Upper Deck didn’t even come with the slabs of powder-sprinkled gum other companies tucked in alongside Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs. Gum was for kids; this was serious business. According to the New York Times, in 1980, Topps and Fleer were kings of a $50-million industry. By 1992, with Upper Deck in the mix, sports cards had become a $1.5-billion juggernaut. But while the card companies made a bundle, few kids cleaned up. Alas, most of us had to rely on student loans to pay for college. Thanks for nothing, Ken Griffey Jr.
STATUS: Still going strong. Upper Deck eventually expanded into everything from golf to lacrosse to Hello Kitty cards.
FUN FACT: Upper Deck has even produced cards featuring actual autographs and—no lie—strands of real hair from historical figures like Babe Ruth, George Washington, and Abe Lincoln.
Urkel
Steve Urkel of Family Matters appears to have been created by a screenwriter who simply listed as many annoying traits as he could think of, then wrapped them all into one character. One whiny, clumsy, doltish character.
There’s absolutely no explanation for Jaleel White’s Urkel becoming a massive national hit, but it happened. What Fonzie and J. R. Ewing were to the 1970s and 1980s, the doofus-y little friend of the Winslow family was to the 1990s. Was the appeal his high-water pants and suspenders? His enormous glasses? That creepy dance? That voice, like a mouse on helium? His cloying catchphrases, like “Did I do that?” Whatever it was, it worked. Family Matters ran for a whopping nine seasons.
Urkel also sold products. There were T-shirts, talking dolls, and an infamous short-lived strawberry-banana cereal called Urkel-Os. Like Urkel’s popularity itself, the cereal probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but made less and less sense in the cold hard light of day.
STATUS: Urkel may be nothing but an annoying memory, but Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory shares Urkel’s nerdiness and questionable fashion sense.
FUN FACT: Jaleel White auditioned for the role of Rudy on The Cosby Show back when the show had yet to decide if the Huxtables’ youngest would be a girl or a boy.
Violent Video Games
Today’s gamers mow down hundreds of photo-realistic enemy troops, zombies, and aliens before breakfast. But it wasn’t always first-person hack-and-slash. In the ’90s, geysers of pixelated blood washed over the video game industry for the very first time. The gratuitous carnage hit so quickly and so hard, it probably made happy-go-lucky Pac-Man barf up a few ghosts.
One of the first games to embrace uber-bloody gore was 1992’s Mortal Kombat. Two warriors would punch and kick each other, until one could barely stand up. The winner would finish his opponent by pulling off his arms or yanking his head and spine out and holding it up like a trophy. (Way to promote nonviolent playground activity.) The next year saw the arrival of Doom, which added 3-D graphics and a first-person perspective to the macabre mix.
Gory as they were, these were the first really addicting games—digital meth. You’d flip them on and the next thing you knew, it was eight months later, you had a long beard and were surrounded by several jars of your own urine and messages telling you not to bother coming in to your job at Cinnabon.
STATUS: Mortal Kombat and Doom spawned several forgettable movies, and cleared a path for similar games like Halo, Resident Evil, and Call of Duty. Grand Theft Auto even allows players to murder police officers and prostitutes. Q*bert, it ain’t.
FUN FACT: According to IMDb.com, in the Mortal Kombat movie, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp were considered for the role of main fighter Johnny Cage, which eventually went to Linden Ashby. Who? Exactly.
Waterworld
With liquid everywhere, why the hell was everyone in Waterworld so filthy? The characters’ inexplicable aversion to taking a quick dip in the ocean that surrounded them wasn’t the only confusing thing about Kevin Costner’s 1995 flick. For instance: If the budget was a ridiculous $175 million—at the time the most expensive film ever made—then why did child-star Tina Majorino’s wig look like a rabid sea otter? And, who wanted to see Kevin Costner as a brooding post-apocalyptic fish man who drinks his own purified pee, anyway? Answer: Probably the same people who paid to see him as a brooding post-apocalyptic mailman in The Postman a few years later.
