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

by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

  Brenda Walsh

  Not many TV characters spawn a newsletter and a song devoted to hating them, but Brenda Walsh on Fox’s hit Beverly Hills, 90210 was not your average TV character. Shannen Doherty’s Minnesota twin turned California brat may have had plenty of dates onscreen, but to viewers, she was as unpopular as emergency dental work.

  Brenda was a piece of work indeed. She shoplifted. Called best friend Kelly a bimbo. Slapped OHN-drea because they both had a crush on the drama teacher. Ran away from home. Pretended to be French to fool a guy she met in Paris. Blabbed about her friends’ flaws to a TV reporter. Her back-and-forth with Kelly and sideburned loner Dylan was a love triangle to rival Edward-Bella-Jacob in its day.

  And just as with Twilight, fans’ feelings about the character leaked over into real life. Doherty’s offscreen troubles tied right in with the character’s slide from dutiful midwestern daughter to West Beverly bad girl. Brenda was written off the show after its fourth season, with her character ostensibly enrolling at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, a plotline at least as realistic as when Dylan spent his summer racing motorcycles in Europe and climbing K2.

  STATUS: Brenda Walsh returned again, still played by Doherty, on the CW series 90210, which premiered in 2008. Surprise! She was still fighting with Kelly over Dylan.

  FUN FACT: Fans’ hatred of the character carried over to actress Doherty, and Darby Romeo of the Ben Is Dead zine’s I Hate Brenda Newsletter rode that zeitgeist. In the newsletter, no less than Eddie Vedder himself dissed the actress.

  Bubble Tape

  When the Mad Scientists of Gum World get bored, they think of a new shape or container for their stretchy, chewy treat. There are gum Band-Aids, gum lollipops, bubblegum cigars, and the Chewapalooza that delighted ’90s kids’ mouths, Bubble Tape.

  The best thing about Bubble Tape wasn’t actually the gum but the circular container, which parceled out gum in long strips like—duh—tape. Even kids from antitobacco homes couldn’t resist pretending the round plastic box was a tin of Skoal—though this worked better after you’d chewed all the Bubble Tape and refilled it with shredded Big League Chew.

  The gum itself was a tightly rolled snail of flat, sweet heaven, testing kids in the one area where they had no self-discipline—portion control. Sure the prim goody-goody in social studies could probably break off a tiny slice and make it last till study hall, but the rest of us crammed at least four of the promised six feet of gum into our mouths at once.

  STATUS: Still around.

  FUN FACT: At Christmas time, there’s a seasonal candy-cane flavor, but what kid likes mint gum?

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  Before the sparkly vampires of Twilight and the studly naked ones of HBO’s True Blood, the most fashionable fanged folk were the craggy-faced undead who fed on the denizens of Sunnydale. Luckily, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was there to turn them to dust—while skewering ’em with sharper-than-a-stake one-liners.

  Five years after the terrible 1992 movie, creator Joss Whedon got it oh so right and constructed a television world full of demons and heroes, filled with both sweeping themes and teeny-tiny moments. Buffy, watcher Giles, witch-in-training Willow, regular guy Xander, popular girl Cordelia, demon Anya, werewolf Oz, and hey-where’d-you-come-from? sister Dawn, not to mention (sometimes) reformed vamps Angel and Spike, saved the world. A lot. And all while Buffy maneuvered through universal high school woes like homework and finding a date that wouldn’t try to drag her into the Hellmouth.

  A little like Buffy herself, the UPN/WB show looked harmless and frivolous on its surface but it had a smart, deep soul. It was always surprising: The nearly silent episode spoke volumes. The musical episode sparked a decade of me-too singing-and-dancing episodes from other shows (really, Grey’s Anatomy, really?). And the heartbreaking episode where Buffy’s mother suddenly died—not at the hands of a demon, but from an aneurysm—was as powerful as anything on TV. Ever. No wonder Buffy made Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best TV shows of all time. It was bloody good.

  STATUS: Buffy slayed her last vamp in 2003, but the tales continued in comic-book form. Spinoff Angel lasted until 2004. Creator Whedon shed his cult status in a spectacular way in 2012 when he wrote and directed The Avengers, the third-highest-grossing movie of all time.

