Sometimes you'll come across something that you know used to be just a fact of life but now seems like a remnant from another world. All of the following are 90s facts of life that are no more, officially, for better or worse.
Fuzzy toilets. (Trigger warning! People who were traumatized by Look Who's Talking may need to skip this) Remember how toilets used to be fuzzy? At some point they were all shaved, which was probably for the best, seeing as toilet rugs' only purpose was to get wet and soiled. Especially between me and my brother! Our war on toilets saw no end and many deaths! I mean, what was the point of putting the plush "carpet" on the toilet lid? Just in case you want to be comfortable while you're sitting there getting a splinter taken out or a Bandaid put on? And then how are you supposed to use the shelf in back if it's all fluffed out? At least they could've put the plush carpet on the toilet SEAT... you know, just for comfort, but no. That would've made too much sense. Present status: non-existent.
Satellite-dish chairs? (Or whatever they were called.) How about these sliding, two-piece, kiddie Venus fly traps? So inviting, but when you try to climb in, the whole thing shifts and dumps you out. But if you do succeed at scaling in, holding onto the rim without pinching your fingers as the thing shifts violently beneath your weight, you'll probably end up falling into its pillowy bowl center, never to be seen again. But, at least it was great to be able to trap siblings underneath and then go and sit on top. And then once you were in, this thing was your throne. If you did succeed at getting into it, you're probably still there as you read this. Just stay absolutely still... it can't know you're sitting in it if you don't move! Present status: non-existent.
Fake plants a la mode! As long as they're not real. I enjoy plants. I enjoy the free oxygen. I even had a pet cactus as a kid. It died because I over-watered it. What I don't enjoy about plants? Treating them as though they were living things. I loved the rain forest as a kid, and fake plants were a way to bring the biome... home, although almost exclusively reduced to the "palm tree and fern" variety. Remember the coconut fibers or wood chips they used to be potted in? I must have stole a hundred of them from the doctor's office. Present status: everywhere dead malls can be found... or forever existing in a landfill somewhere. What's the difference anyways. I mean, "you got plants in this building... you pick them because they look good... but these are aggressive living things and they will defend themselves... violently if necessary." --Dr. Ellie Sattler, Paleobotanist
"Entertainment centers" that looked like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Knobs and blinking lights everywhere. I seriously think HAL 9000 was just a JVC VHS sitting on top of a silver stereo. Want to have some 90s kid fun? Press random buttons, and see what happens! I suppose that was the 80-90s equivalent of the Ipad. Want to watch a movie? Well, you gotta get a scientist or tech support to figure it all out, all for the tape to jam, the tracking to be off, or for it to be on the wrong channel anyways. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Besides, the old VCR ports didn't play cookies all that good. Present status: non-existent.
Torch floor lamps, or just... floor lamps in general. Present status: confined to therapy waiting rooms. I would know. Moving on.
Wood-paneled ceiling fans. They were literally in every house. Now they just look scary-looking. They looked like mosquitoes or giant spiders just perched up on the ceiling. They never actually cooled the room down, but they certainly confused people about just what string to pull to get the lights and/or the fan. They made nap time entertaining at my babysitter's place. Present status: quarantined to mobile homes and your aunt's house.
Right now there is a plot to cover up the very existence of indoor wicker furniture. Present status: "never existed, your memories are false! --CIA"
So as many of my fellow dorks are aware, RadioShack is no more. All the rest of you are obviously the reason (where the heck were you?). Yes, while it's true that they are now owned by a random wireless carrier and function as spaces to sell Sprint products, the nostalgic RadioShack of the past is no more. For those who don't know though, RadioShack was like... the number one place to buy capacitors, resistors, dual axis accelerometers, and other thingamagidgets Scotty needed to repair the Enterprise. Trust me. This is a big deal for DIY people. Oh yeah, you could also buy a wide variety of batteries (and have them shipped to your house), antennas, small televisions, remote controls, sound systems, electronic gadgets and assorted do-dads, cameras, short wave radios, 150-in-One kits, and of course, RC TOYS! RadioShack was amazing back in the day and there was no other store quite like it.
