Awesome Lunch Box Beverages of the 90s

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Nowadays, it takes a lot of dough to impress our friends. $200 jeans, $100,000 cars; it's awfully tough to attain something covetable. Back in our younger days, however, it was as easy as whatever you had packed in your brown bag lunch. As kids, money wasn't much. We wanted some functional currency. Something we could really barter would, something that had tangible value to us.

That's where school lunches came in. If yours happened to contain a Lunchables box or Snack Pack, congratulations. You were well on your way to your way to lunch trading royalty. It was more than just food, though. The 90s brought an onslaught of sweet beverages that were marketed specifically at youth. These drinks became the stuff that supermarket temper tantrums were made of. Our parents may have aspired to feed us healthily, but they could only hold out so long.

These may not have been the healthiest of offerings, but that didn't stop us from coveting them with ever thirst-unquenched fiber of our beings. Many of them had pretty vague and questionable contents, making them the perfect product for kids. We didn't question, we simply consumed. And if it helped garner us some cafeteria credibility, well then, all the better.


Squeez Its/Kool Aid Bursts


What sort of parent wouldn't want to purchase their kid a six-pack of pure liquid sugar? Especially if they came in super-sleek flexible, squeezable bottle. Everything about it just screamed kid-friendly. The twistable cap with its residual droplets of so-called juice. The faces on the Squeez-It brand bottles. The pure, pure sugar that would no doubt be coursing through our veins at a rapid rate by the time we hit math class. Seriously, I still don't know why my mom refused me these. They seem so full of nature's goodness. What? Chemicals are found in nature. Sometimes.




Capri Sun


Speaking of brands who got a lot of flack from parents for their sugar content. These pouches were like liquid crack to children. There was something so satisfying about plunging the pointed end of that little yellow straw into the pre-perforated circle in that shimmering silver pouch. The contents were indiscernible, to say the least. The ads claimed the juice to be "all-natural" but failed to tell us exactly from which fruits these juices were extracted. It didn't matter much, as we were all pretty mesmerized by the Alex Mack rip-off commercials in which active kids morphed into some silvery form of the juice. Sold.




Orbitz



Nothing quite says refreshing beverage like little balls of orbiting gelatin crowding up the bottle. Novelty drinks are one thing, but sometimes manufacturers take it a bit too far. Orbitz were the hottest drink on the market for about five minutes in the mid-90s, proving that your concept doesn't need to be a good one, just a new one. The little suspended balls of gelatin tasted exactly like, well, balls of gelatin. The concept was interesting and kids certainly found them appealing, but it just didn't cut it for the long-term beverage market.



Fruitopia


In 1994, Coca Cola saw the success Snapple was having with their fruit and flavored tea beverages and thought they'd cash in on the market. They unleashed Fruitopia, a fruit-like drink aimed at teens and young people. They created original tv ad spots featuring kaleidoscoping fruits, new-agey music, and beatnik-esque poetry. I'm not totally sure what they were going for, but I did drink a lot of Fruitopia so I can only assumed it worked on me.




Snapple


Snapple was one of the original beverage giants. There was something oddly trendy about these drinks, even though their commercials suggested otherwise. In the 90s, the thrust of their advertising strategy involved use of Wendy the Snapple Lady responding to Snapple fan mail. It was sort of cute and kitschy in a she-sounds-like-all-of-my-Jewish-relatives-with-that-accent kind of way.

Please try to ignore the annoying countdown part of the commercial and focus on the annoying aspects of the commercial itself.

Snapple was (and is) famous for the under-the-lid factoids, though many errors have been found in these facts. I have learned a lot from Snapple over the years, though. When Costco first opened in my hometown my mother would purchase something like 100-packs of Snapple and we'd be forced to drink it nonstop. I know, I know, there are thirsty kids in China. I'm drinking, I'm drinking.




Sunny Delight






Ah, the classics. Sunny D has been around since the 60s, but there was a marketing push for it in the 90s with ads like this:



And of course, Family Guy in the 90s made a pitch-perfect parody of the 1994 ad. You know, back when the show was still funny.



