The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (11 page)

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.

G
ak
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.

O
ur
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.

K
ids
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!

T
he
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.

M
om
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
.

T
he
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.