Oh, the 90's. So many of us, especially millennial's, have an affinity to the nostalgia of that decade. It's hard not to love the retro aesthetics, compact discs and Sony Discmans, the jazz blue and purple pattern that was on all of the cups, and dial-up internet.
Well... maybe not the dial-up part. But if that sound isn't burned into all of our memories!
Some of these things we just can't do anymore, because they simply do not exist (RIP Blockbuster). It's sad, but true. The most we can do is hold tight to those fond moments of our childhood.
Redditor tjapp93 wanted to take a trip down memory lane:
"What's something from the 90s you miss?"
Let's take a stroll through the past together.
Sitting in a Pizza Hut.
"Sit in Pizza Hut."
"I was on vacation in the mountains up state and they had one in town. I got to have pizza in an actual Pizza Hut for the first time since the late 90's early 2000's. We had one outside of town and then that closed and they made a to go one that ended up also closing. Now I can have one of the local places or Papa John's or Domino's."
"The target nearby does have the mini Pizza Hut pizzas and some of their appetizers. It's hardly the same as getting it from a Pizza Hut itself."
"One of my guilty pleasure is Pizza Hut pizza buffet. Haven't been in years and my girlfriend doesn't like it but that's okay I don't need to be there on the reg anyway. That Tony hawk demo disc though..."
- tjapp93
"Remember dessert pizza?!"
"Those stained glass chandeliers."
"And red plastic glasses"
Airports have changed dramatically since the 90s.
"Pre-911 airports."
- touchbar
"I was moving cross country and called a friend to bring me my toolset he borrowed so I could put it in my checked baggage. He never showed up and I thought well, that's that. Sitting on the plane, the stewardess walked up and said are you '____ ' I said yes, and she just handed me my 120 piece toolset complete with hammer, socket wrench, screwdrivers, carpet knife and explained the friend had arrived at the gate just after I boarded. Even back then I was like...'seriously?'"
This would never happen today.
"I remember I was flying home after my first year of college, where I had taken some art classes."
"When I finally got home I was looking in my backpack and forgot that I had left some art supplies in there including a couple of box cutters (the weapon used on 9/11). Security said nothing."
"Another time I was seeing one of my friends off at the airport as they were going to an out of state college. I arrived to the airport with my other friend and his little brother who had brought a toy rifle with him to the airport for some reason. Anyway, we were super late and rushing to the gate so we could say goodbye to my friend who was leaving. The little brother was too small so my buddy picked him up so we could sprint to the gate. In the process his brother hands me the toy rifle. So there we are the 3 of us running through the airport and I'm holding what looks like a rifle. This was before the security checkpoint and I realized this might not look good but I'm in a rush so I just chuck the rifle behind some chairs. I literally just threw it behind some airport seats."
"Nobody said anything, but I'm still surprised security wasn't called."
"The summer before 9/11 my father and I flew to Cincinnati for a national science competition thing I qualified for. While there we decided to drive into Indiana. One of the first things we noticed were firework stores (not stands, but stores)."
"My family ran a couple of firework stands back in Texas, where we are from, for like 30+ years until our town got too big to sell them."
"So, being firework people, we stopped and discovered that not only did they sale fireworks year round (not just 11 days in June/July and 13 days in December as is the season in Texas), they also sold original 'bottle rockets.'"
"These are the rockets on a stick that have a body about as big as a standard firecracker (not quite two inches) and are about 10 inches overall. They had been illegal to sale in Texas since 1981 and not a firework season had passed in my entire life where I wasn't asked if we had any, and then asked again and told they were 'cool' so I could trust them."
"These things were like the holy grail to 18 year old me. They sold them by the gross at about $6 per. My dad and I figured we could put 8 gross into my duffel bag, so that's what we bought. Even bank then we didn't know if they would make it back on the plane."
"We arrive at DFW airport and nervously wait in the baggage area. After a few moments, out comes my black duffel bag. I grab it, open it up, and the bottle rockets had made the flight."
"So, what I miss about the 90s is being able to put explosives in your checked luggage and transporting them home."
- dxbigc
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The electronics.
"Colorful translucent electronics."
"Oh yea that purple N64 controller."
- tjapp93
"Game Boy Color, seeing all the circuit board through the plastic was way cool."
When viral video's weren't a thing.
"Being able to act goofy without having anyone record it and share with the world."
"Ugh agreed. I had to stop drinking with one of my friends because she'd ALWAYS record everyone doing anything even remotely fun or goofy and it'd be on snapchat or Facebook within seconds. Like, I just wanna get a little drunk and dance and have a good time with my friends, I don't want every person I hardly know seeing me let loose."
"l never forget watching a last day of school video from June 2001 and while there's a lot of differences especially in style and fashion, hands down the biggest difference was the relative novelty all the students and teachers gave to the video camera. like, only this one guy decided to bring in the camera, there were no phones or other recording devices at the time so it was so cute seeing someone walk up to him and then their eyes go wide and they say 'Ooo! a camera!' Being recorded was not the norm. And shoot dude I'm in my late twenties still but June 2001 feels like yesterday to me time just f*cking moves on ya."