Critics dubbed the flick Fishtar, after the spectacular Warren Beatty/Dustin Hoffman 1987 mega-flop Ishtar. Audiences may have argued about just how much Waterworld stank like rotting fish, but everyone agreed on one thing: It was a very moist Mad Max rip-off, with jet skis instead of motorcycles and a gill-eared, web-toed Costner instead of Mel Gibson.
STATUS: 2012’s Battleship was another waterlogged, big-budget flick. Kevin Costner even gave director Peter Berg advice on how to successfully shoot scenes on the ocean.
FUN FACT: In the opening credits, the globe in the Universal logo morphs into a world with the ice melted and the continents submerged. Some call this the best part of the entire film.
Wayne’s World
Public-access shows started to explode in the 1990s, and the best one of all wasn’t even real. Mike Myers, as Wayne Campbell, and Dana Carvey, as Garth Algar, sat in Wayne’s Aurora, Illinois, basement and spouted off to a Saturday Night Live audience about everything from babes to new slang. Schwing! Not! Babe alert! I think I’m gonna hurl! Do not blow chunks, Garth. If you were over ten and under forty in the 1990s, you said at least one of those, probably more times than you’d like to admit.
The best Wayne’s World bits illuminated the weird little private corners of Wayne and Garth’s lives. Bruce Willis played the coolest senior in school introducing that year’s cool word. (“Sphincter.”) Wayne’s mom (Nora Dunn) stopped by to lecture her son on how he always managed to spill everything on his T-shirts.
As the skit grew more popular, Wayne and Garth’s world got bigger. Aerosmith visited their tiny little public-access show, and in the 1992 movie, Wayne fell for the babe-alicious Tia Carrere. But no amount of fame or star power could top two pals on a ratty couch, cracking wise and cracking each other up.
STATUS: Dana Carvey has said he’d do another movie, and that it’s all up to Mike Myers. In the meantime, movie stoner pals Harold and Kumar have the same kind of sarcastic, smart-mouthed friendship Wayne and Garth once had.
FUN FACT: Myers and Carvey reprised their roles on Saturday Night Live in 2011. They couldn’t stop laughing at the film title Winter’s Bone. Schwing!
Whassup? Ads
Like beer consumption itself, Budweiser’s Whassup? ads started out harmless and fun, but with repetition, turned head-poundingly painful.
The ads, which debuted in 1999, feature buddies yakking on the phone and screeching “Whassup?” at each other in drawn-out, cartoonish voices. Part of their charm was the unrehearsed sense of pure guyness—the friends were so amused by their own silliness, so consumed by their own World of Bro. The beer was there, but it was almost an afterthought. They might as well have been selling telephones.
When the ad took off, so did the catchphrase, making it impossible to go anywhere without a shrieked “Whassup?” causing your ears to bleed. The ad begat sequels—in one, a meal at a Japanese restaurant turns “Whassup?” into “Wasabi?” with a sushi chef chorus joining in.
But the best sequel showed a group of yuppies who, instead of “watchin’ the game, havin’ a Bud,” were “watching the market recap, drinking an import.” Instead of “Whassup?” their greeting was a stiff and proper “What are you doing?” The final scene cut to the original “Whassup?” guys staring at the screen in shocked disbelief.
STATUS: Budweiser is always cranking out new ads, some featuring the beloved Clydesdales. In 2010, they started using the slogan, “Grab Some Buds.”
FUN FACT: In 2008, the guys were brought back for a pro-Obama ad. One is stationed in Iraq, another is unemployed, one’s wearing multiple casts, and another is watching his stocks drop. In the end, the first guy watches Barack and Michelle Obama on TV, smiles, and says, “Change. That’s what’s up.”
“Whatev
er”
Mom tells you you’ll get gum disease if you don’t floss? Whatever. Your sister whines that you got your ears double pierced at twelve so she should be able to get them single pierced at ten? What. Ev. Er. Your cousin argues that Jonathan Taylor Thomas is way cuter than Leonardo DiCaprio? Whatevs. W/E. Evs!
