Wonderful World of the 90s 2

Part 2 to my 90s childhood

The Wonderful World of the 90s STRIKES BACK!

Thank you for all the great comments on my last article. Here is another chapter to my life in the 90s.
Enjoy.

Micro Machines

These tiny cars were fun. You could buy a bunch of unique sets for them. I also remember that Nintendo came out with video games based on these microscopic cars. Believe it or not, those games were really fun to play.

Colored Camo

Growing up in South Florida, another fad appeared. Colored Camo became extremely popular. I dont know if it was just Florida, but colored camo sold like hotcakes. The most popular color seemed to bee the baby blue camo. Baby blue seemed to be very popular back in the 90s.

LA Lights

Shoes that light up? What a strange concept to comprehend as a child. But a gnarly pair of shoes to wear at night. Only downfall was playing manhunt with these on.

Crash Dummies

Their commercials may have been popular in the 80s, but they lived on with kids during the 90s. Crash dummy toys and video games hit the shelves and kids were hooked. Making a dummy break into different pieces was pure entertainment.

2-XL

This guy was probably the worst toy I ever had. My grandmother bought him for me. I thought it looked cool when I opened the gift wrap. I soon discovered just because it looked like a robot version of Teddy Ruxpin didnt mean it was. This little thing was a teacher disguised as a robot. You can just tell by the way he stands with his arms to his side. Thats a teacher stance, not a robot stance!

101 Dalmatians

Dalmatians were one of the most popular dogs in the 90s. I never knew what a pit-bull was or what a Rottweiler was. I only knew the 3 main dogs of 90s, which were the popular Chihuahua (Taco Bell), Golden Retriever (Air Bud), and the most popular Dalmatians (101 Dalmatians). I loved the animated movie. I really thought I was part Dalmatian because of my freckles. My favorite was Lucky because he seemed like a leader to me. The live action movie was made in the 90s along with the animated series. Toys were made and they too became very popular. The 101 Dalmatians McDonald toys were also extremely popular back then.

Laser Tag

Laser Tag was the best tag to play in the 90s. It was even better than freeze tag. We used to go on field trips to skating rinks, arcades, and a place called Boomers. These places had the huge dark room where you would spend 10-15 minutes playing laser tag. A lot of laser tag toys were made in the 90s but they couldnt compare to the experience you had during those field trips.

Talking Badass Animals

Something about talking badass animals made them very popular in the 90s. After the talking Ninja Turtles, we were given such legends as the Street Sharks and Biker Mice from Mars. Do I remember what these shows were about, NO! I only remember how badass the characters were.

Muzzy

This commercial was played all throughout the 90s. Did anyone ever order this? I never had it and neither did my friends. Why the hell was it played on TV so much? Screw you Muzzy.

Mr. Bucket

Apparently this guy loves to spit out balls. Was a fun game for its time.

Jim Carrey

Jim made the 90s funny. Movies like Dumb & Dumber, The Mask, Ace Ventura, Batman Forever, Liar Liar paved the way for a lot of comedians. Every kid knew who Jim Carrey was.

Zoobooks

Along with Muzzy, this was another commercial I remember watching a lot. I still see it from time to time, but not as much. My question is, do they ever update these things or are they still selling the same ones?

Mighty Max

The boy version of Polly Pocket. Funny story. I was playing with my Mighty Max at the kitchen table. I was annoying my sister with Max and she grabbed him and threw him on the ground near my dog while he was eating. I couldnt find Max so I was sure he was swallowed by my dog. I was so upset and my mom punished my sister by making her look for Max in the dog poop (she wore gloves) the following week. No luck. `Then I was feeding my dog one day and Max was behind his dog bowl. I never told anyone I found him.

One Saturday Morning

Best Saturday morning line-up. I miss it.

Koosh Balls

Koosh balls were so fun back in the day. Do these still exist?

Girl Power

I grew up with 2 sisters so I am familiar with the toys and fashion they grew up with. This next section is for the girls of the 90s.

Mall Madness

I used to play this game with my sisters. Believe it or not, it was fun. You move around a mall and try to buy stuff.

Sky Dancers

These were pretty cool. My sisters had a ton of these. When my friends and I got our hands on them we would see who can go the highest and when that got bored we would shoot each other with them.

Curly Shoelaces

These were very popular with girls during the 90s. Girls didnt have to tie their shoes anymore. It was a great concept.

