Repost Disclaimer: Children of the Nineties is, weather permitting, in transit to much-awaited New Year's Eve celebrations. In the meantime, please enjoy a pre-scheduled classic CotN repost from earlier this year. As I only had three or four readers at the time, it's probably (okay, almost definitely) new to you.
Jock Jams
It only occurs to me now that the Jock Jams music series was in some way related to athletics in a "pump-you-up" sort of way. We all just accepted that the series was called "Jock Jams;" for years I thought it was a legitimate category of music. There was punk, top 40, rock, grunge, adult alternative, and Jock Jams.
Jock Jams was certainly unrelenting in its commitment to providing a singular type of music. Tack listings featured such non-sensically titled classics as "Whoomp! There it is!" "Boom, Boom, Boom" "Da' Dip" and "Tubthumping." Obviously, using words found in the dictionary was not a requirement for admission to Jock Jams stardom. If you could verbalize some sort of grunting sound and write a song about it, you were in. Pump-up themes were also prevalent and pervasive. The first volume featured a staggering 3 songs with the phrase "pump it up!" in their titles. There was no question this franchise was churning out upbeat tunes, as evidenced by a whopping 11 uses of the word "up" in song titles alone in the five Jock Jams albums.
These compliation CDs featured more than just music, though it was their main jock-inspiring focus. Jock Jams also included some spoken and/or chanted tracks full of strangely taunting remarks, often with vengeful undertones. These short tracks were cleverly faded into the next song, with little or no delay between tracks. Assumedly, this was to keep the jocks jamming uninterruptedly. There's nothing a jamming jock despises more than a two second pause between tracks. What sort of a bench press soundtrack would this be if lifters were forced to endure a one-second silence? How would they possibly build up the motivation to increase their muscular capacity if involuntarily subjected to quietude? How, I ask you?
Although the album covers declared the compilations to be presented by the distinctly athletic ESPN, in reality, these supposed "jock" jams were directed more at a teenybopper slash dance club crowd than their eponymous sportsmen demographic. In this sense, the spoken tracks were possibly misdirected with their vindictive themes. A bunch of 12-year olds chanting, "Hey, hey, you! Get out of our way because today is the day we will put you away!" is a tad more disconcerting and less appropriate than say, a football team delivering the same unsportmanlike message. Regardless of their out-of-placedness among the actual consumers, the spoken tracks had a certain charm to them that uniquely characterized the albums.
The most recognizable was of course the classic intro to the original Jock Jams (volume one) was the infamous boxing announcer Michael Buffer's trademarked phrase, "Let's get ready to ruuuuuumble!" Listeners were indeed, ready to rumble, possibly not in a punch-you-out fashion but at the very least in a 90s dance-club rump-shaking manner.
Jock Jams actually had listed tracks attributed to their very own Jock Jams cheerleaders, presumably those pictured on their various album covers. Though it was never made clear exactly what the prerequisites for Jock Jam cheerleaderdom were, we can only assume that the audition process required a yelling/spelling combo exam.
"Alright girls, all 28 of you have passed the shouting test, great work. Unfortunately, only 3 of you passed the spelling portion of the tryout. For those of you who spelled 'action' a-c-k-s-h-u-n, better luck next year trying out for volume 3 when we'll be asking you to incorrectly spell the word 'rowdy' with an 'i-e'." (Note: there is indeed a track on Jock Jams Volume 3 entitled "R.O.W.D.I.E". Check out the track listing for yourself if you have any remaining incredulity about the ridiculousness of these anthologies.)
These CDs included many of our favorite standard 90s upbeat tracks like the Macarena and the Space Jam theme, but also had some odd remixes thrown in for good measure. I'd been meaning to remix the Mexican Hat Dance for awhile now, but the good people at Jock Jams beat me to it. I also played around with the idea of turning "If You're Happy and You Know It" into a rockin' club jam, but again Jock Jams had clearer foresight than I. Did I mention I've always loved when they play the Chicken Dance at classy church-basement weddings...aw, come on, Jock Jams! You've got to be kidding me. That too? What won't you remix? It's obviously back to the drawing board for me.
The 1990s were famous for megamixing everything. We could never be satisfied with just mixing. Even supermixing seemed too tame for our extreme 90s music tastes. No, it was was megamix or nothing. Megamixing was the fine-tuned art of taking approximately one line from every song, in this case from a single compilation album, and mixing them into a something that even the most attention-deficit nineties child could attend to.
"We've tried mixing it...but could we megamix it? Our demographic prefers to listen to their favorite songs in snippets, people!"
I'll admit it is catchy. While the Jock Jams franchise was not creative by any means, you have to admire them for holding out all these years with their initial premise. The CDs were wildly popular and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. No 6th grade basketball tournament would be complete without a pre-game layup show set to some variation of the megamix. Jocks or not, children of the 90s reveled in the eardrum-shattering flavor of these CDs.
