Talk Show Boom
In the ’90s, talk show hosts multiplied like trash-TV Gremlins. Ricki Lake, Cosby Kid Tempestt Bledsoe, Donny and Marie, Mark Walberg (not that one, the other one), Jenny Jones, Montel Williams, Sally Jesse Raphael, Carnie Wilson, Geraldo, fitness guru Susan Powter, and even former 90210-er Gabrielle Carteris all had daytime gigs. If you wanted to see a double amputee who married a horse and now wanted to find his birth mother, your odds were pretty good you’d find that combination on at least one of the shows.
What was it about the 1990s that turned the TV talk genre into a total free-for-all? Promises of big syndication money, for one. And as more and more folks signed up for satellite and cable, all the new channels had to fill their programming space with something. And often, especially when it came to daytime, something weird.
Mornings and afternoons may have been crowded, but late-night hosts popped up like pimples too. Pat Sajak, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Dennis Miller, and Lauren Hutton all hosted after-dark talkfests. Remember Magic Johnson’s short-lived show? We use every fiber of our being trying not to, and still get uncomfortable thinking about it.
But when it comes to talk-show flops, Fox’s The Chevy Chase Show took the biggest pratfall of all. Time magazine summed it up by saying that the visibly nervous host “brought too little experience and too much ego” to the show and that his comic sensibility was “too dated.” Ouch. The program lasted for five weeks in 1993, barely long enough for the paint to dry on the host’s parking space, but the jokes about it will go on forever.
STATUS: The ’90s talk show boom faded almost as quickly as it arrived, although celebrities still occasionally poke their well-manicured toes in the talk-show waters (ahem, Tony Danza).
FUN FACT: The TV Guide Network named The Chevy Chase Show to its list of the “Twenty-five Biggest TV Blunders.”
Tamagotchi
Remember that assignment you got in fifth grade, where you had to treat a raw egg as if it were your own child? That was the idea behind Tamagotchi, the huge 1990s fad which provided a digital version of the egg project—only this time, you didn’t need to worry about your mom accidentally making it into an omelet.
You were obligated to feed, clean up after, and even play with your little creature, or it would eventually breathe its last digital breath. Three buttons let you play God—and forced you to constantly run back to your locker to give it a snack, pick up its poop, or give it some exercise. Most annoying was the constant beeping and booping, like it was a starving Coleco Electronic Football game. Some schools banned the needy little things, and more than one parent probably stumbled into their kids’ rooms in the middle of the night and smashed it with a hammer because it just wouldn’t stop peeping.
Still, the virtual creature in a key fob was the perfect starter pet, because if your Tamagotchi died, all you needed to do was reset it—unlike when a real pet died and you had to give it a burial at sea via the toilet.
STATUS: They’re still around. Now Tamagotchis have an online element and, most important, a way to turn off the sound.
FUN FACT: The virtual pet sparked its own psychological term: The Tamagotchi Effect supposedly describes when a human develops an emotional attachment to a machine.
Tan M&M’s
First off, who was choosing colors for M&M’s candies anyway? They had the entire rainbow at their service, and yet they picked not one, but two shades of brown. Did those same folks also feel that buttons were too daring a form of clothing fastener, and that milk should be replaced with a tamer beverage, like water?
Whether you called it light brown, tan, or “that color all M&M’s turn once they get a little sweaty in your pocket,” tan M&M’s were few people’s favorite and always an also-ran to big brother dark brown.
So in 1995, Mars decided to stop tanning for good, holding a nationwide contest to replace the color. Ten million candy lovers called 1-800-FUN-COLOR to vote for either pink, purple, or blue. Blue washed away the competition with 54 percent of the vote, and the tan treats vanished. Never fear. You can still get them back if you just lick a handful of the dark brown or red ones for a while.
STATUS: While you can go to specialty candy stores and custom-select M&M’s in shades ranging from aqua to electric green to gold, tan remains unavailable. It’s the shunned taupe sheep of the family who’s never invited home for the holidays.
FUN FACT: Tan wasn’t even an original band member. They replaced violet candies in 1949. No idea why a spectacularly colorful hue like violet was replaced with the color of sand. The ’40s were a weird time.