Seriously, in the age before plastic touch-screen rectangles ruled the universe, anything "tech toy" usually came on four wheels or two copter blades, and sometimes both. RadioShack was the Disney Land of the local mall to the uber dorks in training, the one place I'd actually beg to be taken to, and I have vivid memories of going in with my folks just to play with all the RC cars they actually let the kids play with. Some of them later mysteriously made their way under a few Christmas trees even (funny how that happens). Now I don't know if it was common practice or not, but I remember almost every toy in the store being "try before you buy." I of course was also very young at the time and maybe my imagination is just acting up, but I remember actually getting a hold on the RC cars and driving them around the store, torturing the customers. I remember being told not to drive them outside the front of the store, although I certainly did try it. In fact, I seem to remember them not being able to be driven outside the store. They had some kind of force-field on the doors or something.
RadioShack indeed had a good run. They started out in the 1920s selling radio equipment. They sent around mail-order catalogs to enthusiasts of the new technology before they began actually manufacturing their own. They set up their first stores to sell their own radio products before they were bought by the Tandy Corporation, and that's when they really took off. People forget that they were one of the major retailers of computers in the 1980's and did a lot through their print advertising in mainstreaming the sale of computers to the average public. People way before my time know them for their TRS-80 computer, which actually came pre-assembled and not in the form of a "kit" (something rare for the time). In the long run, Tandy couldn't compete with IBM and they began restructuring. In the 90s, they shifted more toward retailing consumer electronics. They sold off their computer manufacturing and cut down their product line. Since then they've been trying to compete in the cellular and smartphone market, but obviously not doing so well at it.
I distinctly remember having one of these RadioShack 4x4 Off-Roaders my brother and I probably ended up driving down the stairs one too many times. In any case, it was definitely a truck and it was definitely blue, and definitely had little lights on the top and a strong front grill that probably protected it for at least twenty minutes of slamming into the kitchen chairs.
In the end, it seems even RadioShack knew their glory days were behind them when in 2014 they played up their own nostalgic image in this Superbowl ad where an innocent storefront gets ransacked by an army of 80s pop culture. Noticeable in the backgrounds are the "VCR" and "Boom Box" sections, perpetuating the joke of their retro-ness. Now as a loyal RadioShack consumer through the years (particularly around the holidays) I couldn't be more upset by this twist of fate for this part of my childhood. How will I go on without my "Battery of the Month Club" membership? But as a lifelong dork I am probably more upset about just where I'm going to go for capacitors. Seriously, the LED display went on my stereo and where was I going to go to DIY the thing back to working order? BEST BUY? Hah! In other recent news, the stereo I tried to DIY the display back to working order on is now RIP completely. How poetic.
Nowadays we can take pictures and video with a few taps of the touchscreen, but I remember a time when we actually dreaded making what we used to call "home movies." I remember how dad (usually dad) was always whipping the big-honking thing out every Christmas, birthday, and just any day he felt like being an amateur filmmaker, propping it up on his shoulder and gathering us all together to be the main attraction, whether we wanted to or not. I remember the "squint" in the view-finder, the ever-present JVC or Panasonic logo, the assortment of big glass lenses covered in fingerprints, and (though it may be total anachronism now) I remember a time when you really did see the little white lines and the blinking red "REC" in the corner when you recorded something. This is where it all comes from kids.
At least these days you can delete horrible shots, but there was a time when your dad's film ambitions would be stuck down on celluloid forever, whether they were picture-perfect Kubrickian high cinema (in his dreams) or (more likely) Blair Witch Project-esque shaky-cam clip reel snuff film. How many of us have reams of celluloid devoted to us flipping the bird on vacation, getting pukey-faced after too much ice cream on our birthday, or the ever-popular "sitting on the toilet" voyeurism they used to torture us with? Home movies were always more of an interruption. How annoying was it to have to stop tearing into your presents on Christmas morning to announce "what you got" and "show it to the camera" every five minutes like the camera was a person and gave a damn? In fact, I will go out on a limb and say the camcorder was a weapon of psychological destruction... even if it couldn't have been any worse than what these "Disney World! Nah, just kidding..." Youtube parents do these days. At least our humiliations weren't broadcast for the whole world to see! (Just aunts and uncles, grandparents, and such folk who knew where we lived.) So I guess you could say the camcorder has screwed up two generations of kids, or at least, the people wielding them have. "Daddy did it" indeed.
