In 1998 The Wedding Singer came out, and was (IIRC) the first major 80’s nostalgia movie. It’s now ten years later, 2008 is almost up, and we have not, to my knowledge, had a major 90’s nostalgia movie. (Or did I just miss it?) Assuming there hasn’t been one, isn’t it about time?
So if we were to make a 90’s nostalgia movie, what fashions/trends/slang/music/hairstyles would have to be included?
The 90s were pretty bland. Outside of grunge there was really no style movements for most of the decade and most of the music was pretty much a constant until modern day. Really, we’re still sort of in the 90s. There’s been no pragmatic shift yet.
B.S.
In the 90s, the internet was just barely coming on the scene, as was gangsta rap with the east coast/west coast rivalry, there were all sorts of little pop trends like Beanie Babies, Pogs, and Magic: The Gathering, people actually said “the bomb” as in “man those pogs are the bomb!”, or “Hey have you heard the new Ace of Base album? It’s the bomb!”, cell phones were fancy new technology that few people could afford, certainly not high-school and middle-school kids, and the handsets were HUMONGOUS.
Just to name a few things. I am sure we can think of many more.
Also to expand: I can tell you’re not a hip-hop fan, but hip-hop has absolutely exploded in our country and the world - I just checked the Billboard and 23 of the top 50 songs right now are hip-hop or R&B. And the 90s is where that explosion happened - yes hip-hop traces its early roots to the 80s and even 70s, but it would be a massive oversight not to note that the 90s was when the Golden Age of Hip-Hop (as it is described by hip-hop fans) bloomed.
How do you show the internet as a non-entity? People not sitting in front of a computer?
And all the rest that you point out, I mean compare that to Disco or Punk. Who cares whether people said “the bomb” or not. You need a lot greater difference.
Living through the shift from the 80s to the 90s it was obvious that things had changed significantly. Certainly things have changed since the 90s, but not in a revolutionary sense (except for, as you say, the internet perhaps.)
It wasn’t a “non-entity”, it was a growing entity. E-mail was a buzzword, and if you knew what it meant you were really tech savvy.
Again, the gangsta rap/hip-hop explosion was huge. Don’t we remember the politicians and public figures clamoring about how horrible and corrupting to the youth it was? Ironically the hip-hop today is getting tamer and tamer and it’s bigger than ever - even my mom likes Kanye West.
The internet is really damn revolutionary. So are cell phones.
I think The Wackness would fit some of the criteria here.
Yes, and I remember politicians saying the exact same things about heavy metal music in the 1980s, as they’ve done with every musical movement for decades.
Frankly, if nobody ever makes a nostalgia movie about any decade ever again, I’ll be a happy guy.
It’s not a “Nostalgia Movie” but * The Big Lebowski* is set in 1991. The only thing that pegs the movie as not being set in the present (besides the TV interview right at the start) is A) The enormous cellphones and B) the Cassette-playing Ghetto Blaster the Nihilists have. Besides that, you could say the movie was set on Tuesday last week and I think 99% of people wouldn’t think anything of it. Even more tellingly, The Big Lebowski was made in 1998- before the '90s were even over- and still seems “modern” 10 years later at the close of the first decade of the 21st century.
There was a '90s style, but it’s hard to pin down; kind of the tail end of the '80s Leisure Suit And Funky Colours look. I’ve always felt Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, for example, was very much a product of its time, but still a great TV series nonetheless. 
Rap has been a large but secondary force for the last 28 years. It didn’t just take off since 2000 nor, would I guess, has it expanded it’s market penetration appreciably since then. And it’s never been the number 1 music and style, which is the main issue.
But I mean, look at the number of rap stars to work as actors. Will Smith, Ice Cube, Marky Mark, Eminem, LL Cool Jay, etc. All of these except for Eminem became famous in the 90s. Since then, Rap has quite possibly shrunk in the public eye since it’s become part of the background, even though that might have meant expanding in terms of sales.
Eminem got famous in the 90’s, too. I can remember blasting the Slim Shady LP at full volume during a field trip my senior year: 98-99. If he’d made it all the way to podunk Jefferson, Texas, I’d assume he was a force to be reckoned with by then.
