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

  Orbitz

  People may not remember what Orbitz was called or how it tasted, but they remember how it looked. It was the drink that resembled a lava lamp, clear liquid in a curvaceous glass bottle with tiny colored balls bobbing inside.

  Orbitz floated onto store shelves in 1997, in varieties that were less “flavors” and more “what happens when an entire produce section crashes into your beverage.” Blueberry melon strawberry and pineapple banana cherry coconut were two of the choices, suggesting that someone in research and development had a bad case of option paralysis.

  The flavors were weird, and the floating balls had no taste. So really, the point of buying it was to look like you’re drinking a lava lamp and to get to make a couple dozen “balls” jokes while you’re at it. It’s little wonder that the drink flopped within about a year, and an unrelated online travel agency took over its name.

  STATUS: Asian bubble tea is becoming more popular, but the tapioca balls in it don’t float, they settle to the bottom of the drink, to be sucked up through overly wide straws.

  FUN FACT: One of the flavors was called “Charlie Brown Chocolate.” We’re seriously hoping Charles Schulz banked some royalties from that before Orbitz circled the drain.

  The Oregon Trail

  A fire hit your wagon! One of your oxen is injured! Inadequate grass! You have died of dysentery! What would you like on your tombstone? The Oregon Trail, one of the first computer games we were actually allowed to play in school, was no Halo, but heck if it wasn’t stressful all on its own.

  Who knew pioneer travel was all about budgeting, committing so much money for bullets versus so much for clothing? The math gave us a headache, but hey, we were getting out of class, so we played anyway. When allotting resources, we always tried to skimp on the food, but our greedy family insisted on adequate sustenance or punished us by keeling over. Oh, and never ford the damn river. Your wagon will break, your kids will drown, your food will float away.

  Eh, forget it, Oregon’s full of hippies and microbreweries anyway.

  STATUS: The game’s been updated many times and is now available on platforms that ’80s and ’90s kids couldn’t even dream of, including iPhone and iPad.

  FUN FACT: One spoof of the game reimagines it as The Organ Trail, and features a trek across a zombie-infested wasteland.

  Pajama Pants

  Who decided that pajama pants were an appropriate item of clothing to wear to school, shopping, or even church? Kids in the ’90s, that’s who. Part of the same comfort-trumps-fashion trend as that bizarre hospital-scrubs fad, flannel pj pants somehow became the must-have clothing item. It didn’t matter that wearing them put you just one step away from throwing on a ratty terry-cloth bathrobe and matching slippers and shuffling into Social Studies with sleep drool still stuck to your cheek.

  We’re not sure what we were thinking—were we that lazy? Are the kids who wore plaid pajama bottoms to middle school the same adults who wear velour tracksuits to weddings? At least it never devolved into bringing a pillow and blankie to class, and sucking our thumbs during Calc.

  But it did take an even weirder turn: Boxer shorts somehow became approved apparel. Girls (primarily) would show up for class adorned in flannel boxers, often with the fly sensibly sewn shut. Teachers must have been dumbstruck by their students’ choice of bottom wear, which screamed “I’d rather be sleeping.” Because nothing demonstrates a commitment to learning more than rolling out of bed and not bothering to change your pants.

  STATUS: The debate over whether pajama pants are appropriate for school continues today. But it’s all relative. Really, pajama bottoms are about the most innocuous dress-code worry parents and teachers face in this era of obscene T-shirts and sexy school outfits.

  FUN FACT: The yellow dudes in the ’90s kids’ series Bananas in Pajamas wore pj’s all day long, and nobody seemed to mind.

  PalmPilot

  Hey, you free for a movie on Thursday?” In the late 1990s, for the first time, the answer to that question was right in the palm of our hand. With the pint-sized PalmPilot PDA, introduced in 1997, we no longer had to flip through our dictionary-sized day planner or—God forbid—run home and check our Garfield calendar to see if we were available.

