It was the age that Dutch people massively saved their heads bald, put on track suits and spasmed to the beat of music like they were controlled by some unskilled puppeteer. It was the golden age for quiz shows and making people do weird stuff for money. Like there was a show where people had to do like a challenge like.. pee in your pants for a 1000 bucks you have 10 minutes to do so or find 11 people to slep in the face. It was the age where the adults did not wonder about YouTuber X tweeted or which , vaguely half assed celebrity cheated on their spouse and now they had to be destroyed for it.. no they sat on the couch ate some crisps and wondered if Ross and Rachel would ever get back together. I was a kid.. from the age of 4 up until 13. I did not know about those things, I just hoped that Shredder would not harm April O’Neil or that the Biker Mice from Mars would find their way home! Today we take a look at my 90’s!
I want to to thank Winst0lf Portal for tagging me for this one! I am going to have some fun with this one! Also a note, due to it requiring many clips from YouTube this post is not WordPress-Reader friendly.. please use the actual website to enjoy this post!
There are several answers to this question. What would be my favorite 90’s show in hindsight. That would probably be Friends! I still enjoy watching that so much! While it carried on into the 2000’s most of it was 90’s as heck. Back then I think I would have either said DuckTales or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but those are cartoons so I am no sure if the count. But in the end.. all things considered I am going to have to say the one that shaped me most and the one that I really went all out on was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It is the perfect amalgamation of 90’s and what basically is anime! Kids with superpowers and giant combiner robots including multiple transformations and monsters of the week! I wrote Tommy Oliver if he wanted to be my boyfriend after Kim dumped him… I was young but I’d make a great pink ranger! I went to a life show in our concert halls! It was the best thing i had ever seen. While in truth it was not a lot better than the Turtles coming out of their shell tour! .. You really should watch that! Luckily you an right here! (If you are not reading this on WordPress Reader)
Power Rangers stuck with me until this day! I still like it! Ducktales I see got outdated and the new DuckTales series is soooo friggin good it ruined the old show for me. However while I have seen a lot of Power Rangers series and kept updated with more of them even if I could not watch, nothing beats that time capsule feeling of the original. Don’t get me wrong. Power Rangers in Space is like the absolute best series but MMPR is the closest thing to live changing. It introduced me to the concept of soap opera acting and I to this day think there has been no better Blue Ranger than Billy Cranston. Portrayed by David Yost. While Amy Jo Johnson’s Kimberly Hart always has a warm place in my heart I have to admit that my favorite Pink Ranger is Kendrix Morgan played by Valerie Vernon but now is not the time for that! It’s about the 90’s and yo do not get more 90’s than MMPR. The way we have socially grown since then, the outfits, the visual effects, the lessons and what ever kept our minds back then.. there is just so much in this show to remind me of those good old days! I also hate like a treasure chest full of Power Ranger toys so I must have really liked this show.
Honorable Mention to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the way! I discovered it late.. which isn’t uncommon for us Dutch to get something fairly late but that is another thing that had me hooked and one of the first times I had a girl crush! Season one is from 1997 so I’d say it does count.. though the majority of it happend in the 2000’s But hey.. the winner still is MMPR! Another honourable mention is there for Pokémon, the anime aired here really soon and like Power Ranger it changed my live. Yet like with Buffy , the majoirty of it’s lifespan happend in the 2000’s so just a mention!
That time has come again for me to talk about THAT song! But before we do I am going to show you guys a few other songs. You see as I lived in the Netherlands.. back then we did a lot more “our own thing” rather than dub your shows or post all of america’s top hit songs in our charts.So while doing my tag I am showing you a bit of the dutch 90’s as well! The first song I am going to pick here is a bit more international. Of course I wanted to pick something some of you guys might have forgotten so no Barbie Girl from me! I love how much pink is in that clip though! Not even Toy Box with Best friend.. no instead we go with Bewitched with C’est La Vie!
