Our Easter present to ourselves is what is possibly the greatest compilation album ever produced.
Read this track list. The meaning of life may well be contained within it.
Our Easter present to you, meanwhile, is more nineties and noughties-tastic blasts from the past, starting tomorrow! Never miss a post by following us on Facebook or Twitter. If you like us, help us out by sharing!
Remember this?
Of course. But do you remember this?
Children are the great forgotten Baywatch fanbase. Whilst adults may have had their own (highly suspect) reasons for appreciating the show, it was the strong plots, intricate characterisation, and the fun of imitating that run-and-dive combination in your local baths which had children hooked on this quality show.
(Let’s face it – it was basically just the run-and-dive.)
In honesty, due to her lack of flexbility it was difficult to get Baywatch Barbie to do a true run-and-dive. But that didn’t stop Baywatch Barbie being the best idea since Poptarts.
For most children the appeal of Baywatch Barbie was not only that Baywatch + Barbie was a genius combination, but that this Barbie could be played with in the BATH. Baywatch + Barbie + Bathtime?! The possibilities were endless.
And so Baywatch Barbie would rescue the turbulent waters of the Upstairs Bathroom from the evil clutches of Mr Matey. These scenarios would gradually increase in mundanity over time, descending via ‘Barbie Takes a Part-Time Job At The Baths’ to ‘Barbie Gets Her 50m Badge and Her Mum Buys Her Some Quavers From the Vending Machine to Celebrate’.
Baywatch Barbie came with a number of vital accessories, namely:
The Swimsuit – waterproof, quick-drying; Barbie and Bathtime could finally mix with some modesty on Barbie’s part.
The Dinghy – useful for capsizing in ‘storms’. Often resulted in bathroom flooding.
The Dolphin – as reinforced by the advert for Baywatch Barbie, Barbie’s supposed best friend. A suspect addition to the Baywatch world which was never quite to be trusted. Emitted a strange techno cry when its lever was pulled. Despite the combination of water and battery, suspiciously immortal.
To these accessories, of course, would be added the other staples of bathtime. And so Barbie would be left floating perilously on letter S of the Kids Bathtime Foam Alphabet, her dolphin trapped helplessly underwater in the empty 2 litre vanilla softscoop carton which had at some point become an indispensable bath toy.
Baywatch Barbie is for everybody whose Barbies would require therapy if they had memories.
Remember this?
The Philips Savvy was a phone for people who didn’t know what they wanted from a phone.
The Savvy was ahead of its time. Mostly in that it had literally bypassed its time and misfired into an alternate future universe where phone users didn’t care about suspicious new-age features such as the ability to store messages, so long as the phone had an inbuilt fortune teller.
The futuristic Savvy could send a picture emoticon in a text message, for example. So long as the recipient had a Philips Savvy.
Long before the advent of the novelty app, the Savvy fortune teller was blazing its own novelty trail, revolutionising the app world in an alternate future universe where phones could store up to one app, and you couldn’t choose what that app was.
If you put a certain combination into the fortune teller, it would give you a perfect fortune. This came with a certain sense of victory. “YEAH I CHEATED YOU PHONE.” It was essentially the most fulfilling experience offered by the Savvy.
When you first got the Philips Savvy, you felt victorious. You had a phone. You could text whoever you wanted, whenever you wanted, for a sweet 12p per message. You were happening. You were the future.
Then your friend got a Nokia. She had a novelty Hello Kitty clip-on cover she got off that market stall, that didn’t seem to sell anything for the Philips Savvy, and a ringtone version of Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’, which she ordered off the back of the TV guide, using her phone, which she could do because she didn’t have a Philips Savvy.
She had a highscore on Snake.
You realised you’d been stiffed. But you still loved your Philips Savvy. It felt fun and loveable, like that Grandma that baked you burnt cakes.
The Philips Savvy is for everybody who secretly wants a Nokia, even now.
RIP.
Remember these?
The Onken Frufoo. The King of Yoghurts.
What is it, exactly?
In its purest form, the Frufoo is a circle of pink yoghurt around another circle, in which there lies a small toy. But the Frufoo is much more than that. It’s a little island in a sea of yoghurt. It’s a castle atop a yoghurt moat. It’s a flying saucer… made of yoghurt.
The yoghurt itself is pleasingly pink – not that dull, unsatisfying pink which comes with putting real raspberries in a blender, but that comforting, fluorescent hue which comes from using good old-fashioned food colouring.
The basic flaw of the Frufoo is that yoghurt isn’t actually bad for you. Sure, it’s nice enough. But no bright colours and smiling faces are effective at disguising the fact that the whole thing is essentially quite healthy. The Frufoo is basically a Kinder Egg, but somebody stole the chocolate and replaced it… with yoghurt.
You couldn’t actually eat all the yoghurt, of course. The circular segment wasn’t actually wide enough for a spoon. But once you had lowered the level of the sea/moat/swirling pink tide to a sufficient degree, you could finally flip the thing over – albeit with some trepidation – and prise the toy from the centre.
“Yay! A… thing.”
And with that thought, the experience was over. It was a good one, though, what with the cheerful lettering, and the intriguing shape, and the sheer pinkness of its primary product. Even the name was a bit cool. The Onken Frufoo. What does it mean? Nobody knows.
