I mean, in the 90s, we teens wondered what it was like to be a 1960s and 1970s teenager, because what we saw on TV / movies about being a teen at that time looked absolutely bonkers.
:)
😭 IIRC we did the same stuff teens do now, except we didn’t have phones or high-speed internet/streaming TV. Oh, and also, it sucked even more than now if you weren’t cis, white, hetero, masculine, etc.
I was a college student and parent in the 1990s. According to TikTok, we are all the "olden days". I guess we need to start getting ourselves some canes, but we need to make them interesting ones with swords or flasks inside - or both.
i reckon we spent about the same amount of time at the video store deciding what movie to watch as kids (and adults) today spend deciding what movie to stream.
Yeah, that was my thought. I don't have a perfect vision of my own parents' teen years. Hard to expect people young enough to be my children to know about mine.
The longevity of coolness as a word and concept is the longevity marvel of our age, even if it was pronounced 'kew-el" for a while (that now seems to have passed). Now that I'm old as dirt I have trouble even finding out such info!
I also find it very good advice now that I'm an old fossil that young people don't know what it's like to grow old, but we *do* know what it's like to be a teenager or to have your parents control your life as a kid. We're the ones responsible for making the relationship positive until they relate.
Oh, yeah, I had roller blades. There was an actual roller disco every saturday at the health centre - that's not a gym. The health centre had a gym, and a public swimming pool. We went swimming a lot, too. You didn't need a membership, you just showed up.
Or, the late 80s: Imagine Instagram, but each 320x240 image comes in 10 different uuencoded messages you have to save from rn, edit out the headers, cat together, and uudecode.
Honestly, if the kids took on our disdain for media in favour of art things would be better.
I know every generation says it, but it feels way more true.
Teenagers nowadays have no idea how difficult it was to coordinate anything. Teens usually weren't home and didn't have beepers, you actually had to find each other out there😄
In the 90s myself and most people I knew were off the internet after morning coffee, and for fun we'd go hiking or drive to Atlanta for the day. It's a lot harder these days to get friends to engage in such simple activities.
There were no smartphones and no internet besides perhaps AOL for most folks. The US had just ushered in the end of history. So, ancient and long forgotten.
How to horrify modern fandom: telling them that in the 90s my internet friends would print out fanfics and mail them to me in envelopes because I didn't have internet during the summers
Plenty of real life interactive activities such as performing music, sports, school clubs etc. Not like today’s teens who spend hours watching brainless Tik Tok and waiting for likes on their social media.
I mean, you are to someone who is a teenager today. It would be like you wondering what being a teenager was like in the 60s. You could ask your parents, but it’s still hard to imagine.
My first computer was a used, outdated Intel 286 with a power up button for switching between a measly 8 and a whopping 16 Mhz. To this day, I have no idea what purpose the switch served. I loved that rancid machine nevertheless. Young folks will feel the same about their first mobile phone one day.
It’s not like we don’t have first-hand narrative sources from the time to show what youths were up to, namely the Teenaged Ninja Turtles or Powered Rangers.
I started to think of my reply but remembered I was a teenager in the 1980s!!!
So even more ancient and definitely off line.
I remember it as a great time.
I am sure you saw your share of horrors, but consider this: I have seen not just every episode of Gilligan's Island, but also every episode of Wings, because there was just nothing else on in the afternoon.
I'm willing to bet at least some of the following were also available:
Brady Bunch, F*Troop, Three's Company, I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, The Odd Couple, I Dream Of Jeannie, Alice, One Day At A Time, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Bewitched, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy and/or Happy Days.
I've been doing a podcast on Boomer TV/the Andy Griffith Show, for about five years now and I've learned that every gen Xer and Millennial just has a block of "tv old" in their brain somewhere from this experience.
Then we don't compute that all these shows ran about 20 years apart/
This is a good example, when you were a kid, you didn't compute that Happy Days was from the 70s pretending to be the 50s, even though you were probably watching "That 70s Show" do the same thing.
Andy Griffith was canonically set in the 60s but everyone pretended it was the great depression.
Idk why or even what channel but when I was a kid I would watch Lassie, Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver, Gilligan’s Island and I loved them all. I’m 38 y/o. Early teens I really enjoyed twilight zone. Brady bunch always sucked to me and the pow bang 💥 Batman show was awesome. Happy Days was ok
1: This is a really stupid show, but I'll watch because it's the only thing on;
2: I can't believe I watched show about a Nazi POW camp. I'll never watch again.
3: OMG, Col. Klink & Sgt. Schultz were played by Jewish refugees. Living well = best revenge.
As kids, we couldn't watch anything with a laugh track when my dad was around without getting a lecture. He REALY didn't like M.A.S.H., and Hogan's Heroes was absolutely verboten.
My girlfriend got hooked on Madame Secretary and dragged me down that rabbit hole too. The 1st time we watched it she mentioned that the actor who played Tea Leoni's husband had been "on some show." I was all, yeah, he looks familiar. I think we were into the 3rd episode when I blurted out "Wings!"