Teddy Ruxpin
You know the audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents, with his metal skeleton and creepy robot eyes that have just a glint of life to them? He’s a close cousin of Teddy Ruxpin. Although the bear robot was even freakier. Because when was the last time Abe Lincoln mauled you while you slept?
The battery-powered bear robot initially came to creepy life in 1985, moving its eyes and jaw in synch with the cassette tape in its backside. When its original manufacturer filed for Chapter 11 two years later, though, Teddy went into hibernation. In the ’90s, Hasbro picked up the license—and invoked the technological black arts to raise the unholy bear from the dead. Now, instead of cassettes, it used higher-tech cartridges. But it still ran on batteries, and also, we’re pretty sure, on children’s nightmares.
Didn’t humanity learn its lesson when it built Skynet and gave the machines self-awareness? With Teddy Ruxpin, society is just a microchip upgrade away from bear-shaped Terminators roaming the Earth, reading bedtime stories while they enslave us all.
STATUS: While several companies tried to spark a Teddy comeback, they were off store shelves by 2010. But we don’t think we’ve seen the last of Teddy: Just like the Terminator, he’ll be back.
FUN FACT: As a kid during show-and-tell, future Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am used his sister’s Teddy Ruxpin to play the songs he’d written and recorded.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Somewhere deep underground, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles must have had one heckuva marketing machine. For a certain age group of boys in the 1990s, if you didn’t carry a Turtle lunchbox, sleep on Turtle bed linens, or at least have a fistful of the action figures stuffed in your cubby or locker, you might as well quit school and go live in the sewers yourself.
Heroes on the half-shell Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello leapt from indie comic books to their own TV cartoon in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, their images—and their action figures—were everywhere. It wasn’t hard to see why. They combined so many things that we loved, it was as if they were created by a group of kids who threw every awesome idea they could think of into a blender. They ate pizza! They fought crime with wicked weapons like staffs and nunchakus! They talked like surfers! They lived in the sewers! They reported to a mutant rat! Just like us—except our sewers were just messy bedrooms and our mutant rat was Miss Dedman, the math teacher.
Why did the Turtles bother to wear masks, anyway? Only those same nimrods who couldn’t tell Clark Kent was Superman would be unable to figure out that the four gigantic, carb-loading, anthropomorphic green guys next door were probably the superheroes everybody kept talking about. Cowabunga, dude.
STATUS: It’s turtle time once again. In 2012, they returned in a Nickelodeon series, and there’s talk of a new big-screen version as early as 2014.
FUN FACT: In the 1990 live-action movie, villain Splinter was played by Kevin Clash, formerly the voice of Elmo.
Terrible Saturday Night Live Movies
The ’90s were chock-full of SNL spin-off flicks, and only two—Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2—were better than horrible. Coneheads, A Night at the Roxbury, Stuart Saves His Family, and Superstar each have their moments, but mostly they smell like Lorne Michaels left a few million dollars’ worth of raw shrimp out in the sun.
The worst offender, by every possible method of measuremen
t, is It’s Pat, the 1992 flop starring Julia Sweeney as the androgynous title character. The groan-worthy gender-confusion plot worked in tiny doses on TV, but when the very gross Pat, dressed in horn-rimmed glasses, a western shirt, and black, curly hair, made it to the big screen, America stayed home in droves. For some reason, people were unwilling to pay good money to sit in a theater and cringe as Pat made uncomfortable noises and wiped his or her hands on his or her shirt. The best thing about the film? It was only seventy-seven minutes long.
STATUS: They keep making ’em. MacGruber, anyone?
FUN FACT: It’s Pat includes Aerosmith’s classic song “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”
“The More You Know” Public Service Announcements
Public-service announcements take many forms, from the fried egg of “this is your brain on drugs” to the druggie son-and-dad’s “I learned it by watching you!” Starting in 1989, NBC cut right to the chase with its short-and-sweet “The More You Know” campaign. An actor, anchor, or other famous person pops up, delivers a few sentences about the cause du jour, and wham, bam, the star-comet logo soars across the screen and those four addictive notes pound out the theme.
