But when the video-store industry settled into its stride, oh, the places you’d go. You could walk out with an eclectic triple-feature of Slumber Party Massacre, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Lethal Weapon 2 all under your arm! And movie stores immediately turned into one-stop shops. Who knew those purse-sized packs of Raisinets and bizarre offerings like Sno-Caps and Goobers existed outside of a theater’s shiny glass case? If your video store was diverse enough, you could even snag a tanning session before you left. Be kind, rewind!
But the high life for movie-rental stores was a short one. VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs, and the craze for wandering the aisles, then having to return the movie the next day, started to wane. Choosing from a streaming website or opening a Netflix envelope was so much easier. Movie stores started a fight for life to rival anything in a Bette Midler–starring tearjerker. But, while it lasted, what a show it was.
STATUS: Many brick-and-mortar stores were shuttered when Netflix and Amazon streaming came to town.
FUN FACT: Acclaimed movie director Quentin Tarantino worked at a southern California video store called Video Archives for years, and says the discussion of film sparked by his job helped lead to his career.
Movies with Twist Endings
You could argue that 1941’s Citizen Kane was where the cinematic twist ending was born (ahem, Rosebud), but the film world’s zig-zig-zig-zag! gimmick really took hold in the ’90s. For a while, you couldn’t step into a multiplex without getting the Jujube-covered rug pulled out from under you just before the credits ran.
The Crying Game was one of the first to really capitalize on its “wait…what?!” left turn. (Spoiler: Dude looks like a lady.) Seven, Fight Club, and Primal Fear all used sleight-of-hand to misdirect, and then delivered a dizzying punch to the head while moviegoers were looking the other direction. One of the best twists ever came courtesy of 1995’s The Usual Suspects. We won’t ruin it for you, but it turns out that Kevin Spacey’s seemingly harmless nerd is actually the big bad Keyzer Soze. Wait—well, I guess we will ruin it for you. Sorry.
Perhaps the most famous fake-out was served up in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, where Haley Joel Osment sees dead people—like Bruce Willis. Director M. Night Shyamalan rode that “surprise, suckas!” wave well into the 2000s, where he finally fizzled after producing critically drubbed fare like The Happening, where Marky Mark tried to talk a plant out of taking over the world. You mean you can’t base an entire career on jerking the audience around? What a twist!
STATUS: Just about every horror flick these days tacks on a surprise at the end.
FUN FACT: The famous Sixth Sense quote became one of moviedom’s most parodied. In one opening scene for a Simpsons episode, Bart writes on the school chalkboard, “I can’t see dead people.”
My So-Called Life
The L.A. Times once wrote that My So-Called Life was “Beverly Hills, 90210 minus the lobotomy.” Angsty Angela Chase (a luminous Claire Danes) wouldn’t have known how to deal with Brenda and Brandon and their bikini-clad, Jaguar-driving friends. To her, school was like a drive-by shooting, where you’re just lucky to get out alive.
Angela was battling to find herself—dying her hair red, leaving good-girl friend Sharon behind, crushing desperately on soulful-looking Jordan Catalano, and dabbling in the daring world of new pals Rayanne Graff and Rickie Vasquez. In the all-consuming world that is high school, she was suddenly sure she didn’t measure up, and finding out was agony.
Created by veterans of Thirtysomething, MSCL lasted just one short year, but that was enough to forever cement it in the minds of those who found the small truths of growing up in boxes of hair dye, band practice, and love letters never sent.
STATUS: The show ended in 1995, after just one season. Gilmore Girls attracted similar devotion in the 2000s, though Lorelai and Rory’s sisterly relationship was one Patty Chase could only dream of having with Angela.
FUN FACT: In the 2008 film Juno, screenwriter Diablo Cody inserted a reference to never-seen Tino from Jordan Catalano’s band, Frozen Embryos.
Mystery Science Theater 3000
The nineties were the decade that overlaid commentary onto everything. Beavis and Butt-Head and Pop Up Video mocked music videos and Talk Soup took jabs at talk shows, but no one did the supplementary soundtrack better than Mystery Science Theater 3000.
