The responses are people who sound suspiciously like trust fund kids failing to comprehend inflation. Yes, candy used to cost pennies kids, but pennies were worth a lot more, and you got paid a lot less.
It’s not the numbers, it’s that Dream of the 90s that Portland still offered in the early 2010s – a survivable (outside the black “inner city”) economy with not-meaningful work that left manual-labor weirdos and college grads who could use a mouse with an opportunity to dabble and draw reward from “alternative” scenes where everyone was aligned with you against the world beyond
And in the course of this you’d do normal life event stuff like meet friends and mates, form households and careers anyway, only with better opportunities than you could get outside this world
The fact that in the later 90s antiwar.org and Justin Raimondo were ultimately a paleocon entryist op to the “let’s listen to RATM and make paiper-mache protest floats” scene is retrospectively elegiac but hilarious
people don’t remember that in the late ‘90s Salon still had a hardon for child liberation and occasionally ran series on how PINS – “person in need of supervision”, the idiom by which judges were still putting slutty girl-teens under formal control – was bullshit
Or about how there was still a network of on- and offshore schools you could have your kids professionally kidnapped and sent to to treat them being incorrigible or queer – this was kinda what But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) was about
What’s really sad about the furor over Lola Bunny being redesigned for Space Jam 2 isthatshe was literally just there to be “sexy”, and given basketball skills in a shallow attempt to mask it as “girl power”. That’s all she’s remembered for, and if you take that away, there’s not much else to her in the original film.
Subsequently, the way you see a lot of guys talk about her redesign, it’s pretty clear that being “hot” is the only worth she had to them, to the point where the character means so little to them that she might as well not even be there.
Like, heaven forbid she be a character, and not just a stack of meat. If you’re really that upset that they flattened a cartoon rabbit’s chest, I really just don’t even know what to think about you.
I assumed Lola Bunny had basketball skills for the same reason any other Loony Toons character did, namely that the entire premise of the movie is “what if Loony Toons cartoon characters had basketball skills and played basketball with Michael Jordan”.
I mean if you’re thinking about the role of “a NOT actively sexualized girl Bugs equivalent from the 90s” the obvious point of comparison is Babs Bunny
They got the character better as Dot Warner, though
I get that even knowing what Fugazi is already marks you as a bit of an effete upper-middle-class hipster, but what makes this guy think working class normies know anything about Broadway theater either? Rent?! Ffs.
Like, Nirvana, Tupac, Green Day, Eminem, Britney Spears, the Matrix, Fight Club, Clueless. Weird Al Yankovic, for crying out loud!
Name literally any popular movie or chart-topping musician from the 90s, it’s probably more influential than either Rent or Fugazi.
Smashing Pumpkins was really more of an ultimate playing-out of effects pedal-driven rock than an inspiration, but like, as far as avant-normie goes, they appeared on The Simpsons, had a Batman soundtrack song, and you were expected to recognize the title of the 5 CD B-sides collection off their big double album
Thought the reputed fall-off in quality was overrated but at this distance I actually remember the character arc of Clerks – Dante has a dead-end life but has an earnestly caring girlfriend promoting his self-improvement… into what, the normie morons who populate his store as customers and remember her from high school as an orgasm dispenser?
Whereas Mallrats, uh, his girlfriend’s pissed he plays NHL on Genesis instead of making an effort so he… goes to the mall… then goes to the dirt mall… then Silent Bob Batmans in to expose Ben Affleck fucking a high schooler? I have no memory what the lesson was, what wisdom Silent Bob, Stan Lee OR the topless fortune teller passed on
Also from Clerks, Dante the iconic loser has
his own place
a job
a car
a girlfriend
work friends
a crew of guys to play hockey games with
Just saying
Uhh from Mallrats a lot of the good guy/bad guy gradient comes from Ben Affleck being into painal. If in that elevator scene he’s like “yeah, I keep up a good appearance, and then I find girls who’ve been disappointed by their men, and then, I stick my penis in their vaginas”? Like yeah dude, that’s heterosexuality, “being better than the other guy” is the move by which the protagonist wins here
Realizing a lot of the one-off stuff in turn-of-the-90s upper elementary school was preparing me for pre-computerized business presentations
Like, not just the stuff explicitly framed like that, but the projects made into trifold boards, making our own overheads, hell slide sets, I remember at one point I was to think up some urban planning design and model it out in miniature with paper-wrapped-matchbox buildings to talk about
realizing that my Sunday thing of going to play MTG and then L5R at the local comic shop and read things off the shelves while I waited for an opponent in the mid-90s has left me with not only a pretty good understanding of Vertigo comics but, courtesy of White Dwarf, a weirdly deep knowledge of painting techniques on complex surfaces
Thinking about Old Navy in the ‘90s, as the last attempt I can remember to build a mass brand.
Which, ironically, should have been a warning about the impending collapse of the mall, because that would have been department store territory a generation earlier.
Department stores got big by gathering a complete selection of consumer goods under one roof, then served as the “anchors” that allowed the mall form of non-urban retail, which was replicable enough to allow national chains, then with '90s-level supply chains (computerized tracking and third-world production) they could poach consumer staples from the department anchors
Also the fun, flip, later 90s suburban cool branding was exactly the angle non-mall big box stores were pitching themselves – you can get the benefits of Wal-Mart without the non-cosmopolitan stigma now! You can pronounce it “Tar-JHAY”!
eWorld! The Apple-specific mid-90s Prodigy-alike (before AOL was even hegemonic)! We tried this for like a month free with our Performa 6115 back in the Gil Amelio years when Mac modems were called “Global Village” and how ‘90s was that
still remember how Shirley Manson shat in that exs’ corn flakes, still remember how she finished school at 14 and went to work as a shopgirl whose boss would fuck her in the back room like anyone in Scotland
‘Cause life is a game that no one wins. but you deserve a head start the way your life’s goin’. So throw in the towel, ‘cause your life ain’t shit. No, take that towel and hang yourself with it.
Life’s short and hard like a body-building elf, So save the planet and kill yourself. If you’re feeling down-and-out with what your life’s all about, Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
“Life’s short and hard like a body-building elf,“ is a good line
Thinking about Jewishness in 90s popular culture as like, marked, but distinctly not a separate culture, with fluidity at the margins
Phoebe assuming Chandler is Jewish cause of his self-deprecating humor, George Costanza’s parents being white-ethnic gentiles in the most nominal way, with Festivus as a Freudian-Jewish festival about casting off the burden of civilization and freeing the grievance-filled Id to establish hierarchy by feats of strength.
Friends’ Rachel and Clueless’ Cher Horowitz’s specificity as Jewish-American Princesses being missible (the nose job stuff just landing as a tease about ‘90s plastic surgery fads) and being received as icons of well-off young womanhood generally
The Beastie Boys no less than Madonna as white-ethnic New Yorkers who kept up with the streets as the vibe shaded browner. Adam Sandler as avatar of all suburban goobers. Howard Stern as honestly a decade-older same thing.
Overall an adoption of the Woody Allen version of the American Jewish narrative – Brooklyn tenements, the Dodgers, Coney Island, psychoanalysis, comedy, the Catskills circuit, magazines, radio, TV, movies, all sorts of interesting neuroses and intellectual arguments along the way.
(In retrospect I notice that even keeping to 20th century America this was totally burying longstanding leftist tradition, but that’s the 90s for you)
Thinking about Kris Kross, and where we were in 1991 that “tough black rappers are the new thing, that’s how we should package our next novelty act for schoolkids” made sense
Thinking about how counter to the then-current French-influenced stereotype, it was Mallrats, where Kevin Smith moved on from black & white independent filmmaking, that had the gratuitous tits
