Have any movies skewered the '90s in the same way that “The Wedding Singer” made fun of the '80s? The closest example I could think of isn’t a movie, but rather that horrible Simpsons episode where Homer had a grunge band.
And if you were to make a movie about the 90s what trends, news events and pop culture landmarks would you choose to make fun of?
One big thing–the internet sent, seemingly overnight, from the domain of computer-literate researchers and academics to an unwashed horde of clueless newbies and opportunistic spammers, facilitated by Prodigy, America Online and a host of others. The old line and the vulgar newcomers had zero sympathy for one another.
You mentioned grunge. A bigger shift was “realty television,” which ate MTV–they gradually showed fewer videos and more Real World spinoffs.
Also, I got to gloat a little to all my relatives, who for some reason thought I might be the Unabomber.
Singles, the movie that pretty much ushered in the Grunge era, functions pretty well as something that skewers what followed soon after. Primary Colors is another.
I’m not sure that’s what the OP is looking for. Singles came out in 1992 and was one of the quinessential films ABOUT the 90s, not a parody of them. Sort of like The Breakfast Club was a quinessential film on 80s high school culture. In fact, even though the films are completely unrelated, you can sort of see them as similar characters to the ones in The Breakfast Club but about 8 years later:
The Hypercompetetive Jock
Andrew (Emilio Estevez) -> Debbie (Sheila Kelly) (same character archtype, he didn’t have a sex change…although it was the 90s)
Still overly competitive
The Stoner
Bender (Judd Nelson) -> Cliff (Matt Dillon)
Found a more creative outlet for his angst
The Academic
Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) -> Steve (Cambell Scott)
Mellowed out a bit
The Princess
Claire (Molly Ringwald) -> Janet (Bridget Fonda)
Became more independent
The Artsy Girl
Allison (Ally Sheedy) -> Linda (Kyra Sedgewick)
Became more comfortible with herself and more confident
Anyhow, excuse the hijack.
Office Space, even though it came out in 1999 was a pretty good parody of 20-something 90s dot com tech worker culture.
The Adam Sandler film Click has a flashback to the 90s where he met his wife. (The song was “Linger” by The Cranberrys was playing in the bar).
That’s all I got.
There was also this weird SNL sketch where Andy Samberg played an out-of-breath jogger from the early 90s. It was essentially Andy in neon spandex gasping for air and talking about things that people in the early 90s thought were pretty nifty. The things he mentioned got more and more silly until he just shouted “Crystal Pepsi!” right before the fade to black. I suppose that more than anything it was mocking the idea of mocking earlier decades.
It’s hard to parody recent events like this. Even the Wedding Singer had a hard time with the actual parody because it was too close. You couldn’t actually parody CDs for example because everybody still used CDs. They had to parody people being impressed/confused by this commonplace technology. All they could really parody was the ludicrous fashions. It would be much easier to remake an 80s parody today because so much has become truly redundant in the last 10 years (cassette tape, dot matrix printers, the Taliban as an ally etc).The same applies to the 90s. And trust me, grunge is at least as easy to parody as big hair.
So, novelties from the 90 that are now commonplace that can confuse the characters:
The internet
Kids on Ritalin and similar drugs
Cell phones becoming ubiquitous (although cell phones have been common enough since the 80s everybody owning one is very 90s.)
Ecstasy and similar recreational drugs (only works for the early 90s)
Where you can and can’t smoke.
Reality TV
Ubiquitous, interchangable boy bands (yeah I know NKOTB was late 80, but the unceasing flood started in the mid 90s.)
Microsoft in general (until the mid 90s most people didn’t know what Miscrosoft or Bill Gates was).
Windows 95 in particular. The hype, the beat up. The publicity. Oh so very 90s.
The Millenium bug (any 90s movie has to mention this one).
The Ozone Hole (an 80s invention, but it was still considered a looming catastrophe well into the 90s)
Tattoos on girls
Brazilians (Not the nationality). Compare early 90s porn. Rare then, apparently normal now.
