The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade
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FUN FACT: In the 1994 animated series on ABC, Willy and his boy Jesse teamed up to fight the Machine, a cyborg out to pollute the oceans.
Friends
Our friends looked nothing like this. Forget Manhattan, even in Minneapolis no one had an apartment as spacious as Monica’s. Or a hairstyle as trendsetting as Rachel’s, sarcasm as sharp as Chandler’s, or the sexy airheadedness of Joey. These were fictional “friends” for sure, but spending time with them was often hilarious and always entertaining.
Gorgeous they may have been, but like most twentysomethings in the 1990s, the “friends” were embarrassingly underemployed. How else could they spend so much time hanging at Central Perk, singing about a certain “Smelly Cat,” or watching embarrassing prom videos from the 1980s? Love was hard to come by too. The Ross-Rachel, yes-no, love-hate relationship wore thin, but just when it vaulted into cliché, the writers managed to save it. (“We were on a break!”)
But what really endeared fans to these “friends” were the little things. The trivia contest where no one knew what Chandler’s job was, Ross bleaching his teeth so much they glowed in the dark, the Thanksgiving football game where Ross and Monica refought childhood battles. Through it all, though, ran a ribbon of devotion. The Seinfeld crew was one chocolate babka away from every man for himself, but the “friends” were truly there for each other, just as their theme song claimed.
STATUS: Gone for good—except in reruns or on DVDs. How I Met Your Mother may be for the Nintendo generation what Friends was for the Atari era.
FUN FACT: Network executives reportedly worried that a coffee shop hangout was “too hip” and wanted the “friends” to hang out at a diner instead. They lost.
Fruit by the Foot
In the 1990s, Fruit Roll-Ups took a lesson from major-league baseball and started injecting themselves with growth hormones. They then gave birth to Fruit by the Foot, a yard-long version of the original 1980s snacking favorite.
The three-foot length made it as much of a toy as a treat. Who didn’t paste a couple rolls together and use it to measure your height, or your dog’s? Between this and the enormous roll of gum that was Bubble Tape, what was the message being sent to 1990s kids here? Snarf down twice as much junk food as your Gen X siblings ever did just to keep up? Was it all some giant corporate test of a new generation’s self-control? If so, we failed. Deliciously.
Hippie moms bought food dehydrators and made their own, which went over about as well as when they tried substituting carob for chocolate. We universally preferred the packaged stuff, although to be honest, they contained about as much “fruit” as they did “foot.”
STATUS: Still for sale, including tie-dye and mystery flavors.
FUN FACT: In a creepy 1990s commercial, the smiley face on a kid’s T-shirt eats up his Fruit by the Foot. TV addicts spent much too much time pondering the physics of how that was even possible.
Furby
It was part Giga Pet, part Gizmo from Gremlins: Furby was the Cabbage Patch Kid of 1998, as desperate parents knocked each other down at the Toys R Us to bring home the hairy, animatronic alien for their mesmerized child.
Out of the box, the battery-operated fuzz ball spoke only “Furbish,” nonsensical gibberish. But kids could “teach” him English—the more you played with him, the more he made sense. You could interact with him by petting his back or sticking your finger in his mouth. Sure, we all knew the Furby was using every ounce of his alien willpower not to chomp through our flesh and suckle human blood, but they were so cute, we didn’t care.
Just like real parents, Furby moms and dads eventually knew sweet joy when their little guy uttered those three little words every kid longed to hear from a pet: “I love you.” Sure, now they’re mostly screaming for help getting out of the box in the attic you threw them in, but hey, nobody said love was forever.
STATUS: In 2012, Furby 2.0 hit stores from Hasbro, now with backlit LCD eyes, an available iPad app, and a price that’s about twice as much as it was in the 1990s.
FUN FACT: The little guy’s resemblance to Gizmo the Mogwai from the hit 1984 movie Gremlins didn’t go unnoticed: According to Variety, Hasbro settled with Warner Bros. for a reported seven-figure payout.