Butterfly Hair Clips

My sisters had to have these when they came out. These butterfly hair clips were very popular for some time in the 90s.

Boy and Girl Bands

Boy and girl bands were the obsession of all the girls in the 90s. Girls went crazy for their cds, concert tickets, clothes, dolls, etc. The Backstreet Boys, N Sync, and Spice Girls were the top 3 most popular of the genre during the 90s.

Sanrio

A lot of girls, including my sisters, loved Sanrio. I remember having to wait for them to shop there at the mall. All I wanted to do was look at video games. My sisters probably spent more money in Sanrio than I ever did at a game store.

Dream Phone

Dream Phone was another game my sisters owned. This was one game I stayed away from. Calling guys and waiting for them to ask you out was not a priority for me.

Dear Diary

I hated this thing. My sisters would write in these things and they were hard to access. I had to figure out a password. The old school diaries were much easier because that lock was the easiest thing to pick. I will never know what they said about me!

Some Technology of the 90s

Technology played a major role in the 90s. This is dedicated to the technology lovers out there.

Beeper

If you were important you had one of these. My stepdad used to wear one and I thought he was so professional. Little did I know that AC repair wasnt that professional. My mom got me a beeper during the late 90s. With a beeper on my side she didnt have to scream across the neighborhood to find me.

The Nokia Cell Phone

Nokia was the most popular cell phone in the 90s. Everyone that had a cell phone had a Nokia. There were no iPhones, Sidekicks, or Blackberrys. No one compared cell phones and bragged about how expensive their phone was because if you had a phone you had those bragging rights.

Snake

Speaking of Nokias, the one game Nokia had became a very popular one. Snake was the coolest game to have on a cell phone.

Windows 95

This operating system was legendary. No more Windows 3.1. We were able to surf the internet and play cooler games and use floppy disks.

Floppy Disk

The floppy disk was the 90s version of todays flash drive. Anything could fit on a floppy back then. Can you imagine how many floppys it would take to hold a DVD.

America Online

100 FREE HOURS! OMG thats like forever. It seemed like everyone you knew had an AOL account back in the 90s. When you asked someone for their email it usually ended with AOL.com, now its mostly yahoo.com. The internet was so cool! You could play games and talk to friends. You didnt have to spend your time at the library to do school research. Everything was possible at home. 56K dial-up was so fast because there was nothing to compare it to. YOUVE GOT MAIL!

Chat Rooms

Back in the 90s chat rooms were extremely popular. People would sit for hours in cyber conversation. The most common chat room line was A/S/L?

The Black Box (V Chip)

Black boxes were used in the 90s to descramble pay channels. If you wanted to watch Pay Per View or HBO for free, you needed a black box. I remember I was watching tv and scrolled by the Playboy channel. That black box became my best friend.

CD Players

Before iPods and Zunes we had CD Players. These SUCKED! Try to carry one of the things around in your pocket, almost impossible. CD Players loved to skip so I decided my cassette player was a lot better. Thank god for MP3 players.

Napster

Napster was free in the 90s. Downloading a song took about 20 minutes but it was so worth it. I was shocked when I learned I could get music for free. Napster refurbished pirating in the 90s!

CD Burner

OMG now we can burn our MUSIC?! CD burners were introduced in the 90s. My brothers girlfriend was talking about burning a CD. I didnt understand what she was talking about. I couldnt comprehend the concept. I thought she literally melted a CD on to another one. CD Burners were defiantly revolutionary.

I hope you this article kept you guys entertained. Again, there is a lot more where this came from. Should there be a part 3? If you guys have any ideas, concepts, dislikes, or something you want me to add, LET ME KNOW! I enjoy the feedback. Thanks

-Dustin

Comments

The nostalgia these articles bring on make me feel sad

I guess because I miss the good old days!..

I remember Street Sharks - I had the toys..i remember throwing the brown one up in the air at school and his arm broke off

and biker mice from mars - I used to hire the SNES game all the time.
And Mighty Max - I'd all but forgotten about that until this article...oh the memories

Talking bad ass animals. YOU FORGOT THE MIGHTY DUCKS CARTOON SHOW!!!!! And i dont know about you but i thought Baloo from talespin was the man. And i dont know if you consider them animals, but the gargoyles were the most badass things ever. period.

I miss Windows 95.