  FUN FACT: Before he was Giles, Anthony Stewart Head starred in those flirty, soap-opera-y Taster’s Choice commercials that ran in the mid-’90s.

  Bungee Jumping

  How did bungee jumping ever get popular? Shouldn’t we be paying people big money to help us not fall off a scarily high surface? Still, this sport/suicide method became a weekend activity to rival horseback riding or roller skating for some ’90s daredevils.

  Why did people throw themselves off a high bridge with just a rubbery cord attached to their foot? For the same flood of adrenaline that made some people skydive or parasail, or drive into downtown Chicago at rush hour. Those of us who’d rather tease rabid wolverines than bungee had our beliefs reinforced by watching the nightly news, which gleefully covered the trend whenever somebody misjudged and head met pavement.

  By the 2000s, bungee jumping was a regular component of shows like The Amazing Race or Fear Factor. It also became a thrill ride at state fairs, because after stuffing down a corn dog, chocolate malt, cheese curds, and some deep-fried pickles, the best thing for your already-roiling stomach was a barf-inducing leap from a high distance. You knew you’d see those pickles again anyway, didn’t you?

  STATUS: Daredevils still do it.

  FUN FACT: In 1995, at the height of the craze, super spy James Bond bungee jumps to escape an enemy in the opening of GoldenEye. He ended up both shaken and stirred.

  Caboodles

  They looked like Dad’s fishing tackle box, except Fleet Farm didn’t sell tackle boxes in hot pink with aqua and lavender accents. Caboodles were makeup cases for girls who really weren’t old enough to wear makeup. So your three-level Caboodle might hold four Chapsticks, one Great Lash mascara on the verge of drying out, some Avon perfume samples from the next-door neighbor’s garage sale, totally stylin’ ribbon barrettes, and Mom’s shocking turquoise eye shadow that would have been a favorite of Mimi from The Drew Carey Show.

  Of course you had to haul your Caboodle to your best friend’s house for a sleepover, and she’d bring hers out too. You’d swap products and organize as if you were surgeons preparing tools for a heart transplant, not middle schoolers who weren’t allowed to wear makeup to school anyway. Like Barbie’s pink Corvette, Caboodles were less about who you were and more about the image of who you might someday become. They were plastic pastel dream academies with removable segments.

  STATUS: They’re still available, sleeker and more stylish than the originals.

  FUN FACT: The first-ever Caboodle was pink, and was created in 1987. The idea was inspired by a 1986 People magazine photo of Vanna White using a tackle box to store her makeup.

  Caller ID and Star-69

  Before the crazy phone innovations of the 1990s, the telephone’s role was simple and straightforward. You dialed. It rang. Or it rang, you picked up.

  But then came caller ID, which identified who was calling before you even answered, and then the last-call-return function known as star-69. It was like we were living with the Jetsons. Oh my God, it’s him calling! Or maybe, Ewww, it’s him calling. With caller ID, the caller’s name and number were right there glowing at you. Still mad at your lab partner? Ignore her call with your head held high! Don’t want to go bring the phone to your brother just so he can yack with his baseball buddy? Strike three for him—don’t answer that call!

  Using star-69 to identify a missed call was great when you came racing into the house just as that final ring was dying away, but it did put a bit of a damper on every girl’s favorite hobby of calling your crush repeatedly just to panic and hang up.

  We’d barely become accustomed to phone calls losing their anonymity when cell phones made these inno
vations obsolete. Now your smart phone automatically pops up the number, and often the name, of whoever’s calling you, and we don’t give it a second thought. Sure, you can avoid solicitors and nagging relatives, but an element of mystery got lost along the way.

  STATUS: Caller I-what? Star sixty-who? The next generation has all but ditched phone calls in favor of texting anyway.

  FUN FACT: In the movie-inside-the-movie in 1997’s Scream 2, when Heather Graham receives a phone call from the unknown killer, Jada Pinkett yells at her to “Hang up and star-69 his ass!”

  Calvin and Hobbes

  There had been mischievous kids in the comics before (Dennis the Menace, Family Circus). There’d also been anthropomorphic animals (Snoopy, Garfield). But never was there a combination like the little boy and stuffed tiger of Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from 1985 to 1995.