George Clooney would rather you not hit your kids! Bill Cosby wonders if you’ve ever considered teaching! Betty White suggests that you read! David Schwimmer wants you to stop your friends from raping drunk girls! Kathy Griffin shadowboxes with a turtle! Not really sure what that last one was about.
Sometimes the star is so random you’re not really sure who they are, except that they surely have a show on NBC. Sometimes the cause seems to have been chosen as a drunken challenge. (Ask your doctor about bone density? Plant trees to prevent asthma?) But the simplicity and shortness is hard to beat. If after-school specials had only thirty seconds and one chair for a prop, they’d be “The More You Know.”
STATUS: NBC still cranks ’em out.
FUN FACT: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart dubbed a segment “The Less You Know.”
Thomas Kinkade Art
Move over, Currier and Ives. In the 1990s, Thomas Kinkade’s snow-covered mansions, babbling brooks, and glowing churches replaced you as the sappiest art in the universe. Whether depicted on paintings, Christmas cards, tote bags, or night-lights, there is something unnervingly, Stepford-ly creepy about Kinkade’s rainbow-skied universe.
In Kinkade’s world, houses are “cottages,” Christmas is “yuletide,” and everyone has their own gazebo and/or lighthouse. Don’t get us started on the random color choices. Why is that patch of snow glowing pink?
And ever notice how a Kinkade house features light blazing not from just one window, but from every single orifice? Either that place is on fire, or somewhere in there our dad is walking around lecturing about the electric bill and snapping switches off as fast as the artist can turn them on again.
STATUS: Still very popular, despite Kinkade’s untimely death in 2012.
FUN FACT: Jared Padalecki of Supernatural fame plays Kinkade in the 2008 DVD movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, produced by Kinkade himself.
Tickle Me Elmo Craze
Ever see a stampede of buffalo? Now imagine them with credit cards, sharp elbows, and a laser focus on snagging a rare, goofy, giddy doll, and you’re getting close to the frenzied pandemonium that overtook toy stores when Tickle Me Elmo came to town. The little red Muppet would chuckle when you pressed his belly, then started to freak out into a giggly frenzy the more you squeezed. (More than a few frazzled parents dreamed of squeezing and squeezing until Elmo suddenly stopped, but we digress.)
Sparked in part by Rosie O’Donnell featuring the laughing fuzz ball on her show, mobs of Muppet-lusting shoppers descended on unsuspecting stores in 1996. One unlucky Walmart clerk was trampled by the crowd and suffered a concussion, broken rib, and injuries to his knee, back, and jaw. (“Today’s stampede was brought to you by the letter ‘T,’ for traction.”)
Still, the fervor paid off for at least a few savvy shoppers. Some quick-on-the-draw buyers who snapped up the hysterical doll turned right around and scalped it for as much as fifteen hundred dollars. Who’s laughing now, Elmo?
STATUS: In 2006, Playschool unveiled the Tickle Me Elmo X-treme (T.M.X.), which amped up Elmo’s laughing to near psychotic levels. The little guy rolled around on the floor in histrionics, begging you to stop.
FUN FACT: On The Simpsons, Millhouse got a Tickle Me Krusty, which cackled lines like, “Hooo ha ha ha! Hey, kid, get your finger outta there.”
Topsy Tail
Topsy Tail taught 1990s girls a valuable lesson that resonated well beyond the world of cheap hair products: As-seen-on-TV purchases never quite make the leap from TV to the real world.
On the ads, women waved a tiny plastic noose through their lush locks and seconds later were sporting an exotically complicated ponytail, braid, or updo. The commercial even promised you could Topsy Tail your thick tresses for your wedding.
But if you actually sent in your hard-earned cash and ordered the thing, were you ever in for a surprise. Turns out the tiny plastic noose doesn’t actually come with its own stylists, and what took seconds in the ad took hours while you sweatily squinted at the instructions and tried desperately to recreate them in your own bathroom mirror.
You could only stab yourself in the neck a few times before giving up and tossing the Topsy Tail into the drawer next to the curling iron, the crimper, the foam curlers, the heated rollers, and three cans of long-expired mousse.
