Dig deep enough on the net and you’ll find a plethora of 90’s crap you can watch that’ll not only make you want to be a kid again but also remind you how awesome a decade it was. Now I don’t want to be one of those people writing yet another post about the 90’s and then listing shit from the 90’s, which covers basically, everything from fashion, to music, to toys to Saturday morning cartoons.

It’s been done and we don’t need another f-ing post about it. If you break it down a lot of the time people don’t remember the cartoons or particular episodes per se. Primarily because they were too young, and secondly, because there was just too much stimuli for them and by them I mean myself included and by myself I mean most Gen Y / X’s.

What was I saying…

Oh yeah, there was just too much stimuli so the details were the things that were really hard to come by so when we go back to watch an episode of Talespin, Rupert Bear or You Can’t do that on Television you end up realizing how shit the show really was. In fact what you actually remembered was just the intro song. I’m not f-ing with you, that is really all you remember. Why do you think on youtube the majority of the hits are not on the uploads of the episodes but on the intro song clips.  Anyway if you look you’ll see I’ve already succumbed to the listing of 90’s memories so lets break it off here and begin my post proper. Actually one last thing, it’s ironic how most of the cherished Saturday morning cartoons were from the late 70’s and 80’s but were re-dubbed and re-casted for an ever growing audience of 90’s kids.

Okay so…actually one last thing, I promise. The reason why a lot of these movie remakes fail is because they commit the cardinal sin of not marketing the concept with the one thing the kids remember – the intro! If the first piece of marketing for the film were a trailer, which was essentially a live action version of the intro song, I can assure you that film would find it’s original audience and then some within a matter of minutes.

All right let’s begin.

My idea of the 90’s rests upon a feeling, a feeling that came about from a decade that was doing it’s darndest to shake off the hard lines of the 80’s, whilst putting the breaks on an approaching technological age of the 00’s. It’s sort of the middle child that for most of its adolescent life was ignored by the parents and then went on to become the coolest and most successful of the three children. It had hidden qualities that only became apparent when we put is side by side the crap of both it’s younger and older sibling decades. This might have been because of the climate of the time, there was no great war or depression, sure there was the Gulf but it wasn’t of the magnitude or spenditure of Afghanistan. And the economy may have faulted but not to the heights of the fall of the 80’s. But once again I keep coming back to this feeling, people seemed happier, the horizon of peak oil, drought and over population hadn’t sunk into the public zeitgeist.

It was this decade of limbo, which to me represented freedom that could not be re emulated, a decade where the world shifted from Modernity into the Post Modern age.

Yes I stole that last line from Wikipedia but I think it sums up the 90’s pretty well.

Yet for some reason I keep chasing this feeling, I know it will never come back, I know it was lost at the stroke of midnight when we ticked over to 2000 and Brenden Fevola kicked 12 goals in his first match for Carlton at a bizarre NYE Millenium football match.  But a few years ago I found it again, it may have been only for a few hours but the feeling was there. It was at a house party, and one of the best I’ve attended in a while. Imagine well over 100 kids crammed into a tiny house, it’s backyard and it’s front street decked out in everything that abides by the party theme – the ninties. For those few hours, most of us between the ages of 24 – 26 were 10 again. It wasn’t that one person was dressed as a gameboy and another person was dressed as a policeman from police academy, of course they were but it was that those very people brought with them the spirit of the 90’s.

I think that’s what’s missing now, a spirit, a sense of fun, even the colours were more basic then, if they were bright you were in. No internet, no mobiles, no cable…well at least not in Australia for a while. The time at the shopping centre was truly spent hanging and video arcades actually had people in them. But if I had to lower this post down to the level of recalling some sort of media from the decade it would be the almost acid jazz pre garage / dance sounds of a band called Crystal Waters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQX2q6WCrbE

This song, it’s music video and it’s general air encapsulate everything that was great about the 90’s. Simply put it is the anthem. Okay maybe that’s a tad sudden and there are scores of people who would argue that Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit is the anthem of the 90’s but really can that song almost bring back the spirit, and when I say almost I mean that any other 90’s song may be great to listen to but doesn’t have, to use a Jerry Maguire term – “The Quan”

Nirvana’s legacy was in the utter submersion in the humility of their craft, something that was lost in the 2000’s amongst a hail of talentless blingmesiters regurgitating through an a vocoder tube.

Well I’m running out of ways to express this feeling that doesn’t exist anymore, if you want to watch 90’s crap type it into the internet and knock yourself out but I can assure you it will only fill the void momentarily, once that video or song is over you are back in 2010 and realizing that we have a lot of work to do to make this planet a better place. Good times exchanged for fake times, noise that resembles music without a clear sound and Saturday morning cartoons that barely have an entertaining bone in their animated bodies.

Well that’s it, I was going to announce my first comment but for some reason I have a sneaking suspicion that it could be spam.
Watch this space.