AOL and Chat Rooms

Once upon a time, our parents didn't have a clue what we were doing online. The internet was a new and exciting place, and it seemed like a safe and inpenetrable fortress of unsupervised mischief. Mind you, this was years before Chris Hansen was popping in to offer you a seat while the decoy internet teen went to go check on the hot tub. There was no catching of predators, no online policing, just pure, unadulterated dangerous fun.

If anything, our parents were more concerned with our tying up the phone lines than our online whereabouts. Sure, we may have been making under-the-table investments with Nigerian princes, but our parents were solely worried about the busy signal clogging our line. Back in the day, there was no wireless or high speed internet connections, there was a little phone jack that shared a common line with our home phones. In a time before universal cell phone ownership, this was a pretty serious inconvenience. Not to mention how annoying that modem sound was when you picked up the phone. Ouch.

When children of the 90s first got in-home internet access, it was a novel and exciting concept. Finally, a relatively captive audience with whom to share our innermost thoughts, dreams, and anonymous flirtations. Once we could actually forge a connection, that is. I'd sit for scores of minutes at a time, waiting impatiently for that little running AOL man to enter his successive phase of connectedness. Words like "modem failure" and "inability to connect" haunted us, forcing us to redial and redial until finally we could enter our glorious online community.




At our house, there were three potential modem phone numbers with which to reach the internet, and we'd frantically alternate between our options, forever seeking a signal. It's remarkable to think that just a decade earlier, we were content to wait five minutes to catch even the briefest glimpse of the internet. Nowadays, if a website takes more than three seconds to load we're all about one step away from tossing the laptop out the window. Back then, though, these were different times. More patient times. And of course, more salacious.

No sooner than we'd heard that familiar robotically enthusiastic declaration "You've Got Mail!", we'd be clamoring to reach our favorite chat rooms. As AOL was the premier internet service of the 90s, a good chunk of the online population could be found roaming these virtual spaces. It was a novel concept for the time: you could actually communicate with many people at once! People you didn't know! People who we should trust indefinitely to be telling the truth, the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth!


So help us God, this was probably not the case. Judging how things usually went our own end, it's doubtable that these new virtual pals were honest about any element of their existence other than that they were currently connected to the internet. The original chat rooms were popular online pickup scenes, the equivalent of an internet singles bar. Only, truth be told, all the people in those rooms were probably either under the age of 12 or over the age of 50.

While today a notion like that might raise a red flag or two, these things were chalked up to good, clean fun back then. Well, er, sort of clean. Children delighted in their ability to fool others, though looking back it's unlikely that my friends and I fooled anyone with our fifth grade writing skills and general misunderstanding of innuendos.

From the moment a person asked, "A/S/L", you knew it was on. That is, imploring his chatroommates to give their age, sex, and location. I don't know about you, but this was a great source of fun for my pals and I as children. In one room we could be exotic 18-year old Brazilian twins working to get our modeling careers off the ground while in the next we could easily slip into the guise of a mysterious lonelyhearts Spanish exchange student seeking a nice middle aged office drone to. The possibilities were truly endless.





Sometimes we may have outed ourselves as the 12/Fs we really were, but in general the idea was to fool others into believing the bull we were serving up. I imagine parents everywhere would have been pretty uneasy to find that their young children were being approached online with the request to "cyber", but again, these were different times. Very few people had considered the notion of troubling internet connections, we were too enthralled by its exciting possibilities to see any danger in letting children loose into chatrooms with a slew of card-carrying NAMBLA members and known sex offenders.

In our innocence, though, we were too giddy to be bothered by these facts. These were the days before MySpace, Facebook, or online dating, so people everywhere used this free market chatroom environment to make connections. Users formed full-fledged online relationships with people they had never even met. Sure, in real life you may have been a Dungeons and Dragons playing loner with duct-taped glasses, but online you could be the suave AOL romeo you'd always dreamed of being. Until your potential mate requested a picture, of course. Photographic evidence is a bitch.






The original AOL was a kid's paradise. It's going date us immensely when we someday tell our children of plugging a common search term in a search engine and having zero results, but we'll know that we were the true online pioneers. We knew the thrill of navigating the unknown wildernesses of the internet before firewalls and parental controls and the like neutralized the treacherous terrain. Sure, we may have talked to a pedophile or two, but we lived, dammit. We lived. Well, vicariously through our internet alteregos. But you know what I mean.

Gel Pens

If you have noticed, we over here at Children of the 90s have been pretty caught up in the back-to-school spirit. There's something about fall that brings all of us 90s nostalgianiks right back to our frantic scrambling office-supply store shopping trips. We would all try to use our intuition and summer-accumulated wisdom to buy the most coveted back-to-school items, but there was little way of knowing whether your choice was going to sink or swim in the classroom implement hierarchy. It's a cruel world, and we might as well have learned it at a young age. There's nothing quite like ridicule and public shaming over what we were toting in our pencil cases. It's probably what's turned us into the humble adults we are today.

