What do you miss about the 1990's

Post Reply New Topic

While this thread is mainly for Generation Y, Millennials, anyone alive and old enough to remember the 1990s can post.


What I miss:

1. Beast Wars (Easily the best generation of TFs ever! What G1 started in the 80s, BW perfected in the 90s!)
2. Beast Machines (While not as good as BW, BM was profound, meaningful, mindful, and most of all, ballsy. Something that is now lacking not only in TFs but in Western animation in general.)
3. Everyone was happier and much more optimistic
4. The future was much more hopeful, and people looked forward to it!
5. No rampant terrorism
6. No war on terror
7. Nuclear threat had left the stage
8. Climate change was a distant threat (back then, we called it global warming)
9. There was no great social or political division
10. Technology didn't invade every spot of our life
11. No mass surveillance
12. No 9/11
13. No smartphones
14. No social media
15. No Facebook
16. No YouTube
17. No message boards (ironic, I know)
18. People were a lot smarter back then
19. People were a lot nicer
20. Trends and fads still meant something
21. MTV still played music and had only a few original programs like Beavis and Butthead
22. Dating was A LOT easier back
23. There was no anti-vax movement
24. Trick-or-treating was still a thing back then, and kids took it seriously
25. Halloween was still very popular
26. There was no Orwellianism (It was a book, not a reality)
27. Police were still seen as the good guys (not the fists of Big Brother)
28. The Internet was brand new and offered so much potential for our species
29. No Memes
30. No trolling
31. No cyberbullying
32. Alone in the Dark
33. Movies were better back then
34. Television programming was better back then
35. Not only was music much better back then, but the 90s was the last great decade of music!
36. The world was closest it had ever been to world peace
37. The economy was booming
38. The 90s was the golden age of video gaming
39. There was no pandemic
40. No wokeness (I'm all for positive societal change, but not to a condescending point)
41. The Cold War had ended.
42. One's religion was not as important back then like it is now (I didn't get bullied for my irreligiosity until the '00s)
43. Children still played outside (Parents overprotect their children now)
44. No helicopter parenting (Ditto)
45. No widespread riots (the 1992 LA riots have NOTHING on the riots of 2020 and onward)
46. People read more back then (remember Goosebumps and Animorphs?)
47. Cartoons were of much higher quality than today!
48. Bungie was a studio that gave world Myth & Myth II (well before Halo took the world by storm)
49. Except for Columbine, gun violence was far less common than it is today.
50. No murder hornets (at least outside of Asia, if not Japan)
51. No news inundation
52. One would only go to a strip club for their bachelor party, and that was it.
53. No reality television (or very little of it)
54. No ghosting (Back then, ghost was only a noun and NOT a verb)
55. Christmas was something to look forward to (at least, more so back then)
56. My maternal grandmother was alive for most of the 90s
57. Candy bag Fridays!
58. Saturday Morning Cartoons
59. Fox Kids
60. Nickelodeon
61. People were more trusting of one another back then
62. Children still referred to grownups by their last names (With a few exceptions, I remember always being expected to refer to my elders as Mr., Mrs., or Miss.)
63. Back then, if you didn't eat meat, you were just a vegetarian (Now the public assumes that you're vegan)
64. Widespread obesity was not as big of a health crisis back then like it is now.
65. Sony gave the world PlayStation
66. The X-Files
67. No ISIS
68. Nintendo ruled the world (e.g., Super Mario Bros, Pokemon, etc.)
69. Integrity still mattered, and the bar was still high
70. Back in the 90s, people fondly bid the previous year farewell on New Year's Eve. Now, it's "So long, and good riddance!"

Few things have gotten better since the 90s:

1. Less tolerance for bullying
2. More activism for gun control (but also a lot more gun violence)
3. A renaissance of fantasy
4. Video games have evolved a lot since the 90s.

And that's pretty much it.


So what do you miss about the 90s? Please share your examples!

From early 90s
- card catalogues in the library
- hand writing, then typing school papers (couldn't make a mistake or had to rewrite the page)
- anonymity (no social tracing)
- Oasis CDs in my car
- news anchors
- unbiased news

Hmmm...yeah. I didnt realize how much affection I had for the 90s.

