The decade that brought us 'Forrest Gump' and clear soda is so over, and already we miss it
We Americans are known for our short attention spans, our oftentimes myopic obsession with ourselves.
So it should come as no surprise that in our state of ADD – appropriately the fad diagnosis of the 1990s – we readily engross ourselves in the nostalgia of the bubble decade, like opening a can of Crystal Pepsi before it's had a chance to age.
Consider that VH1 has launched its "I Love the '90s" deconstruction of pop culture, the third in a series of minutae-driven retrospectives that also helped us to relive the '70s and '80s.
And picking up on the trend, Hasbro is marketing a new Trivial Pursuit game dedicated to '90s nostalgia.
Suddenly – a mere five years removed from the New Year's Eve when we panicked over Y2K being the end of the world – the '90s are all up in our collective grills.
Ummm, hellooo … like, whassup with that?
Robert Thompson, a pop culture guru at Syracuse University, says the decade of the '90s has been able to jump the nostalgia gun by about 10 years because the cultural climate changed so drastically after 9/11.
What we consider the '90s begins, he says, with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, signaling America's victory in the Cold War, and ends on what was otherwise a nondescript Tuesday morning nearly three years ago.
"It's a really distinct period when the cloud of nuclear destruction goes away and we have these sunny skies until the cloud of terrorism comes in," Thompson says. "While it hasn't been that long since we left the period of the '90s, a lot of stuff has changed in dramatic ways."
Yes, life was like a box of chocolates.
The Internet seemed to make the world smaller, until we learned once again how big the world really is.
A war in Iraq was a Desert Storm, an in-and-out affair that took less than two months to complete.
Money management was like a magic show: Putting $20 into a mutual fund turned into $200 almost overnight.
Was Tinky Winky the "gay Teletubby"? Oh, the scandal of it all.
No wonder we're straight trippin' to relive America's decade of blithe narcissism.
The '90s were all that and a bag o' chips. As for the dawn of the new millennium … well, talk to the hand, we don't even want to go there.
So what, exactly, is it that we remember?
In preparing the new Trivial Pursuit (could any decade be more trivial?), marketing suits conducted a survey in mid-June of 1,033 people of diverse backgrounds and ages.
Here's what they remember from back in the day:
– Cooking shows like "Emeril" were the third-most-impactful trend of the '90s, topped only by the Internet and the cell phone.
– Four out of 10 Americans surveyed named Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates" bit of pop philosophy as the most memorable movie/TV line, followed by "Show me the money!" of "Jerry Maguire" fame.
– Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" stuck most in the minds of one-third who participated in the survey, with MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby" trailing behind.
– In the category of non-sports sporting moments, Roseanne Barr's irreverent rendition of the National Anthem before a Padres game tied with George Foreman's introduction of the George Foreman Grill.
Kevin Griggs, a 22-year-old Greenville native enlisting in the Army, remembers when the '90s decade was in its infancy.
He remembers TGIF on ABC, with "Full House," "Step By Step," "Boy Meets World" and "Family Matters" (you know, the one with that nasally Urkel kid).
At recess, Griggs and his friends played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A few years later, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers would seem so wack, like Pokemon compared to SpongeBob SquarePants.
But, he wonders, is it too soon say buh-bye to yesterday?
"How will we look back on all this 20 years from now?" he says. "What seems normal now might be funny years later."
Stephanie Adamson says she sees a certain demarcation line drawn in the mid-90s, separating what seems ancient (MC Hammer's genie pants) from what seems too recent to pine over (cell phones).
Adamson remembers watching MTV's "The Real World" in middle school, when "we were watching MTV when we weren't supposed to."
That self-indulgent '90s precursor to today's surplus of reality TV (remember surpluses?) feels out of step now, she says, like some kind of outdated vanity overkill.
So very dope when things should no longer be dope.
Robert Meek, a 41-year-old country music fan from Mauldin, heard a lot of rap music in the '90s — thanks to his kids.
Admittedly, Meek never was much of a playa and he never wore much bling-bling. He spent more time listening to what he considers the pop-ification of country music, "when singers changed what country music was into what it is today."
Something about all this '90s nostalgia is unsettling, he says. First the '70s and '80s. Now this?
"For us older people, it makes us feel so … old," he says.
Carol Phillips can feel that.
Phillips, 47, has worked for the Furman University post office for 13 years. In 1996, the post office made the switch to e-mail. That's about the time when all those who weren't "computer persons" learned the painful lessons of evolution.
"I called the computer many, many bad names," says Phillips, of Travelers Rest.
You could say she almost went postal.
Ahh, yes. Going postal.
For 29-year-old Tuan Tran, the '90s weren't all bulging 401(k)'s and "Friends" chatter over comfy coffee in its comfy cups. In other words, as Chuck D said, "Don't believe the hype."
For certain, Michael Jordan was indeed superhuman and the evil commies didn't appear to want to nuke us anymore.
But then again, there was Michael's little baseball escapade and the Los Angeles riots were the genesis of what would become sustained presence of brutality depicted in most every form of media.
"The '90s kind of numbed us to violence," Tran says. And oh yeah, he says, O.J. did it.
Nevertheless, our appetite for reliving recent history doesn't show signs of going the way of the grungy flannel, says Thompson, the pop culture expert.
"You go through most of your life and you play dumb games and eat Count Chocula cereal, and nobody ever brings that stuff up," Thompson says. "This is the stuff that was really part of your daily life."
Word, professor, word.