The problem with school supply trends was that we could hardly look to fashion magazines for our social cues on what to buy. Instead, we had to simply hold our collective breath and hope that whatever we'd haplessly shoved into our OfficeMax carts was the wise choice. Would Yikes Pencils be in or out? Would Clueless's Cher's feather pen still be the highly coveted item of the back-to-school season, or were Troll pencil toppers the way to go? It was enough to etch premature wrinkles into our juvenile brows.

There are, however, some school supplies that spoke for themselves. When we saw them in the store, we simply knew we had to have them. They had a value all their own, not only because they were popular, but because they had real appeal. Not to mention we knew deep down, even from a young age, that if one of these babies would set our parents back $2 a pop versus the fifty cents or so they'd shell out for a regular pen they just had to be great. After all, the pricers wouldn't lie to us. They know real value, and we had to be prepared to pay for it.




Gel pens quickly became a veritable writing implement phenomenon, flooding into middle school desks everywhere with a barrage of metallic colors. These things were legitimately impressive, for school supplies. We had never seen this type of performance before in a pen, nor had we particularly cared when it came in the drab shades of blue and black favored by rival pen producers. Gelly Rolls, though, these things were impressive. Not only did they come in a vast spectrum of visually appealing shiny colors, but they could write on all sorts of surfaces! What more could you ask for?

Sure, our parents were probably less than pleased when we came home with homeroom-drawn gelly roll tattoos graffiti-ing our bodies, but at least it was still a step above opting for permanent ink. My mother unleashed upon me a slew of old-wives' tales of how the ink would permeate my skin and lead to all sorts of terrifying blood poisoning, but I saw right through it. Well, I did at first. My vision started to blur after the fourth or fifth day, now that I think about it. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Gel pens had pretty incredible powers, really. For one, they could write on black paper. I know, I know. Maybe I should give a minute to let that sink in. Black paper. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I know I hadn't, until I bought a colored multi-pack that came complete with a pad of black paper. I sat there staring at my new acquisition, thinking, Why, it just can't be. How can a pen write on a piece of black paper? I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, but suffice it to say I was sold. Yearbook signing would never be the same.

There were a few prototypes in particular that particularly astonished, amazed, and amused us. I wrote many an origami-folded note to my friends, imploring them "W/B/S" (write back soon) and declaring my feelings via LYLAS (love ya like a sister). Among the most popular on the market were:

Gelly Roll


These were truly the original impressive gel pen. They were so shiny. Really, just so so shiny. My mind is riddled with mental ADD at the mere thought of them, so just imagine the effect they had on real live kids attempting to take notes with their sparkly, sparkly ink. Ooh, sparkly. I'm sorry, what were we talking about here?



Milky


Though now the name sort of makes me want to vomit, in middle school we were completely enamored with these pastel-hued pens. These things drew on everything, leaving no drawable surface on my body, clothing, and schoolwork untouched by the magic of their soft hues.



Marble Ink


Described by their manufacturers as "a milkshake of colors", these pens were a teacher's worst nightmare. To receive a handwritten essay that gradually shifted from one end of the color spectrum to the next and back again was nothing short of a grading nightmare. Kids were certainly entertained by them, though, so it would take more than simple chastisements to stop us. We had pen rights, dammit, and we were prepared to exercise them, color-induced nausea aside.


Sure, there were a few kinks in the process. Namely, when the inkwell in the pen's core began to go dry, these things were nearly impossible to write with. You'd scratch through your paper just trying to get some color out of it. And don't even get me started on the moments of gel overload. Believe me, these splotches were not pretty. Okay, they were kind of pretty, but that's not the point. It's hard to take an algebra answer seriously when half of the equation is obscured by a giant shimmering pink blob you're forced to turn into a flower to make it less conspicuous.

Regardless of their minor flaws, these babies were golden. And silver. And bronze, and well, you get the idea. My technicolor-dreampen-case was brimming with shimmery, shiny colors and for a brief moment in time, it was enough to hold my attention and entertain me in class. If only I could get as worked up about office supplies now. It's hard to picture me hugging my stapler or spooning with the fax machine, but I'm willing to give it a try. What can I say? I'm a dreamer.

Mentos

When you watch one of these commercials that is burned into everyone's brains for all eternity, you sort of have to wonder if the people hawking this ad campaign had even an inkling it would go quite so far. Did they know that I can not for the life of me remember how to solve a simple algebraic equation, but I can sing the entire 90s-era Mentos jingle from memory? Or perhaps that I would slowly but steadily forget the names of my former classmates and teachers, but would forever recognize that opening "doo-do-do-do-do-do-doo-waaah" with unwavering accuracy? God, I hope not. It's hard to fathom an ad agency with that level of thirst for absolute power over my dwindling available brainspace.

