The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (26 page)

When the ad took off, so did the catchphrase, making it impossible to go anywhere without a shrieked “Whassup?” causing your ears to bleed. The ad begat sequels—in one, a meal at a Japanese restaurant turns “Whassup?” into “Wasabi?” with a sushi chef chorus joining in.

But the best sequel showed a group of yuppies who, instead of “watchin' the game, havin' a Bud,” were “watching the market recap, drinking an import.” Instead of “Whassup?” their greeting was a stiff and proper “What are you doing?” The final scene cut to the original “Whassup?” guys staring at the screen in shocked disbelief.

M
om
tells you you'll get gum disease if you don't floss? Whatever. Your sister whines that you got your ears double pierced at twelve so she should be able to get them single pierced at ten? What. Ev. Er. Your cousin argues that Jonathan Taylor Thomas is way cuter than Leonardo DiCaprio? Whatevs. W/E. Evs!

“Whatever” started to gain momentum with the Valley Girls of the 1980s, but really found its sneering, dismissive stride with children of the '90s. It is to conversation what Dan Dierdorf was to football—a good solid blocker. When you don't want to let a discussion go one step further, when all hope for progress is lost, or when you just really want to punch a blabby somebody in the mouth but it's not socially acceptable to do so, pull out the “whatever.”

Kids, from toddlers to teenagers, have very little control over their lives. Bigger people make them do things, go places, say things they would never choose on their own. But “whatever” is the final bomb dropped on a verbal battle you can't or don't want to win.

No one can offer up a decent response. Other than “Don't ‘whatever' me, young lady!” (Mom), there's just not a single verbal comeback that makes sense. Like Rhett Butler sailing out of Scarlett's
life for the final time, you've expressed the amount of damns you give about this matter, and that amount is zero.

K
ids
like to find stuff. Parents like to keep kids quiet. Thus
Where's Waldo?
books hit the parent-kid sweet spot in a big way. No reading skills were required, only working eyeballs and a tiny bit of patience.

Being kids, we were good with the eyesight, but sometimes lacking in the “patience” realm.
Waldo
artist Martin Handford crammed hundreds of characters into his frustratingly detailed drawings, confusing the issue by throwing in red-and-white striped beach balls and other objects that closely resemble dorky Waldo's striped sweater and hat.

Why is Waldo wearing a sweater and long pants on the beach anyway? How come he constantly needs to be found? He appears to be under forty, so why does he walk with a cane? Also, does he have reverse claustrophobia? He never shows up in a crowd smaller
than forty gajillion, as if he perennially lives in the toy section of Walmart on Black Friday. More than just being found, he needed to be forcibly steered into some therapy.

O
ur
parents had to walk miles barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways, to get to their one-room schoolhouse—or so they say. But '90s kids had it almost as bad, trying to figure out the revolutionary but confusing Windows 95 operating system. Concepts that seem no-duh to us today (files you drag to the recycle bin stick around unless you empty it) had to be explained in painstaking detail. Looking back, we want to slap ourselves silly with a floppy disk.

Wait, what? We could name our files whatever we wanted?
Minimize a document and go back to it without having to reopen? Copy and paste? Hold us back from this futuristic technology! It was like being taken out of arithmetic and tossed into advanced algebra.

Thankfully, we had some, er, Friends to walk us through it. Microsoft hired sitcom stars Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston to star in an infamous video (available on VHS, natch) to teach us about this newfangled way of computing—and cheesily crack wise in the process. “Task bar?” asks Aniston. “Is that anything like a Snickers bar? Does it have nougat?” Ohhhh, man. No wonder Ross kept dumping her.

The media blitz for Windows 95 was unprecedented and will likely be unequaled. A new version, Windows 98, was in stores before some of us had even mastered emptying the recycling bin. Since then, programmers have been firing updates at us like fastballs in a batting cage, and sometimes it feels as if we're ducking more than we're keeping up. But there's no choice now. At work, home, and school, we're up at bat every day.

W
WJD
bracelets, with the initials standing for “What Would Jesus Do?” caught fire via Christian youth groups in the early 1990s, but were soon everywhere. Quickly, there were bumper stickers, T-shirts, lanyards, teddy bears, and, because this was still the '90s, even slap bracelets bearing the slogan.

