The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (23 page)

I
n
1999, sixteen years since the final Ewok was dry-cleaned and put away, George Lucas finally went back to the intergalactic drawing board. When the news hit that the bearded Jedi master was readying a new
Star Wars
flick,
Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace
, a generation was as thrilled as Jabba the Hutt at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Expectations were higher than Princess Leia on the
Star Wars Holiday Special
.

Sadly, what showed up on-screen was…a steaming pile of Jar
Jar. It was all wooden acting and a pre-Vader Anakin Skywalker running around in space-Pampers, combined with super-exciting political intrigue like the Imperial Senate worrying about a trade disputezzzz—sorry. Fell asleep there for a minute.

The Force wasn't exactly with this film—or the next one, or the next—but that didn't stop nerds from lining up for weeks and paying Super Bowl prices for first-night tickets. The original three movies had come out a long time ago, in a decade far, far away, and a new generation of Jedi had been born in a world that had never not known
Star Wars
. These weren't the droids we were looking for, but we didn't know that going in.

I
f
an asteroid ever crashed into the woods behind your house and dripped a strange glowing fluid that turned all your farm animals into vampiric cannibals, yeah, it'd probably look a lot like Surge soda. Was it green? Was it yellow? Surge was a mix of the
two, maybe the color you'd get if you soaked a highlighter in a glass full of lime Jell-O.

Coke brought Surge to the U.S. in 1997, supposedly as a competitor for Pepsi's Mountain Dew. Citrusy and tangy, the mega-caffeinated drink was a hit with kids, but sales quickly fell off. Ads tried to push it as an extreme-sports beverage, a kind of pre–Red Bull energy drink. But the Surge slowed to a trickle and in the early 2000s vanished from store shelves.

In one of the 1990s' weirdest commercials, urban kids line up a bunch of couches in the street, then leap over them to get to a bottle of Surge. If you sensibly asked why they didn't just run around the couches, you were obviously not Surge's target market.

W
hile
kids of the '90s were jumpin', jivin', and wailin' like swing dancing was their very own invention, their grandparents were shaking their heads and cautioning the whippersnappers to take care of their hips. Been there, danced that.

Still, the craze was new to us, and swept across the decade like a zoot-suited tidal wave, resurrected from the '30s and '40s by modern groups with names like drinks (Squirrel Nut Zippers! Cherry Poppin' Daddies!). The 1998 Gap commercial featuring ultra-enthusiastic khaki-clad dancers flipping each other around to Louis Prima's “Jump, Jive an' Wail” was hugely responsible (or to blame, depending on your point of view) for the revival. The other culprit?
Swingers
, the 1996 flick that celebrated the loungy, cocktail-fueled lifestyle of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, whose metabolisms at the time allowed them to eat whatever they wanted without fear of getting doughy.

They were so money, and they didn't even know it. And so was swing dancing—until it faded away again into just another wing-tipped, Lindy-Hopped, wide-tied memory. It's scheduled for another return in 2052.

B
eginning
in the 1980s, television networks started to attach nicknames to especially powerful parts of their schedule. NBC made the biggest splash with its Thursday-night Must-See TV, but it was Nickelodeon's SNICK and ABC's TGIF that are remembered most fondly by children of the 1990s.

SNICK stood for “Saturday Night Nickelodeon,” and for kids too young to go out on dates but too old to go to bed early, it was a slice of basic-cable heaven. SNICK offerings included such treats as
Ren and Stimpy
,
Clarissa Explains It All
,
All That
,
Rugrats
, and more. The block even had a mascot—the big orange couch.

Everyone knew TGIF as short for “Thank God It's Friday,” but ABC claimed that the initials for its Friday-night programming stood for “Thank Goodness It's Funny.” And it usually was, with shows like
Family Matters
,
Step by Step
, and
Boy Meets World
starting off your weekend with laughs.

But on TV, nothing's funny forever. As the shows declined in popularity, and the age group raised on them started to drive and go out on weekends, the programming blocks fell away. But everything old is new again. Nickelodeon started highlighting its old 1990s shows again in 2011 under the name The '90s Are All That. They really were, weren't they?

W
hy
did we ever let a dog advise us on fast-food choices? Dogs are hardly connoisseurs of Mexican cuisine. Dogs will eat their own vomit. But in the 1990s, Gidget the Taco Bell Chihuahua sashayed her way to commercial stardom.

The wide-eyed little purse dog was female, yet it was supposed to represent the chain's prime customer, a smart-alecky, sometimes bratty teen male. In true teenage boy form, it tried to trap Godzilla, mimicked Che Guevara, and broke into people's apartments, all in search of its spicy quick fix.

Most notably, of course, it never failed to deliver the accented slogan, “
Yo quiero
Taco Bell.” If you watched TV in the 1990s, this may have been the only Spanish you knew.

I
n
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.

R
emember
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.

F
irst
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?