The main thing was that the Cold War had ended, but the War on Terrorism hadnt kicked in yet. It was pre 9-11.


It was the first digital decade. We had CDs and DVDs, but didnt yet have streaming or thumbdrives. And the Internet started in the middle of the decade- or became democratized (it had existed already for decades but only for the military and for high academia). In the mid decade they legislated changes to make it in to what now know it as. But it hadnt taken over our lives yet.

Shopping malls still ruled. Though even in that pre Amazon era there were malls that were already failing and becoming ghost towns.

Yeah. MTV still played music videos. But had Daria, and B and B. The History channel had some ok programming. Though it was still mostly "the All Hitler All of the Time Channel" but it hadnt degenerated into reality TV yet.

Had a lot of hit songs that were so bad that they were good: Barbie Girl, The Humpty Dance. the Three Little Pigs, and Rico Suave. To name a few.

But beneath the surface societal divisions seethed. And came out when things like the Rodney King riots happened, and when OJ was put on trail.

Less school shootings.
When mine were in school you drove right up to a few feet of the door and dropped them off with a rifle in the gun rack of the truck.High schoolers had them in racks in school parking lot during hunting season so they could go deer or squirrel hunting after school.
If you wanted to check the kid out you just walked into the school and got them out off class.The school doors were always unlocked.
No active shooter drills , just tornado drills.

I'm not really nostalgic for the 90s; I'm more nostalgic for the 60s/70s.

The early 90s were irritating because:

I had to pay all my bills by mail.

No Internet until later in the decade.

The music wasn't as good as it was in the 60s/70s.

I never got the hang of VHS, really.

I had to hope that a pay phone was working if I wanted to make an important phone call outside of my home. I also had to hope I had the right change.

If I lost my driver's license, I had to go down to the Motor Vehicles Office in person; whereas now, I could get a temporary license from the Internet.

People were as cynical in the 1990s as they are now. But at least there weren't too many school shootings back then. The first World Trade Center attack was in 1993.

After about 1990, you had to go through metal detectors to get into government buildings. This is not a recent phenomenon.

I'm guessing I'm not nostalgic for the 90s because I was an adult in the 90s.


What was good about the 90s, as compared with the 80s:

If I became broke, I could have gotten money from an ATM in the 90s, but not the 80s. In the 80s, I would have had to hope that the bank was open.

You didn't have to go through metal detectors in the 80s to get into buildings.

I used banking machines when I started Uni in the late 80s. ^
They were definitely around.

I do miss filling in deposit slips and waiting for a teller.
Banks smelled good and had those velvet rope dividers when you were waiting your turn.

I miss film photography, and photo developing. People only took one or two pictures of each thing, and didn't know if they'd turn out until you sent the roll away to be processed. It took a week or two sometimes. No one wanted to waste film because the film and developing were expensive. Now people snap 50 million pictures of the same thing, including themselves (?!), and post it all over the internet instantly, without it costing anything. It's like individual pictures aren't as important anymore, because they're posted so quickly they don't have time to form "memory" status in our minds.

I also miss the film negatives, and holding them up to the light.

^I guess that was my fault. I didn't get my first "real" bank account until 1990. But I believe ATM's didn't become a real thing until the late 80s.

I had a couple of bank accounts earlier----in the era of "passbooks."

I liked the way camera film had a limit of 24 pictures, or whatever. You'd have to budget or prioritise how many pictures to take on holiday so you wouldn't run out at the end. No one took pictures of their food or their pompous lifestyle, or anything but their friends, family, pets, sunsets, and special occasions. Memories meant more then.

I also miss independent bookshops for the smell and the atmosphere. Now most seem commercial and sterile.

I suppose these things were around before the 90s though.

I agree Rodney King was a turning point in social history. In my mind the early 90s and late 90s are two entirely separate worlds. It's hard to believe how much things started to change around 94.

