Hey Dude

There was once a time when children's networks didn't feel they needed to dumb down their shows for a preteen audience. Unlike the Disney and Nickelodeon networks of today, classic Nickelodeon created teen-centric sitcoms that were funny and well-realized. Hey Dude was a classic example of this vein of solid comedic children's programming: it didn't rely on wacky gags or outlandish premises to drive its action. Rather, it took a simple believable premise and extrapolated from it a show worthy of our attention and admiration.

This admiration was fairly easily bought. After all, here was a group of teenagers doing what every kid dreamed of: spending a summer away from home, having a peer group of other attractive teens, and spending endless hours riding horses. It was sort of like an extended version of the Saved by the Bell summer beach specials, only it was set at a dude ranch. Essentially, the show took familiar character molds, placed them in an unfamiliar situation, and watched the humor unfold.

The show's underlying plot was fairly uncomplicated. Mr. Ernst, a nerdy but lovable New York ex-accountant and newly ex-husbanded, bought an Arizona dude ranch on a whim in the midst of a midlife crisis. Much to his son's chagrin, Mr. Ernst packed up and headed west with a humorously limited knowledge of dude ranching, whatever that is. His ranch, the Bar None, was staffed by a motley crew of teenagers assembled from across the country. Apparently, the ranch had once been owned by a reputable cowboy, and the staff was in for a hefty surprise upon the arrival of bumbling newcomer Mr. Ernst.

If that was not quite enough to draw you in, well, Nickelodeon had plans for all of you naysayers. This plan came in the form of one of the catchiest television theme songs to date. I dare you to listen to it and not spend the rest of the day replaying it in your head. Go ahead, give it a try:



What can I say, I warned you. If you're reading this incognito at work and would likely blow your cover with an impromptu outburst of loud western kid's TV show theme music, here are the convenient read-along lyrics for your perusing pleasure:

"It's a little wild and a little strange...
when you make your home out on the range.
So, start your horse and come along.
'Cause you can't get a ride if you can't hold on.
Singin' yippee kai aie ay. (Yippee kai aie what?)
Like the cowboys say. (Sing it again now.)
Yippee kai aie ay.
'Till the break of day.
(You'd better watch out for those man-eating jackrabbits... And that killer cacti!)
Hey Dude!"

Under closer inspection, this song tells us absolutely nothing of value. Sure, it's vaguely Western-themed (largely evidenced by that "yippee kai aie ay") but the lyrics themselves tell us no story whatsoever. What man-eating jackrabbits? What killer cacti? Perhaps it would take a bit more investment in the show to rope you in (yes, that is a lasso joke, please take it as such).

Luckily, we had a wide range (I'm going to keep pointing out these puns, don't even try to stop me) of characters with whom to relate:


Ted: Our protagonist for no real reason other than his general egotistical frat-boy amiability coupled with a lack of other defining qualities. Well, outside of his rather remarkable good looks, that is. He was the real glue of the show, and his premature departure from the cast was an inevitable shark-jump. Luckily, he later returned to the ranch under shaky (read: ratings related) pretenses, but it was never quite the same.

In case that was somewhat lacking on the descriptive side, you can always refer to the following Ted testimonials:




Bradley: Hold on, back up here. Brad's a girl? But that's a boy's name! Just when you think you've heard it all. Don't worry, though, she's totally rich and we can therefore assume she can buy her way out of an ill-begotten fate of name mockery. See, you can tell she's rich because she wears designer clothes...at a ranch! Boy, this Brad sure is something. Luckily for Brad, she was a pretty stellar horse trainer, or else we would really have no clue what she was doing here. Additionally, her love-hate relationship with Ted just screamed playground flirtation:

A "Hey Dude" Romance @ Yahoo! Video

Melody: Requisite goody-goody with all-American good looks (read: blonde). Sure, we may now know Christine Taylor as a relatively well-known actress and wife of Ben Stiller, but back then she was just our favorite 90s lifeguard this side of Baywatch. Melody also had a good deal of sexual tension with Ted, though none of us as children would have defined it as such.