You know the story: In the not-too-distant future, a human (first Joel, then Mike) is imprisoned in space with wisecracking robots Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and sometimes Gypsy, and forced to watch bad movies and equally awful mental hygiene shorts.
A great idea turned golden. How else would the world have discovered Manos: The Hands of Fate, a film made by a fertilizer salesman? Or met up with chubby Canadian ex-cult member Zap Rowsdower, the supposed hero of The Final Sacrifice? Or watched victims in 1964’s The Creeping Terror helpfully crawl into the monster’s mouth?
Some viewers were Joel diehards, others preferred Mike’s riffs. Some loved the team of Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank, others got a kick out of Pearl, Bobo, and Observer. But whatever your favorite player on the ever-changing roster, this was and remains the all-star team of commentary comedy.
STATUS: MST3K alums have formed two similar movie-mocking groups, RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic.
FUN FACT: Joel, Mike, and the bots are stuck on the Satellite of Love, which takes its name from the 1972 Lou Reed song.
Nelson
Those dainty, dollish features. Those pouty lips. Those long, golden locks. Nope, not Malibu Barbie: We’re talking about Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, the twin brothers who rocked ’90s audiences’ socks off to the tune of more than six and a half million albums. Never has there been a more literal representation of the term “hair band.”
Armed with a unique acoustic-meets-electric sound and catchy harmonies—and, we’re guessing, industrial-size vats of Pantene stashed in the tour bus—the Teutonic-looking twins took over MTV with hits like “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” and “After the Rain.”
With platinum, California-girl, corn-silk hair down to their waists, the brothers looked a little like they could be the spawn of Edgar Winter, but their musical family tree was actually even more impressive. With ’40s-and-’50s TV icons Ozzie and Harriet Nelson for grandparents, and rocker Ricky Nelson for a dad, entertainment—along with a gene for lady hair—was woven into their DNA. Today, with their Samson-esque locks finally chopped, they look more like the twins from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody than dolls you just wanted to brush.
STATUS: The brothers tour more than one hundred dates a year, both as Nelson, and as a Ricky Nelson tribute band.
FUN FACT: Matthew and Gunnar’s sister, Tracy Nelson, is an actress best known for playing crime-solving Sister Steve, the sidekick of Tom Bosley’s Father Dowling character.
Nerf Guns
Pew! Pew! From cowboy six-shooters to rat-a-tat Tommy guns to outer-space lasers, kids from every generation have played with faux firearms. But Nerf made the first toy weapons that let Billy shoot his little brother right in the face.
Sure, they were loaded with foam projectiles, not real ammo, but still. In the ’90s, Nerf came out with marketing barrels a-blazing, unleashing its “Nerf or nothin’!” campaign. The commercials made it clear that you needed to beg your mom to buy a bunch of newfangled Nerf weapons or you’d be ganged up on by every kid in the neighborhood and pelted to within an inch of your unarmed life. Millions of Nerf-less kids feigned the flu so they wouldn’t be stalked and gunned down with foam bullets while they were waiting for the bus.
The brightly colored Nerf weapons lived up to the hype—Arrowstorm, semiautomatics with rotating turrets loaded with foam arrows; Ballzooka, which let you unleash a constant storm of round bullets; and the Nerf Slingshot, with its TV commercial featuring a street-talkin’ Seth Green unleashing holy hell in a shopping mall. In those pre-9/11 days, it was perfectly acceptable to carry loaded weapons in public and shoot mimes—which Green inexplicably did. Of c
ourse, today, he’d be Tased by mall security and sent to Guantanamo.
STATUS: Today’s Nerf guns feature tech even the CIA would admire, including glow-in-the-dark darts, removable clips, and electronic scopes.
FUN FACT: NERF originally stood for Non-Expanding Recreational Foam.
