The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (25 page)

For girls, trolls offered a diverse doll universe minus Barbie's eating disorders and angst over Ken. In Troll Land, a shrimpy Santa troll might preside over the wedding of a giant pink-haired bride and green-haired groom dressed up as the Easter bunny. Nudist trolls with gems for bellybuttons drank tea with grandma trolls with rainbow hair, and nobody got judge-y or uptight.

Boys were a harder sell. Hasbro tried to suck them into the fad in 1992 with the release of the Original Battle Trolls, who were armed with weapons and painful, constipated-looking expressions even creepier than their traditional-troll counterparts. We can't imagine why Hasbro lost that war.

The one concession boys made to the trend: For some reason, troll pencil toppers were exceptionally popular with both genders. Although since the pencil pretty much impaled the troll's butt, they looked as if they were being tortured for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Salem.

M
any
thanks, Nerf, for developing the foam-based technology that allowed even sports-averse nerds to throw a football with pinpoint accuracy. The Turbo was molded with grooves that made it easy to grip, and aerodynamic enough to let you throw a perfect spiral faster than Brett Favre could change his mind about retiring. Far better than a standard light and airy Nerf ball, the Turbo was heavier, denser, and harder, and cut through the air like a lawn dart.

The Turbo made a benchwarmer into a mini–Joe Montana. But, of course, when you tried out for the JV team with your newfound, Nerf-centered confidence, you got smacked in the face with reality—and by a seventh-grade tackler. Still, Nerf continued to make more and more elaborate versions, outfitted with bells and whistles, like the Screamer, which let out a high-pitched whine, and the Turbo Liquidator, which was wrapped with a “gyrowave” ring filled with liquid. The classic Turbo remained the most sought-after, though. We swear we chucked one into the air in 1992 and it still hasn't come down.

R
emember
when collecting baseball cards was about the thrill of the hunt, and not whether your Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card was going to pay for your college education? That all changed in 1989 with the arrival of upstart trading-card company Upper Deck. Suddenly, even kids saw dollar signs and moved their collections from shoe boxes to safe-deposit boxes.

The company's novel gimmicks were as thrilling as an inside-the-park home run. Every card featured a shiny hologram, and real player autographs and jersey swatches were randomly inserted into some card boxes. (About as randomly as a Cubs win, as we didn't know anyone who actually ended up with a Reggie Jackson sweat-stained elbow piece.) Upper Deck jump-started the collector's market, and kids were convinced that someday they would trade in their piles of cards for a mansion and a yacht. Suddenly, it paid to keep cards in mint condition instead of clothes-pinning them to the spokes of your bike.

Upper Deck didn't even come with the slabs of powder-sprinkled gum other companies tucked in alongside Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs. Gum was for kids; this was serious business. According to the
New York Times
, in 1980, Topps and Fleer were kings of a $50-million industry. By 1992, with Upper Deck in the mix, sports cards had become a $1.5-billion juggernaut. But while the card companies made a bundle, few kids cleaned up. Alas, most of us had to rely on student loans to pay for college. Thanks for nothing, Ken Griffey Jr.

S
teve
Urkel of
Family Matters
appears to have been created by a screenwriter who simply listed as many annoying traits as he could think of, then wrapped them all into one character. One whiny, clumsy, doltish character.

There's absolutely no explanation for Jaleel White's Urkel becoming a massive national hit, but it happened. What Fonzie and J. R. Ewing were to the 1970s and 1980s, the doofus-y little friend of the Winslow family was to the 1990s. Was the appeal his high-water pants and suspenders? His enormous glasses? That creepy dance? That voice, like a mouse on helium? His cloying catchphrases, like “Did I do that?”
Whatever it was, it worked.
Family Matters
ran for a whopping nine seasons.

Urkel also sold products. There were T-shirts, talking dolls, and an infamous short-lived strawberry-banana cereal called Urkel-Os. Like Urkel's popularity itself, the cereal probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but made less and less sense in the cold hard light of day.

T
oday's
gamers mow down hundreds of photo-realistic enemy troops, zombies, and aliens before breakfast. But it wasn't always first-person hack-and-slash. In the '90s, geysers of pixelated blood washed over the video game industry for the very first time. The gratuitous carnage hit so quickly and so hard, it probably made happy-go-lucky Pac-Man barf up a few ghosts.

One of the first games to embrace uber-bloody gore was 1992's
Mortal Kombat
. Two warriors would punch and kick each other, until one could barely stand up. The winner would finish his opponent
by pulling off his arms or yanking his head and spine out and holding it up like a trophy. (Way to promote nonviolent playground activity.) The next year saw the arrival of
Doom
, which added 3-D graphics and a first-person perspective to the macabre mix.

Gory as they were, these were the first really addicting games—digital meth. You'd flip them on and the next thing you knew, it was eight months later, you had a long beard and were surrounded by several jars of your own urine and messages telling you not to bother coming in to your job at Cinnabon.

W
ith
liquid everywhere, why the hell was everyone in
Waterworld
so filthy? The characters' inexplicable aversion to taking a quick dip in the ocean that surrounded them wasn't the only confusing thing about Kevin Costner's 1995 flick. For instance: If the budget was a ridiculous $175 million—at the time
the most expensive film ever made—then why did child-star Tina Majorino's wig look like a rabid sea otter? And, who wanted to see Kevin Costner as a brooding post-apocalyptic fish man who drinks his own purified pee, anyway? Answer: Probably the same people who paid to see him as a brooding post-apocalyptic mailman in
The Postman
a few years later.

Critics dubbed the flick
Fishtar
, after the spectacular Warren Beatty/Dustin Hoffman 1987 mega-flop
Ishtar
. Audiences may have argued about just how much
Waterworld
stank like rotting fish, but everyone agreed on one thing: It was a very moist
Mad Max
rip-off, with jet skis instead of motorcycles and a gill-eared, web-toed Costner instead of Mel Gibson.

P
ublic-access
shows started to explode in the 1990s, and the best one of all wasn't even real. Mike Myers, as Wayne Campbell, and Dana Carvey, as Garth Algar, sat in Wayne's Aurora, Illinois, basement and spouted off to a
Saturday Night Live
audience about everything from babes to new slang.
Schwing! Not! Babe alert! I think I'm gonna hurl! Do not blow chunks, Garth.
If you were over ten and under forty in the 1990s, you said at least one of those, probably more times than you'd like to admit.

The best
Wayne's World
bits illuminated the weird little private corners of Wayne and Garth's lives. Bruce Willis played the coolest senior in school introducing that year's cool word. (“Sphincter.”) Wayne's mom (Nora Dunn) stopped by to lecture her son on how he always managed to spill everything on his T-shirts.

As the skit grew more popular, Wayne and Garth's world got bigger. Aerosmith visited their tiny little public-access show, and in the 1992 movie, Wayne fell for the babe-alicious Tia Carrere. But no amount of fame or star power could top two pals on a ratty couch, cracking wise and cracking each other up.

L
ike
beer consumption itself, Budweiser's Whassup? ads started out harmless and fun, but with repetition, turned head-poundingly painful.

The ads, which debuted in 1999, feature buddies yakking on the phone and screeching “Whassup?” at each other in drawn-out, cartoonish voices. Part of their charm was the unrehearsed sense of pure guyness—the friends were so amused by their own silliness, so consumed by their own World of Bro. The beer was there, but it was almost an afterthought. They might as well have been selling telephones.