These guys were lucky they came before the days of fast-forwarding through blocks of quick-passing DVR-ed commercials. Nowadays, it's pretty unlikely many of us even know what commercials are on the air, let alone can recite them with startling astuteness from memory. Someday we'll tell our grandchildren of the days that advertisers weren't using cheap product-placement ploys to get to us but that we consciously absorbed information from a real live ad. They'll look at us blankly, we'll hum a few bars of a jingle for effect, and a generational gap will be had by all.
Mentos commercials were the absolute campiest thing to come out of 90s TV advertising. Many may have assumed we left behind these lamely cheesy commercials in the 80s, but our brothers at Mentos stayed true to the corny tradition of hackneyed ad premises and embarrassingly light and fluffy background music. In some ways we'd like to believe that the good people at Mentos were offering us a sort of tongue-in-cheek, intentionally campy commercial, it's just as likely that they were totally and completely serious. What? Real people brandish a cylindrical roll of chewable mints when they get themselves out of a tough jam. Well, some people. I'm sure at least one person. Possibly.

The Mentos commercials were something of a 90s phenomenon as the jingles had that uncanny ability to lodge themselves forever in our brains and play on a constant, unnerving loop. The commercials all featured the same basic skeletal plot outline with a few variances in character and setting. Typically, they involved a good-looking person facing a mildly inconvenient and potentially day-interrupting situation. Luckily for these fine folks, they've got the power of Mentos behind them, like in this classic take:



Wow, I honestly had no idea that you could simply repeat the same few words again and again in a rhythmic sequence and label it a fully-composed songs. The things I don't know, huh? I suppose these ads were all about the power of suggestion, and their reliance on repetition was supposed to reinforce those messages. Or maybe, more likely, to really, really get under our skin and keep us humming the tune all day long.

In case you failed to take good notes during the above video, here's a refresher course for the lyrics. Get it? Refresher? *Holds hands up to shield face from onslaught of reader-thrown tomatoes*. I can take a hint. Anyway, the words are:

'Doo doo doo doo, doo-doo, do-Wah!'

It doesn't matter what comes, fresh goes better in life, and Mentos is fresh and full of life.

Nothing gets to you, staying fresh staying cool, with Mentos, fresh and full of life.

Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better with Mentos, fresh and full of life!

Mentos, the freshmaker!

I'm sorry, what? how many times did you say fresh and/or full of life? By my count (not necessarily a reliable one, based on my suspect arithmetic skills) some variation of the word "fresh" comes up nine times. Nine times. The commercial's only 29 seconds long! That means nearly a third of the airtime is devoted to saying the word "fresh". Based on my complex algorithm equating a single word with one second, that is.

If the above ad's content didn't do it for you, don't you worry. They had plenty of other farfetched Mento MacGyvering fare to offer. Like this gem:



My favorite part of these commercials has got to be the incredible acting. Or miming, I suppose, considering the lack of verbal engagement. You have to love the way the jerk guy who parked behind her gives her that droll, "Oh, you!" look as the construction workers haul her car from its entrapment. He seems so mildly amused by the situation, as if it were a quickly resolved misunderstanding between friends rather than the more realistic road-rage induced maniacal behavior that inevitably leads to fake neck braces and gold-digging lawsuits in real life.

Or, if you prefer the jazzier remix version of the jingle, you can always go with this version of the ad:



Well, would you look at that! The lady is ingenious, I tell you. Ingenious. There's no way I could have thought of that in a stinky-breath moment. Thank God for Mentos, that's all I have to say.

If you're looking for more of a male-dreamboat featuring awesome Dawson hair and an open-front flannel shirt, then this one is definitely the way to go:



Okay, okay, I think you've got the idea. These commercials were incredibly formulaic yet remarkably successful. I suppose we all just wished the answer's to our everyday dilemmas could be so simple, or at least that we could handle them so breezily while underscored optimistically by doo-wop music.

A decade later, Mentos were back in the spotlight thanks to some enlightening viral video-ry showing us all the hidden danger of Mentos when dropped in soda. Apparently, there's something in the chemical reaction that causes a geyser-like effect, creating a dangerous pressure situation and a minty-fresh bottle rocket. Since I'm about as good at science as I am at math (that is to say, my knowledge extends no further than the notion that the earth is not trapezoidal) I'll let my good friends from MythBusters do the dirty work for me. Well, not so much dirty as sticky. And minty. Did I mention these things are fresh?



Don't try this at home, kids. Or, if you do, don't even think about telling your parents I told you to. A poor unpaid blogger like me can't afford a lawyer. Explosive chemical reactions aside, Mentos are notoriously chewy, minty, delicious, and they had a cameo in Clueless. Really, what much more could a 90s breath mint dream of?