  It was easy as electronic pie: All you had to do was rummage around in your backpack until you found the little gizmo, flip open the plastic cover, wait for it to power up, use your fingernail to pry loose the stylus, tap the calendar icon, adjust the contrast wheel, squint to see the calendar and then curse when the screen suddenly went blank because you forgot to change the two double-A batteries that ran it. It was probably all moot, anyway, since you probably also forgot to sync the thing.

  By the time you figured out if you were free, the movie you had planned to see had already been released on DVD.

  STATUS: Today, personal digital assistants live in your smartphone, respond to verbal commands, and do everything but the dishes.

  FUN FACT: The Simpsons loved to skewer the device: In one episode, mobster Fat Tony complains that his PalmPilot forgot to remind him about a meeting and that it needed to be “hot-synced.” His henchman misunderstands and shoots it. (“You know how it is with us, everything means kill!”) In another, Reverend Lovejoy’s PDA is called a Psalm Pilot.

  Party of Five

  What kid hasn’t had at least a fleeting thought about what life would be like if their parents suddenly disappeared? Sure, most imagine their newly orphaned life a la Home Alone, eating gobs of ice cream and tobogganing down the stairs. Too bad for the Salinger family it was a little more true-to-life on Party of Five, one of the most depressing shows ever to run on Fox, up to and including When Animals Attack!

  The show was Lifetime-movie-heavy, as the five children tried to maneuver through life after their parents died in a car accident. Irresponsible Charlie, prodigy Claudia, confused Julia, Tom Cruise–y Bailey, and cipher Owen engendered a small but rabid group of fans, despite the fact that every other episode was about Bailey drinking again. That plotline was so frequent, it quickly became a pop-culture joke—like the episode of Gilligan where they almost got off the island.

  Even though it often languished near the bottom of the ratings, PO5 worked its way into watercooler buzz-dom by launching the careers of everybody from Neve Campbell to Jennifer Love Hewitt to Matthew Fox—before he became a purgatory-trapped ghost-angel-robot or whatever actually was going on during Lost. It may have starred a gaggle of soon-to-be-A-list celebs, but with its super-depressing plots, Party of Five wasn’t all that much of a party.

  STATUS: Reruns are hard to come by, but the party continues on DVD.

  FUN FACT: An episode of The X-Files reportedly briefly shows the Salinger parents’ gravestones in a cemetery scene.

  Pogs

  Pogs were more than a fad, they were approved gambling for kids! But gambling that might have been invented by an impatient third-grader with no athletic ability or desire to remember any rules. It was a game in the same way that hitting somebody with a stick and taking their stuff was a game.

  First, you collected a ton of the little paper circles, which featured designs ranging from pro athletes to Hello Kitty to Batman to Bart Simpson. Stack them up along with some Pogs from your friend, and throw your slammer, a heavier playing piece, at the whole pile. Hey, did your throw send Joey’s treasured Alf Pog faceup? Alf’s furry little hide was yours now.

  Grandma did it with jacks, Grandpa with marbles—but losing your favorite Pog still hurt like getting the wind knocked outta you in dodgeball. Nobody wanted to see their precious hologram skull disappear into somebody else’s grimy pocket. Sore losers—plus irresistible in-class trading—got the game banned from some schools. That was okay. By the time that the schools got around to cracking down, trends had shifted, and we would no sooner be seen with a tube of Pogs than we would wearing acid-washed jeans.

  STATUS: The “collecting random tiny things in jillions of varieties” fad continues. Just ask a kid who
loves Squinkies, Polly Pockets, or those cool food-shaped Japanese erasers.

  FUN FACT: Pog stands for “passion fruit, orange, guava,” and came from a Hawaiian drink whose bottle caps were reportedly first used to play the game.

  Pokémon

  In 1997, America was invaded by addictive little monsters that ate allowance money. American kids took the Pokémon slogan, “Gotta catch ’em all,” literally, shelling out hundreds of dollars on trading cards aiming to score one of the rare valuable ones. Kids would collect, trade, and sell them with an obsessive frenzy, turning schools, playgrounds, and alleyways into pint-sized versions of the New York Stock Exchange. “Who’s got a Bulbasaur? For the love of God, I need a Bulbasaur. Sell all the Squirtles! Sell all the Squirtles!!” Sadly, we’ve yet to meet a kid who was able to retire early because of his stash of Jigglypuff cards.