Newsies
Newsies seemed like it had everything going for it: The 1992 movie musical starred a seventeen-year-old Christian Bale as the leader of a ragtag group of singing newsboys; its rousing tunes were written by Alan Menken, who had just scored with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast; and it was directed by Dirty Dancing choreographer Kenny Ortega. Slam dunk, right? Wrong—Newsies didn’t deliver: It ended up being one of the lowest-grossing movies in Disney history.
What in the name of Joseph Pulitzer happened? Critics identified the movie’s glacial pace, labor-dispute plot, and terrible New Yawk accents as the reasons the film only raked in $3 million at the box office. Teenage fans who loved every note, leap, and fist pump didn’t care that it was an extra!-extra!-huge flop, though, and theater geeks across the country made it their mission to win over new converts, passing along VHS copies and singing the movie’s praises to anyone who would listen. Twenty years later, their campaign to give the flick a new life paid off: In 2012, Newsies finally made it to Broadway. See kids, it pays to recycle.
STATUS: Internet fervor for the flick continues, and the Broadway version opened to rave reviews. The real-life newspaper industry, on the other hand, is on life support.
FUN FACT: Max Casella, who played Racetrack Higgins in the movie, went on to originate the role of Timon the meerkat in the Broadway version of The Lion King.
The Nutty Professor
1996’s The Nutty Professor was a retelling of the classic tale of Jekyll and Hyde, but with a lot more gravy. Oh, and also Eddie Murphy dressed as a woman, clapping and delightfully chanting, “Herc-a-lees, Herc-a-lees!”—something sadly missing from the 1963 original, where Jerry Lewis hammed it up as his buck-toothed “Hey, laaaady” character.
In the updated version, Murphy’s four-hundred-pound college professor Sherman Klump drinks a potion that restructures his DNA, and transforms him into slick, slimmed-down swinger Buddy Love, also played by Murphy. Heck, nearly every character is played by Murphy, including his mom, dad, brother, grandma, and the Richard Simmons–looking exercise guru. And we wouldn’t be surprised if he played Jada Pinkett too. That was the draw: The reason we kept buying tickets was to watch Murphy, Murphy, Murphy, and Murphy sitting around the dinner table together, handing each other fried chicken and farting.
The movie won an Oscar for Best Makeup, and kicked off a spate of actors in fat suits, notably Martin Lawrence in the eighteen Big Momma movies, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal, and Mike Myers as Fat Bastard in the second and third Austin Powers flicks. Get in mah belly!
STATUS: Available on DVD. So is the 2000 sequel, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.
FUN FACT: Even Murphy went back to the fat-suit well once again, this time as his own wife in 2007’s Norbit.
OK Soda
Like Esperanto and yogurt-covered raisins, OK Soda was a cult invention that some people loved with a passion, but that never really caught on with everybody. In 1993, beverage giant Coca-Cola looked at Generation X’s reputation as sullen slackers, and decided that even brooding layabouts bought pop. And so they rolled out the most noncorporate corporate beverage ever, OK Soda.
The cans, designed by alt cartoonists Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, featured a gray-and-black motif and startlingly bleak designs. The flavor was kind of like fruity Fresca, but kids raised with free rein at fountain-drink stands immediately recognized it as a “suicide,” the drink you get when you mix a bit of each flavor offered into your cup. It’s a SpriteFruitPunchLemonadeColaNanza!
It was an odd attempt to reach a generation that whatever its economic and internal struggles, still drank soda like pretty much everyone else in the nation. By 1995, OK was KO’d.
STATUS: It’s been replaced by boutique sodas like Jones Soda, with flavors like Turkey & Gravy for Thanksgiving and Latke for Hanukkah.
FUN FACT: OK had a hotline where people could leave random messages, and a manifesto, parts of which (“What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?”) were printed on the cans.
The Olsen Twins
While most nine-month-olds were pooping in their nappies and blowing bubbles with their drool, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were hitting their marks and probably demanding designer Similac for their dressing rooms. Starting in 1987, the tiny twosome took turns playing youngest moppet Michelle Tanner on ABC’s Full House, delivering awww-inducing catchphrases (“You got it, dude!”) and sending the show’s cute rating off the charts.