Early 90s


Simplicity of life
Gaming consoles
Sears catalog
Metal/Hard Rock
Cars
Music videos on TV
Cartoons

-----------------------------------------------

Late 90s

WCW
Nascar
F1
Country Rock
Nu Metal
N64
Hockey
Movies


Same, I agree with no Smartphones, No Facebook. The old internet has more forums like this one here, and less mainstream ads/clickbait websites and auto-play videos. I liked that when you were with people, you really where with them. No distracting technologies like there are these days.

On the other hand...

corduroy skirts

1. Being a small child (I was a small child all the way through the 90s)

2. The good music (although 2000s and 2010s had good music as well)

3. The good TV shows

4. Computers were a luxury in the home, not essential

5. People were more sociable with people in the same room because there were no iPhones or social media

6. Not so bombarded with adverts (only on the TV and maybe sometimes in the mail)

7. Not so many cars on the road, and the average working-class household only had one car, so the streets weren't lined with parked cars everywhere

8. The UK wasn't so overpopulated like it is now

9. Not many major disasters happened

10. Political correctness wasn't over the top like it is now

11. More countryside. Now, houses and apartments everywhere

12. People still used their brains instead of relying on computers to do everything for us

13. Not everything was digital, in the early 90s some households still had record-players and even rotary phones. I know we did

14. The fashion at the time

15. Kids at school still said prayers and sung hymns (now it's offensive)

16. Kids at school used pencils/pens and books to do their work with (computers were just used for learning games and educating kids how to type and stuff like that)

17. Technology was easy back then. If you wanted to record something off the TV all you had to do was put in a blank videotape and press record. So simple

18. Technical things lasted longer, and if they did start to shut down they'd give off 'warning' signs, which gave you enough time to buy a replacement before they stopped working completely. Nowadays, technical things are working one minute then the next time you switch it on it suddenly doesn't work any more ever

19. You could apply for jobs without a computer involved (writing and posting letters)

20. Less hacking; the only 'hacking' people could do was to break into your house. Now it's so easy to get tricked into being hacked online

21. Although the cane was abolished here in the UK by the 90s (thank God), teachers were allowed to touch kids (I don't mean inappropriately). Now every adult is a potential paedophile (sarcasm) so big lawsuits are made against touching children like giving them a cuddle if they fall over and hurt their knee

22. More jobs to go around, because there were more industries and businesses and services and things that needed to be ran than there was before, but most of the positions weren't taken by computers and robots

23. Banks, post offices and building societies were a big thing, now these places are shutting down one by one, it's so sad to see

24. Netflix and Amazon didn't exist, people actually went out to the stores to buy things and they watched things on the TV or bought videotapes

25. Kids played outside (in fact I read somewhere that millennials were the last generation to actually play outside. Now I hardly ever see children playing outside)

26. Kids weren't so mollycoddled like they are today

27. Parents were still allowed to smack their own children and it wasn't frowned upon. Adults ruled the world, not children

28. The NHS looked after people much better, doctors still sometimes came out to your house and they seemed much more competent

29. You spoke to humans on the phone, not robots

30. Not so much fake news like there is today. If covid existed in the 90s more people would probably have their jabs without being put off with all the scaremongering and conspiracy theories and rumours you read all over the internet

I spent basically most of the 1990s drunk and high so im a bit clueless of that time but it sounds like I missed out on a good decade

What I miss most about the 90s is Bill Clinton being president & Hillary Clinton being 1st lady Yes Bill majorly f#cked-up & abused his power & lied under oath but that is still alot better than some other presidents we've had & our country was a hell of a lot better off during his presidency then than we are now or even during Obama's presidency. I'm not really trying to turn this thread into a political thing but this is what came rite away to my mind. I may think of some other stuff to list here at some point

What do I miss most about the 1990's?

It was before 9/11.

It was before January 6th

It was before Trump became president.

We didn't have a global pandemic.

The GOP had not embraced fascism yet

We had MySpace instead of s**t like Facebook and Twitter

Entertainment on TV was MUCH better.

People weren't trying to ruin everything with cancel culture.

Video games didn't force you to play online with jerks or require that you spend more and more money on DLC.

And you could actually own video games and movies in physical form instead of streaming them online or paying for a digital download only to lose what you paid for sooner or later.