Libby's Juicy Juice

Okay, I can see that now it's Nestle's Juicy Juice. I will remember it forever forth as Libby's, though

It may not seem like much, but Libby's is something of a juice box advertising genius company. You see, the name sounds familiar to most of us based on their sponsorship of some of our favorite PBS shows, namely the Arthur series. When day after day, we saw our pals at Juicy Juice supporting our favorite shows, we couldn't help but desire our very own juice boxes. After all, it was 100% juice for 100% kids. I guess that means Sunny D is for those of us who were only 2% kids. You know, really grown up for our age.



It definitely is enough to make you nostalgic for the days when your status could be determined by what you pulled out of your lunch box. I've tried bringing Red Bulls and other flashy beverages to meetings at the office, but it just doesn't have the same effect. At least we have our memories.

90s Kids TV Game Shows

People grumble a lot about this current generation of children. They complain that they're too lazy, too unfocused, or overly dependent on technology. I, on the other hand, have a different theory.

Kids these days are suffering from a major shortage of children's television game shows.

I mean, think about it. Really think about it. We watched a lot of TV, too, but what was the differentiating factor that motivated us to get up off the couch and do something? I'm telling you, it's game shows. Watching kids on TV partaking in mild to moderately strenuous activities was enough to give us something to aspire to. Sure, their activities were strange, unconventional, and had little applicability in actual society, but they were real kids who were challenging themselves physically, academically, or super sloppily.

And to those of you who didn't have cable, well, you'll probably feel just as bad reading this post as you did back when you were taunted for being the only kid on the block without cable. Don't say I didn't warn you.


Nick Arcade



I might as well negate everything I just said up there about these game shows encouraging kids to be active. Nick Arcade actually encouraged them to be pretty darn inactive. Contestants battled virtual video game wizards in a green screen world, creating a mesh of animation and live action in a virtual Nick Arcade universe. You have to admit, that's pretty cool.


Finders Keepers



Now this is my kind of show. As the owner of an incredibly messy room that resisted all sorts of motherly intervention attempts, I was deeply envious of the kids on this show who were allowed to ransack the rooms in this fake house. Some kids have all the luck. The game was bisected into two rounds. In one round (the boring round, if you will), kid contestants identified hidden objects in pictures. In the second (the cool round), kids were unleashed in a makeshift simulated house environment finding object based on the host's clues. The best part was the bonus Room-to-Room-Romp round in which kids frantically and methodically ransacked rooms for cards that could grant them such mediocre prizes as a summer at space camp or a gift certificate to KB Toys.


Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?



Speaking of mediocre prizes, Carmen San Diego's offerings teetered on the brink of insulting. That didn't stop us from coveting the goods and being tricked against our will into learning the geography we so desperately needed. Plus Rockapella was there to provide us with their sweet, sweet in-house harmonious musical stylings. If you didn't take home the gold, though, your prize pickings were admittedly slim. We're talking Rand McNally atlases and Carmen Sandiego sweatshirts. Oh well. It's the thought that counts.



Legends of the Hidden Temple



Speaking of vaguely educational children's television game shows. Legends of the Hidden Temple was sort of educational, in a confusing, myth-heavy sense. It's kind of Incan or Mayan, or whoever it was that was heavy into talking stone head Olmecs. The game began with the moat, as partner-teams would race to cross a pool and ring their assigned gong. In the Steps of Knowledge round, our friends answered questions based on the tale Olmec had recounted for them. The Temple Games featured Guts-like stunt work. The real fun, however, came in the Temple Run. It was like ancient Incan Finders Keepers, but with incredibly frightening Temple Guards who would steal your hard-earned pendants. Tough break, kids.

You have to admit, just a little part of you wants to be a Silver Monkey or Purple Parrot for Halloween. Go on now. We won't tell.


Double Dare





Some things are better left unexplained. Like why exactly in the above clip these kids are pulling rubber chickens out of the birdcages perched on their heads. Really, who comes up with this stuff?
It was a nice touch to make Marc Summers the host, what with his cleanliness-demanding OCD and all. Whether it was Super Sloppy, Family style, or just plain old Double Dare, a lot of really confusing stuff went on. Confusing and messy. We didn't know why, but we just wanted to be a part of it.