Danny: Our small dose of diversity in this snowy white cast. I'm not sure if any of you have ever been to Tucson, but I can give you a hint that the show's ethnic balance is more than a little off. Danny is a Hopi Indian, which we know not only by his looks but also because his last name is Lightfoot. That's subtlety for you. Danny was always full of little tidbits of Hopi wisdom, because the 90s couldn't have a token non-white cast member without tying the major thrust of his character traits to his race.

In addition, there was Buddy (Mr. Ernst's young teenage son) who was mainly preoccupied with the undesirable skateboarding conditions of the desert. He was largely one-dimensional, but served as a sort of little brother character to the senior staff.

Later, a mysterious Jake, and later an even vaguer Kyle (quasi-related to ranch hand Lucy) were basically stand-ins for the Ted character after his exit from the show. They may very well have come from central casting for Teds, and served as the cousin Olivers in this unfortunate jumping of the shark. Ted's return was welcomed, but the show was already somewhat on the wane.

Regardless of any cracks in its sturdy foundation, Hey Dude ran a fairly solid few seasons from the late 80s to early 90s. Though it wasn't necessarily the sharpest or the most original, it was a little wild and a little strange, which in this case was enough to rope in a slew of little buckaroo viewers.


Check it out:
Hey Dude Episode Guide
Hey Dude Book on Amazon
Hey Dude on iTunes?

Ode to Discontinued 90s Food Products

Note: this image contains general snacks, not necessarily discontinued ones. It serves an illustrative purpose and therefore prompts no unnecessary mourning of delicious favorites like Combos and Hot Tamales

We all have a soft spot for the snacks we consumed during our formative years. In some cases, we may be left with actual bodily soft spots due to the sore lack of nutritional snack options. Regardless of their questionable merit, we craved these snacks with near-religious zeal. We can only now understand why our parents shook their heads in disbelief as we placed these items into our family's grocery cart; many of these foods, while admittedly delicious, were otherwise completely insane as concepts.

I suppose it's possible that major food production firms suffered from large-group drug use during product conception meetings, as that's probably the only passable explanation for any of these items making it past the, "Call me crazy, but I have an idea" stage. Under usual circumstances, the assembled group of professionals would agree that yes, that was indeed a crazy idea, and proceed with their days unaffected by the interaction.

Perhaps the 90s were especially generous to creativity. More likely, it was a time of shameless one-upmanship in marketing and reformulations of products. Regardless of the reasons, as children we were more than happy to reap the rewards of food companies' lapses in judgment. Though we may mourn their loss, their memories will forever represent to us a time when haute cuisine meant a good gimmick and a lively spokescartoon.

Orbitz


You know, I always dreamed of drinking a lava lamp. When told they were horribly toxic, I happily settled for the next best thing. The fact that this soft drink ever went into full-scale production is at minimum mind baffling. How exactly would one go about pitching an idea like this to the kind people at Clearly Canadian*?

"Feel free to stop me at any point if this sounds a little iffy, but what if we took our existing product, let it go flat and decarbonated, and then floated little mysterious balls of unidentifiable goo in them? I know what you're thinking, that sounds delicious, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and agree. These little gummy globulations are just the thing to put Clearly Canadian on the map. The beverage company, that is, I'm pretty sure the actual Canada is already on there in full clarity."

The gelatin balls were technically suspended by means of gellan gum, but no scientific explanation can play down the eeriness of these frightening floaters. I used to love these drinks, but in retrospect it seems more likely that I like the idea of them more than the actual taste. The drink itself was fairly benign, but it was pretty unpalatable to swallow little slimy orbs without fair warning of their entry into the mouth region.

Conveniently, Clearly Candian chose to blame you, the consumer, for the discontinuation of Orbitz. Apparently, we as beverage drinkers were unsure whether to eat, drink, or discard these balls. The company's investment in the beverage was luckily not for naught: they made a pretty penny selling their website domain name to the flight search engine of the same name.


Rice Krispie Treats Cereal




It's tough to determine whether or not these are indeed discontinued, but if still in production they are certainly in limited retail release. In the case of Rice Krispie Treats Cereal, at least the Kelloggs' people could justify this product with its sheer efficiency. Factories were already producing full size Rice Krispie Treats squares, so theoretically all that had to be done was breaking the treats into smaller bite-size pieces and adding an additional word to their cereal box packaging.

