(I wasn't sure whether this thread should go here or in the History Room. I guessed here because the tone I'm intending is a casual one. If it needs to be moved, the mods can feel free to move it.)
This is just a thread where we (anyone/everyone) can share stuff from/about the 1990s that we were/are fond of. Most of my childhood took place in the '90s and there's a lot about that time that I revisit or look back on when I'm feeling down anymore. '90s nostalgia is starting to catch on in the larger culture too lately, I've noticed. I'm sure most of us have some fond memories from that era. This is a thread where you share them! It can be anything. It can be a song or an album, or an artist (musical or otherwise). It can be a movie or a TV show. It can be a video game, a board game, a comic book, a card game, a fad (as Pogs or 1999's extreme Pokemon mania or the fun Y2K freakout), whatever. It can be a political development or event (like maybe you want to harken the Year of the Woman or the (chokes out the words) Ross Perot presidential campaigns or a particular protest action, for example). It can even be a personal memory (e.g. maybe you met the love of your life in the '90s and want to share a bit of that memory with us). And of course you can post here more than once and at any time. You're not confined to one or a few memories to share. I will likely be posting more of my memories here fairly often and they'll likely ultimately come to span the whole spectrum of options I've just described.
I'll start us off with a few simple examples of what you can do:
XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS
High-quality television right here!
Oh well, I loved it! Not only was this like the most dorkishly awesome show on TV in the mid and late '90s, it's also become kind of iconic for subtly fostering rumors about the relationship between protagonists Xena and Gabrielle at a time when portraying same-sex relationships on TV was exceedingly controversial to a degree that makes today's TV climate look broad-minded by comparison. Heather (my first girlfriend) and I picked up on those vibes and fell in love with this show almost as much as we did with each other.
(The above isn't an official opening, incidentally, just the official voice-over. It's the official voice-over set to a fan trailer that I like better. Neither of the official openings had a lesbian kiss scene, for example.)
MAGIC: THE GATHERING
The original, and best, trading card game! The cards came out in large, collectable sets and you used the ones you wanted to assemble a deck of monsters and spells and whatnot with which to battle a competitor. Each game was supposed to represent a battle between wizards known as planeswalkers. I was introduced to this game by receiving several booster packs (small packages of random cards from the game) for my tenth birthday and continued to play throughout the 1990s. Official play venues were rare for most of that time, so it was almost all casual play for me. I loved it! Magic is still going, I believe, though I haven't played in over 15 years now. (I eventually quit because I couldn't afford to both continue collecting the cards and come close to affording college.) I still have all my cards in binders stuffed in a closet and have been known to look through them again when I'm feeling nostalgic (as today).
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NIRVANA
Smells Like Teen Spirit in particular was an
extremely popular song when I was young and I still love it because it really captures the awesome and lovely spirit of the youth of the early 1990s. Singer Kurt Cobain came up with the title of the song when his friend Kathleen Hanna, who at the time was the lead singer for the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill (another of my favorite bands of all time), wrote "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on his wall. The song, according to Cobain, was about how "We [he and his friends] still feel as if we're teenagers because we don't follow the guidelines of what's expected of us to be adults" and that he felt a duty "to describe what I felt about my surroundings and my generation and people my age". He further commented that "The entire song is made up of contradictory ideas...It's just making fun of the thought of having a revolution. But it's a nice thought." That I think sums up that era in punk rock, including grunge (which was stylistically a sort of fusion of punk rock and heavy metal), riot grrrl, etc. pretty well: there was a sarcasm and light-heartedness to the anarchist themes these bands presented that suggested that they only took themselves half-seriously, but at the same time sincerely sympathized with the radical ideas they were forwarding. This song took off like it did and made Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain in particular, a generationally iconic household name. It still holds up with me really well. I feel like a bit of an over-aged teenager myself and I'm sure I come across that way to others.
OKAY, I will surely post more memories later (possibly later today or at a later date (like tomorrow), but I think this gets the basic idea of how this thread is supposed to work across, so...your turn (anyone)!
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Originally Posted by Ethereal
