What were the 90s like? -

[AtreyuFalcor]

Hey guyz, sorry if this is in the wrong section, or CatParty if it's been done before, but here goes..


I barely remember the 90s ( only lived thru about 3 years of them.) But people at school talk about it a lot, saying how 90s music and tv was cool etc., along with 80s and 70s to a lesser degree..

What was it like to live thru them and be a teenager thru them? Was it all that different from now?

From what my brothers have told me ( all college age and over) and what ive been able to figure out on my own, there were a few main differences.

1. Safer: The cold war just ended and some people though it was the "end of history" in that there would be no major threats to worry about. Then 9/11 happenned...

2. Better Tv and Movies: From what I've seen of 90s media ( Seinfeld, Homicide Life on the Streets,Bev Hills 90210,Cartoon Network, Disney movies, and good action/ comedy movies) the quality of film was better all the way round?

3. Less Politically Correct: My bros have told me that in the 90s, it was much more ok for kids and schools to say the words "fag" and "retard" and that other kids didn't mind and teachers didn't really care that much. I would never use those words at all, and my friend would really let me have it if I did. Ive also heard that Gay rights weren't nearly as accepted as now generally, and most people, while tolerant, did not view it as an acceptable "moral" way of being? Just to be clear I 100% support gay marriage, just asking about a slightly different time. I also get the impression that sexism was kind of more of a problem then too, just kind of an impression I get.

4. Better Economy. I've heard getting a summer job in say 1997 was far easier than it has been in past 5 years.

Anyway.... Just curious about a different time, and if anyone here is old enough to have come of age during the 90s let me know !

 

[The Hunter]

It sucked and it was gay.

 

[champthom]

You know, Hunter is right, but this question intrigued me so so I decided to reply, so here's a longer version:

For starters, it's worth noting that pretty much any era seems nicer than the present as it's kinda human to look back on the past with rose tinted glasses. As long as humanity has existed, we've always looked back on "the good old days" when really, the good old days have yet to come.

I grew up during the 90s, I have a good memory of all of them albeit 1990 and bits of 1991. I don't remember the Cold War ending, I was too young to remember that, but I remember most of the other vents of the 90s - the OJ trial, the "I did not have sex with that woman" speech, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc.

TV - early 90s TV wasn't bad, at least the stuff I watched as a kid. Nowadays, Saturday morning cartoons, the places that still air them, are mostly just TV shows rerun from cable channels like Disney Channel or Nickelodeon (that's another thing - back in the 90s, Disney was commercial free and a premium channel, it was a big thing to have the Disney Channel. They also had good programming and not umpteen live action shows with teenagers in them). But in the early 90s, Saturday morning cartoons were stuff you could only see on Saturdays. Generally they'd only last a season or so and generally were forgettable, though by the mid 90s they started to have regular series that would continue over, this was about 1996 when they started with the E/I requirements for the FCC.

Safer - I'm not sure if that's necessarily the case. There were incidents like Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing (which I remember vividly), the WTC bombing in 1993. I'm not sure if it was objectively safer than today (I'd probably say we're safer now, as that's the general historical trend). I remember back in the 90s, anyone could get through security at the airport. Let's say you wanted to pick up a friend at the airport, you could go through security and meet them at the gate. Now, you can't get to the gate unless you have a ticket. Oh, and you didn't have to take off your shoes and the security agents weren't huge assholes.

Politically correct - from my personal experience, I think the 90s was less concerned about bullying than we do now. I was bullied growing up and pretty much the attitude was that I shouldn't be so weird, that I was obviously a distraction, etc. I had someone threaten to kill me and the response was "Oh, boys will be boys!" Then Columbine happen and by the early 00s, when someone yelled at me "YOU'RE DEAD, [CHAMPTHOM]" they got suspended for a few days. All it took was two lunatics to shoot up a cafeteria to get people to take bullying seriously.

The 90s weren't that great though. I remember when AOL would offer you 10 free hours of the Internet and you'd be like "Wow, 10 hours!" Until 1995 or so, maybe earlier, AOL and other ISPs would actually charge by the hour to use the Internet, like $10 an hour and that was like, 14k. My first real access to the Internet was via a computer at the library and it was a text based terminal, no pictures or anything, green text on a black screen, that was 14 kilobytes per second. I remember being into Star Wars and downloading and printing off the entire script to A New Hope from it. Well it was only like 1 MB for the file but it would take like, 20 minutes to load. Now I could go to the same file and get it instantly. Plus we didn't have printers we had now, it was a dot matrix that would take forever to print and you had to trim off the sides, they'd have holes on both sides to load the paper.

It was also a big deal to miss your favorite TV show. You'd have to set up the VCR to record it if you missed it or you'd have to hunt through a TV Guide to find out the next showing. If you wanted to look up a fact about something, you'd have to hunt it down in an encyclopedia. It would be a pain in the ass to take pictures, you'd have to buy a roll of film or a disposable camera, then you'd have to take enough pictures to fill up the whole roll (only about 20 pictures or so), then you'd have to take it over to a place to develop them and wait like 3 or 4 days unless you spent a lot more for 1 hour development. Then they'd pretty much sit around in a photo album that you'd show people if they came to your house.

Though on the other hand, MTV actually showed music videos. And Cartoon Network was all cartoons. You know, here's a contest that wouldn't work now - in the mid 90s, I think in '94, Cartoon Network had a contest where you had to write out the lyrics to the "Josie and the Pussycats" theme. The problem is that it's so indiscernible that you can't really understand them all and if you wanted to view it again, you'd have to record it on your VCR, play, rewind, etc. Now that contest wouldn't work because you would just google the lyrics and bang, you'd find them.

And speaking of Seinfeld, if you watch the show now, pretty much 99% of their problems would be non-issues today. Like a Seinfeld plotline would involve something like Elaine losing someone's phone number. That'd probably be a non-issue today - you'd just program their number into your phone when you get it. There's a good Twitter feed called "Modern Seinfeld" that pretty much has updated versions of Seinfeld plots, and I think it would totally work.

So in honesty - yeah, the 90s sucked. I wouldn't say they were gay though.