The Onken Frufoo is a risky choice when it comes to shared nostalgia. It was seldom seen, for one thing, because the brand name was a bit suspicious, and your mum resented paying more money for a single yoghurt than for a 36-pack of Asda own-brand fromage frais. The Frufoo also looked quite European. But it was something to behold.
Special mention goes also to Frubes. In the business of making yoghurt consumption feel fun, you blazed into the lunchbox of history. RIP Frufoo.
Remember this?
Yes, it’s a vision in plastic. It’s the Asda cow.
There she sits, in her shed, guarding the reasonably priced milk of the world. Moo.
She was fairly disconcerting, in a nice, familiar way – the head without a body, the eyes that followed you wherever you moved (try it); the enigmatic expression – yes, it’s a bovine Mona Lisa, at least if the Louvre had installed a giant plastic button next to the Mona Lisa which caused her to emit a disembodied moo when pressed.
If you aren’t familiar with the Asda cow, that is because your parents most likely still bought their milk from a mythical creature called a milkman, who came in the night and left his bottled product behind like a stealth milk ninja, and we Children of the Asda Cow would look enviously upon you, because you didn’t have to go to Asda, and your parents said intriguing things like “I’ve no money for the milkman, Graham.”
The Asda Cow was the product of a period where supermarkets still wanted to give their produce the air of having come from a living thing – the cow, the decorative milk churn, the rustic little shed – you mean milk comes from… comes from a farm? To this end, there was also an Asda Chicken, up by the eggs – complete with disembodied clucking – but they never did go the whole hog and put an adorable plastic newborn lamb in the meat section.
The Asda Cow moved on to pastures new some years ago, and now resides in a retirement home for cows without bodies somewhere in Bedfordshire (probably). But when a child was in his darkest hour – two hours into the Big Shop and still not out of the chiller section – the promise of seeing that big creepy cow face was a beacon of hope for all.
Remember this?
Tammy was once the pinnacle of tween fashion.
After the heady days of the 90’s, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the whole of the 2000’s were a safe decade for photography. Gone are the leggings, and the enormous Minnie Mouse jumper; I’ve some jeans and a nice t-shirt on – what can be so bad?
Unfortunately, the year is 2000, and you’ve just been on a mammoth trip to Tammy, the shop which took the jeans + t-shirt combo and vomited all over it. The jeans are plastered in glitter – stars, lovehearts, swirls; it’s all fair game so long as the glue holds out for a wash or two – and the fronts have been splattered with purple and green paint, graffiti style, because you’re twelve now, and you’ve got the vague impression somewhere that you should start rebelling. The t-shirt (which, by the way, has any number of unnecessary appendages – pockets, tassles, a hood – why limit yourself?) proudly proclaims the new rebel you, whilst simultaneously destroying any attempt at street cred you may have been forming. “SWEET AS HONEY,” it reads. Ooh, cheeky! And there’s a picture there too!
It’s Winnie the Pooh.
There’s worse news yet – the ‘fashion trainer’ is in. You have two giant pink bricks on your feet, and they’re tied with green neon laces, and the look is complete.
Tammy was fooling yourself that you were a teenager now because your mum had let you look after your own purse; Tammy was linking arms with four people at once as you entered the store; Tammy was shopping on your own for the first time – and Tammy is the photo you can never burn.
Remember this?
Forget Google. If you went to school during the late 90’s, this was where it was at.
Not for you, maybe. Because believe it or not, you didn’t give a monkeys about the Internet in the late 90’s. You had a Gameboy Colour and a pair of rollerblades. But for the poor teacher who was now given a computer on a trolley once a week and told that it was the future, Lycos was the first point of call.
Feeling masochistic that day, the teacher would set thirty children, two at a time, the simple task of using Lycos to find and print some interesting information on [insert generic topic here, usually fossils], thereby exponentially accelerating the arrival of the teacher’s forthcoming nervous breakdown.
The first issue would be that the school had so over-zealously installed every parental control software at their disposal that the majority of the results of any search were inaccessible. The second issue would be that the remaining results were useless. “ALL ABOUT FOSSILS”. Fantastic! Until your eyes were hit by a badly-coded dancing neon header which had ended up halfway down the page, covering the actual information, which was illegible anyway, because the background hadn’t loaded, and the font was white. But we were children; we liked dancing neon things! Yeah, print!
Unsupervised printer access: the second great mistake of the late 90’s school. Fifteen blank pages, some with lines, some with boxes, some with unintelligible code – and one at most with actual information on fossils.
And then, somewhere between pairs ten and eleven, the Internet would cut out altogether. Nobody in the school was yet sure what the Internet actually was – object? concept? animal? vegetable? mineral? – and the man only came on Wednesdays – and so the teacher would sink into a corner, and cry, muttering something inaudible which sounded a lot like “use… the Encyclopaedia Britannica…”
This was not Lycos’ fault. But Lycos and his little dog ought to bring back some stellar memories of teachers valiantly trying to master the new world. Special mention also to Alta Vista. You tried.
Remember This? Nineties and Noughties 