Free The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Brian Bellmont Page A

title aside, the movie, about a twelve-year-old boy befriending a five-ton killer whale, had us all bawling out of our blowholes. The ’90s were a good time to be a cute kid who could turn on the waterworks because of an animal friend, like Anna Paquin and her geese in
Fly Away Home
or Tina Majorino and her Hawaiian-shirt-wearing seal BFF, Andre. Jason James Richter, the kid from
Free Willy
, didn’t exactly parlay his success as a child actor into a sustained career, though. Your acting gigs tend to dry up when you’re best known for playing second fiddle to a giant pile of blubber.
    STATUS: They freed Willy in three sequels and a cartoon. And people still love whale tales. In 2012’s
Big Miracle
, Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski tried to save a family of gray whales stuck in the ice.
    FUN FACT: In the 1994 animated series on ABC, Willy and his boy Jesse teamed up to fight the Machine, a cyborg out to pollute the oceans.

Friends
    O ur friends looked nothing like this. Forget Manhattan, even in Minneapolis no one had an apartment as spacious as Monica’s. Or a hairstyle as trendsetting as Rachel’s, sarcasm as sharp as Chandler’s, or the sexy airheadedness of Joey. These were fictional “friends” for sure, but spending time with them was often hilarious and always entertaining.
    Gorgeous they may have been, but like most twentysomethings in the 1990s, the “friends” were embarrassingly underemployed. How else could they spend so much time hanging at Central Perk, singing about a certain “Smelly Cat,” or watching embarrassing prom videos from the 1980s? Love was hard to come by too. The Ross-Rachel, yes-no, love-hate relationship wore thin, but just when it vaulted into cliché, the writers managed to save it. (
“We were on a break!”
)
    But what really endeared fans to these “friends” were the little things. The trivia contest where no one knew what Chandler’s job was, Ross bleaching his teeth so much they glowed in the dark, the Thanksgiving football game where Ross and Monica refought childhood battles. Through it all, though, ran a ribbon of devotion. The
Seinfeld
crew was one chocolate babka away from every man for himself, but the “friends” were truly there for each other, just as their theme song claimed.
    STATUS: Gone for good—except in reruns or on DVDs.
How I Met Your Mother
may be for the Nintendo generation what
Friends
was for the Atari era.
    FUN FACT: Network executives reportedly worried that a coffee shop hangout was “too hip” and wanted the “friends” to hang out at a diner instead. They lost.

Fruit by the Foot
    I n the 1990s, Fruit Roll-Ups took a lesson from major-league baseball and started injecting themselves with growth hormones. They then gave birth to Fruit by the Foot, a yard-long version of the original 1980s snacking favorite.
    The three-foot length made it as much of a toy as a treat. Who didn’t paste a couple rolls together and use it to measure your height, or your dog’s? Between this and the enormous roll of gum that was Bubble Tape, what was the message being sent to 1990s kids here? Snarf down twice as much junk food as your Gen X siblings ever did just to keep up? Was it all some giant corporate test of a new generation’s self-control? If so, we failed. Deliciously.

    Hippie moms bought food dehydrators and made their own, which went over about as well as when they tried substituting carob for chocolate. We universally preferredthe packaged stuff, although to be honest, they contained about as much “fruit” as they did “foot.”
    STATUS: Still for sale, including tie-dye and mystery flavors.
    FUN FACT: In a creepy 1990s commercial, the smiley face on a kid’s T-shirt eats up his Fruit by the Foot. TV addicts spent much too much time pondering the physics of how that was even possible.

Furby
    I t was part Giga Pet, part Gizmo