The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the spotlight.
The Real Live Brady Bunch
dramatized scripts onstage. The 1990 drama
The Bradys
brought the family into a more troubled era (Marcia’s an alcoholic! Bobby gets paralyzed!). Two big-screen movies parodied the original series. Suddenly, the Bradys, who’d never really been cool, were everywhere.
    Many kids who grew up watching the Bradys didn’t have the happy family they saw on the show. They sought comfort in it as kids, and as adults, they enjoyed the family reunion. Interest in the Bradys peaked around 1995, but it’s never truly gone away. Every generation, it seems, longs to somehow form a family.
    STATUS: Members of the
Bunch
keep popping up, and in 2012, Vince Vaughn and CBS were working on yet another reboot of the famous family.
    FUN FACT: Stars who made it big after stints on
The Real Live Brady Bunch
include Andy Richter (who played Mike), Jane Lynch (Carol), and Melanie Hutsell (Jan).

Brenda Walsh
    N ot many TV characters spawn a newsletter and a song devoted to hating them, but Brenda Walsh on Fox’s hit
Beverly Hills, 90210
was not your average TV character. ShannenDoherty’s Minnesota twin turned California brat may have had plenty of dates onscreen, but to viewers, she was as unpopular as emergency dental work.

    Brenda was a piece of work indeed. She shoplifted. Called best friend Kelly a bimbo. Slapped OHN-drea because they both had a crush on the drama teacher. Ran away from home. Pretended to be French to fool a guy she met in Paris. Blabbed about her friends’ flaws to a TV reporter. Her back-and-forth with Kelly and sideburned loner Dylan was a love triangle to rival Edward-Bella-Jacob in its day.
    And just as with
Twilight
, fans’ feelings about the character leaked over into real life. Doherty’s offscreen troubles tied right in with the character’s slide from dutiful midwestern daughter to West Beverly bad girl. Brenda was written off the show after its fourth season, with her character ostensibly enrolling at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, a plotline at least as realistic aswhen Dylan spent his summer racing motorcycles in Europe and climbing K2.
    STATUS: Brenda Walsh returned again, still played by Doherty, on the CW series
90210
, which premiered in 2008. Surprise! She was still fighting with Kelly over Dylan.
    FUN FACT: Fans’ hatred of the character carried over to actress Doherty, and Darby Romeo of the
Ben Is Dead
zine’s
I Hate Brenda Newsletter
rode that zeitgeist. In the newsletter, no less than Eddie Vedder himself dissed the actress.

Bubble Tape
    W hen the Mad Scientists of Gum World get bored, they think of a new shape or container for their stretchy, chewy treat. There are gum Band-Aids, gum lollipops, bubblegum cigars, and the Chewapalooza that delighted ’90s kids’ mouths, Bubble Tape.
    The best thing about Bubble Tape wasn’t actually the gum but the circular container, which parceled out gum in long strips like—duh—tape. Even kids from antitobacco homes couldn’t resist pretending the round plastic box was a tin of Skoal—though this worked better after you’d chewed all the Bubble Tape and refilled it with shredded Big League Chew.
    The gum itself was a tightly rolled snail of flat, sweet heaven, testing kids in the one area where they had no self-discipline—portion control. Sure the prim goody-goody in social studies couldprobably break off a tiny slice and make it last till study hall, but the rest of us crammed at least four of the promised six feet of gum into our mouths at once.

    STATUS: Still around.
    FUN FACT: At Christmas time, there’s a seasonal candy-cane flavor, but what kid likes mint gum?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    B efore the sparkly vampires of
Twilight
and the studly naked ones of HBO’s
True Blood
, the most fashionable fanged folk were the craggy-faced undead who fed on the denizens of Sunnydale.Luckily, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was