  STATUS: Still massively popular, even though a group of parents filed a class-action lawsuit in 1999 that claimed that Pokémon cards were a form of illegal gambling and turning their kids into addicts.

  FUN FACT: In 1999, Pikachu, the little yellow guy with a lightning-bolt tail, landed on the cover of Time magazine, which called him “the most famous mouse since Mickey and Mighty.”

  Pop Up Video

  The 1990s were all about multitasking, and music videos were no exception. Why just veg out in front of an ordinary video when you could watch a video paired with Beavis and Butt-Head commentary or one adorned with Pop Up Video’s cartoony word bubbles?

  The best pop-ups told you something hilarious, like the one on a Rick Astley video pointing out a dancer who never learned the steps, or confiding that the director and producer had a two-hour fight about whether Astley should roll up his sleeves. Awesomely, the writers of the pop-ups seemed to have the same bemused contempt for the music industry as the rest of us, never failing to point out where the producers cheaped out on a set or the singer was replaced with a stand-in.

  Watching Pop Up Video was like kicking back with your friend who worked as the third director’s assistant and letting him dish about the scene where Meat Loaf fell off his chair or snark that Dexys Midnight Runners fired their drummer midway through the shoot. The pop-ups were like musical footnotes, but footnotes that were often more entertaining than the real text.

  STATUS: Pop Up Video popped off the air for a time in 2002, but was revived by VH1 in 2011.

  FUN FACT: Pop Up Brady gave the pop-up treatment to old Brady Bunch episodes. One pop-up on the famed Kings’ Island episode claims Robert Reed saved the cast’s life by spotting a poorly mounted camera that would have flown off a roller coaster and possibly killed the actors.

  Pretty Woman

  Most prostitutes look more like “Pretty Woman” singer Roy Orbison than Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts, but when has a little thing like reality ever stopped the Hollywood movie dream machine?

  In the 1990 smash-hit movie, tycoon Richard Gere hired reluctant escort Roberts, and they fell in love. Exactly like it always happens in real life! Awwww. It was a Cinderella story for a new generation, except instead of a glass slipper, she wore hooker boots. The romantic comedy sidestepped typical call-girl-movie issues, like jealous pimps and gonorrhea, and instead concentrated on the super-fun side of prostitution, like the slap-happy scene where Roberts let out a startled, hysterical “bwah-ha!” when Gere snaps a jewelry case on her gloved fingers. What was the next step in this odd courtship—slamming a car door on her thumb?

  How does a flick about a prostitute’s relationship problems appeal to a mass audience? Pretty well, apparently. The movie raked in almost $500 million worldwide. And the accompanying sound track went triple platinum, likely appealing to the skeezy guys who bought it because of Roberts and her thigh-high, black-leather boots on the cover, but also to preteens who thought Sweden’s Roxette (“It Must Have Been Love”) and their hairdos were rad.

  STATUS: Available on DVD.

  FUN FACT: Jason Alexander, Seinfeld’s George Costanza, costarred as a creep lawyer. Apparently, the jerk store called, and they were running out of him.

  Pulp Fiction

  Hey honey bunny, you know what they call the best movie of the ’90s in France? They got the metric system there, so they call it—aw heck, they call it Pulp Fiction, just like we do.

  Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit shook up American audiences in a way that few films have since Star Wars. The one-time video-clerk-turned-director blended together humor, pop culture, shocking violence, and witty dialogue that stuck in your brain like a ball gag in a hapless boxer’s mouth. From Samuel L. Jackson’s pseudo-biblical quote to breakfasts of Big Kahuna burgers and Fruit Brute to the disturbing gimp in the pawnshop basement, this movie was a full-on fire hose aimed straight into the face of the Hollywood establishment.