Napster. You’ve just gotta reference Napster in a 90s parody.
The Simpsons and the legion of adult animated shows it.
I graduated in 2000. Cellphones were not ubiquitous in the US until a couple years afterward.
And tats on girls seems a lot more prevalent now than then, but I’ll cede that one as I can’t say for certain.
Well, in Japan they have. Check out “Bubble Fiction” some time.
Ecstasy and The Simpsons were both well-known in the 80s. I vividly recall the first time someone tried to sell me Ecstasy in 1984, right before it became a controlled substance.
I was in college in the early-mid 90’s, in Berkeley no less, but tattoos were still not very common. Piercings, however–everyone had piercings. Even I had 5 earrings. I worked with one girl who said she had, I think, over 15–she had a number but I don’t remember now. None were visible. :eek: (It was totally believable too, with this particular girl.)
Oh, and veganism was just getting started.
Yeah, everyone didn’t have cellphones until the 2000s. I would say that if you were parodying cellphones in the 90’s it would be more about people treating them as a technical marvel and as a status symbol.
Only in the way that The Beatles were well known in the 50s.
The first Simpsons episode aired on December 17 1989. Not really a stretch to call it a 90s phenomenon. Whether it was well known prior to that is entirely subjective. It was certainly not even remotely as well known. I can only assume you don’t remember “Bartmania”, “the Bartman” etc.
A list of 90s phenomena without the Simpsons would be like a 60s list without the Beatles. Sure they existed and were known late in the previous decade, but the phenomena were manifest in the 60s/90s.
As for Ecstacy, well my experience of illicit drug use is limited. I had heard of it in the 80s but never knew anybody who actually used it until the 90s, whereupon you could buy it readily at any club or bar and every second person was using it. Maybe it had always been popular and it just became more openly used, but I tend to associate the widespread use with the 90s.
Once again, it’s like associating LSD with the 60/70s. Sure it existed and was used in the 50s, but widespread use is always associated with flower children. Ditto for ecstacy and the 90s.
As with all these things YMMV. Some things, like Windows 95 of Woodstock, may be date specific, but most of these phenomena associated with a single time period have a true starting date decades earlier but only took off in one decade.
I won’t disagree that they are mostly a 90’s (and 00’s) “thing” but they were around a little earlier than you give them credit for. The Tracy Ullman shorts predated the first episode by a few years. They really didn’t hit big until the show, true, so your point still stands.
Cellphones might not have been ubiquitous in the 90’s, but lots of people had pagers. Prior to the 90’s it was mostly doctors that had them. Then suddenly lots of people had them in the 90’s. I also recall that many schools treated them as drug paraphernalia because drug dealers were using them to keep in contact.
Great. Now I have a Bartman earworm. Thanks a lot.
I spent the 89-90 school year abroad, and came home to sudden and inexplicable Bartmania.
Hell, the 90’s parodied itself.
Clueless.
Grosse Pointe Blanke
High Fidelity, man…
The “Real World” was that in itself, man.
Whatever, man…
“The Simpsons” were a feature on The Tracey Ullman Show for a couple of years before that, as early as the third episode on 19 April 1987. Unlike Tracey’s cable specials, her show on Fox was pretty widely viewed. The Simpsons characters had already entered the cultural zeitgeist before hey had their own show; they appeared on the cover of the first edition of Charles Solomon’s Enchanted Drawings: A History of Animation, released in 1989 well before the first Simpsons episode. The Simpsons are as rooted in the 80s as Jimi Hendrix was in the 60s.
Napster launched June 99, and didn’t take off immediately. I’d put this one down as an early 00’s phenomenon.
But the 90’s was November 1991* through September 2001.
- Smells Like Teen Spirit.
For a 90s parody movie you’d also have to include some references to the following:
[ul]
[li]Beanie Babies[/li][li]The Macarena[/li][li]Tamagachi[/li][li]Furbies[/li][li]Tickle-Me-Elmo hype[/li][/ul]