It was easier said than done anyways. I could never get camcorders to work right. Nobody ever seemed to know if they were actually recording when we thought they were recording, or not recording when we thought they were doing what they were doing when we thought they were recording, or just not recording. If that's confusing, then yeah, that's kind of what it was like. There was always some little "blinking light" hidden somewhere on it that would tell you, nevertheless, I can't tell you how many vacation videos were void of any of the sights and full of hour-long bouncy shots of the interior of the camcorder case. There'd always be that moment after we all got together in front of some landmark, all grinning like a bunch of fools, and dad (usually dad) would go, "Hmm... that's funny... it says the tape is out... I put a new one in two hours ago... just hold still family... got to figure this thing out here..." Better was sitting down later to see your dad's short shorts in a whole new light... for a half an hour.
Not only did I not care very much about making or viewing home movies, I don't know anyone who did. People even used to host parties and invite people over to watch their home movies, embarrassing the hell out of all involved, so I made sure whenever I got the spotlight, I'd make it worth it. I'd usually do things like smooch the camera lens or do a funky dance, just to give the people something. Likewise, my uncle used to play games with it, like turn it upside down randomly so that we were jumping on the ceiling, and my dad used to do "magic tricks" with it when we were little, using jump cuts to make us suddenly "vanish" from a shot. Those were always fun. And I got to say, every time I got to play around with one of these camcorders, getting to prop it up on my shoulders, it never failed to make me feel like an amateur Spielberg. If I had a touchscreen camera as a kid though, I'd probably be an amateur Spielberg by now.
I never owned a Tamagotchi back in the days when kids owned these things as pets. I still don't know exactly what they were supposed to be, coming in those little plastic egg things and blinking around the screen like a little Digimon whathaveyou, but I certainly killed my fair share of them.
The girls used to play with them in school and would often conveniently leave them behind at their desks for mischievous dorks like myself with nothing else better to do but unleash a little mayhem for shits. Something about sabotaging a girl's tamogotchi always felt like sweet payback for something, maybe just for outsmarting us all the time perhaps. Sure, we had the "Talk Boy" and the "Game Boy"... so how dare girls play with their own techno-toys! I mean, think of it as us just picking on something our own mental size! For the record though, I don't think I personally was brave enough, or mean enough, to do the dirty and (moderately) hilarious deed myself, but I do remember at least instigating it, consenting to it, and perhaps aiding and abetting the real perps (my best friend Nick), and getting bitched out for it. Either way I plead the fifth. In my defense, I knew it would be totally worth it.
Now the easiest way to kill a Tamagotchi was to press that button on the back (which would "reset it") and leave it behind for the owner to figure it out a half hour later when the thing wasn't crying for even just thirty sustained seconds. I think we were doing the school a favor, actually, taking these things out. The other way was usually more time exhaustive, but a lot more fun, and involved feeding it like a nervous eater on a roller coaster. Keep pressing feed until it's wallowing in its own waste (and believe me, these guys really are little machines!). It won't take long after that. Then you put it back on the desk or in her drawer where she left it, and wait. Oh, the wait was palpable! And then she doesn't notice a thing until... "Wait a minute, my Tamagotchi is dead!!"
The pure enjoyment of "Hey! You killed my Tamagotchi!" was so brief, but then the chase was on. Hell hath no fury like a Tamagotchi owner scorned, and I don't think I have to tell you whose life they considered more valuable. They weren't just out for blood. Heck, my old friend Nick (wherever he is) probably still can't have kids because of it! (Sorry Nick!) But you know, still worth it. It's ironic too, seeing as the typical Tamagotchi died at least a couple times a day anyways... heck, you could accidentally kill it. Just sit on it for a long time. It's got to suffocate eventually!
Back in the day, and particularly in the 80's, computer animation was actually awesome, because you didn't see it every day. It was a totally new style. And until Toy Story came out in the mid 90s, a lot of that wonderment still captured us whenever we got even momentary glimpses of the wonders these new-fangled computer programs could do.