Okay that one was not my favourite song. I mostly listened to dutch music as it was a lot easier for the by then still mono lingual me. When three Soap Opera Stars formed a girl group using character name to become the Netherlands most desired girl group , I was playbacking and singing along with this song! A song about the breathlessness after sex, but back then I did not know that. I just repeated the words and took it in the most innocent way possible.
I am sure that one was not very interesting to your guys though! It’s a bland clip and the words would make no sense. The other dutch song I am putting up here is something about a dutch group called Gabber’s. A variant of Ravers who would shave their heads, put on a lot of golden chains and would go do a dance named Hakkuh! Which basically would translate to something as Chopping. This got parodied by a dutch comedian and a group named Hakkuhbar and it resulted in this weirdness that I do hold dear. It is a pretty good representation of the “Gabber” Lifestyle.. though the music doesn’t reflect it that well, the Gabbers are still a thing today.. though a lot less of them! This is a real life style to people.. and this clip.. shows it’s quirks very well.
As for my favorite piece of 90’s music! Well in 1990’s a certain video game dropped here in the Netherlands and Japan. It was in America Early..but hey 1989 counts! My love for this song has been mentioned in many tag post and will continue to be mentioned so here it is!
While I don’t know many international adds from back in the time, again the Netherlands did a lot more of their own thing back then so here is a dutch commercial. This is a great commercial for an insurance company that .. despite the “victim” being outdated, would work today, just replace this man with anyone relevant of your choosing! I hope you enjoy this one!
Spice Girls! Girl Power and all! But if I had to choose between the two it would definitely be Back Street Boys! I never liked boy bands all that much but Backstreet’s Back was one of the better songs. I really never liked Justin Timberlake, like ever! Though in the 90’s he had some seriously Giorno Giovanna hair! But yeah Boy Bands always were aimed to make girls dream about boyfriends and make them feel a weird form of ticklish! I never got that so this appeal was lost on me! Not the biggest music fan either! I preferred the Smurfs cover famous music!… or video game music.
I guess Spice Girls here then? Maybe the smurfs?! I honestly do not really idolise music artists at all, Bon Jovi was alright! Robbie Williams had some nice songs.. but yeah I was not really a fan of anyone. I always had a thing for one trick ponies like Eiffel 65 and to lesser extend Lou Bega and of course Los Del Rio. A song captures me not an artist. I am going to with the Spice Girls! I think they would make an awesome anime.. maybe even a JoJo series with them as the main cast! Then again.. a Jojo with Los Del Rio Might even be better! They even already pose!
I was an avid Flippo collector, I am not sure if those existed overseas or if they were exclusively a dutch thing but they were super hype here. I think I saw some with other language prints.. but back then the world was a lot smaller so who knows! Little disks with Looney Tunes characters on it that you played a sort of slamming game with. You threw your Flippo on a stack of your opponents Flippo and everything that fell of the stack face up was yours to collect everything face down including the one you slammed with ..would belong to your opponent.
No one did that though it was just a trading commodity! We send our mothers to buy us the folders in which we could collect them and they came in bag of crisps so we ate like 2 bags a day and begged old ladies for their flippos. They spawned many incarnations including Pokémon spin offs, heavier variants in special flavor of chips and flying flippo’s which you could launch and something called topshots which were flippo’s but of soccer players. I even collected those even though I hate soccer. I once got two air packs of crisps in a row with tose as they really got poorly packaged and they just send met the entire set as an apology! I was so mad they ruined the fun of collecting for me now as well!
If we count the official ones not a lot, if we count the brandless ones about five. Not five different ones though, me and my sister would get one at the same time, and she would always end up abandoning them and I would try to save hers as well. So we got one of those things that grow up from blob into dino things, though I had a more chicken like creature. I lost that one on a vacation and then I had my sisters dino for a while ..but that one could no longer be silenced anymore after one of the buttons broke and one day it disappeared from my room never to be found again ..weirdly enough.. I guess it went to go live on a farm. The third and fourth one was a really weird dog like thing with a hat.. me and my sister got the same thing. That one did not die if you left it alone either, it would take a little handkerchief and tie it to a stick and just walk out of the tamagotchi, it would abandon you. The problem was that thing was super fickle! Like even if you took the best care of it in the world it could still decide to walk out on you for no reason at all. So my sister quickly gave up on hers and I tried to maintain two! Eventually their batteries ran out and that was the end of them.