STATUS: You can still buy Topsy Tails, but the bouffanty Bump-It is a more recent take on mail-order DIY hair design.
FUN FACT: In 1994, Tyco made a doll dubbed My Pretty Topsy Tail, who came with floor-length hair and her own miniature Topsy Tail.
Troll Dolls
Has there ever been an uglier, weirder fad than troll dolls? They sport wildly colored hair, faces like unbaked pretzel dough, and clothes straight outta the Brady Bunch’s Goodwill donation pile. Yet somehow they just keep becoming popular. Nineties kids snapped up the so-ugly-they’re-cute creatures by the outstretched armful just as their parents did in the 1960s. And here we thought insanity skipped a generation.
For girls, trolls offered a diverse doll universe minus Barbie’s eating disorders and angst over Ken. In Troll Land, a shrimpy Santa troll might preside over the wedding of a giant pink-haired bride and green-haired groom dressed up as the Easter bunny. Nudist trolls with gems for bellybuttons drank tea with grandma trolls with rainbow hair, and nobody got judge-y or uptight.
Boys were a harder sell. Hasbro tried to suck them into the fad in 1992 with the release of the Original Battle Trolls, who were armed with weapons and painful, constipated-looking expressions even creepier than their traditional-troll counterparts. We can’t imagine why Hasbro lost that war.
The one concession boys made to the trend: For some reason, troll pencil toppers were exceptionally popular with both genders. Although since the pencil pretty much impaled the troll’s butt, they looked as if they were being tortured for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Salem.
STATUS: They’re everywhere!
FUN FACT: Drew’s arch-nemesis Mimi on The Drew Carey Show was obsessed with the creepy critters. In one episode, she tried to replace all of the store’s mannequins with giant troll dolls.
Turbo Football
Many thanks, Nerf, for developing the foam-based technology that allowed even sports-averse nerds to throw a football with pinpoint accuracy. The Turbo was molded with grooves that made it easy to grip, and aerodynamic enough to let you throw a perfect spiral faster than Brett Favre could change his mind about retiring. Far better than a standard light and airy Nerf ball, the Turbo was heavier, denser, and harder, and cut through the air like a lawn dart.
The Turbo made a benchwarmer into a mini–Joe Montana. But, of course, when you tried out for the JV team with your newfound, Nerf-centered confidence, you got smacked in the face with reality—and by a seventh-grade tackler. Still, Nerf continued to make more and more elaborate ve
rsions, outfitted with bells and whistles, like the Screamer, which let out a high-pitched whine, and the Turbo Liquidator, which was wrapped with a “gyrowave” ring filled with liquid. The classic Turbo remained the most sought-after, though. We swear we chucked one into the air in 1992 and it still hasn’t come down.
STATUS: Today, Nerf makes a Turbo Jr., but it doesn’t have the same design as the ’90s version.
FUN FACT: In 2004, one of the Turbo’s descendants was pulled from store shelves for being too dangerous. Nerf’s Big Play Football featured a flip-open top with an erasable writing pad inside to jot down plays. It was also a lot harder than your average Nerf ball. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, at least eight people had to get stitches after they got smacked in the face with it.
Upper Deck Baseball Cards
Remember when collecting baseball cards was about the thrill of the hunt, and not whether your Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card was going to pay for your college education? That all changed in 1989 with the arrival of upstart trading-card company Upper Deck. Suddenly, even kids saw dollar signs and moved their collections from shoe boxes to safe-deposit boxes.
The company’s novel gimmicks were as thrilling as an inside-the-park home run. Every card featured a shiny hologram, and real player autographs and jersey swatches were randomly inserted into some card boxes. (About as randomly as a Cubs win, as we didn’t know anyone who actually ended up with a Reggie Jackson sweat-stained elbow piece.) Upper Deck jump-started the collector’s market, and kids were convinced that someday they would trade in their piles of cards for a mansion and a yacht. Suddenly, it paid to keep cards in mint condition instead of clothes-pinning them to the spokes of your bike.
The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade Page 15