The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade (6 page)

B
efore
the sparkly vampires of
Twilight
and the studly naked ones of HBO's
True Blood
, the most fashionable fanged folk were the craggy-faced undead who fed on the denizens of Sunnydale.
Luckily, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was there to turn them to dust—while skewering 'em with sharper-than-a-stake one-liners.

Five years after the terrible 1992 movie, creator Joss Whedon got it oh so right and constructed a television world full of demons and heroes, filled with both sweeping themes and teeny-tiny moments. Buffy, watcher Giles, witch-in-training Willow, regular guy Xander, popular girl Cordelia, demon Anya, werewolf Oz, and hey-where'd-you-come-from? sister Dawn, not to mention (sometimes) reformed vamps Angel and Spike, saved the world. A lot. And all while Buffy maneuvered through universal high school woes like homework and finding a date that wouldn't try to drag her into the Hellmouth.

A little like Buffy herself, the UPN/WB show looked harmless and frivolous on its surface but it had a smart, deep soul. It was always surprising: The nearly silent episode spoke volumes. The musical episode sparked a decade of me-too singing-and-dancing episodes from other shows (really,
Grey's Anatomy
, really?). And the heartbreaking episode where Buffy's mother suddenly died—not at the hands of a demon, but from an aneurysm—was as powerful as anything on TV. Ever. No wonder
Buffy
made
Time
magazine's list of the one hundred best TV shows of all time. It was bloody good.

H
ow
did bungee jumping ever get popular? Shouldn't we be paying people big money to help us
not
fall off a scarily high surface? Still, this sport/suicide method became a weekend activity to rival horseback riding or roller skating for some '90s daredevils.

Why did people throw themselves off a high bridge with just a rubbery cord attached to their foot? For the same flood of adrenaline that made some people skydive or parasail, or drive into downtown Chicago at rush hour. Those of us who'd rather tease rabid wolverines than bungee had our beliefs reinforced by watching the nightly news, which gleefully covered the trend whenever somebody misjudged and head met pavement.

By the 2000s, bungee jumping was a regular component of shows like
The Amazing Race
or
Fear Factor
. It also became a thrill ride at state fairs, because after stuffing down a corn dog, chocolate malt, cheese curds, and some deep-fried pickles, the best thing for your already-roiling stomach was a barf-inducing leap from a high distance. You knew you'd see those pickles again anyway, didn't you?

T
hey
looked like Dad's fishing tackle box, except Fleet Farm didn't sell tackle boxes in hot pink with aqua and lavender accents. Caboodles were makeup cases for girls who really weren't old enough to wear makeup. So your three-level Caboodle might hold four Chapsticks, one Great Lash mascara on the verge of drying out, some Avon perfume samples from the next-door neighbor's garage sale, totally stylin' ribbon barrettes, and Mom's shocking turquoise eye shadow that would have been a favorite of Mimi from
The Drew Carey Show
.

Of course you had to haul your Caboodle to your best friend's house for a sleepover, and she'd bring hers out too. You'd swap products and organize as if you were surgeons preparing tools for a
heart transplant, not middle schoolers who weren't allowed to wear makeup to school anyway. Like Barbie's pink Corvette, Caboodles were less about who you were and more about the image of who you might someday become. They were plastic pastel dream academies with removable segments.

B
efore
the crazy phone innovations of the 1990s, the telephone's role was simple and straightforward. You dialed. It rang. Or it rang, you picked up.

But then came caller ID, which identified who was calling before you even answered, and then the last-call-return function known as star-69. It was like we were living with the Jetsons. Oh my God, it's
him
calling! Or maybe, Ewww, it's him calling. With caller ID, the caller's name and number were right there glowing at you. Still mad at your lab partner? Ignore her call with your head held high! Don't want to go bring the phone to your brother just so he can yack with his baseball buddy? Strike three for him—don't answer that call!

Using star-69 to identify a missed call was great when you came racing into the house just as that final ring was dying away, but it did put a bit of a damper on every girl's favorite hobby of calling your crush repeatedly just to panic and hang up.

