Quotes / The '90s

Boy, the way Nirvana played
Songs that got Kurt Cobain laid
They were broke and Smalls was paid
Those were the days!

And you knew where you were then
Seinfeld yakked 'bout Superman
Mister, we could use a man like Bubba Clinton again!

Pundits endlessly debate
Doom and OJ's big court date
Gee our Genesis ran great
Those were the daaaays!

Folks could voice their discontent
Three digits could pay the rent
No-one knew what jihad meant
Those were the days!

Take the Trans-Sport for a spin
Go to watch the Blue Jays win
Then home to play some Wolfenstein on your huge 8 megs of RAM

Summers short and winters long
MTV was going strong
Where the fuck did we go wrong?
Those were the days!

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Comic Books

Haroun al-Rashid: This is as good as it's going to be, isn't it?
Morpheus: That may be so...
Haroun al-Rashid: ...But Allah alone knows all. Indeed.

-The Sandman: Ramadan

Film — Live-Action

"We're the middle children of history man. No purpose or place. We have no great war. No great depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."

—Tyler Durden, Fight Club

"Once we get out of the 80s, the 90's are gonna make the 60s look like the 50's."

—Huey Walker, Flashback (1990)

Live-Action TV

"First I'm sentenced to a computer tutorial on Saturday, now I have to read some computer book. There are books ON computers? Isn't the point of computers to replace books?"

—Cordelia, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("The Dark Age")

Kimberly: (on the communicator watches) We can teleport and communicate with the Command Center with these things?
Billy: Affirmative.
Kimberly: This is so Nineties.

— Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, "High Five"

"Remember when people were content to be unambitious? Sleep 'til 11:00? Just hang out with their friends? I mean, they had no occupations whatsoever, maybe working a couple hours a week at a coffee shop?"

—Jason from LA, Portlandia

"We, we're not two years into the nineties, and already it's shaping up as a lame, boring stupid decade that we're just going to have to suffer through. Responsibility, restraint, recession. There's no escape! Or is there? Maybe you need the ultimate vacation. A trip to the 1980s."

—Almost Live! "'80s Land"

Music

So show me yours, I'll show you mine
Tool Time, you'll Lovett it just like Lyle
And then we'll do it doggy style
So we can both watch X-files

—Bloodhound Gang, "The Bad Touch"

Cuz' it's a bittersweet symphony, this life
Tryin' to makes ends meet
You're a slave to money
Then you die

—The Verve, "Bittersweet Symphony"

Get the satellite if you want to see me
Talking on the net I know the way you like it
Get your credit card cause I need more money
All I wanna get is you baby

—Maurizio De Jorio, "Running in the 90s"

When I was a kid I lived for climbing trees, ate Dr. Pepper Jelly Beans,
My favorite part of Jurassic Park was how real the raptors looked,
When I was a Kid I still had VHS, watched Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff,
Zack Morris owned the first cell phone, it was off the hook!

—Owl City, "Unbelievable"

Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we'd never see an end to it all
And we don't even care
To shake these zipper blues
And we don't know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust, I guess
Forgotten and absorbed
Into the earth below

—The Smashing Pumpkins, describing the Generation X in "1979"

Newspaper Comics

In this dance I celebrate the new American optimism. Wherein we look at recession, deficits, education, poverty, racism, sexism, AIDS crime, drugs, poisoned resources, crumbling highways-railroads-buildings-bridges and go 'HO HUM.' Because who cares? WE WON A WAR!

—Jules Fieffer, 1991 political cartoon◊

Blame it on eight years of Reagan... Blame it on seven years of Dynasty... the '80s saw a frenzy of lotteries and jackpots, and a nation of people crazed to win them. With tonight's announcement, of the 'Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes' winner, we put a wrap on the decade of greed of the '80s, and more into a decade of more reasoned personal goals. Across the country, the shrieks of hedonism are being replaced by the nice, calm voices of hard working people concerned about the needs of others.

—Cathy, January 26, 1990

Podcasts

V1: [at wit's end] EIGHT PEOPLE on this show wore jorts and some form of t-shirt, or vest, or top.
OOC: That was the style at the time.
V1: Fuck. Everyone is John Cena?

—OSW Review Ep. 33, WCW Thunder

Video Games

The present—if we can still call it that. Specifically, 1990...a rather perilous time of planetary egocentricism leading to an overemphasis on dangerously shaky interplanetary jealousies and greed. The times reflect the people who suffer stress with a sense of urgency that encourages pragmatism over reason, dulls an awareness of values and leads weaker souls to lives of crime.

—Ultima II game manual

It is the nineties, and there is time for Klax.

— Klax, opening screen

Webcomics

''Nineties kids think they're so great, with their Power Rangers and their Nirvana and their non-people corporations.'-

— Danny, Dumbing of Age

Web Originals

Our brains weren't fully evolved back in 1993, as evidenced by The Nanny's inexplicable popularity.

—Cracked on Groundhog Day

You are not a 90's kid, you were born in '99.

— Welcome to... Facebook!

The first time someone in the '90s thought to put on sunglasses and stand in front of graffiti, Satan laughed and said, "That's exactly how I'm going to greet that guy when his filthy black soul arrives." The trend that doomed individual invented was called eXtreme, and it became the driving force behind every marketing campaign of the decade. Extremeness opened our eyes to radical new truths like how every Mountain Dew drinker is a spazzy piece of shit with nothing to live for. It turbo-charged the eXcitement of products we already loved and gave us a Dorito flavor that a human colon could actually pass.

— Seanbaby

This wholesome golden age was only ever so slightly overshadowed by the beginnings of economic globalisation, but this was easy to ignore especially with the technological wonder of the Game Boy Color to marvel at.

—Uncyclopedia

Surprise, I'm not a Millennial! Whew. Thank God for that. Barely dodged the bullet, too. No, see, I'm a classic Gen-X-er, in case you hadn't noticed from my general apathy, bad attitude and the immense pleasure I take in needling you.

— Tracy Moore

I’m not even kidding when I say that I miss the era when major movies always had their own raps. An era that began with Addams Family and ended with Wild Wild West. They did what they wanted to do, Matt. They played how they wanted to play.

— Chris Sims and Matt Wilson on 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze''

The X-Files is, appropriately enough, a show that helps define what is known as 'Generation X', the generation born following the post war baby boom, as the afterglow from America’s ascent to global superpower began to wear off...it’s little wonder that Generation X seemed completely disillusioned with their elders. 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' is quite overt in its handling of broken father figures.

— Darren Mooney on The X-Files, "The Erlenmeyer Flask"

Blake strikes me as the ur-Father of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, speaking to the id-driven sales force. In good times, Blake comes across as a parody of all bad managers with his A-B-C rules — he is Stephen Covey's evil twin. In a bad business climate, however, he is the bearer of profound Hobbesean truths, and one feels obliged to internalize him and let him whisper in the back of one's mind, for his is the voice that drives industry.

— James Ashley, "Second Prize is a Set of Steak Knives"

Boomer lust for WWII was a simultaneous lame tribute to dying vets (Happy Father’s Day! Here’s another copy of The Greatest Generation!) and a slap in the face to their slacker kids, Generation X. Gen-X failed to get real jobs and in general, to care whether they did or not.

— Molly Brown, "Time Travel and the New Nostalgia"

Generation X hasn't had a real voice since Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, Tupac was murdered, Jeff Mangum went crazy, David Foster Wallace hung himself, Jeff Buckley drowned, River Phoenix overdosed, Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.

— Matt Honan, "Generation X is Sick of Your Bullshit"

Around the time Richard Linklater’s film Slacker came out in 1991, journalists and critics put a finger on what they thought was different about the young generation of emerging adults – they were reluctant to grow up, disdainful of earnest action. The stereotype stuck — and it stuck hard.

— Sara Scriber, "Generation X gets really old"

Luckily, as most Z’s have only a vague memory of the pre-Bush v. Gore world, they’ve known nothing but escalating bullshit for their entire lives. They thus have no baseline of non-suckitude to cultivate bitterness or nostalgia. Generation X’s 'bad attitude,' on the other hand, has always been a function of living in the boomer shadows—culturally, economically, politically, and so on.

— Jeffey Sconce

Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’

— The Onion headline, January 17, 2001

Web Videos

Yahtzee: We're moving on from the happy-flappy 8-bit era to the dark and gritty 90's! Do you remember the 90's?
Gabriel: I remember them being very radical and hyper-colored.

—Let's Play DreamWeb

"When you look at the evolution of action movies beginning with westerns, you'll notice how the main choice of weapon always changes: in the 50s and 60s, it was all about rifles. In the late-70s and 80, it was all about lasers. But as soon as the 90s hit, it was slingshots and squirt guns."

—The Angry Video Game Nerd on Dennis the Menace (SNES)

"By looking at the fashions, you can tell that this was made around the time the '80s were trying to die, and the '90s were trying to define themselves in that they have no original way of defining themselves."

—The Nostalgia Critic, Nickelodeon Week

"'Aw, c'mon Bob! The 90s weren't so bad! Animaniacs! Gargoyles! Batman: The Animated Series! Power Rangers!' And, OK, fine. If we're speaking strictly in terms of nostalgic children's television... well, the 80s still wins."

— Moviebob, "The Big Picture"

"It was 1993, when everyone was pretending to be depressed in a marketing-friendly way. 'We're rising against the expectations of society and playing hockey on the roof because I just don't agree with our socially-irrelevant baby boomer world. Think about it.'"

—George Weidman

"Dance music in the nineties was moving in a different direction. People didn't want fun, they wanted in your face! Aggressive! 'Slammin'!' I think we called it, in the nineties."

—Todd in the Shadows on "Groove is in the Heart"

"Everything felt like, 'Wow, this is it.' Like 'All of human history has been leading up to this point'."

—Danny, Game Grumps

Western Animation

"We're having fun 'cause it's not 9/11 yet!"

—Daisy Fuentes, Family Guy

Real Life

"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy."

—Charles Manson in 1994

"A lot of life is hopeless today, even for middle-class kids. I mean, for the first time in I think human history, middle-class kids now assume they are not going to live as well as their parents—that's really something new, that's never happened before. My kids, for example, assume that they are probably never going to live the way that we live. Think about it, that's never happened before in history. And they're probably right, except accidentally—like, some of them may, but on average they won't."

—Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

For some, they offered a '90s point of view' on young people and their relationships....But older adults 35+ were more critical, and felt this group did not really care about each other like real friends would. These older viewers also found it hard to relate to this group of friends. They found the character smug, superficial, and self-absorbed.

—NBC internal memo on Friends

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