  Calvin was an unstoppable little force of nature in a striped shirt, and with Hobbes by his side, he could do anything. He built terrifying snowmen, including a batch that were vomiting in protest of his mom’s eggplant casserole. He invented Calvinball, a random prop-filled game with ever-changing rules and final scores such as “Q to 12.” He tormented his parents, teachers, and babysitters, and formed GROSS—the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club—to agonize little Susie Derkins.

  Calvin was driven by an axis of little-boy chutzpah and an imagination that knew no bounds. A cardboard box became a Transmogrifier, turning him into a mini version of Hobbes. A game of doctor ended in a fight when Susie resists Dr. Calvin’s prescription of a lobotomy for her minor foot injury. When crabby teacher Miss Wormwood asked Calvin what state he lives in, he happily replied, “Denial,” and there was really no reason to argue with that.

  There was a purity to Calvin and Hobbes that few other comic strips ever found. Artist Bill Watterson resisted licensing his creation, not that this prevented every car enthusiast on the planet from snatching up a bootleg bumper sticker of Calvin peeing on the logo of a competitor. But when Watterson closed the door on Calvin’s world in 1995, he went out as far up on top as a comic strip could. Off sailed Calvin and Hobbes on their sled, leaving behind a world that felt a little less magical, and a newspaper comics page that never quite recovered.

  STATUS: Gone for good. No strip has truly replaced Calvin and Hobbes in readers’ hearts.

  FUN FACT: “Derkins,” the last name of Calvin’s nemesis, Susie, was the name of Watterson’s wife’s family beagle.

  Cassette Tapes

  The music format of one’s childhood never lasts. Vinyl albums are now a novelty, 8-tracks a punch line, and CDs are getting their butts kicked digitally by iTunes. But let us stop and say a prayer of thanks for the elegant cassette tape, which for a quarter of a century wrapped its magical magnetic ribbons around our music-loving hearts.

  Tapes were smaller and sleeker than 8-tracks, and they fit nicely in the shoeboxes we stacked in closets and under our beds. But the best thing about them was the DIY aspect. You could make your own recordings so easily, whether you were taping the Rugrats soundtrack off the TV with your Fisher-Price tape recorder or creating your own monster movie with a hand-scribbled script and a batch of squirmy cousins. And of course, our favorite thing to do with cassettes was to make mix tapes, for ourselves and for friends.

  Professional musicians working on multimillion-dollar albums couldn’t have fussed more about the order and song choice than we did, sprawled in our bedroom with a blank see-through TDK tape and a double-sided boom box. Would the boy of our dreams make the connection between “Friday I’m in Love” and the fact that we had identical class schedules on Fridays? Was “Kiss from a Rose” too forward, “Wonderwall” too subtle? Would the ex-boyfriend we pined for pick up the hint we were dropping with “Your Wildest Dreams”? When the music plays, would he hear the sound he had to follow?

  Cassettes had their problems. We grew to be experts at rewinding a tangled tape by sticking a ballpoint pen or a pencil in one of the reel holes. Like the romances they helped us nurture, tapes had short lifespans, always seeming to break at the worst possible moment. But as the 1990s ended and CDs rolled in, it was hard not to hold on to those cassette-crammed shoeboxes much longer than we should have. We just weren’t ready to hit eject on our musical memories.

  STATUS: Tapes will never be as popular as they once were, but a loyal contingent still loves them. In 2010, NPR reported that at least twenty-five music labels were still stubbornly distributing music on tapes.

  FUN FACT: In 2011, the phrase “cassette tape” was removed from the concise version of the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the words it made room for? “Sexting.”

  Celebrity Movies

  Was there some sort of terrible-movie-loving genie granting wishes to athletes, wrestlers, and rappers in the ’90s? How else do you explain that fact that nearly every nonacting celebrity was given a chance to nonact in his own movie?