You didn't have to be Christian to wear them, as the bracelets became a middle-school fashion craze, regardless of one's faith. Some kids doubled up on the wrist religion, wearing two or three at a time for extra questioning power.

Soon, the parodies took over. What Would Journey Do? What Would Brian Boitano Do? What Would Jesus Drive? What Would Scooby Do?

What
Would
Jesus Do? Whatever it was, he probably wouldn't bother to make a jewelry line about it.

T
he
sci-fi-and-supernatural mythology that ran through
The X-Files
was so thick, it turned off some viewers, but millions of nerds still tuned in every Friday night for their weekly dose of government conspiracies, alien-invasion plots, and scenes of people running with flashlights through shadowy Vancouver forests.

Most of us followed the show for the Sam-and-Diane-meet-E.T. chemistry between skeptical scientist Dana Scully and believer and porn aficionado Fox Mulder. But we also craved the creepy phenomena of the week, like the guy who could slither through narrow air vents, the serial killer who was really a demon, or Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a bulky Man in Black. And the topper, an episode that was so unsettling and horrific, it was banned from being rerun: “Home,” where the inbred mutant family kept their legless and armless mother on a cart under the bed. Yeesh.

But if the (sometimes unsettling) fan fiction on the Internet is any indication, the answer most X-Philes longed for was when the heck Scully and Mulder were going to finally get it on. The duo did eventually lock lips—starting with a New Year's Eve smooch in 1999. Was it the right move to resolve all that sexual tension? The question has sparked more debate than the Roswell UFO crash, the moon landing hoax, and Elvis still being alive put together.

A
nything
the Olympics could do, the X Games could do backward on a skateboard launched from a helicopter while chugging a Red Bull. And with a pierced tongue. When the extreme sports competition began in 1995, a whole generation of snotty-nosed Evel Knievels skated into the spotlight as if it were an empty pool. Move aside, Bruce Jenner and Nadia Comaneci. Unlikely athletes like skateboarder Tony Hawk, and later, snowboarder Shaun White, took all the insane tricks kids were attempting on American playgrounds and mountains, perfected them, and then performed them on camera.

Even those of us who couldn't manage to skateboard the length of our block were fascinated by the televised spectacle. It was like a freak show you didn't have to feel bad about watching—seriously, did that guy just do a double back-flip on a snowmobile? X Games
stars did everything your mom warned you against, and instead of getting grounded and ending up in traction, they got medals and ended up on Wheaties boxes. Throughout the whole thing, there rang a sense of generational pride. These weren't the Baby Boomer Games, after all. X marks the spot where sports married danger and gave birth to barely controlled insanity.

A
ye-yi-yi-yi-yi!
Hercules may have been strong enough to knock out a giant with a single punch, but a busty gal in a skirt trounced his leather-pantsed butt in both TV ratings and cult popularity.
Xena: Warrior Princess
, the 1995–2001 spin-off of
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
, followed the title character as she traveled around ancient Greece in a tiny outfit and some totally bitchin' bangs, trying to atone for her past as a jerk.

In 2007,
TV Guide
named
Xena
number ten on its list of the Top Cult Shows Ever, and rightfully so: Fans, especially those who knew their way around D&D dice and Renaissance festivals,
flocked to the program because it mixed humor with good, old-fashioned sword and sorcery, blending historical fantasy with contemporary pop culture. (Aphrodite, goddess of love, talked like a Valley Girl—like, omigawd, that is a totally tubular toga.)

Xena
was one of the first action shows to put an empowered woman front and center, paving the way for everybody from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Sydney Bristow from
Alias
to Starbuck from
Battlestar Galactica
. Xena demanded respect; if you didn't play nice, she would slice your head off with a chakram, her signature round-bladed weapon. Even her traveling companion—Robin to her Batman—Gabrielle, evolved from a milquetoast to badass over the run of the show. The pair's relationship may have evolved into something else altogether, as well: It was never definitively confirmed, but there's been much speculation that Xena and Gabrielle were one of TV's first Ambiguously Gay Duos. You go, girls.