Get The Picture



In the 90s, it didn't take much of a premise to get a game show off the ground. All you needed was Nickolodeon's buy in, Mike O'Malley signed on as a host, and you've pretty much got yourself a show. It was a sort of mix between a trivia game, picture guessing game, and physical-challenge filled excitement fest. All in all, not a bad run.



Figure it Out



Sigh. If only I'd had some sort of secret hidden talent or spectacularly interesting fact about myself. I never quite qualified as a contestant for this one. The kids on this show always won. It was pretty much in the script. We were supposed to let our Nickelodeon-grade celebrity guests make fools of themselves and get endlessly covered in buckets of green slime all so we could win our Nintendo 64s and Figure It Out t shirts and call it a day.


For some reason or other, the genre faded into obscurity by the late 90s, despite the syndicated push of reruns on the Nickelodeon cable Games and Sports channel. Like I said, these kids just don't know what they've missing. Maybe once they've ransacked a temple only to be accosted by a full grown man in full Mayan sentinel garb all while wearing a helmet and kneepads, they would know what it was all about. Maybe.

90s Movie Remakes

With all this current talk of remaking such recent films as The Neverending Story and The Karate Kid, you've got to wonder if Hollywood's just plain running out of ideas. Remakes are a tricky thing. If done in the right way they can come off as a clever reimagination of the original, but veer too far from or even to close to the original story and you've got a potential disaster on your hands.

Seriously, you don't have to tell me twice. My friends and I in a bout of uncharacteristic (okay, characteristic) laziness decided to rent the movie Great Expectations in lieu of reading the no-doubt worthy if undeniably lengthy Charles Dickens classic in high school. No one told us, however, just how many times this film had been remade. In our bad luck my friend picked up the 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle instead of the admittedly more boring and less sexy of any of the three previous incarnations. It was amusing, no doubt, to see Paltrow's character all dressed up in some ridiculous outfit and asserting flippantly, "But Mother, it's the 90s!" Unfortunately for us, it had really very little to do with the actual book itself. Suffice it to say none of our movie-watching gang performed too wonderfully on the exam.

But perhaps I digress. What exactly is the point here? Great cinema may be timeless, but choosing to remake a great film is a treacherous road. Succeed and you achieve the goal of exposing a new generation to a worthy classic. Bonus points if you remake a foreign film, as most of us ethnocentrites here wouldn't have a clue it wasn't an original. After all, that was pretty much the only thing I learned from watching the 1998 version of Great Expectations. Much to the chagrin of my English teacher, of course. She was all-too-quick to inform me that there was no character in the novel named Finn. Damn you remakes and your insidious name-changing. I suppose it didn't help my cause that for a paragraph or two in my essay, I accidentally referred to him as "Ethan Hawke". Subtlety isn't my fine point.

These 90s movies may not have been originals and some are far from classics, but they generally did pretty well in holding our attention. And if at the end of the day, it gave us a common notion to discuss with our parents who so loved the original, then all the better.


Little Rascals


If you can believe it, the Little Rascals (or "Our Gang") comedic shorts featuring cute and rambunctious child actors date all the way back to the 1920s.



While the popularity of the originals waned sometime around the 1940s, the brand was reinvigorated when it was picked up for syndication television in the 50s. Just a few decades later, however, the Gang was all but forgotten. In 1994, Universal Pictures put out a loosely defined remake of the shorts. The new film borrowed heavily on gags and themes from the originals, and retained many of the same characters. Oh, and in case you're wondering, here's my favorite part:



Fans of the originals were less than thrilled with the remake, but the film did reasonably well and a new generation of kids were rather taken with these miniature rascals. It may not have lived up to the standards of the original gang, but they were admittedly pretty cute.




The Parent Trap

The original was released in 1961, featuring Hayley Mills as both Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick. This was, no doubt, pretty sharp technology for the time. The film was well-received and was even nominated for two Oscars. Though, let's be real here, they were for Sound and Editing respectively. Oh well, they're still Oscar nods, right? You can still put that on your home video case.

