The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (18 page)

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!

L
ike
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.

W
hile
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.

B
efore
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.

O
prah
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 was 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
.

P
eople
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.

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.

W
ho
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.