The twins didn’t get much bigger, but their careers—and bank accounts—sure did. They graduated to innocuous made-for-TV movies and hit the big screen with Kirstie Alley and Steve Guttenberg in the 1995 movie It Takes Two. The Olsens may have been pint-sized, but they became huge tween idols, released books, perfumes, and dolls, and even built a fashion empire. Mary-Kate is credited with starting the “bag lady” fashion trend, with her floppy hats, giant sunglasses, and enormous (for her) cardigans that looked like she found them in an alley.
In 2011, their clothing lines alone raked in more than a billion dollars. That’s billion, with a “b.” The fashion line started by their TV dad Bob Saget? Not so much. Okay, there wasn’t really a Bob Saget fashion line, but we wish there was.
STATUS: Mary-Kate and Ashley have all but retired from acting, but they still manage to make headlines.
FUN FACT: In 2004, the sisters skipped their high school prom so they could host Saturday Night Live.
Online Services
Before the online world was everywhere, it was a private club. Membership required only a small monthly fee and the willingness to plunge in to untested technology waters before most people even knew how to dog paddle.
Whether you logged on via Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, or a similar offering, the procedure was pretty much the same. You could bounce around—at paint-dryingly grueling dial-up speed—to various forums, sharing recipes here, yacking about Melrose Place episodes there. You could shop, book travel, and check sports scores and stocks. For a world mostly without mobile phones and where many office computers still offered that horrible glowing green type on black backgrounds, this was a Star Trek level of futurism.
But the companies offering these services soon showed they had no real idea what they’d started. Prodigy, for one, expected to make money from its shopping options, and when it became apparent that users were gravitating instead to the friend-making and email functions, executives freaked out. The service tried to limit monthly messaging to thirty a month—a number most teens now routinely exceed before breakfast—and charge twenty-five cents for each additional message. But it was too late to save their business. We soon left online services behind, a quaint pair of water wings for a generation that was about to dive headlong into the technological deep end.
STATUS: The Internet’s all just one big online service now, and everyone’s on the same one.
FUN FACT: Actor Elwood Edwards, who voiced AOL’s famous “You’ve got mail!” line, has parodied it many times, including “You’ve got hail!” for a weather forecast and “You’ve got leprosy!” for a Simpsons episode.
Oprah’s Book Club
Oprah didn’t exactly strike us as a hard-core reader. You didn’t believe Ms. Winfrey was curling up with Richard III or Dostoyevsky in the original Russian. She probably owned a lot of Harlequins. But starting in 1996, the talk-show host became the publishing industry’s BFF when she started Oprah’s Book Club, choosing a new novel each month for her gazillions of viewers to buy and discuss.
And buy they did. If you worked at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton during the ’90s or 2000s, Oprah was your nightmare. The second she announced her new title, the store phone lines lit up like the whole town wa
s trying to win Bruce Springsteen tickets. Everyone wanted Oprah’s pick, whether it was a classic like Elie Wiesel’s Night or a newer favorite like Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster.
Oprah’s club also resulted in some train-wrecky literary scandals. In the most famous, author James Frey was found to have made up parts of his supposed memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and had to come back on the show and try to explain his lies. In a quieter debacle, author Jonathan Franzen snubbed her pick of The Corrections in 2001 and felt the big O’s resulting rage.
Of course, there were more than a few literary snobs who felt slapping an “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker on a book’s cover automatically made it uncool. But it’s hard to argue with anything that gets the whole country reading. And the cash bump Oprah’s attention created for her chosen authors was certainly more deserved than any paycheck MTV ever gave the cast of Jersey Shore.
STATUS: Oprah’s Book Club ended with her syndicated show in 2011, but Winfrey restarted the club online, dubbing it “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0,” in 2012. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was her first pick.
FUN FACT: The only real flops among Oprah’s choices were her final two. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities never moved above number 52 on USA Today’s bestseller list. “Dickens let me down,” Winfrey reportedly said.
The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade Page 11