We all knew Rice Krispie Treats as a dessert, so imagine our surprise to find them amongst healthy fare in the cereal aisle. I took a shine to these immediately, though in reality it was probably the novelty of the product that appealed to me over its inherent value. Either way, I knew I loved Snap, Crackle, and Pop but hated plain old Rice Krispies, so I was glad to see my favorite characters branch out into more sugary territory.


Life Savers Holes



Again, this seems like a fairly accountable use of company resources. They're already making the candies, and we can only assume they're discarding millions of holes yearly to produce their trademark shape. Why not sell the contents of their factory trash? Unappealing as that may sound to us, they managed to market it in a way that convinced us that we were somehow getting something different while we were clearly just getting more of the same but in a new hard plastic container.

In the 90s, it was popular to reformulate popular foodstuffs into smaller, cuter, more animated versions of itself. Lifesavers Holes--and later M&Ms minis--featured ads depicting tiny candies frolicking carefreely, enjoying their tiny lifestyles. The Lifesaver Hole ads were actually a Pixar endeavor, which was pretty fancy shmancy for the time in terms of expensive advertising at the time.

Lifesavers Holes was able to capture an audience for a short period of the time as a result of flooding the candy marketplace with advertising, but kids caught on quickly that these were pretty much the exact same thing only less satisfying.


Surge


In the 90s, there was a huge movement toward marketing things as "X-treme!" Extreme sports were on the rise, and apparently required some sort of tie-in promotional beverage to endorse this madcap lifestyle. Major proponents of this extreme way of life spent much of their days skateboarding, wearing backwards baseball caps, mainlining adrenaline, and shotgunning cans of Surge.

Surge was marketed as X-treme! on the basis of its caffeine content, though under closer examination it was apparent that soft drinks like Mountain Dew actually contained higher levels of caffeine. In reality, the main thing that was extreme about the beverage was its repellent electric green color and coordinating logo. Unsurprisingly, parents often vetoed Surge as a source of unnecessary hyperactivity, making it all the more appealing to us. My friends and I used to have Surge-chugging contests at slumber parties, leading us to eventually have to downgrade these fiestas to simply "parties." After downing a 2 liter of Surge, sleep wasn't really an option.


Oreo-Os

Ah, dessert as breakfast. It was a beautiful concept, and kids were quick to hop on the cookies-in-the-breakfast-bowl bandwagon. The cereal's tagline, "The delicious taste of Oreo now in a fun-to-crunch cereal!" was unlikely to pull in any sort of parental approval ratings. The sugar content was outrageously, unjustifiably high, making them incomparably attractive to children while remaining the bane of every parent's trip to the grocery store. Sure, the things probably had a vitamin or two infused in for good measure, but in general this was really just a matter of cookies for breakfast.

Like its chocolate chip rival, Cookie Crisp, the cereal was a bit of a letdown on the cookie-likeness front. Cookie cereals always seemed to posess some form of unfortunate bitter aftertaste and abrasive texture. The Oreo people probably should have taken a page from the Rice Krispie Treats book and just crushed up some of their original product and called it a day. Unfortunately, this tampering with the sacred Oreo formula yielded less than oreo-tastic results. They did, however, later come out with the dubiously named "Extreme Creme" version which to its credit contained ample marshmallows. Unfortunately, conceptual cereal could only go so far without substantial taste credibility. Alas, it was adios to the O's.



Of course, some 90s snacks undoubtedly deserve further investigation and thus have been awarded full length posts for their sheer ridiculous existence. Luckily, many of them were featured here on Children of the 90s before I had any readers, so just think of it as new bonus reading material to munch on. Just remember to breathe a sigh of relief as a few of these are still around:

• Dunkaroos
• Crystal Pepsi
• Koala Yummies
• Gushers
• Lunchables
  

*Considered kind on the basis of Canadian citizenship alone.

Starter Jackets

Mainstream fashion in the 1990s was highly brand-oriented--much of the statement the wearer chose to project was based on prominent name or logo emblazoned across every emblazonable area of a garment. It was as if 90s fashion was an insecure pre-adolescent, constantly seeking to reaffirm its worth by donning extremely visible status symbols. Children of the 90s often wore their affiliations on their sleeves; in this case, literally.