The final one was a birthday gift my sister had gotten.. it was a dog that could talk and it had a lot more functions.. but the twist was.. it did not walk around on your screen.. it was the device the screen was just it’ face. So instead of playing games you had to wipe crummies off it’s face and do a sort of Simon Says with it. That one I loved the most but eventually that one ran out of batteries as well and I could not be stuffed to begin all over with it all again. Not that long after that Pokémon would come out anyway so I had now virtual pets that were just as cute but a lot less stressful to maintain.
Ducktales for NES is one of the contenders of favorite video games but my favorite console definitely was the SNES! My glory days of gaming! While I loved all Nintendo Consoles to bit up until the Wii , which almost made me renounce Nintendo for a while, the SNES is always my highlight.
While Nowadays I’d arguable say Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI/III are my favorite games in quality I am going to have to say Donkey Kong Country takes the cake for my favorite 90’s gaming experience. I was so proud when I finally beat it! The music the graphics and the overall gameplay was so amazing for it! I vastly preferred it’s platforming over Mario’s. Beating an enemy felt so much more satisfying and the level design back then to me was unparalleled. While there are games I acknowledge are better this is one of the games I could always be asked to play and I will always enjoy myself with even if it’s just to look at it!
I can’t remember if we ever had cereal toys, I do remember that for quite a while though I was really into the rice based cereal. Like Coco Puffs or Rice Crispies but I really alternated. One of the best cereal memories I have though is that of Kellogs Frosties. Back in the 90’s I would stay over and my grandparents , who lived in the same town, a lot. It would often be a break from my sister. I was always a kid that really thrived on some alone time. While Grandma was always overly caring she would often let me wander her big garden or the big house alone! I could play hours finding some old board games she had trying to understand the rules, or wandering on the 7 meter sound wall her garden was edges off with, I would always be up fairly early because she woke up very early and she would make me a soft boiled egg and I would get this beautiful little crystal bowl with super cold milk we got in a very special supermarket in Belgium where I could eat my Frosties from.. after the soft boiled egg was finished. We always made our egg super salty so the milky and sugary stuff afterwards were really good! I would come back home so relaxed and thoroughly overfed.
I was 13 when the 90’s ended! I wasn’t very feminine and mostly into geek stuff. Like Power Rangers but also Dark Wing Duck and I had a big thing for classic monsters. Horror books but also pseudo-scientific books on how Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies worked. I wasn’t to busy with a crush back in the days. So no one really. Maybe Really late in the 90’s I began picking up Buffy the Vampire slayer and I realised much much later that it might have actually been a crush I felt towards Buffy.. and later when I became more self aware for Willow.. though as the series progressed into the fifth season and beyond I’d lose those crushes on both of them. Phoebe Buffay is another 90’s character I ended up having a bit of a thing for but again .. not in the 90’s !… They are 90’s characters though so you can decide if they count. I never got into that Backstreet boy love thing though! Nor did I ever had a Celebrity crush aside from Deborah Ann Woll.
Ducktales the movie! We did not have the Disney Channel but I am pretty sure that one would count right? The one with the magic lamp? The scorpions! It once aired belgian tv and we videotapes it and I watched the heck out of that! Those wishes, that ending.. I loved it so much! The villain scared me for a bit but I watched this movie until the video began breaking. The sound began to go off key and more and more wear began to show on the tape from rewinding it so much! I loved it more than the show and that already was very dear to me! Not my favorite show back then because some episodes weren’t all that good but this movie made me happy every single time!
Now this one is tricky, we had none of those networks in the actual 90’s they all came to us much later, or required some expensive additional package for tv to access. The shows that did reliable air where the Disney shows that usually aired on the Belgian public access channel that me as a kid living near the border could view without any trouble. I loved Gummi Bears, Rescue Rangers and Duck Tales but I guess I have to say my favorite one was Darkwing Duck! It was so funny and zany! I really liked that almost “fake” hero thing he had going on for him. It was cool to see a hero who is often plagued by bad luck. His analogies stuck with me for a long time as well! Darkwing Duck is the reason why I hate Talespin..as it was the show that replaced it. Back than I was really fickle and just replacing my favorite shows was enough reason for me to hate you with a passion!
