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 B

from
Gremlins
: Furby was the Cabbage Patch Kid of 1998, as desperate parents knocked each other down at the Toys R Us to bring home the hairy, animatronic alien for their mesmerized child.
    Out of the box, the battery-operated fuzz ball spoke only “Furbish,” nonsensical gibberish. But kids could “teach” him English—the more you played with him, the more he made sense. You could interact with him by petting his back or sticking your finger in his mouth. Sure, we all knew the Furby was using every ounce of hisalien willpower not to chomp through our flesh and suckle human blood, but they were so cute, we didn’t care.

    Just like real parents, Furby moms and dads eventually knew sweet joy when their little guy uttered those three little words every kid longed to hear from a pet: “I love you.” Sure, now they’re mostly screaming for help getting out of the box in the attic you threw them in, but hey, nobody said love was forever.
    STATUS: In 2012, Furby 2.0 hit stores from Hasbro, now with backlit LCD eyes, an available iPad app, and a price that’s about twice as much as it was in the 1990s.
    FUN FACT: The little guy’s resemblance to Gizmo the Mogwai from the hit 1984 movie
Gremlins
didn’t go unnoticed: According to
Variety
, Hasbro settled with Warner Bros. for a reported seven-figure payout.

Gak
    G ak was thicker and less gelatinous than its boogery ancestor, ’70s gross-out staple Slime, but it was no less entertaining. Especially when you squeezed it and it made farty noises. A cross between Silly Putty, Play-Doh, and snot, Gak came in an amoeba-shaped container and smelled like ammonia and rotten milk. Still—or maybe because of that—it was the most popular in Mattel’s Nickelodeon line of products named after choking sounds. (Others: Smud, Goooze, and Floam.)

    Gak’s label featured several bold-printed cautions, the most intriguing of which was: “Gak is not a food product.” Were kids spreading this stuff on toast? Or snapping off a hunk and chewing it like gum? Whether or not they ingested it, nobody heeded the other warning: “Caution: Do not play with Gak on carpeting.” Run your hands through the wall-to-wall in any ‘90s house, and you’ll find twenty-year-old Gak still clinging to every fiber. The stuff’s persistent, we’ll give it that.
    In the mid-90s, Mattel embraced Gak’s inner stinkitude, and launched a line with added scents called Smell My Gak. Pickles, pizza, or hot dogs, anyone? Uh, one word, and it’s not the name of a Mattel product: Blorf.
    STATUS: Gak came back in 2012.
    FUN FACT: You could also get a Gak Vac, a handheld pump that let you suck up the Gak and then squirt it out—most likely onto the carpet.

Game Boy
    O ur older siblings had Mattel Electronic Football, but in 1989, we got something far more revolutionary: Nintendo’s Game Boy and its monochromatic, 8-bit freedom of choice. Unlike earlier handheld consoles, you could actually change the game you were playing.
Tetris
one minute,
Alleyway
the next. It put portable, versatile gaming power in our twelve-year-old hands, and most important, gifted us with the ability to feed our short attention spans by yanking one cartridge and replacing it with another. Buh-bye,
Super Mario
—see you again when my Ritalin wears off.
    Very few of us minded that the screen was the size of a piece of Dentyne. Yes, we had to squint like pirates to make out what the microscopic guys in
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure
were up to. (Answer: We’re still not sure.) Until Game Boy Color hit stores in 1998, that is. The screen wasn’t any bigger, but the color was a revelation, like when Dorothy opened up the door of her tornado-swept house and inhaled a Technicolor Munchkinland. Our eyes were glued to the colorful but still tiny screen; we weren’t looking up for anything. The system should have prompted a new