They used to play computer animation demo shorts in repeat on the big screen televisions at Sears to show off the specs of the TV, and if there were living room setups available, my brother and I would plunk down on the couches and watch this stuff in amazement as our parents did boring adult things like "buy a new washer." The best computer animated short of the whole bunch could only be this one called "Chromosaurus" though. Seriously badass. They had T-Rexes running around, and they were ROBOTS. It couldn't be any more perfect.
Chromosaurus! Listen to that rockin' soundtrack!
Along with this one there were a plethora of other computer animated shorts they'd show on those big screen TVs of yore. Two I definitely remember were "Locomotive" and "Stella and Stanley: Breaking the Ice." This was like Pixar before there was a Pixar as we know it. The humor and eye-popping realism of "Locomotive" had us smiling, and the strange fantasy environment of the love story in "Stanley and Stella" was just totally mystifying, and still is. Watch it.
As far as picture quality, sound quality, and quality in general goes, who could argue VHS is better than DVD, or Blu-ray? Tapes (as we called them) really weren't all we crack them up to be (literally)... they easily tore and crinkled, VCRs thought they were snacks, and every time you played them they lost focus until they became muted, fuzzy, 90's glory. And yet, these black plastic bricks with tape loops in them were still downright cool.
Remember the problems? Bits of static might show up on the top and bottom of the screen, or the picture might double-up, or change weird colors, or flip like a cartoon book. Sometimes there'd be total stoppages of film or jams which would cause the television to go into black-out "damage control" and run its white or green letters across the top, reading "STOP.... PLAY..." in a desperate struggle to get the tape spinning again. Chance are, the sound of a tape getting stretched around the loops and "cranking" is burned into your memory forever.
You hit "Stop" and the thing would literally jam to a halt, and you'd hear it. You hit "Fast Forward" and you'd see the world like a caffeine addict. You hit "Rewind" and you'd see people speedily ripping off Michael Jackson. "Rewind" actually meant that the tape was being "rewound" then... something that gets lost on modern DVDs... (I think they're using the term "fast-backwards" now). But if it's still okay to say "You sound like a broken record," maybe "rewind" is here to stay too. I hope so. "Fast Backwards" is stupid.
But besides the technical glitches that we used to hate and now suddenly love... what we always loved about VHS was taping things. In this age where anything on TV can be Tivo'ed, paused, reserved, bought, Netflixed, On-Demand'ed...etc., there really is no reason to tape anything anymore. Back in the day though, if a movie was playing on TV, and you wanted to see it again, you had to stick in a VHS and "record" what you were watching, commercials and all (or you'd sit there hitting "stop" on all the commercials). If you weren't around to catch a program you wanted to see, you had to set the timer and pray it might record what you wanted. It never did, but there was always a chance. Half the movies we "owned" were taped off the TV...always in SLP mode (or Super Long Play)... because, any other mode just wasn't super enough.
But most of all, the reason we love VHS is because, if you're a 90s kid, all your big milestones and events from your childhood are probably still recorded on them-- birthdays, Christmases...etc. That has something to do with it fer sure. We will soon no doubt think back fondly on "that old rainbow-effect" of the DVD, but for now, I salute you, VHS and VCR... may your green 12:00am display forever blink in our memory.
No, he couldn't win on Jeopardy, but if you stuck a penny in his platter-like hand, he'd raise it up, drop it down his gullet, rock back and forth as he chewed, and then stick his red tongue out to lick his chops. He was a clever little robot, taking a cue from his Coke machine and pay phone ancestors, only this time designed specifically to eat your money. And yet, with a face like that, it's exactly what you want him to do. How could a kid resist this Radio Shack classic?
Of course you could just push his hand and he'd go through the whole spastic rigmarole without you having to lose a quarter. And yes, there was an opening in the back where you could gain access to his digested stash, for better or worse, leading to all the typical jokes. Saving money was never more hilarious. The only regret, he didn't burp.
Torch floor lamps, or just... floor lamps in general. Present status: confined to therapy waiting rooms. I would know. Moving on.
Wood-paneled ceiling fans. They were literally in every house. Now they just look scary-looking. They looked like mosquitoes or giant spiders just perched up on the ceiling. They never actually cooled the room down, but they certainly confused people about just what string to pull to get the lights and/or the fan. They made nap time entertaining at my babysitter's place. Present status: quarantined to mobile homes and your aunt's house.