Velcro shoes! I know that isn’t as zany but I was hardly going to shave my head and put on a track suit now was I?! I was bullied for a large part of the 90’s as well, (like from 1994 onwards) so my clothing was usually to be as stealth as possible , also something that would not be to bad to ruin when kids threw their juice boxes at me or squished worms all over…so I wore very casual stuff with shoes I could not trip over.. It was not enough to run away as I had a weird motor dysfunction that made me slow and clunky.. but at least I managed to run away a few times when I was absolutely terrified..so a good practical trend. Poor worms that died to bully me! Of course shoes back then had to have light in them so you had to turn that on before you ran away! So that is kinda weird?!
Power Rangers…with barbie/ mini clothes on! I never liked playing with barbies or something like that to much. She always felt like a shallow girl to me! Kimberly and Trini were much more interesting people! I would play the wedding between Tommy Oliver and Kimberly heart a million times dressing them up in barbie clothes which either were way to large or we had adapted. It would not always be a happy wedding though.. Lord Zed would come over and turn their wedding cake into a monster or send Pudgey Pig to eat their wedding buffet. Or they would go to a movie date together and I would just sit them next to me and watch a movie! …Most of the time that Ducktales one.. Sometimes my stories would also be a bit more messed up.. like when Kimberly got stung to death by Grumble Bee which was actually a Bee on a bouquet given to her by Tommy. Tommy who caused her death killed himself from guilt but also in the hope he can find her in the after life. But he gets send to hell and now has to use his ranger powers to battle an army of demons..which were the small soldiers from that terrible movie! I had all those as toys as well.
None of the above we did not have them as channels here! We did get Fox Kids though! Which would be by choice! I remember on wednesdays they had this block of action cartoons named Power Rock which had shows such as Spiderman TAS and X-men TAS. The Tick was also part of that solid line up. During the day there was amazing stuff like Eek the Cat! It also had Power Rangers and Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog!
That really depended on my mood, we had three major cartoon sources. We had Kindernet, which had awesome shows like Earthworm Jim, Bouli de Sneeuwpop (Bouli the Snowman) Maple Town and Star Street. While some are actually 80’s show they ran until deep into the 90’s. I could not get rid of Nils Holgersson even if I tried!
Telekids had stuff Animaniacs but also a lot of ecological stuff like Seabert the Seal , WNF Ranger kids, and of course Captain Planet. Their sunday would be a bit “nature” themed. While on Saturday they would hold a big live show filled with skits, and games , it was super fun. For example there was this segment where kids had to ride derpy cowbot-hatted horse named Harry. Just before afternoon the hosts would do a skit show of our most famous soap opera!
Fox Kids finally would hold the cartoons that one might identify most with Saturday Morning Cartoons, shows like Kidd Video, Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks and Inspector Gadget. Fox Kids was usually my go-to but it all depended on my mood.
I actually never really liked McDonalds, I did not like the food and I never really got the toys I wanted. One I remember very vividly was a Flounder from The Little Mermaid that was like a squirt gun! I wanted that as a Bath toy but all I got was stupid Prince Eric! One I did kinda like was those disney figures of Beauty and the Beast and most of their disney stuff.
I loved the dress changing Belle Toy a lot! I was upset though there was no Lumiere toy! He was my favourite character! I liked show people and the singing and dancing.. perhaps that’s why I like Idol Girl shows this much nowadays?! I also loved those Disney Characters in a car or train thing.. but those were hard to make a nice story to play with!
Back then it was definitely horror , I was a big collector of those Goosebumps books by RL Stein my favorite one was Horrorland which got sold so short in the tv series adaptation the book was so much better. Yet my favorite book would definitely be “De Griezelbus 2 or 3”
Griezelbus was a dutch book series written by Paul van Loon, in which a writer by the name of P Onnoval would lure kids into a trap to eat them. In the first part he is werewolf and by telling them horror stories he tries to wait for the full moon to eat them.