  Someone thought it was a good plan to cast jock Brian Bosworth as a cop who played by his own rules in 1991’s Stone Cold. The Washington Post said it perfectly: “Carl Weathers and Dolph Lundgren are both Shakespearean actors compared with Bosworth.” Singer Vanilla Ice eyeballed that incredibly low cinematic bar and sailed right underneath it as a motorcycle-riding rapper who played by his own rules in Cool as Ice. Stop, collaborate, and listen: Whoever’s idea that was, you’re fired.

  For some reason, people kept giving wrestler Hulk Hogan second, third, and fourth chances to become a movie star, with terrible flicks like Suburban Commando, Mr. Nanny, and one of the worst movies ever made, Santa with Muscles. In that 1996 disaster, the Hulkster played a millionaire with amnesia who thought he was Kris Kringle. Naturally, he wore studded black-leather gloves with his Santa suit, as you would.

  Basketball star Dennis Rodman and his multicolored hair starred in a couple of duds as well: Double Team and Simon Sez. Simon says: Rodman, Hogan, and everybody else with little natural acting talent, please stop making movies.

  STATUS: Still popular, and now more female nonactors are getting their big-screen shots too. Witness: Christina Aguilera in 2010’s Burlesque or Miley Cyrus in anything.

  FUN FACT: Cool as Ice debuted at a rock-bottom number fourteen the week it opened, an embarrassing nine places below Scared Stupid, starring Ernest.

  Cheetos Paws

  Cheetos have come in puffs and twists, balls and whirls, but none of the brand’s long-lost junk-food variants are as much missed as a 1991 marvel known as Cheetos Paws.

  In the commercials, hepcat snacking mascot Chester Cheetah would hand the treat out to boys and girls on the playground like a furry crack dealer. The kids would go so nuts for the puffy orange pillows, and for good reason: Paws were extra-fluffy and thick, and more aerodynamic than the caveman-club-shaped regular Cheetos.

  But why wasn’t anybody getting bent out of shape over what should have been the biggest snack-food scandal of the ’90s—the fact that Chester Cheetah was selling his own severed hands to hungry children?

  STATUS: Frito-Lay keeps cranking out the new flavors and shapes, but so far no other bags of cheetah body parts.

  FUN FACT: In Japan, Cheetos come in such flavors as strawberry, chocolate, and wasabi-mayonnaise.

  Clarissa Explains It All

  Before she played a teenage witch, Melissa Joan Hart was the confident and spunky title character with funky fashion sense and a heck of an imagination on Clarissa Explains It All. The show, which ran from 1991–1994 on Nickelodeon, broke new ground as it broke the fourth wall: Clarissa talked directly to the viewer as she deftly dealt with such problems as boys, pimples, and her annoying redheaded brother, Ferguson.

  The mini–Mary Tyler Moore had a slew of boyfriends throughout the show’s four-year run, but the one dude who stood by her through it all was her platonic guy-pal Sam. Although why in the world were Clarissa’s parents okay with the stalker-like way he always visited: on a ladder through a second-story window?

  Clarissa was an all-American girl, but with a decided
ly adult side, quoting Karl Marx, actually saying the word “sex,” and getting arrested for protesting animal testing. Wonder if it had something to do with show writer Suzanne Collins, who went on to create the kajillion-selling, not-for-little-kids phenomenon The Hunger Games. Wouldn’t it have been awesome if Clarissa would have stalked Ferg-face with a bow and arrow, Katniss-style? Clarissa would have had a lot of explaining to do.

  STATUS: Clarissa’s grrrl power inspired other teen shows like iCarly and The Secret World of Alex Mack. As of 2013, Nickelodeon was re-airing this and other classic ’90s shows.

  FUN FACT: In 2008, Denver band L’elan Vital released a song called “Clarissa Didn’t Explain Shit.”

  Clear Colas

  If the colors of the 1970s were earthy tones like harvest gold and avocado green, and the colors of the 1980s were the sunshiny pastels of Miami Vice, what was left for the 1990s? For a while in the early part of the decade, marketers just gave up on color completely, and suddenly, clear was the way to go.

  Clear sodas, including Tab Clear and Clearly Canadian. Miller Clear beer and the much-derided Zima. Clear soaps. Even clear trash bags were introduced—because if there’s one thing you want to get a good sharp look at, it’s a mashed-up bunch of garbage.