The 1990s TV show Dinosaurs was a breath of fresh air from other sitcoms, imagining a prehistoric world where dinos lived in a modern civilization. Secret Galaxy looks back at the show, its origins, the depth of its messages, and how it ended with one of the darkest finalés of all time… mass extinction.
A lot has changed with music over the past 60 years, but memorable melodies will always be a thing. Music teacher Milo Andreo sat down at his electric piano and synthesizer to play the introductions to a single famous song from each year since 1963. Close your eyes and see how many you can name without looking at the titles.
(PG-13: Language) 80s and 90s kids might recall McDonald’s weirdly entrancing Mac Tonight ad campaign. Portrayed by award-winning actor Doug Jones, the moon-headed crooner made several comebacks over the years before becoming an internet meme and an odd symbol of hate. Doplex and ManyKudos teamed up to recap Mac Tonight’s strange history.
Fatboy Slim dropped this awesome 27-minute DJ mix celebrating the 25th anniversary of his 1998 album You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. The mix incorporates excerpts from Right Here, Right Now, Praise You, and The Rockafeller Skank, as well as music from Gorillaz, Eminem, The Rolling Stones, Ramones, and more.
Back in the 1990s, Microsoft dropped its first virtual assistant onto PCs with Clippy, a talking paperclip designed to help guide us in the use of our computers. Instead, Clippy was annoying, and most of us looked for a quick way to disable the feature. Great Big Story sat down for a few minutes with illustrator Kevan Atteberry, the man who designed the character.
Created by Jason Scott and a team of dedicated tech archivists, Discmaster provides online access to more than 91 million files from CD-ROMs and floppy disks collected by the Internet Archive. The retro-style search interface lets you directly view images and play video and audio files from the disks.
When There I Ruined It isn’t laying waste to popular songs, he’s experimenting with them like Victor Frankenstein in his laboratory. He created this lovable monster by grafting the DNA of Smashmouth’s All Star onto Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee). Get ready for a bad case of earworms.
These days, many visual effects are produced using computer animation. Artist and filmmaker Markus Rothkranz looks back at some low-budget practical effects he created in the 1980s and 1990s. The tricks include miniatures, multiplane backgrounds, mirrors, and set pieces made from everyday objects.
Dust off your CD collection and enjoy the early days of digital music once more. NINM Lab’s portable CD player can transmit audio to modern headsets and speakers via Bluetooth. Its clear cover lets you watch discs spin, while the snap-on cover adds a pair of speakers. It’s also got a magnetic back for sticking it to metal surfaces.
After a 24-year hiatus, UK pop duo Everything But the Girl is back. From the sound of Nothing Left to Lose, they haven’t skipped a beat. The first single from their new album Fuse is a song about love, dedication, and desperation set against a sizzling electronic dance groove.
Despite its outrageous product placement, Pepsiman was a shockingly fun PlayStation game. Its protagonist was a metal superhero who had to run through towns gathering up cans of its sponsor’s soft drink to save the day. Minimaus Crafts created his own model of Pepsiman using skinny Pepsi cans as his medium.
rerunthe80s takes us back in the time machine to remind us of sounds most of us haven’t heard in decades. From analog televisions to VCRs to video game systems, see how many of them you can guess with your eyes closed. We scored 15 out of 19.
VCRs might be obsolete technology, but they still featured some pretty smart engineering. That’s why illustrator and educator Jared Owen put together this in-depth look at the mechanisms that lie behind the VHS cassette flap. It’s cool to see how VCRs loaded and unloaded tapes without tangling them… most of the time.
1980s and 1990s music fans will remember MTV’s 120 Minutes as the go-to show for the latest in alternative music. Thanks to fan Chris Reynolds, there’s now a YouTube playlist featuring the more than 2500 music videos that ran on the show between 1986 and 2003. We’re assuming he had a little help from this website.
A fresh take on the Nike Air Max 97 celebrating 25 years of the bullet train-inspired shoe. The sneaker is at its best in this new colorway. The mudguard is done up in shiny metallic silver, while the upper is encircled in rings of dark blue, complemented by a watery Chlorine Blue air cushion and matching swooshes.
Want to see what a website looked like on a specific date? You can always go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and type in a URL to find out. Or, you could do what The Science Elf did and build a box that runs the Wayback Proxy and lets him dial in a specific date to surf old versions of websites on vintage web browsers.
“My spreadsheet doesn’t do that!” This 1992 promo spot for Microsoft Excel 4.0 seems like it was directed and performed by a team that wished they were doing more meaningful work. Instead, they ended up pimping the ubiquitous productivity software with a level of gravitas typically reserved for serious TV dramas.
We recently were reminded how painful it was to get on the Internet in the 1990s. Installing software on a computer without a CD-ROM drive was even more of a chore. Tech Tangents walks us through the slow but somewhat meditative task of installing Microsoft Office 97 from its 46 floppy disks onto a Gateway 2000 laptop.
These days, we’re used to whipping our phones out and connecting instantly to the internet. But back in the 1990s, it was a much slower task. Gough Lui dusted off an old PC running Windows 98 to walk us slowly down memory lane to surf the web using a 31.2k baud dial-up modem and some vintage web browsers.
Long for the startup sound of your old Macintosh? Or perhaps the squeal of a dial-up modem? Save the Sounds’ Museum of Endangered Sounds offers an online soundboard where you can enjoy the sounds of retro technology any time you’re feeling nostalgic. Try playing them all at the same time for fun.
Nostalgic for the ’90s? Skullcandy goes retro with this limited-run earbud collection, borrowing the neon-pink, purple, and blue splatter colorway from Pit Viper, the lifestyle brand conceived on the ski hill and born in the back of a van. Options include the popular Grind, Push Active and Dime true wireless earbuds.
Nike goes back to the 1990s with these funky cushioned sneakers based on the Air More Uptempo ’96. Graffiti-inspired bubble graphics splash the word “AIR” wrapped along their sides while the Swoosh moves to the toebox of these high-contrast black and white shoes. Drops 3.16.2022.