into a blender. They ate pizza! They fought crime with wicked weapons like staffs and nunchakus! They talked like surfers! They lived in the sewers! They reported to a mutant rat! Just like us—except our sewers were just messy bedrooms and our mutant rat was Miss Dedman, the math teacher.

Why did the Turtles bother to wear masks, anyway? Only those same nimrods who couldn't tell Clark Kent was Superman would be unable to figure out that the four gigantic, carb-loading, anthropomorphic green guys next door were probably the superheroes everybody kept talking about. Cowabunga, dude.

T
he
'90s were chock-full of
SNL
spin-off flicks, and only two—
Wayne's World
and
Wayne's World 2
—were better than horrible.
Coneheads
,
A Night at the Roxbury
,
Stuart Saves His Family
, and
Superstar
each have their moments, but mostly they smell like Lorne Michaels left a few million dollars' worth of raw shrimp out in the sun.

The worst offender, by every possible method of measurement, is
It's Pat
, the 1992 flop starring Julia Sweeney as the androgynous title character. The groan-worthy gender-confusion plot worked in tiny doses on TV, but when the very gross Pat, dressed in horn-rimmed glasses, a western shirt, and black, curly hair, made it to the big screen, America stayed home in droves. For some reason, people were unwilling to pay good money to sit in a theater and cringe as Pat made uncomfortable noises and wiped his or her hands on his or her shirt. The best thing about the film? It was only seventy-seven minutes long.

P
ublic-service
announcements take many forms, from the fried egg of “this is your brain on drugs” to the druggie son-and-dad's “I learned it by watching you!” Starting in 1989, NBC cut right to the chase with its short-and-sweet “The More You Know” campaign. An actor, anchor, or other famous person pops up, delivers a few sentences about the cause du jour, and wham, bam, the star-comet logo soars across the screen and those four addictive notes pound out the theme.

George Clooney would rather you not hit your kids! Bill Cosby wonders if you've ever considered teaching! Betty White suggests that you read! David Schwimmer wants you to stop your friends from raping drunk girls! Kathy Griffin shadowboxes with a turtle! Not really sure what that last one was about.

Sometimes the star is so random you're not really sure who they are, except that they surely have a show on NBC. Sometimes the cause seems to have been chosen as a drunken challenge. (Ask your doctor about bone density? Plant trees to prevent asthma?) But the simplicity and shortness is hard to beat. If after-school specials had only thirty seconds and one chair for a prop, they'd be “The More You Know.”

M
ove
over, Currier and Ives. In the 1990s, Thomas Kinkade's snow-covered mansions, babbling brooks, and glowing churches replaced you as the sappiest art in the universe. Whether depicted on paintings, Christmas cards, tote bags, or night-lights, there is something unnervingly, Stepford-ly creepy about Kinkade's rainbow-skied universe.

In Kinkade's world, houses are “cottages,” Christmas is “yuletide,” and everyone has their own gazebo and/or lighthouse. Don't get us started on the random color choices. Why is that patch of snow glowing pink?

And ever notice how a Kinkade house features light blazing not from just one window, but from every single orifice? Either that place is on fire, or somewhere in there our dad is walking around lecturing about the electric bill and snapping switches off as fast as the artist can turn them on again.

E
ver
see a stampede of buffalo? Now imagine them with credit cards, sharp elbows, and a laser focus on snagging a rare, goofy, giddy doll, and you're getting close to the frenzied pandemonium that overtook toy stores when Tickle Me Elmo came to town. The little red Muppet would chuckle when you pressed his belly, then started to freak out into a giggly frenzy the more you squeezed. (More than a few frazzled parents dreamed of squeezing and squeezing until Elmo suddenly stopped, but we digress.)

Sparked in part by Rosie O'Donnell featuring the laughing fuzz ball on her show, mobs of Muppet-lusting shoppers descended on unsuspecting stores in 1996. One unlucky Walmart clerk was trampled by the crowd and suffered a concussion, broken rib, and injuries to his knee, back, and jaw. (“Today's stampede was brought to you by the letter ‘T,' for traction.”)

Still, the fervor paid off for at least a few savvy shoppers. Some quick-on-the-draw buyers who snapped up the hysterical doll turned right around and scalped it for as much as fifteen hundred dollars. Who's laughing now, Elmo?

T
opsy
Tail taught 1990s girls a valuable lesson that resonated well beyond the world of cheap hair products: As-seen-on-TV purchases never quite make the leap from TV to the real world.

On the ads, women waved a tiny plastic noose through their lush locks and seconds later were sporting an exotically complicated ponytail, braid, or updo. The commercial even promised you could Topsy Tail your thick tresses for your wedding.

But if you actually sent in your hard-earned cash and ordered the thing, were you ever in for a surprise. Turns out the tiny plastic noose doesn't actually come with its own stylists, and what took seconds in the ad took hours while you sweatily squinted at the instructions and tried desperately to recreate them in your own bathroom mirror.

You could only stab yourself in the neck a few times before giving up and tossing the Topsy Tail into the drawer next to the curling iron, the crimper, the foam curlers, the heated rollers, and three cans of long-expired mousse.

H
as
there ever been an uglier, weirder fad than troll dolls? They sport wildly colored hair, faces like unbaked pretzel dough, and clothes straight outta the
Brady Bunch
's Goodwill donation pile. Yet somehow they just keep becoming popular. Nineties kids snapped up the so-ugly-they're-cute creatures by the outstretched armful just as their parents did in the 1960s. And here we thought insanity skipped a generation.