Tag: Tamagotchi

Cue the Spice girls playing on your pink snazzy Discman. Trap your blonde highlights into a shiny orange scrunchie and  Zig a Zig Ah yourself back to the nineties.  Sunny Delight and Pop tarts. Space raider snacks and Aztec bars. The nineties lacked the magical mystery of the sixties, the glam of the seventies and the business acumen of the eighties. But it made up for this with pitifully bad music, fluorescent clothing and a particularly bad taste in shoes.

 If you  are a child of the nineties, you will remember these:

Tamagochis:   Try to explain the appeal of these weird items to the savvy child of today. It seemed as if everyone was physically attached to these little plastic eggs with tiny screens. Beeps alerted the owner to feeding and cleaning duties. — In these screens lived our hearts, our pets, our avatars, our very own Tamagotchi’s.  The responsibility of constant care made the Tamagotchi a short lived obsession.   

 Furbys and Polly Pocket:   Furbys were plastic owl like creatures who took delight in being quiet when you wanted to  the electronic blathering’s and particularly noisy when you needed silence. Furbys were particularly scary toys when you woke at night and found them staring at you, mimicking your breathing. Ugh

Polly Pockets:  The tiniest doll in the world, living in the tiniest flip up plastic house. Everyone had one. Everyone lost one.

Pogs: Remember these. Round printed discs which we collected and matched and collected and swopped… what was the purpose of pogs?  Oh yes, of course, to teach us raw commercialism and the need for more useless things in our lives.

Goths: Not to be mistaken with the punks of the eighties. Being a Goth was a way of life. Well, more a way of morbid undeadens. The hours it took to apply shocking makeup, black khol and lipstick and dressing in the ‘right ‘clothes, took away from Goth’s intended anarchism. Two hours in the bathroom applying eyeliner and ripping tights does not a provocateur make?

 Video tapes:  How uncool was it to rent a video tape and find it had not
be rewound by the last person!  Nineties kids videoed everything from
the telly. ‘Do not tape over’ signs were an invitation to reuse and recycle. Video tapes are in attics all over the country. The only record of communions, family events and match of the Day.

Gameboys:   The coolest retro item to survive the nineties!  A battery powered game console produced by Nintendo and the ‘must have’ toy of the nineties.  Prisoner of Zelda and Pokemon as you walked to school. Still awesome and worth a few bob if you have an original, in its case. Highest price paid for a retro Gameboy  €259.00 !  But hey,who kept this bad boy in its box?  Most people inadvertently bounced their Gameboy off the floor at least once a day.

Barney: It would be ten years before this purple dinosaur became an
instrument of torture in Guantanamo Bay.  In the nineties, you loved him and he loved you.

 So take a bow, child of the nineties. Your wonder years were so uncool and kitsch that they are now actually officially super- cool. And you didn’t turn out so bad yourself.

Take a bow, child of the nineties.