I was just scrolling through what teens did a decade after I stopped being one when I saw you'd watched 'Wings'... only I thought it was the British TV drama about pilots in WW1 and got really nostalgic (and then confused by the comments)
True, that was one of those shows that had serious issues but lots of comic relief. I also remember watching MASH and KRLT and TAXI and of course All in The Family
I always get a bit eye rolly when someone from Gen X complains that Gen Z or Alpha doesn’t get some cultural reference from the 80’s. We got boomer references because we were watching Bugs Bunny in WW II recruiting cartoons as kids
We had cable in the early 80s, but it only gave us 10 channels, and 4 of them were two pairs of NBC and ABC.
Remember being sick? Around 7am there were Little Rascals reruns, then 9-12 were the game shows. Then your only choices were 50s/60s reruns in the afternoon, or soap operas...
I’ve seen things you people couldn’t imagine…Test patterns gleaming in the darkness at the end of the broadcast day…Joan Rivers in a flame war with Mr. T…all these memories preserved on YouTube, but it’s not the same.
You poor pampered 90s teens! Imagine a world where a day home sick from school was a day-long roulette of The Price Is Right, General Hospital and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.
The daily life of everyone, teenagers especially, drastically changed with the rise of the Internet and the destruction and monetization of Third Spaces.
I imagine they do what I've done all my life: Stay inside, have no friends in real life, and pine for strangers they'll never meet.
It's depressing. At least I had recess periods where I could have made friends. They were getting rid of those 20 years ago.
I have a lot of memories of riding to various gaming stores and then people's houses where we'd play magic. Much of it hinged on the fact that parents could not contact us unless they were in the house we were at. Being always connected would change every dynamic.
I feel like life would be drastically different in a place with public transportation. Before moving to Portland my only real experience with it was a week couchsurfing in DC.
Hell, you did what all the kids did in the seventies and eighties:
"This here's a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here's what happened when they decided to cut loose"
I was playing this old game called Magic the Gathering... Back in my day EDH was a judge format, everyone played this thing called Standard or Type II. Pokemon was also a thing, if you had the Gameboy comm cable you got to be everyone's friend. Saturday morning cartoons were a thing.
I was a theater kid. I was either at my highschool or community theater doing shows or hanging out with my theater friends watching cult films, cartoons, or doing creative stuff.
To be fair, I wasn't a teenager until 2003, but I would argue being a teenager in the 90s-early 00's was vastly better than it is now, and we have vastly superior social skills to boot courtesy of it!
Comments
:)
The TV had 5 channels, including PBS.
We played outside, rode our bikes.
(By the way, I don’t know about being a teen in the 90s, but in the 80s it was all MTV and weed.)
It's like they haven't seen the documentary, Mallrats.
Fuck me... Basically nothing has changed.... Except I don't really watch anime anymore. Or buy VHS.
This kind of stuff :)
“Wanna go shred the stairs at the shopping mall?” We’d say.
Shopping malls were also big back then. You kids may know them as “the old abandoned mall”
Moving from arcades to smartphones shows that very little has changed in the intervening decades.
I know every generation says it, but it feels way more true.
I keep telling my 13-year-old that 40-something is "not old" but Reddit always has a way of ripping out my heart.
Motor boys and girls with tans
Nearly was and almost rans
I remember this
Real cave man stuff
I'm gonna go make sure I still fit in my casket nicely.
Internet was hit or miss since it was minutes limited. But I still joined early forums and messed around on BBS with my friend.
I got REALLY good at the few video games we had.
So even more ancient and definitely off line.
I remember it as a great time.
Brady Bunch, F*Troop, Three's Company, I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, The Odd Couple, I Dream Of Jeannie, Alice, One Day At A Time, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Bewitched, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy and/or Happy Days.
Then we don't compute that all these shows ran about 20 years apart/
Andy Griffith was canonically set in the 60s but everyone pretended it was the great depression.
I couldn't stand Brady Bunch or Happy Days.
I Love Lucy was weirdly absent. Obviously it was long past its run, but for a classic you'd think it would've been shown more.
1: This is a really stupid show, but I'll watch because it's the only thing on;
2: I can't believe I watched show about a Nazi POW camp. I'll never watch again.
3: OMG, Col. Klink & Sgt. Schultz were played by Jewish refugees. Living well = best revenge.
Tony shalhoub will always be Antonio Scarpacci to me. 😆
"Sid's new hair is in the mail, hallelujah!"
I mentioned it every once in a while to my wife who made fun of me for it.
Even family guy did a bit where no one remembered it.
I don't think I have ever seen a full epsiode.
Still, I wonder if it's as dark as I remember...
The best.
I mostly skipped Wings and opted for a lot of The Weather Channel and Discovery back then.
Remember being sick? Around 7am there were Little Rascals reruns, then 9-12 were the game shows. Then your only choices were 50s/60s reruns in the afternoon, or soap operas...
“Oh, my sweet summer child” (GoT reference)
It's depressing. At least I had recess periods where I could have made friends. They were getting rid of those 20 years ago.
That is firmly relic territory 😄
"This here's a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here's what happened when they decided to cut loose"
“Was it a better time?” Unbelievably so.
It was a lot like today, only a phone was a phone.