Gak
Gak was thicker and less gelatinous than its boogery ancestor, ’70s gross-out staple Slime, but it was no less entertaining. Especially when you squeezed it and it made farty noises. A cross between Silly Putty, Play-Doh, and snot, Gak came in an amoeba-shaped container and smelled like ammonia and rotten milk. Still—or maybe because of that—it was the most popular in Mattel’s Nickelodeon line of products named after choking sounds. (Others: Smud, Goooze, and Floam.)
Gak’s label featured several bold-printed cautions, the most intriguing of which was: “Gak is not a food product.” Were kids spreading this stuff on toast? Or snapping off a hunk and chewing it like gum? Whether or not they ingested it, nobody heeded the other warning: “Caution: Do not play with Gak on carpeting.” Run your hands through the wall-to-wall in any ‘90s house, and you’ll find twenty-year-old Gak still clinging to every fiber. The stuff’s persistent, we’ll give it that.
In the mid-90s, Mattel embraced Gak’s inner stinkitude, and launched a line with added scents called Smell My Gak. Pickles, pizza, or hot dogs, anyone? Uh, one word, and it’s not the name of a Mattel product: Blorf.
STATUS: Gak came back in 2012.
FUN FACT: You could also get a Gak Vac, a handheld pump that let you suck up the Gak and then squirt it out—most likely onto the carpet.
Game Boy
Our older siblings had Mattel Electronic Football, but in 1989, we got something far more revolutionary: Nintendo’s Game Boy and its monochromatic, 8-bit freedom of choice. Unlike earlier handheld consoles, you could actually change the game you were playing. Tetris one minute, Alleyway the next. It put portable, versatile gaming power in our twelve-year-old hands, and most important, gifted us with the ability to feed our short attention spans by yanking one cartridge and replacing it with another. Buh-bye, Super Mario—see you again when my Ritalin wears off.
Very few of us minded that the screen was the size of a piece of Dentyne. Yes, we had to squint like pirates to make out what the microscopic guys in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure were up to. (Answer: We’re still not sure.) Until Game Boy Color hit stores in 1998, that is. The screen wasn’t any bigger, but the color was a revelation, like when Dorothy opened up the door of her tornado-swept house and inhaled a Technicolor Munchkinland. Our eyes were glued to the colorful but still tiny screen; we weren’t looking up for anything. The system should have prompted a new slogan: Game Boy—Prepping a generation for texting and walking since 1989.
STATUS: In 2004, Nintendo unveiled the DS, which meant game over for Game Boy.
FUN FACT: Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera in 1998, which took super-grainy black-and-white photos, and for a time was recognized by Guinness as the smallest digital camera in the world.
George Foreman Grill
Kids of the ’90s were too young to remember George Foreman for his famed Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali in 1974. Instead they knew the boxer as a genial bald man who had a ton of kids named after him and who made delicious-looking burgers.
Has there ever been a more extreme personality change in American history? Foreman as a fighter was a stone-cold badass, with muscles of steel and a grim murderous look. Foreman as a commercial pitchman was a cartoon of a man with a permanent smile, dorky apron, and ability to say things like “Knocks out the fat!” and “With built-in bun warmer!” without cracking up.
Sure, you could keep on making burgers on the stove or outside on the grill, but America loves nothing more than a new gadget, especially one endorsed by a celebrity. In an era when everyone had closets stuffed full of seldom-used appliances, the Foreman Grill punched its way into our kitchens and rope-a-doped the other items fighting for counter space. Down goes the juicer! Down goes the bread machine!
FUN FACT: Wrestler Hulk Hogan reportedly was going to be asked to endorse the grill, but he wasn’t home, so Foreman got the call—and the millions.
Giant Cell Phones
The first time a lot of us laid eyes on a “cellular telephone” was in 1989, when early adopter Zack Morris beeped and booped his way into TV history on Saved by the Bell. It looked like a high-tech loaf of bread, smelled like something burning, and thanks to its heft, probably gave Mark-Paul Gosselaar years of back trouble. But it did allow him to get into all sorts of hijinks, including ordering pizza in class and calling Screech while pretending to be a girl.