"I remember being in high school around 2003/2004 when some of my peers were just starting to get cellphones. My friends and I all laughed at the 'Spoiled rich kids' with their cellphones, all of us claiming we'd never be like that. A year or two later, we all had cell phones."
"How old does it make me when I remember kids getting their first pagers? They had them clipped to the inside of their jeans so you could only see the back of the clip exposed. Pagers were the sh*t."
Photographs weren't so easy to send.
Now we aren't even talking the 90s, this is just in the last 20 years.
"This is the example I use. When my son was born in 2007, I had a digital camera. I had to take the camera home that night, upload pictures to my PC, and email them out to people. When my daughter was born in 2011, I did all of that in the delivery room on my phone."
"I was in 5th grade in 2005 and was part of a photography club that year."
"Had a cheap digital camera that was my prized possession. It was a pain in the a** to plug that into the laptop and upload my photos using a dedicated software that I had to install from a disk that came with the CD. And the memory card limited me to like, 100 photos."
"Nowadays my phone has a substantially higher resolution and memory, by orders of magnitude. And I can just upload them to the cloud or social media in a minute."
There was a specific kind of movie.
"Movies. A lot my favorite movies are mid-sized thrillers from the 90's. A lot of big actors, but not huge spectacles.
"That segment is dying out. You have huge blockbusters for international markets, some prestige period pieces, comedies and indies. And then there are TV shows."
"But the sort of 'Harrison Ford's wife is missing, again' films are severely lacking theses days."
"I sometimes ask myself if movies from the 90s were so great because they were just a part of my childhood, or they're actually special by objective standards."
"As you alluded to, I really do think there was a style of film they put out more in the 90s. I can't exactly put my finger on what that style is, though."
"I feel like it was just a simpler style of storytelling. For me, watching a 90s movie feels like hearing a really engaging story from a good friend. Nothing flashy, nothing in 4 parts. There's some good music on in the background and I'm just enjoying something humans have enjoyed for eons."
"Arcades. Big, noisy arcades, full of actual videogames, whose graphics were 20 times better than what you could get at home."
"And the machines took coins, not this bullsh*t refillable card system that is waaaay more of a blatant rip-off."
- Tazittel
"Oooh the cards are the worst. You have to buy one card per person or everyone has to stay together to use the card, and each card has an activation fee!"
"Instead of inserting x amount of coins into an arcade machine to play, arcade chains found it better if people had to buy cards with credits in them, so you can buy credits with cash that are loaded onto the card instead of turning paper money into coins. That way, you can carry your card and bring it to multiple locations. If I had to guess why this happened, It's probably because arcades shifted to redemption games and prizes that are damn near impossible to get."
"Also, people are acutely aware of what a game costs when you have to plug in five tokens. You can tell how much play time you're getting by how fast your pockets get empty. On a card, you never really know what the game costs and how much you have left. You go full tilt until it is gone."
"The other thing is a lot of us will add a dollar to two just to spend the entire card or people walk out with 50 or 75 cents on a card and never come back. That's real money when a thousand people or more a year do it."
"Arcades died specifically because home console graphics caught up to them. The PS1 and Saturn got close enough that the differences started feeling minor and then with the Dreamcast and PS2 (and the rise of online gaming) it was all over. It's not as though Dave and Busters and Round One are unpopular, but you go for experiences that don't translate as well to home, which means the few modern arcade games are either steering wheel racers, light gun games, or peripheral-based rhythm games."
The 90s internet.
"Sometimes I miss the internet from the 90s. It was less stressful if that makes sense."
"It was far less commercial, people ran the internet, not companies."
"I'm so glad that the dumba** sh*t I said as a teenager is hidden away on some defunct video game forums under a screen name that isn't even close to my real name. I feel for today's kids, who know that if they ever do anything noteworthy with their lives, someone will dig through their old tweets and be like 'Yeah but look at the sh*t this guy said as a freshman in high school.'"
Trying to hang with friends.
"Walking 20 minutes to a mates house knocking his door then finding out he's not in. It was like rolling the dice."
"Various issues to 'just use the landline' - a lot of people didn't answer their phones anyway, some people left them off the hook sometime as they didn't want to be bothered. Some friends wouldn't hear the phone if they were in their room listening to music/playing SNES/Megadrive, some people had sisters who were always on the phone so calling just got engaged tone. That's just the issues I can think of right now."
"If I really wanted to hang out with a particular friend and they weren't home, that meant it was time to hop on the bike and ride by the next 4-5 most likely places he would be."
"We did this all the time. Huge games of tag, capture the flag, or hide and seek at dusk/night time. Was some fun times back in the 90's."
- ilikeme1
"Or when you could hear kids playing and you'd just bolt out the door hoping it was so-and-so coming your way. No better feeling when your two best buds were coming down the road on their bikes."
Though it is so sad to see these things go, we can still carry those fond memories with us. Who knows, with the way trends work, maybe these once popular things will come back around again.
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