9 Things I Miss About the 1990s
Technically, MTV was a product of the 1980s, but it was still relevant and watched by young people up until the 2000s. The biggest complaint I remember most of us had was that they used to only play music videos and moved too much to reality TV shows, but as a young person at the time, it felt refreshing to have shows and a whole TV channel geared towards us. My fondest memory of MTV was when we'd stay up all night watching the top 500 videos of all time. The number one video would always belong to Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Guns N' Roses but we'd have fun arguing which music video would come out on top. Today, we have YouTube and a fairly good algorithm that predicts pretty well which song to play next, but it just isn't the same as watching MTV back in the day. You can show your kids the videos you used to watch, but can't recreate the fun of watching MTV with your friends while your parents were asleep. What was your favorite music video? What was your favorite show on MTV?
I had a hard time restricting this post to just nine things. Feel free to copy my title and make your own post about nine things you miss about that decade. I think I'll make another post called 8 things I miss about the 1980s too. I don't think it's wrong to steal someone else's title as long as your post is original.
It was fun to remember all the quirks and unique things from the decade of the 1990s. As far as music formats, it was either going to be Boomboxes, Walkman, Minidiscs, CDs, the radio, or even the few of us who still used records in the 1990s, but in the end, I chose cassettes. I used Wikipedia for all of my image resources so some of my decisions were defined by the quality of the picture they provided. I thought restricting my image sources to Wikipedia would be good in case anybody wanted to read more about what I wrote below. I would've gone with Sony Walkman for this item, but without the cassette, there wouldn't be a Walkman.
Minidiscs were really cool too. I am a person who rarely feels jealousy. If I see a handsome young man with a good body, I think good for him, and feel sorry for him at the same time for all the pain he must put himself through to look that way. If I see someone who's rich, I know that material items don't bring happiness, but one time in 1999, I was at a dance club and I saw a DJ with a clear plastic box full of MiniDiscs and I remember feeling so jealous of him. I loved MiniDiscs for many reasons. First of all, they looked like something from the future. They had the benefits of both CDs and cassettes and were really small too. I think they would've been a lot more popular and widely used if MP3 technology had never come along.
Now some of you may be wondering where are CDs? I actually started off this part with MiniDiscs, then remembered that only tech nerds used them. CDs were definitely a big part of the 1990s, but they suck in my opinion. For one thing, they're still with us today and still suck. The names may have changed to DVD or Blu-ray, but they are still easily stolen and scratched. Although I still have a fond memory of seeing a CD for the first time and seeing its rainbow in the sunlight, I would grow to hate the technology in no time. I do remember that my first CD was The Lion King soundtrack. And the first CD I purchased with my own money was Queen Greatest Hits I & II. I thought it was such a great deal to get my first two CDs for the price of one at Fred Meyer. The first DVD I purchased was Army of Darkness with Bruce Campbell. Do you remember your first CD?
Cassettes are another technology that was around before the 1990s that we all associate with that decade. The technology goes back to WWII and the compact cassettes we all remember came out in the 1960s. Speaking of the 60s, I'd really like to read a post about 6 things you miss from the 60s. I can only guess since I was born in 1980, but ask anybody who was alive back then about that decade and I can guarantee you that their face will light up and they will most likely remember Rock and Roll, NASA, and really cool cars.
For me, I remember getting in arguments with girlfriends in my car about silly things and them ejecting my CD then throwing it out the window. I'd of course stop and search for it only to find it never works again even if I bought one of those fancy CD repairers, but if you did the same to a cassette tape, it would be just fine. I also remember being useful to friends because I was one of the few people who could fix a cassette with just a pencil and some scotch tape.
Why were movies from the 1990s the best? I was shocked when my girlfriend had never seen a Hollywood movie in her life. She has only watched crappy Thai dramas on Facebook and YouTube, so when it was time to introduce her, I of course showed her Terminator 2, but I started her off with Titanic. I just showed her a few scenes from 1984's Terminator on YouTube just to introduce her to Sarah Conner and T-800s. I'm not saying all modern movies are horrible. I really wanted to get her into Star Wars so I showed her Rogue One before episodes IV, V, and VI, but she doesn't even know the prequels exist. She was really shocked to hear what Darth Vader had to say to Luke in Cloud City. How would you break in a Hollywood virgin? So far she's seen Titanic, E.T., Terminator 2, Rogue One, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Army of Darkness, GoldenEye, and Red Notice.
I was a teenager in the 1990s, so I remember either straight up sneaking in the back door of the theater or buying just one ticket then sneaking into as many other films as we could. Another trick we would pull to stick it to the man was to have a little gang of friends. One would work at McDonald's or KFC and sneak out free food. One would work at the grocery store and ignore a bit of shoplifting, and one friend would work at the movie theater and let us watch as many free movies as we wanted. We'd even have the movie ticket in case a company man with a flashlight showed up.