Cell phones slowly started to move into our world too, and man, at first we felt like Wall Street king Gordon Gekko. If you were lucky enough to get one of the first cell phones—perhaps due to a paranoid mom who was willing to fork over the big bucks so she could track your every move—you know it wasn’t exactly sleek. Holding one up to your ear was like bashing the side of your head with a brick. Forget shoving them in your pocket either. Girls with purses the size of an unabridged dictionary could cram them in there, but boys were pretty much outta luck.
Not that you got to make many calls on them though. Parents were so paranoid about bills that they warned their kids to only use them in emergencies. No calling to remind Mom to pick you up from practice. They were for when you broke your leg—but only if the bone was visible. For a sprain, you could wait in line for the pay phone.
STATUS: Who still has a landline? Mobile phones are everywhere. With the introduction of the Razr in 2004, they shrunk so significantly, they were almost choking hazards.
FUN FACT: There’s a whole website devoted to Zack’s humongous phone: ZackMorrisCellPhone.com.
Goosebumps Books
Mom might have been toting her Stephen King paperback, but kids of the 1990s could match her fright for fright with a scary book of their own from R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. Forget the musty old campfire tales of ghosts and one-eyed pirates. These tales took terror into a modern kid’s world, whether they were stuck inside a haunted Halloween mask or trapped in a sarcophagus inside an Egyptian pyramid.
Sure, Stine’s characters found themselves in situations we’d only seen in nightmares, but they felt real because he sketched them out as normal kids, fighting with siblings and worrying about being popular. Oh, and dealing with giant worms, cursed cameras, and cuckoo clocks that can send you back in time.
And as with anything kids loved this much, inevitably, there was a backlash. As scary as the books could be, they were never violent or cruel. Yet that didn’t stop the imagination police from trying to ban them from school libraries, either for being too scary or for containing suggestions of the occult. Yeah, show us a kid who was led to Satanism because of a goofy Goosebumps story and we’ll show you a kid who decided to play in traffic because it looked like so much fun in Frogger.
STATUS: Stine still writes six Goosebumps books a year. A new Goosebumps series, Hall of Horrors, launched in 2011. The first book, Claws, is about a zombie cat.
FUN FACT: A 1995 parody series, Gooflumps, offered up two titles, Eat Cheese and Barf (playing off of Say Cheese and Die) and Stay Out of the Bathroom (a twist on Stay Out of the Basement).
Got Milk? Ad Campaign
The very first “Got Milk?” ad, which aired in 1993, remains the best. A radio station will give a guy ten thousand dollars if he can tell them who shot Alexander Hamilton, and his entire apartment is a museum to that famous duel. Yet with a mouth full of peanut butter and no milk, he can’t spit out the answer. “Aaron Burr” comes out vaguely sounding like “Aawhahn Buhhe!”
Later ads turned amazingly edgy and dark for a dairy-product campaign. Cats menace a sweet elderly lady who tries to fool them with nondairy creamer. A Damien-like boy warns others not to eat the cake at the world’s creepiest birthday party. Full Body Cast Man snarfs down a cookie but can’t make his beverage request understood.
“Got Milk?” spawned an entire industry of unfunny parodies, from “Got beer?” to “Got MILF?” But nothing touches the original. Milk is always missing, people are always tortured for the want of it. In the world of empty milk cartons, the lactose intolerant is king.
STATUS: The catchphrase is still popular.
FUN FACT: That very first “Got Milk?” ad was directed by Hollywood explosion master Michael Bay, who would go on to direct the Transformers films. Got dynamite?
Groundhog Day
Plenty of ’90s movies were perfect for watching and rewatching until our VCRs spat out the tape in disgust—but only one did the rewinding for us: Groundhog Day. When his alarm clock flicked over from 5:59 to 6:00, Bill Murray rolled out of bed to the strains of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” and quickly realized that he was trapped in the same day over and over again. He’d interact with the goofy denizens of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (“Bing!”), hit the hay, and when he woke up the next morning, it all started over again.
Once he realized nothing he did had consequences, a snarky and bored Murray embraced his inner hedonist, stuffing a whole piece of cake into his mouth while sucking down a cigarette, and using his repeating reality to charm a hot townie into the sack. Eventually, Murray started to warm to the townspeople, realized he was being a jerk, and used his superpowers to help them rather than take advantage. Bing! The curse broke—along with Murray’s crunchy outer shell.
Critics praised the flick for its spiritual take on the nature of existence. We loved it because Murray kept his trademark smarm even as he became a better person. The film couldn’t have been cast better. After starring in 2006’s horrible Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, doesn’t Murray of all people deserve a do-over?
STATUS: Especially around February 2, it keeps coming back on TV…again and again.
FUN FACT: According to IMDb.com, Murray was bitten twice by the groundhog in the film.
Grunge
The poppy, bright sounds of ’80s music gave way in the ’90s to the blunt, honest notes of grunge, pouring like rain off the damp streets of Seattle. The music was pulled together the same way the musicians assembled their flannel-heavy, thrift-store wardrobes, with disparate elements of punk, metal, and alternative music all forming an uneasy alliance. It seemed to spring straight from the hearts of the ignored kids who slouched in the back of the gym during school assemblies, who never showed up for football games and proms.
The lyrics, when you could understand them, freaked parents out. Rest assured, the Beach Boys never led off a song with “load up on guns, and bring your friends,” and Duran Duran probably never felt “stupid and contagious.”
The genre had style, sure, but it was a complete rejection of what had passed for rock chic in previous eras. Hairspray and carefully feathered locks felt fake and showy next to built-for-comfort flannels and white-boy dreads. Who needed to bathe in a tub when you could bathe daily in your own angst and ennui?
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who would become the marquee name of the genre, represented every kid who never fit in, whether due to a broken home, crappy school experience, or just a messed-up self-image. Cobain himself once expressed shock that the fans he saw wearing Nirvana T-shirts were the same kind of kids who’d once beaten him up.
Grunge soared high and burned out fast, with Cobain’s 1994 suicide marking an end point for many. But it was in its time the perfect soundtrack for a generation raised with low expectations, coming too late to a party that was making them no promises.
STATUS: Many say punkier, poppier young bands like Green Day and Blink-182 were grunge’s most natural successors.
FUN FACT: Teen Spirit deodorant, the brand which inadvertently inspired the name of Nirvana’s hit, soared in the 1990s thanks to the song’s popularity, but then started to fade. Now only two of its ten scents remain.
Hacky Sack
Even kids who grew up in the uber-organized sports leagues of the 1980s eventually mellowed
out enough to embrace the unofficial sport of the ’90s, Hacky Sack. Oddly enough for a nation that has long hated soccer, American teens welcomed this sport with open feet, despite the fact that it’s really just soccer with a smaller ball and less of that sweat-inducing running.
Almost every guy who was in his teens in the 1990s, from football captain to D&D nerd, can look back on at least a few sunny hours joyously wasted kicking a little beanbag around their high school field or college quad.
Speaking of “wasted,” is there a Hacky Sack anywhere on the planet that does not reek of pot smoke? If there is, it almost certainly smells of spilled Mountain Dew Slurpee and barbecue potato chips. Hacky Sack embraced its stoner vibe proudly. If there was a game you could imagine Shaggy from Scooby-Doo playing, this is it.
STATUS: Still getting kicked around.
FUN FACT: Hacky Sack is a trademarked brand, but the game played with it is actually called “footbag.”
Happy Fun Ball
It’s just a minute and a half long, but the “Happy Fun Ball” commercial parody that aired on Saturday Night Live in 1991 is a classic that can sit right up there next to Dan Aykroyd’s Bass-o-matic or Bad Idea Jeans.