I pretty much liked the same things your sister did. I used to wear my butterfly clips all the time.

holy shit! i remember a friend of mine [that was a girl mind you] had that mighty max playset. thanks for that, now i can go tell me mom about the toy i kept tellin her about for years and years... and skydancers were fun, cuz i LOVED flying them onto the roof...

always had my dad gettin me a new one.

I remember hearing they made a boys version of Sky Dancers called DragonFlyz or something like that. Then they got pulled off the market because too many kids were getting hit in the face with `em.

Ohhh....the beeper!
I used to have one of those. I completely forgot about it to be honest!
I believe I may still have it.
By the way, the dear diary thingamajig looks almost like my current cell phone!
Except the fact of it being pink, of course.

Nice article! I remember Jim Carey from "In Living Color" J. Lo was a Fly Girl!

Omgosh where do I begin?! Thank you very much for this article! I remember just about everything on here as well. Like the Micro machines, LA Lights, Mr. Bucket, Dear Diary(I used to have one when I was a teenager, parents bought it for me for Christmas, I can not believe I still remember to this day!!!), NSYNC was favorite boy band (Omgosh, why did they ever break up!), I think I had a sky dancer as well, I miss the Saturday morning cartoons(my favorite was Doug, Mickey Mouse and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), haha Koosh balls are still out I think, I remember playing Dream Phone with my cousin and Mall Madness as well and my cousin had the 2XL which was so freaking awesome!! =) Thanks again for bringing us back to the 90's!!!

Lol... More awesome memories! I haven't thought about some of that stuff in ages! And, yes, koosh balls still exist. I got one for my birthday a few years back.

Oh, good god. I remember those Muzzy ads. It wasn't until I was a teenager and learned some French that I knew the phony little girl in the ad says "je suis la jeune fille." Literally, "I am the little girl." And then that old lady would come on screen and be like, "Yes, that's FRENCH they're speaking, and these children aren't AREN'T French, they're American!" And what's worse, we actually had to watch one of the videos in class. I didn't learn squat from it. The series sucks.

Would have preferred this article broken into two parts with more information on each item. But '90s were my time so you get a thumbs up.

Awesome article. I remember a lot of this stuff. I used to wear light-up shoes and curly shoelaces in 2nd grade. Also, my dad used to work for AOL. He worked in an office with a lot of empty cubicles, so my sister and I would run around in there, competing to see who could find the most AOL discs, haha

Holy shit, I totally forgot about Street Sharks! Thanks bro!

You've done it again! Great article, and by all means go for part three!

And for twinkiethekid, there is no need to feel sorry for us. I can assure you us 90's kids had a fantastic childhood.

I have to concur with twinkiethekid, as awesome as the 90's were for me, the 80's were something very special. This is a great look at the 90's though, I remember Windows 95 very well.

Thank God I grew up in the 80s, and missed most of this crap. You 90s kids got screwed. The toys were shitloads better in the 80s.

Thumbs up for the effort, though. It's not your fault that your parents waited too long to have you!

Oh look, no sooner than I demanded a part two on the other article, here it is (yes, passed right over it en route to part one). Anyway, another great look back to the cool stuff from my childhood/teenagehood. Part three? Could you possibly squeeze any more nostalgia out of the 90's? Could ya, hah?

Amazing read overall, Dustin- that best describes _my_ 90's youth!

I recall having some of what you mentioned, like Windows 95, Yak Bak, Muzzy, Zoobooks, Pogs and Moon Shoes.

Really good article, thumbs up. I'm a child of the 70's-80's and some of this stuff (and some things from the first article too) actually originated before the 90's. Micro Machines and Laser Tag, to name two (though they didn't have the dedicated Laser Tag play parks that I recall). My French teacher used to bring in Muzzy videos for us to watch on occasion. (By the way, what the girl is saying is "Je suis le jeune fille," if memory serves. It means, "I am the young girl."

Also, the Black Box is not the V chip. V chip is to help parents control what their television shows. Black boxes (a friend had one) were to illegally de-scramble cable signals.

These are great articles!

I don't know about any of you, but Crazy Bones were insanely popular during the 90's where I lived. Throw them in your next article if you can.

Crash test dummies and 2-XL teacher stance, nice.

I rember windows 95 me and my best friend would surf the internet for hours and hours until we couldn't do it no more we also played the games that came with windows 95, and Napster I downloaded about 20 songs from that service, And AOL I rember and chat rooms to my friends and me would talk to each other in chat rooms.