“Whatever” started to gain momentum with the Valley Girls of the 1980s, but really found its sneering, dismissive stride with children of the ’90s. It is to conversation what Dan Dierdorf was to football—a good solid blocker. When you don’t want to let a discussion go one step further, when all hope for progress is lost, or when you just really want to punch a blabby somebody in the mouth but it’s not socially acceptable to do so, pull out the “whatever.”
Kids, from toddlers to teenagers, have very little control over their lives. Bigger people make them do things, go places, say things they would never choose on their own. But “whatever” is the final bomb dropped on a verbal battle you can’t or don’t want to win.
No one can offer up a decent response. Other than “Don’t ‘whatever’ me, young lady!” (Mom), there’s just not a single verbal comeback that makes sense. Like Rhett Butler sailing out of Scarlett’s life for the final time, you’ve expressed the amount of damns you give about this matter, and that amount is zero.
STATUS: You seriously think our language will ever give this one up? Whatever.
FUN FACT: “Whatever” was voted the most annoying word in the English language for three consecutive years in a Marist College poll.
Where’s Waldo?
Kids like to find stuff. Parents like to keep kids quiet. Thus Where’s Waldo? books hit the parent-kid sweet spot in a big way. No reading skills were required, only working eyeballs and a tiny bit of patience.
Being kids, we were good with the eyesight, but sometimes lacking in the “patience” realm. Waldo artist Martin Handford crammed hundreds of characters into his frustratingly detailed drawings, confusing the issue by throwing in red-and-white striped beach balls and other objects that closely resemble dorky Waldo’s striped sweater and hat.
Why is Waldo wearing a sweater and long pants on the beach anyway? How come he constantly needs to be found? He appears to be under forty, so why does he walk with a cane? Also, does he have reverse claustrophobia? He never shows up in a crowd smaller than forty gajillion, as if he perennially lives in the toy section of Walmart on Black Friday. More than just being found, he needed to be forcibly steered into some therapy.
STATUS: Waldo is everywhere, but he’s still tough to spot.
FUN FACT: In the UK where he began, Waldo is called Wally. He’s Walter in German, Charlie in French, Willy in Norwegian, and Volli in Estonian.
Windows 95
Our parents had to walk miles barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways, to get to their one-room schoolhouse—or so they say. But ’90s kids had it almost as bad, trying to figure out the revolutionary but confusing Windows 95 operating system. Concepts that seem no-duh to us today (files you drag to the recycle bin stick around unless you empty it) had to be explained in painstaking detail. Looking back, we want to slap ourselves silly with a floppy disk.
Wait, what? We could name our files whatever we wanted? Minimize a document and go back to it without having to reopen? Copy and paste? Hold us back from this futuristic technology! It was like being taken out of arithmetic and tossed into advanced algebra.
Thankfully, we had some, er, Friends to walk us through it. Microsoft hired sitcom stars Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston to star in an infamous video (available on VHS, natch) to teach us about this newfangled way of computing—and cheesily crack wise in the process. “Task bar?” asks Aniston. “Is that anything like a Snickers bar? Does it have nougat?” Ohhhh, man. No wonder Ross kept dumping her.
The media blitz for Windows 95 was unprecedented and will likely be unequaled. A new version, Windows 98, was in stores before some of us had even mastered emptying the recycling bin. Since then, programmers have been firing updates at us like fastballs in a batting cage, and sometimes it feels as if we’re ducking more than we’re keeping up. But there’s no choice now. At work, home, and school, we’re up at bat every day.
STATUS: Microsoft eventually ditched the year-naming convention, but years later, many features that were introduced in Windows 95 live on.
FUN FACT: The refrain of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” the song Microsoft used in its ad campaign, is “You make a grown man cry”—a fact not lost on Windows 95 critics.