You know you're a real 90s kid when you hear Hayley Mills' voice even as a teenager and your mind immediately jumps to Good Morning, Miss Bliss

In 1998, Disney remade the film and introduced the world to a then-adorable Lindsay Lohan. The film was appropriately updated to entertain 90s children, giving them something over which to bond with their parents who had grown up with the original.





Romeo and Juliet

There have been quite a few releases of Romeo and Juliet, but perhaps the most widely seen was the 1968 version. I know we were forced to sit through it in 9th grade Language Arts.



Probably completely unfairly to the perfectly fine '68 version, my classmates and I had been spoiled by the 90s-ified remake and thus referred to the older film as "The Boring One". Hey, it's tough to compete with Leonardo DiCaprio, gunfights, and songs by The Cardigans. Sorry, 1968 version. We never gave you a chance.





101 Dalmations

The 1961 Disney animated version was spectacularly successful and well-received by audiences. It was so successful, in fact, that the film was actually re-released to theaters a staggering four times before they finally just came out with it and did a remake.

Sorry, guys, according to this commercial it looks like this baby may already be back in the Disney vault. Looks like you missed your chance.

While Glenn Close was pretty spectacular and terrifying in her role as Cruella DeVil, the film wasn't quite as critically acclaimed as the original. It was a financial success, however, and a pretty wise move by Disney overall.

If only the world's dalmatian puppy population had fared as well. Following the release of the '96 version, demand for adorable dalmatians skyrocketed. No one at Disney ever told us that they weren't all that great with kids. I mean, they looked so cuddly in the movie. Soon thereafter rescue shelters with bursting at the seams with returns and exchanges of dalmatians. Whoops. Maybe the film should have come with some sort of caveat.





Angels in the Outfield

The1951 picture was not nearly as family-oriented a film as its subsequent reincarnation. The first didn't have much in the way of child-age characters, and come on, the team in this version was the Pirates. Where's the pun in that? Come on.

I have to say, this original trailer is awesome. It's completely ridiculous.

The 1994 release was much more of a family movie. A sad little foster kid played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt is told by his deadbeat dad that they'll be reunited when the Angels win the pennant. See, the Angels. Clever update, right? Plus we get Christopher Lloyd as our lead angel. What's not to like?

Oh my god, how cute is little Joseph Gordon-Levitt? The correct answer is, incredibly, unbelievably, heartstring-tuggingly cute.

Little Women

I guess great stories really are timeless. Either that, or people have terrible memories. There have been five big-screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, although the first two were in the era of silent films. We had our 1933 release with Katharine Hepburn as Jo:



The 1949 adaptation with over-the-top theatrics, featuring Elizabeth Taylor as Amy:

I love the way the trailer claims it to be Romantic as Springtime! Merry as Christmas! Sparkling as Winter!

And finally, our 1994 feature chock full of big names as Winona Rider, Christian Bale, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon:


For a movie that's been remade so many times, you've got to admire the 1994 version for getting it right. Yes, it's sappy and sentimental, but so is the novel. It's pretty hard to make selling your hair and dying of scarlet fever into slapstick comedy.




The Nutty Professor

I'm sure this news is going to shock you, so I'm going to try to break it to you gently: the original Nutty Professor contained infinitely fewer fart jokes. It also did not spurn any insufferable fart-joke filled sequels featuring its star playing every member of his family. Here's the trailer to the Jerry Lewis original, released in 1963:



The Eddy Murphy vehicle somehow, God knows how, morphed into, well, this:


Some things are better left unexplained.



As you can see, remakes run the gamut from a welcome reinterpretation to inexplicable excuse for cross-dressing and flatulence jokes. We can only hope the forthcoming remakes of 80s and 90s films can do any bit as much justice to the movies we grew up with. After all, I don't know how I'll ever explain to my kids that no, that flying luckdragon thing from The Neverending Story is not supposed to be computer animated, it's supposed to be real and fuzzy and absolutely terrifying.