Speaking of movies, who can ever forget Blockbuster? I think they are a good example of how having a huge ego and thinking you're king of the hill can lead to your own demise. Blockbuster could've bought out Netflix for nothing back in the day, but now they no longer exist.
Be kind and please rewind stickers were even put on DVD boxes by Blockbuster employees. Although I rented my fair share of DVDs and VHS tapes from Blockbuster, I would go there mostly to rent Nintendo games and also remember sneaking into the adult section just to sneak a peek at the adult videos. I always wished I had a pair of star-shaped screwdrivers so I could swap out whatever crappy NES, SNES, or N64 ROMs with the ones I was renting. Did any of you think or actually do that?
Today any game from the 1990s can be easily downloaded and emulated on a phone or PC, but the only ones I keep coming back to are the N64 games. Riding my bike to the "SuperMall" and buying an N64 and a Super Mario 64 cartridge will always be one of my favorite memories from any decade. It was September 29th, 1996, and the electronics mega-store which no longer exists and I can't remember its name either had a contest on a huge screen. If you could get the secret castle star where you slide down in under 21 seconds, then you could win a free Mario game. It's one of the moments in time I wish I could use my current gaming skills to go back to. I would also never open or damage that Mario game knowing that it could sell for a million dollars today. There were many great games for the N64, but the first one, Super Mario 64, was definitely my favorite. How many times has that happened in video gaming history? Where the first game was the best? Maybe only ever with the Gameboy and Tetris.
I never owned or even liked a Honda CR-X, but it seemed like everybody else did back then. My first car was a pickup truck, a Chevy Luv. It was a total piece of junk, but I drove that little guy to San Diego and even to Texas without it ever breaking down. The only reason I got rid of it was because the communist state of California made (and still makes it) almost impossible for any old car to pass emissions. I sold it a Mexican friend for $500 and he told me it kept on going well into the 2000s. If I were to ask you for a lift today and handed you a one-dollar bill, it would be a total insult, but back in the 1990s, just a few friends handing you one-dollar bills could actually put some gas in the tank.
I didn't get my first peak of pornography until I was 16 years old. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's perfectly healthy for a teenage boy to see some beautiful naked women. It was very exciting to see. I can't see how it's a good thing that kids can see porn so easily before they're ready to see or even like it. If some boys want to see titties today, all they have to do is open Twitter or do a Google search. I had to bribe a bum to buy my first Playboy magazine at 7-11 and when I was 18 and old enough to buy it legally, I still felt so embarrassed to wait in line and ask the 7-11 clerk for it.
I grew up on a small airport in South Dakota, so aviation has always been interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, it felt like the technology had hit some kind of wall. When asking my grandfather why it was so, his answer was, "Because the god-damned lawyers ruined it."
My grandfather had good reasons to hate lawyers and they very well may have ruined general aviation, but surely not military or commercial aviation. The F-16 still looks cool today. Flying on a jet has not changed at all since I was a kid. Well, maybe a bit. The cabin crew got a lot fatter and now there are TV screens, but the general look and feel of commercial aircraft are sadly exactly the same, only worse. How the hell did that happen? It's stuff like that which fuel conspiracy theories. I don't have a conspiracy theory, other than that it's Generation X's fault. Millennials may be a bunch of whiney-ass bitches, but Generation X was named appropriately. They did X. They did nothing. They definitely are the worst generation. Seriously what did they do besides continue using horrible banking and invent the iPhone? One thing I really miss about the 1990s and before that was the whole airport and airplane experience. I remember you could send your loved ones all the way to their seats and even meet the Captain and take a look at all the aircraft controls in the cockpit before 9-11.
Before making this post I asked my followers on Facebook and Noise.Cash what they miss about the 1990s. Nothing. I got nothing. What a bunch of like monkeys. I showed a few people my draft of this post and the only thing I got was how they miss landlines. What's there to miss about that? OK, maybe a few things...
I remember if I wanted to eavesdrop on my parents' phone conversations, I'd first remove the phone line so they wouldn't hear me pick up the line, then slowly slide it back in without clicking it and covering the noise of my breathing. Sometimes I'd just break the little snap off and have an extra line I'd use just for listening in on them. There was also the fun of making prank calls before *69 or caller-ID came along. (I still like using the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard to prank call people today.)
Today, you can go out and buy the latest iPhone, but unless you truly need it for the camera, you just look like a cunt trying to look cool, but anybody who had a pager back in the day looked cool as fuck. You were either a soldier, doctor, businessman, or drug dealer if you had a pager. I never had a pager, but I felt they were the coolest tech at the time.
Thank you for reading about my 1990s nostalgia. I used Wikipedia for all these images and shared the links to the articles below. What do you miss about the 1990s? What did I forget to mention?
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_LLC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CR-X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager