Here are 9 of the best 90’s fads!
9 – Pogs
Playing and collecting Pogs has to be one of the craziest fads ever – how could playing
a game trying to flip a bunch of cardboard circles get so popular?!
POGs got their name from the popular Hawaiian juice, POG, which was made out of pomegranates,
oranges, and guava, hence the name POG.
POG bottle caps were the original cardboard caps that were collected and used to play
the game.
The game of flipping milk caps possibly originated in Maui, Hawaii during the 1920s or 1930s,
although a similar game was played in Japan as well.
The game got a resurgence in the 90’s after an elementary teacher in Hawaii used this
method to teach her students math.
Next thing you know, POGs were everywhere, with big corporations such as Coca-Cola and
McDonald’s doing POG giveaways.
The POG mania even got to the Roman Catholic Church!
The church ordered 50,000 pogs with the Pope’s face on them when he was visiting New Jersey
in 1995!
However, the U.S. military actually found a practical use for POGs.
POGs were designated for use as army currency with the aim of cutting down on the weight
of shipping heavy nickles and dimes overseas.
With the official name of “POG gift certificates,” army pogs were released in 5, 10, and 25 cent
denominations and are still used to this day to buy items from Army and Air Force Exchange
Stores worldwide!
8 – Tamagotchi
Remember when you were a little kid and you wanted a puppy or maybe just a cat, but your
parents wouldn’t let you have one?
That’s probably the time that your parents thanked their lucky stars that the Tomagotchi
was invented!
Maybe that didn’t exactly happen to you….okay, maybe that didn’t happen to a lot of people,
but it seems that the Tomagotchi was a perfect pet for a lotta people!
The love for all things virtual began sometime in 1996 with the invention of the Tamagotchi.
The one responsible for this genius creation was a Japanese lady named Aki Maita, who got
her inspiration by observing what people enjoyed most: their pets and their gadgets.
Hey, why not put the two of em together?
The name translates into English as an “egg watch”, which pretty much sums up exactly
what the Tamagotchi is!
The Tamagotchi mania spread around the world from Japan.
It seemed like every kid had a Tamagotchi hooked on the loop of their jeans.
The device itself was pretty easy to handle, as it had only three buttons and a relatively
loud speaker for its size.
Back in the 90’s, to keep your Tomagotchi going, your job was just to feed, play, and
clean your pet.
But apparently, modern versions require you to find your pet a mate and also make it get
a job?!?
Hmmm sure okay.
I’m guessing anyone that ever had a Tamagotchi would agree: it was the perfect pet most of
the time because hey, at least you could scoop its virtual poop with the press of a button.
7 – Reebok Pump
Considering the mega-popularity of the NBA during it’s heyday in the 80’s and 90’s
with Michael Jordan and other superstars in their prime, it’s no wonder Nike and Reebok
were going head to head in a heated competition for supremacy in the market for basketball
shoes.
It was actually a really intense rivalry going on, as it wasn’t just MJ blazing through
the field in his Air Jordans.
Reebok had some amazing athletes of their own as well.
They had signed Shaq and Shawn Kemp to lucrative shoe deals, and let’s not forget that Dee
Brown won the 1991 dunk contest in a pair of Reebok Pumps, which he pumped up before
the contest, and that only fueled the craze for pumps even more.
Unfortunately, you know how this story is gonna go for Reebok and the pumps, or else
it wouldn’t have made this list!
The Reebok Pump was born when Reebok designer Paul Litchfield knew Reebok needed technology
that competed with Nike’s visible air pockets.
They introduced the so-called pump system, which was basically a shoe with an inflation
system in it that gripped your feet for a customized fit and gave better overall support.
To be honest, kids couldn’t care less about the fit, nor did they really care didn’t
care much about support for the shoe.
All they cared about was pumping air into their sneakers or even better, letting the
air out!
Who’re better customers than a bunch of kids who’d do anything to be the coolest
in school with a pair of Reebok pumps?
Basically, the Reebok Pump became the official status shoe for kids, so having those meant
you’d be wowing your classmates on the school playground.
The shoes were selling for a whopping $170 dollars at the time or what would be $330
in 2017 dollars.
, Yeah, it’s no wonder I wasn’t wearing a pair when I was growing up!
6 – Beanie Babies & Furby
Good corporations always have the knack of knowing what people want before they even
know it.
For example, why buy regular teddy bears when you can buy some weird-looking, under-stuffed
dolls that makes suburban housewives go crazy?
Beanie Babies started getting popular in late 1993 just for the plain reason of being cute,
cheap, and collectable.
Beanie Babies were intentionally made to look deflate with their special “beanie filling”,
which apparently was done to make the stuffed animal appear more real.
Sales for Beanie Babies actually started extremely poor, to the point that stores told the manufacturer
that they’d only buy 6 at a time, instead of the minimum order of 12 on order forms.
Somehow, someway, with the help of bored suburban Illinois moms trying to complete Beanie Baby
sets, more than 100 million beanie babies were sold by 1996.
People literally were fighting over beanie babies in stores.
Following in the footsteps of Beanie Babies, the Furby was another pretty weird-looking
for a stuffed animal but hey, at least this lil guy did SOMEthing.
More than 40 million Furbies had sold since its introduction in 1998.
C’mon, who could resist a Gremlin-looking doll that was programmed to speak?
The Furby spoke Furbish and English, and the more you played with it, the better it would
get at talking, which I guess kind of made people feel like they had a real pet.
You could feed it by holding a spoon on its tongue, though a bunch of people just held
their fingers to its mouth.
Which of you guys out there still have a beanie baby or a furby?!
5 – The Macarena Song
Singing, or better said, screaming, HEYYYYY MACARENA at the top of your lungs while doing
the Macarena is something that I’m gonna guess roughly 98% of people between the ages
of 5 and 65 had done when the Macarena song first released in 1994.
Okay, don’t hold me to that number, but let’s just say a ton of people have done
the Macarena at least once!
The song was by Los del Rio, a Spanish duo, who had no idea that their rather mature adult
themed song would be a huge hit that spread all around the world.
No one stayed immune to the Macarena fever and somehow that song remained on the top
of charts for quite some while.
Remember how many times this song was played on the radio, on tv, and at completely random
places?!
It’s a good thing that ignorance is bliss.
I’m guessing that not many people back then were aware what the Spanish duo was actually
singing about since no one bothered to read the translation of the lyrics.
The Macarena is the name of a woman and they’re singing about how she cheats on her boyfriend
while he’s being deployed in the army.
Yeahhhhh…….
4 – Fanny packs
Who can forget how many people rocked a fanny pack?
Fanny packs were an all-time favorite of all the dads in the 90’s, who mostly rocked
fanny packs with a pair of shorts.
Okay, really, or with anything else.
Who can forget The Rock and his famous picture with his turtleneck and fanny pack?!
Fanny packs are actually kinda making a fashion comeback right now, but it seems that only
certain people can pull it off.
For all of you too young to have forgotten such a top moment in fashion history, fanny
packs were the thing to wear around your waist if you wanted to be cool.
The 90’s equivalent of rocking a fidget spinner and a vape today was wearing reebok
pumps and a fanny pack.
Obviously, fanny packs are extremely practical.
How else can you haul all of the necessary things with you back in the 90s while keeping
your hands free?!
There were many different ways of wearing them, just like you would a hat.
Only the coolest of people could wear a fanny pack to the side, or even backwards, while
the rest of the world had to wear their fanny packs towards the front.
Joe Rogan actually still rocks a fanny pack to this very day, and you know what, Joe Rogan
definitely seems like the type of dude who can pull it off!
3 – Ramen noodle hair & frosted tips
Remember when Justin Timberlake was a part of NSync and he had that ramen noodle hair,
and a few of the dudes from Backstreet Boys had the frosted tips?
Eminem also had the bleached hair look as well.
It seemed like half the dudes at my school had their hair dyed in some way.
If you were in high school in the late nineties, then you had to do some of the gimmicks that
guys did in the many boy bands that sprang to life during the 90s.
Getting a girl’s attention a lot of times meant that you had to either look like you
could be the member of a boy band, or a grunge band such as Nirvana.
Strangely enough, bleaching hair was one of the most popular tricks for the former during
the 90’s.
We also have to remember that using a pound of gel back then to perfect that ramen noodle
look was the norm.
For most things, a little goes a long way, but this definitely wasn’t the rule back
then when it came to using gel.
Making sure your hair didn’t move an inch while your hair made that crunchy noise if
you touched it meant that you were doing things the right way back then!
2 – Pagers
The only thing cooler than a fanny pack around your waist back in the 90’s was a pager
clipped to your belt.
The fact that a lot of schools had banned pagers at school also gave whoever had one
just that much more street cred for having a pager.
I mean, when your pager beeped and you had to go make a phone call that simply automatically
meant you were one of the coolest kids around.
Also, somehow anyone that had a pager was always suspected of being a drug dealer, no
matter how many straight A’s they got.
Pagers actually go way back to the 50’s, and no, they weren’t invented for rich kids
to show off.
Hospitals were the first that started using pagers but they weren’t available for the
general public.
The real boom on the pager market happened during the early 90’s when people somehow
got hooked on the whole texting idea which obviously exists in a different form.
By 1994, there were 64 million pager users around the world and I think it’s safe to
say, not all of them were doctors or nurses.
Motorola and Apollo were the biggest pager manufacturers back then – something like
Apple and Samsung today.
Both companies kept trying to win customers over until the era of the cell phones began
and then people got hooked on talking again.
That is until we got smartphones and we started texting again, in addition to a whole bunch
of other things.
I’m just wondering when we’re gonna start getting computers implanted in our brains?!
1 – Game Boy
Did Nintendo know the hit they’d have on their hands when Nintendo finally brought
the portable gaming concept to life?
When the game boy was first released in the US in 1989, it sold more than a million units
in just a few weeks, and it sold 40,000 units on the FIRST DAY of release!
The Game boy and Game boy color eventually sold over 100 million units throughout the
90s.
What was great about the Game boy?
You could take it everywhere with you, and it used regular batteries.
But if you really wanted to be plugged into a wall, an AC adapter was an option as well.
Although it wasn’t as advanced as other handheld gaming systems at the time such as
the Sega Gamegear or the Atari Lynx, the Game Boy's excellent battery life, rugged hardware,
and popularity of well-known Nintendo classics for its games made it much more successful
than competitors.
Even girls got into it too!
In 1995, Nintendo announced that 46% of Game Boy players were female, which was much higher
than the percentage of female players for both the Nintendo at 29% and the Super Nintendo
at 14%.
In 2009, the Game Boy was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, 20 years after
its introduction.
Hold up, there’s a national toy Hall of Fame?!
Today’s kids have no clue the struggles back then of having to lug cartridges around
or having to keep the lights on in the back of the car just to play.
However, even with how advance games have become on cell phones, Game Boy classics such
as Super Mario Land or Tetris! can still hold its own again many modern games.
Here’s what’s next!