Amusingly a game designer high-profile associated with the “Legend of the Five Rings” Japonisme CCG and TTRPG I was into in the 90s was named “John Wick”, so my overall impression of the franchise at this point is as if Indiana Jones had been coincidentally named Richard Garfield
Felt very 90s at points. Whaling Bad. Waterworld 9000. Can't think of a particular, contemporary oceanic documentary that was significant on the scale of Blue Planet, but the movie felt very indulgent on that past the first act.
Waterworld’s the only movie I’ve seen in theaters twice. Once on debut night, once at a drive-in on a double bill with The Phantom (1996)
The only reason I haven’t put together a “favourite pre-2000 Internet meme” poll to complement all those “favourite 2000s Internet meme” ones is that nobody actually remembers when the 1990s ended and I know for a fact that the notes would just be a solid wall of people going “dude, you forgot X” and me replying “bro, X is from 2005”.
If you DO eventually do one, the dancing baby better be on there! That’s the first big internet “thing” I remember as a middle schooler back in the day. I remember having it on my computer and hearing about it on the news, and then it was on ally mcbeal. first “meme” I knew of in my internet life
An incomplete list of Internet memes that are actually from the 1990s:
All Your Base*
Colin Mochrie
Dancing Baby
Evil Bert
Hampster Dance
Mr. T Ate My Balls
Stick Death
* the phrase itself, but not the the viral text-to-speech video; the latter first appeared in June of 2000
An incomplete list of Internet memes which are popularly cited as 1990s memes which actually debuted in 2000 or later:
Annoying Thing/Crazy Frog (the sound clip of a guy making motor noises with his mouth is borrowed from an earlier meme, but the creature itself was created in 2003)
Chuck Norris Facts (popularised in 2005)
Hatten är din (the song is from 1981; the Swedish flash video that made it a meme is from 2000)
Homestar Runner (though the eponymous character existed as early as 1996, the webtoon series that spawned the associated memes just barely misses the cut, debuting in January of 2000)
O RLY? (though it’s uncertain precisely when the originating image macro was created, the owl photo it’s based on is not known to have been present online before 2001)
Real Ultimate Power (the website went live in 2002)
Tunak Tunak Tun (the song was published in 1998, but it didn’t achieve viral meme status until 2006)
YTMND (Finding Forrester did not exist in the 1990s)
What was your first source of portable music? Walkman? CD player with headphones? MP3 Player? iPod? Phone?
my fucking god these tags aged me 50 years
they’re literally the size of a CD, hen. you can still buy them
presumably anti skip technology has evolved since then and actually reliably works now (if you jolt a cd drive when it’s playing the laser reading it will also jolt around and songs will skip - not useful when walking. anti skip technology is meant to stabilise so it doesn’t happen. very rarely was this actually the fucking case)
you’d carry around a little flip folder of CDs like this in your bag
often containing at least one mixtape cd you burned yourself, or that someone else had made you, with the tracklist written on it in sharpie
common from the late 90s - early/mid 00s when MP3 players and iPods started to take over
Over the last decade have looked back at the whole ‘90s “kids having kids!” freakout, daytime talk and all, how it was kind of framed (condoms in schools!) as if it was about young couples, enabled by a decadently permissive culture, fucking instead of Waiting For Marriage. But it was really about The 70s having worked their way through the culture so thoroughly that teenage working class girls everywhere were getting knocked up by older men.
Some of which might have been fucking them on an American Beauty neighborhood dad or teacher-groomer basis, but a lot of which was really more of a Dazed and Confused thing – blue-collar men graduate high school but don’t leave town and stay in the same automobile/intoxication-based social scene and as they grow older the girls stay the same age.
What’s funny to me is that $3B (for a 5 year contract) isn’t that much in the world of sports. Yes, this is big but it’s not out of line with other sports deals.
Fox got 4 years of the NFC (one of two NFL divisions) for $1.6b in 1993, which was considered significant to firmly establishing itself (first year 1987) as a mature network, although that (and picking up John Madden) were to a degree most significant in terms not of viewership capture but entertainment industry signaling that FOX had committed backing.
So I’m only recently appreciating how much of the ‘80s concept of “the suburbs” was specifically Long Island/the San Fernando Valley/Chicagoland.
The notion was everywhere as the new default location, but the '80s Reagan reenchantment (and then-dawning Boomer nostalgia) also went big on small towns, it was hard for me to say which one my hometown was – it dated to the Colonial era, but people went in every day to Philly jobs (we’d had commuter rail since the early 20th century)
Really we were an exurb, but that term didn’t really break through until the late '90s (and more specifically “favored quarter” only later)
In the '90s “raves” could be a thing, even suburban kids went to them! Like, maybe inner “suburban”, for a lot of us who were otherwise culturally centered “the warehouse district” did not exist as a part of our world at all
I always forget this is an actual song, like a real song someone sang that was on the radio and adored by many, and whenever I hear it, I never recognize it at first, and when the realization hits, it’s like a brick to the face, and I swear this has happened multiple times throughout my life but by god, having it hit when you’re listening to a playlist of sad 90s songs is something else, like instant heartbreak-healing, you can’t be even remotely upset, went from crying to laughing in 59 seconds, and if you don’t recognize the song either, just play it, trust me on this one, and enjoy the brick to the face:
Thinking about how ‘90s culture had to incorporate the rise of the “creative class” as the decade went on. Like, looking at Clerks (1994) today, the construction of “riffing on pop culture” as a dead-end retail thing as vs. college-educated strivers seems weird, though I suppose even then a major theme was Dante’s gf insisting he’s college material
Twenty years later, model Leilani Bishop recreates her iconic Hole “Live Through This” cover, originally shot by the very talented Ellen Von Unwerth in 1993.