'99 is pretty tail end though.
If you want to know what was amusing about the 90s, go rent Clueless. That movie is hilarious on an intentional and nostalgic level. I mean, holy crap, look at the HATS people used to wear!
True.
Oddly, I sorta-kinda consider 2000 to be the last year of the 90’s.
The 1990s saw cellphones and The Internet become mainstream technologies for most of America.
Watching re-runs of Seinfeld reminds me of what living in the 90s was like, especially in the early part of the decade. Several episodes feature missed hookups, waiting in front of buildings for people who are late or not coming at the last minute, because there was no way to call someone on a cell phone. A plot line that revolved around using “MovieFone” to find out movie schedules, instead of looking it up on the 'net. By the very last episode (from 1998), Elaine did have a cell phone – but a major plot element involved how lousy the connection quality was, and how rude it was to make an important call that way instead of from a land line.
Telephone answering machines with tapes. Nowadays most people have Voicemail based on their digital telephone or cellphone sevice, or at least a built-in digital messaging system on their landline handset. But the plot line of more than one episode involved passing around or trying to steal the tape out of an answering machine.
And oh, the clothes! The flannel… The plaid! It burns!
Also there was a huge shift in Music from early 90s to the later 90s (and not just in rap).
You had the shift away from Grunge and the angstier Generation X’ers sort of music, to the more poppy and happier Teenboppers. You had the rise of Boy Bands, and Britney, Christina, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, and all those other pop stars rising up there while at the SAME time you also had the rise of Nu-Metal, with bands like Limp bizkit, Korn, Staind, and such hitting it big as sort of an alternative to the bubble gum pop out there- you had the Family Values Tour, you had Eminem rising up and dissing all of those artists on his OWN CD, which was something Rap hadn’t really done to full force- sure rap artists had always dissed each other, but to have him cross over and start picking on artists from other genres and to get such a limelight was huge.
The late 90s was more about excess and enjoying life for teenagers, while the early 90s seemed steep in angst and rebellion. Generation X had faded out, and was replaced during the 90s by the rise of Cellphones, AIM, and the whole idea of enjoying oneself as present in the music of the era. The later 90s was way more connected, and this trend would continue further into the 2000, with the Myspace generation and Generation Y (which are more of a 2000’s thing).
For me, the 90s started to end actually with 9-11. That kinda stopped everything and created the cultural change. That’s why I associate 2000 with the 90s, but not 2001 as much. There was the 70s, the 80s, and then there was the early 90s, and then Pre-9-11, and Post-911.
Yeah, it’s already here.
The Jennifer Aniston movie Rumor Has It was set in 1997, as I recall. They didn’t make a huge deal out of it; a big, clunky cell phone, Kevin Costner as an early Internet tycoon. And I couldn’t believe they passed up the chance to make a “Friends” joke in a Jennifer Aniston flick.
(Note: This post should not be taken to imply that the movie was anything other than abysmally horrible.)
Slightly offT: One of my perennieal faves, Free Enterprise set in “The near present” (it was released, or it escaped depending on who you asked, in 1999), has all the characters buying laserdiscs. Now, I had thought DVD’s were a little more prevalent in the mid-90’s but maybe I’m remembering wrong. (It took me a while to get a DVD player, and to tell the truth my first one was my son’s Playstation 2!)
So, would a 90’s nostalgia movie make a big deal out of laserdiscs? Or are they a fad the world passed by?
Nice summary of the music shift. When boy bands died and The Killers became “rock music” is how I define the shift to 00’s music.
I was too young to remember the early 90’s, but the years 1990-1995 have a very distinct look to them. You can see it in My So-Called Life and in early episodes of Seinfeld.
It is pretty easy to notice when there are no cellphones around. Any communication drama that comes up will lead people to ask why cellphones weren’t used to solve it.
What really drives home the 90’s is the lack of fear of terrorism or the Soviet Union. In My So-Called Life the main character complains that she doesn’t have a moment in her life like the JFK assassination. That adults like to talk about where they were when Kennedy got shot, but she has no such event in her life. There was a very huge disenchantment with politics in that decade, unlike in our current one.