WWJD Bracelets
WWJD bracelets, with the initials standing for “What Would Jesus Do?” caught fire via Christian youth groups in the early 1990s, but were soon everywhere. Quickly, there were bumper stickers, T-shirts, lanyards, teddy bears, and, because this was still the ’90s, even slap bracelets bearing the slogan.
You didn’t have to be Christian to wear them, as the bracelets became a middle-school fashion craze, regardless of one’s faith. Some kids doubled up on the wrist religion, wearing two or three at a time for extra questioning power.
Soon, the parodies took over. What Would Journey Do? What Would Brian Boitano Do? What Would Jesus Drive? What Would Scooby Do?
What Would Jesus Do? Whatever it was, he probably wouldn’t bother to make a jewelry line about it.
STATUS: Not as popular, but still available.
FUN FACT: There’s a follow-up bracelet with initials that purport to answer the WWJD question—FROG, for Fully Rely on God.
The X-Files
The sci-fi-and-supernatural mythology that ran through The X-Files was so thick, it turned off some viewers, but millions of nerds still tuned in every Friday night for their weekly dose of government conspiracies, alien-invasion plots, and scenes of people running with flashlights through shadowy Vancouver forests.
Most of us followed the show for the Sam-and-Diane-meet-E.T. chemistry between skeptical scientist Dana Scully and believer and porn aficionado Fox Mulder. But we also craved the creepy phenomena of the week, like the guy who could slither through narrow air vents, the serial killer who was really a demon, or Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a bulky Man in Black. And the topper, an episode that was so unsettling and horrific, it was banned from being rerun: “Home,” where the inbred mutant family kept their legless and armless mother on a cart under the bed. Yeesh.
But if the (sometimes unsettling) fan fiction on the Internet is any indication, the answer most X-Philes longed for was when the heck Scully and Mulder were going to finally get it on. The duo did eventually lock lips—starting with a New Year’s Eve smooch in 1999. Was it the right move to resolve all that sexual tension? The question has sparked more debate than the Roswell UFO crash, the moon landing hoax, and Elvis still being alive put together.
STATUS: X first marked the spot on the big screen in 1998, with the confusing The X-Files: Fight the Future. We wanted to believe, but even we couldn’t comprehend how we spent five bucks on a movie that was mostly about bees and corn. A sequel followed ten years later.
FUN FACT: Mulder’s sister Samantha was abducted while watching the 1970s show The Magician, the same show Patty Hearst was watching when she was kidnapped in 1974.
X Games
Anything the Olympics could do, the X Games could do backward on a skateboard launched from a helicopter while chugging a Red Bull. And with a pierced tongue. When the extreme sports competition began in 1995, a whole generation of snotty-nosed Evel Knievels skated into the spotlight as if it were an empty pool. Move aside, Bruce Jenner and Nadia Comaneci. Unlikely athletes like skateboarder Tony Hawk, and later, snowboarder Shaun White, took all the insane tricks kids were attempting on American playgrounds and mountains, perfected them, and then performed them on camera.
Even those of us who couldn’t manage to skateboard the length of our block were fascinated by the televised spectacle. It was like a freak show you didn’t have to feel bad about watching—seriously, did that guy just do a double back-flip on a snowmobile?
X Games stars did everything your mom warned you against, and instead of getting grounded and ending up in traction, they got medals and ended up on Wheaties boxes. Throughout the whole thing, there rang a sense of generational pride. These weren’t the Baby Boomer Games, after all. X marks the spot where sports married danger and gave birth to barely controlled insanity.
STATUS: Still extreeeeme!
FUN FACT: In 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a group of extreme sports freaks torment the film’s stars, constantly shouting “Extreme!” At one point, they kayak through a convenience store.
Xena: Warrior Princess
Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi! Hercules may have been strong enough to knock out a giant with a single punch, but a busty gal in a skirt trounced his leather-pantsed butt in both TV ratings and cult popularity. Xena: Warrior Princess, the 1995–2001 spin-off of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, followed the title character as she traveled around ancient Greece in a tiny outfit and some totally bitchin’ bangs, trying to atone for her past as a jerk.
The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade Page 16