He travels around in a bus that holds props that each tell a story but secretly he is trying to isolated these kids. Part 2 is set in a car graveyard, kids stumble upon the bus as a radio voice begins to tell them stories to stall them until Onnoval now a vampire can rise from his grave and feast on them. In Part 3 he is even further destroyed and is now a virtual presence.. the bus now has become a museum piece and as a special the museum hosts a fake story telling by the dead writer.. and all the kids experience horror stories in virtual reality. In each story a character dies or nearly dies.. but what the kids do not know is that one kid.. experiences the story they see first person.. they are tricked into thinking they are dead. Once weakened Onnoval can choose the body he wants to possess and dispose of the others without resistance.
This book came out in 1997 and while Book 4 had my absolute favorite short story I think the virtual reality and forcing children to experience their own death trough horror experiences was the strongest book to me!
Like I mentioned earlier Power Rock on Wednesday was my jam. Power Rangers, Mystic Knights of Tir na Nog! I loved that stuff, but I think it was on Tuesdays but I can not remember there was this show called the Droom Show on our public access channels. In this show kids would compete in about an eightish number of settings.. each episode had another set.. like Medieval, Undersea or Candy Factory and Horror, each “dream” had its own games where kids could compete for the highest score and in the end they could participate in a price game. Which could win them gameboys, tv’s but also stuff like a day to a theme park or new pyjamas and cool notebooks. Tests of agility , intellect and strength would come into play in one of the best children game shows I saw and I was completely silent when watching this after school! Sure nowadays this would not fly anymore but to a kid this was amazing!
I miss a lot of things, some I can’t even say without trouble. I guess the best way to summarise it is I miss the inconvenience of the 90’s in some cases. How hard it was to get a copy of a game. You had to go out to the store to buy a game, you could only multiplayer by having friends over.. there were only so many screens people in house could watch so you had to make compromises. Video games weren’t always good but if you made a bad buy you just had to suck it up and try again. Nowadays we don’t have to put any effort into anything anymore. A bad video game can be so burned to the ground because you have a new video game within seconds. People who play Fortnite are often so insanely toxic to another because it no longer is hard to see what exactly happened, people have access to how they humiliate you, in slow mode and normal as well in high quality, they can stream it online with the push of a button and there are millions of others who play that shitstain of a game with them so if you suck.. they can just bully you out of there and only have a penalty for like a second. In the 90’s .. matchmaking was a hassle non existent if it was .. it’s a huge hassle. You could not ridicule your opponent because if they left.. you had no one to play with. Even if they picked Oddjob in Golden Eye!
To rent a video or a game you needed to go to a store, talk to people learn about other cool games.. now you can just type the name in a search bar tab a button on your phone and your playing exactly what you want.. this has resulted into a lot of people having a super small world. An anime is only good if it scores a certain MAL rating right now, a movie with a Rotten Tomato score below 50% isn’t worth watching.. back then we did not have that we had to experiment as a result we would be much more grateful to the good stuff. I really wish that we had the social-cultural understanding of today mixed with the gratefulness for any shape or form of content of back then.. only then I think people can be really open minded..
This had SOOOO Many questions! This took me a lot time! I was afraid the next 90’s might have come! But it was very fun to do! So time to tag some people!
First of all I would like to tag my Blogging Bestie Foovay! Who I am sure will have a different look in this than me!
Second I wouild like to Tag Geek Girl Joy. I am curious to see what her childhood is like!
Thirdly I would like to tag Lita Kino, who I know is a Pokémon and Power Ranger loser like me! So I am eager to find what else we have in common!
If you want to participate you can answer this question! What is Pinkie’s Power Ranger?
Of course all my Coconuts are automatically tagged so check out if you are a Coconut or become one by supporting my Kofi! I will see you in the next blog! Now I I can finally get out of this ridiculous outfit!
Pinkie's Paradise 