We'd barely become accustomed to phone calls losing their anonymity when cell phones made these innovations obsolete. Now your smart phone automatically pops up the number, and often the name, of whoever's calling you, and we don't give it a second thought. Sure, you can avoid solicitors and nagging relatives, but an element of mystery got lost along the way.

T
here
had been mischievous kids in the comics before (
Dennis the Menace
,
Family Circus
). There'd also been anthropomorphic animals (Snoopy, Garfield). But never was there a combination like the little boy and stuffed tiger of
Calvin and Hobbes
, which ran from 1985 to 1995.

Calvin was an unstoppable little force of nature in a striped shirt, and with Hobbes by his side, he could do anything. He built
terrifying snowmen, including a batch that were vomiting in protest of his mom's eggplant casserole. He invented Calvinball, a random prop-filled game with ever-changing rules and final scores such as “Q to 12.” He tormented his parents, teachers, and babysitters, and formed GROSS—the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club—to agonize little Susie Derkins.

Calvin was driven by an axis of little-boy chutzpah and an imagination that knew no bounds. A cardboard box became a Transmogrifier, turning him into a mini version of Hobbes. A game of doctor ended in a fight when Susie resists Dr. Calvin's prescription of a lobotomy for her minor foot injury. When crabby teacher Miss Wormwood asked Calvin what state he lives in, he happily replied, “Denial,” and there was really no reason to argue with that.

There was a purity to
Calvin and Hobbes
that few other comic strips ever found. Artist Bill Watterson resisted licensing his creation, not that this prevented every car enthusiast on the planet from snatching up a bootleg bumper sticker of Calvin peeing on the logo of a competitor. But when Watterson closed the door on Calvin's world in 1995, he went out as far up on top as a comic strip could. Off sailed Calvin and Hobbes on their sled, leaving behind a world that felt a little less magical, and a newspaper comics page that never quite recovered.

T
he
music format of one's childhood never lasts. Vinyl albums are now a novelty, 8-tracks a punch line, and CDs are getting their butts kicked digitally by iTunes. But let us stop and say a prayer of thanks for the elegant cassette tape, which for a quarter of a century wrapped its magical magnetic ribbons around our music-loving hearts.

Tapes were smaller and sleeker than 8-tracks, and they fit nicely in the shoeboxes we stacked in closets and under our beds. But the best thing about them was the DIY aspect. You could make your own recordings so easily, whether you were taping the
Rugrats
soundtrack off the TV with your Fisher-Price tape recorder or creating your own monster movie with a hand-scribbled script and a batch of squirmy cousins. And of course, our favorite thing to do with cassettes was to make mix tapes, for ourselves and for friends.

Professional musicians working on multimillion-dollar albums couldn't have fussed more about the order and song choice than we did, sprawled in our bedroom with a blank see-through TDK tape and a double-sided boom box. Would the boy of our dreams make the connection between “Friday I'm in Love” and the fact that we had identical class schedules on Fridays? Was “Kiss from a Rose” too forward, “Wonderwall” too subtle? Would the ex-boyfriend we pined for pick up the hint we were dropping with “Your Wildest Dreams”? When the music plays, would he hear the sound he had to follow?

Cassettes had their problems. We grew to be experts at rewinding a tangled tape by sticking a ballpoint pen or a pencil in one of the reel holes. Like the romances they helped us nurture, tapes had
short lifespans, always seeming to break at the worst possible moment. But as the 1990s ended and CDs rolled in, it was hard not to hold on to those cassette-crammed shoeboxes much longer than we should have. We just weren't ready to hit eject on our musical memories.

W
as
there some sort of terrible-movie-loving genie granting wishes to athletes, wrestlers, and rappers in the '90s? How else do you explain that fact that nearly every nonacting celebrity was given a chance to nonact in his own movie?

Someone thought it was a good plan to cast jock Brian Bosworth as a cop who played by his own rules in 1991's
Stone Cold
. The
Washington Post
said it perfectly: “Carl Weathers and Dolph Lundgren are both Shakespearean actors compared with Bosworth.” Singer Vanilla Ice eyeballed that incredibly low cinematic bar and sailed right underneath it as a motorcycle-riding rapper
who played by his own rules in
Cool as Ice
. Stop, collaborate, and listen: Whoever's idea that was, you're fired.