  Who knew John Travolta could make such a glorious comeback long after his Barbarino and disco-dancing days? Who knew film noir and brutal violence could go down as smoothly as a five-dollar milkshake? Who knew you could store a watch in such an uncomfortable spot? As Chuck Berry sang while Uma Thurman and Travolta twisted their hearts out at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, it goes to show you never can tell.

  STATUS: A whole generation of filmmakers learned from Tarantino that an independent film could be just as commercially and critically successful as a mainstream blockbuster.

  FUN FACT: In the Big Kahuna scene Samuel L. Jackson tells John Travolta to “check out the big brain on Brad,” even though the character’s name is Brett.

  The Real World

  When The Real World began back in 1992, the middle word in the show’s title wasn’t actually laughable. Original cast members Julie, Andre, Eric, Kevin, Heather, Becky, and Norman were real—and they were also bright, inquisitive Gen Xers with varied backgrounds and actual career dreams. They argued about everything from pets to politics, but there was a strong undercurrent of mutual respect, accented with intelligence.

  The “Real” stayed in The Real World for a couple more seasons—Pedro Zamora’s presence in the San Francisco house being a highlight—but the slide into sluttiness, once it began, was unstoppable. Soon cast members were being chosen for their cup size, not their IQs. Drunken hot tub trysts became de rigueur, and cast members not only didn’t care about politics, they probably couldn’t spell it.

  1973’s An American Family got there first, but The Real World is credited for the modern resurgence of reality TV that brought us such treasures as Jersey Shore and 16 and Pregnant and pretty much erased music videos from MTV. From real to unreal to crazy-wackadoodle surreal in just two decades.

  STATUS: Still on MTV.

  FUN FACT: You can live like a Real Worlder by renting the three-thousand-foot Palms Casino suite that was home to the 2002 Las Vegas cast—if you have fifteen thousand for one night, that is.

  The Return of Donny Osmond

  He may have claimed to be a little bit rock-and-roll, but audiences just weren’t buying it. Seventies icon Donny Osmond—all gleaming choppers and eye-rolling corny jokes—found himself stuck in a career-endangering prison built by his own teenage success as a goody-two-shoes. Turns out, ’80s audiences weren’t exactly looking for middle-aged crooners who got their start on The Andy Williams Show.

  That all changed in 1990, when he was cast in the hit stage musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Suddenly, ’90s kids fell in love with the talented, good-natured, and slightly goofy guy just like their moms did two decades earlier. Donnymania was everywhere. Audiences ate up his nice-guy appeal, first as the host of a popular syndicated TV talk show with his sister Marie, then as a voice in Disney’s Mulan, and later when he took over Dick Clark’s mic as host of Pyramid. He was back, baby, embracing his Donny destiny.

  STATUS: Donny and Marie took their show to Vegas for a long-running cheese fest. In 2011, Donny showed off his fancy footwork and won the top prize on Dancing with the Stars.

  FUN FACT: In 2006, Donny appeared in Weird Al Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy” video.

/>   Ring Pops

  They were the only piece of bling that could give you type 2 diabetes. Ring Pops, the ubiquitous 1990s lollipops molded in the shape of a giant diamond, added a delicious new dimension to the world of candy jewelry. Kids who couldn’t care less about cut, clarity, or carat weight were all about the most important “c” of all: corn syrup.

  Like candy necklaces before them, Ring Pops were wearable snacks—both high fashion and high fructose. You could coordinate the color of the hundred-carat fruit-flavored gem to your outfit, and when you were looking for a sugar fix, the treat was just an arm’s-length away. Some kids simply refused to take them off altogether, and accumulated everything from cat hair to pocket fuzz on the sticky surface. A quick dip in the drinking fountain, though, and they were good to go.

  The popularity of Ring Pops prompted a rash of playground weddings. And why not? The little suckers were sweet, they were sparkly—and they didn’t cost two months’ salary. But then came the inevitable playground break-ups. Soon the merry-go-round was packed with six-year-old recent divorcées, all looking for a new sugar daddy.

  STATUS: Bazooka—a division of Topps—still makes the little suckers, including a sugar-free version.