Of course, it was not only brand name endorsements that drove clothing status and potentially determined your place in the cafeteria and/or grade school popularity pecking order. In some cases, people relied on bold declaration of support for a sport team as their affiliation of choice. And when I say bold, well, I mean bold.

Let's be honest with ourselves here: 90s fashion was never one for subtlety. As much as we try to defend our childhood fashion mishaps, in retrospect it is fairly apparent that many of these clothing choices were at best misguided. In numbers disproportionate with the style's actual appeal, these unfortunate clothing choices frequently feature the once-coveted Starter Jacket. They were not flattering or even particularly comfortable, but dammit they were socially significant. Who was I, a mere fifth grader, to question the wind-and-rain resistant hooded power of the almighty Starter Jacket?


For your reference (that is, in case a time machine ever mysteriously drops you back in the 90s and requires you make quick-witted fashion decisions), here are some of the major components that made Starter Jackets universally attractive to young people in the 1990s:

1. They were expensive
While this may seem like a deterrent, it usually gave brands the allure of exclusivity. In actuality, the real deterrent was to our parents, who justifiably questioned the need to shell out vast wads of cash for a glorified windbreaker. Anyone who has a child, has met a child, or was ever a child themselves can verify that a parent's disapproval is the number one contributing factor to making anything immensely attractive. In the case of Starter jackets, it just took one or two spoiled brats at our schools to start the wave of inevitable begging and temper tantrums on every subsequent trip to the mall or sporting goods store. Sure, it was mildly demeaning to throw yourself screaming and crying onto the floor at the Sports Chalet, but it wasn't about the process. It was about the purchase.


2. They were ostentatious
Now more aptly classified as obnoxious, this level of eye-stabbery was once considered a good thing. The team colors were never muted or subtle, rather they were vibrant to the point of necessitating protective eyewear. The point was to show your commitment to a team as publicly as possible. If someone could not identify which team you rooted for from a distance of at least 100 yards, you probably weren't all that dedicated of a fan.

Of course, some team's color schemes were more desirable than others. You weren't putting yourself out on much of a limb by selecting a blue, white, and silver Dallas Cowboys puffy confection-style coat (pictured above), but God forbid you were a serious Charlotte Hornets fan. Sentencing yourself a long winter spent in flamboyant Teal and Purple was a risky choice, though it certainly showed admirable team loyalty. Extra credit for wearing it with matching Zubaz.

Rapper Omarion obviously doesn't shy away from broadcasting his flamboyantly-colored Hornets allegiance, even more than a decade later

3. They easily associated you with popular sports teams while requiring no input of personal athleticism
In essence, you acquired immediate and undeserving street credibility merely by purchasing an overhyped jacket demonstrating your support for a specific team. If the popular kids on the playground were huge Chicago Bulls fans and you showed up one day sporting one of these red-and-black nylon monstrosities parading as outerwear, you were in. Of course, many would consider that route to be sort of a cop out, as it was generally safe to select a universally beloved team behind which to heave your support. The true rebels would pick a team relatively disparate to their geographic location. We could only assume these kids really knew a thing or two about football or basketball to have selected favorites outside of the easy "root-for-the-home-team" alliance paradigms most of us adhered to. More likely, they just had parents who grew up elsewhere.


4. They had enormous pockets
This might not seem like much now, but as a child this was a fairly important feature. Imagine the toys and distractions you could smuggle into math class with one of these babies. It certainly had more than ample room to accommodate a splat of Nickelodeon Floam, a Tamagotchi, a pack of Dunkaroos, a jawbreaker, and an egg of glow in the dark Silly Putty. What more could you really ask for?


5. They resisted everything
We're not just talking wind and rain here. These jackets were actually poufy enough to deflect rogue snowballs or frisbees. Starter jackets were not only made of water-resistant material, they were also voluminous to a point of making children appear distinctly Oompa Loompa-ish in silhouette. The only thing they couldn't fully protect you from was the shame of choosing the wrong team.

These days, when you're sporting your demure baseball caps and quiet jerseys, just remember the path of loud fandom from which you came. Try as you might to deny your flashy Starter roots, the popularity of the photo scanner will likely replant these junior high memories into wince-inducing flashback Facebook albums. So be proud, children of the 90s. Your childhood selves certainly were in their outlandish displays of loud jacket-based team support.