A fine list, my good man. Here's my thoughts:
Micro Machines; My favorite were the movie inspired ones, especially the Back To the Future II series, I think they lit up.
Muzzy: I remember one of the French lines the kids supposedly learned on the commercial sounded like: "Diz Wi Laz Zoo Vee".
CD Players: My 10 year old Sony Discman is the height of my current portable music technology. Regarding skipping, I remember when I first bought it I didn't know what the anti-skip button did and when it wouldn't play I took it back to Circuit City where the clerk gently informed me that I was a moron.

crash test dummies! i loved those little guys

Yes! Make a part 3! Also, on burning CDs, one time I overheard my cousin talking to my mom about "burning CDs". I thought he meant putting them in the fire until melting them. Finally, I asked him what it meant one day and he told me. It meant using a laser to record them.

lets see. you could add music (like weird al, nirvana, biggie and 2pac, counting crows, etc.)

definitely do another
haha my grandma still hand one of those old nokias sitting in a kitchen drawer last time i checked

The Yellow Nokia Brick, teh 'familie's" first cell phone. God it was big enough to kill a deer.

great article you should make a 3rd, i had that bucket toy when i was a kid and i remember a lot of those toys.

DUDE!! You are a 90's God! Haha I had that 2-XL robot..he had the most annoying voice..a transgender sounding robot. idk he was creepy. As a girl of the 90's, I appreciate your section for us! You were spot on- butterfly clips, mall madness, sanrio, all of it! I miss Koosh balls..I cant ever find them anymore. My friends and I would go into AOL chatrooms when our parents were gone and lie about our "a/s/l" and have extremely inappropriate convos with God-knows-who (it was Ohio, we were bored.) GREAT second article, though. Definitely do a part 3...you can start doing different themes, like commercials you remember? Or one dedicated to our awesome 90's food. Clothes? Endless possibilites!

Haha "56K was so fast!".xD I remember that and those light up shoes...oh my goodness I had like 3 pairs of those. Last time I remember people carrying CD players around was 2000.

Great article! I've been trying to get hold of some crash dummies figures for ages. Had Junkman, Chip & Dent when I was younger and remember how cool they were. Hours of fun smashing and swapping parts!!!

a lot of these items were mentioned in my "retro alphabet trilogy". glad your editing improved.

haha muzzy... that commercial was ALWAYS ON! I hated it, stupid green whatever the hell he was.

Crash Dummies rock! I remember Muzzy. Never had it either. Collected Mighty Max, was a fan of Jim Carrey (still am), 2-XL I have but never played with too often, and I remember the whole Napster thing. Who wouldn't. Awesome job dude.

Great article! I had a lot of friends that were girls when I was a kid, and I played Mall Madness with them. It's not girly to practice Capitalism!

I had the 2-XL with a Jurassic Park tape. I also had the Lazer Tag, though the version I had was Photon.

Another great article. Keep it up dude!

Thanks guys, Part 3 is on the way just adding to it and it should be a little bigger (sorry Velcro) since its the last of the trilogy. =] Stay tuned and thank you so much for the feedback!

Lots of good stuff. Almost too much, actually.

oh wow....mr. bucket, AHAHA, totally slipped from my mind. dont they still show muzzy now? i swear ive seen it somewhere..

Fantastic fantastic fantastic. I had the incredible crash dummy car and i actually crashed it so hard that it really broke and was not fixable . lol oops.

You definately should have written all the episodes to "I Love the 90's"!

Please write a Part 3!

OMG, This guy is the boss. hahah LA lights were sick, what kid didn't own a pair of light up shoes

Ahh, another awesome article. The only other thing that would get me closer to the '90s than this article would be a DeLorean time machine. The Windows 95 and floppy disk part really took me back to my first computer, a '95 Packard Bell. Remember when we'd always get ticked off when America Online would screw up and knock us off the web?

Yes, please write a Part 3. You know how to write articles the right way.

Good article.

CD Players didn't suck. It was awesome to have a portable player in those days, even if it did skip (it wasn't really about walking around with it as it was just being able to take it with you someplace).

They were improved upon before the advent of MP3 players with anti-skip technology. Plenty of people carried them around.

OMG so many things i remember! Lol they STILL play that old Zoobooks commercial XD And my dad had Napster I was about 3, so I had no idea what it was but I was like, "wow you can get Animaniacs songs off the computer?? COOL!"