So go ahead, children of the 90s. Pop a Jock Jams the boombox, crack open a bottle of Surge, zip up that Starter Jacket, and get ready to rumble.
Repost Disclaimer: Children of the Nineties is at a work conference, and despite desperate pleas to the contrary is not entitled to personal computer time. In the meantime, please enjoy a pre-scheduled classic CotN repost from earlier this year. As I only had three or four readers at the time, it's probably (okay, almost definitely) new to you.
Crystal Pepsi
Are you sick of delicious, well-known sodas? Do you find the comforting and familiar to be generally repugnant? Do you need a new soda Right Now, and would prefer to drink it accompanied by the Van Halen song of the same name?
Well, you're in luck! Or at least, you would have been had you expressed these concerns somewhere between 1992 and 1993.
In 1992, Pepsi executives sat down and thought, "Sure, our product is delicious and thirst-quenching...but is it pure?" You may have thought they had learned a key and important lesson in not-tampering-with-a-successful-formula from the 1985 "New Coke" debacle, but you would be wrong. In an ever-ongoing battle for one-upmanship between Pepsico and the Coca Cola Company, no product launch was too ridiculous.
Thankfully, they had an equally absurd ad campaign to accompany the product. Although Crystal Pepsi was indeed clear in color, it tasted pretty much like original Pepsi. I may be going out on a limb here, but I assume that if it tastes the same, there were not major recipe changes for the beverage outside of altering the color of the syrup. This did not stop our friends over at Pepsi from making the supposed "clarity=purity" concept the major cornerstone of their advertising campaigns. The concept in itself was ridiculous; no one was claiming Sprite or 7UP to be particularly pure in comparison to its darker-syruped soda peers. Regardless of the obvious fallibility of this advertising claim, PepsiCo pushed ahead with quintessential 90s commercials like this:
So, what did you learn? Nothing? What? You mean to tell me that despite all of those definitive statements splashed across my screen, not a single one of them tells us anything at all about the product itself aside from its clear color? Well, at least the music drops some heavy hints on when I can expect to find this beverages in stores. I'll give you a hint: it's not later.
Clearly (sorry, I had to), Pepsi was piggybacking on other marketing trends at the time and aiming to portray a product that was simultaneously familiar and improved. Researchers at the time were uncovering some mildly convincing evidence that people's perception of taste or quality is heavily impacted by its color. However, what the Pepsi R&D people failed to take into account was that people's expectations for taste also change significantly with a color shift. While people were expecting Crystal Pepsi to have a lighter taste and lower caloric content (after all, it's not a huge leap from how they market it in the above ad), their tastebuds were in uproar over the eye-to-brain miscommunication.
While Crystal Pepsi had done well in initial test markets, the actual substance of the product failed to live up to the hype. People tasted the cola and were generally unimpressed from its near indistinguishability from the original. In an effort to counterbalance popular public opinion, PepsiCo released the following commercial:
So, what did they think? They claimed it have a "nice lemony-zing taste!" and a "clear" flavor. None of those things were particularly true about the initial Crystal Pepsi formula, but the folks over at Pepsi were desperate to convince us they were so. Confronted with a backlash from loyal Pepsi drinkers, Pepsi continued backpedaling in an effort to extricate themselves from this sticky (though supposedly "less syrupy!") situation.
Suddenly, it was like the Clinton impeachment hearing of soda marketing as the Pepsi people really took it down to semantics. "What do you mean we called it Crystal Pepsi? It's called Crystal from Pepsi!" That's right. Pepsi realized that their staunch classic soda adherents were in a huff over the fact that they tried to pass off this colorless impostor as their old favorite Pepsi. Why, this wasn't Pepsi at all! It's as if their fanbase got together and put out a statement saying, "We don't care if you make it. We don't even care if people know it's from Pepsi. But for God's sake, we can't have people thinking this is Pepsi! Blasphemy!"
And so it was:
At least this ad shows the corporation is able to poke some fun at itself. Pepsi recognized how ridiculous the addition of this meaningless preposition was to the name of their product. They also knew it was absurd that they were forced to add a citrus flavor based on people's perceptions of how a clear soda should taste.
After all of that, I think we can all agree: no more messing with the original. Is that clear?
Repost Disclaimer: Children of the Nineties is at a work conference, and despite desperate pleas to the contrary is not entitled to personal computer time. In the meantime, please enjoy a pre-scheduled classic CotN repost from earlier this year. As I only had three or four readers at the time, it's probably (okay, almost definitely) new to you.
Magic Eye
It's a well-known fact that all children enjoy staring at a two dimensional image for so long that their eyes begin to glaze over and water uncontrollably. Their heads may ache, their eyes may lose focus, and their patience may wear paper thin, but nothing will impede them from their ultimate visual goal. Though usually it is near impossible to force a child to stay still, set one in front of a Magic Eye book or poster and prepare to be amazed: not by the Magic we were promised, but rather by the level of maddening concentration associated with capturing it.
There was nothing worse than being the one kid who couldn't see the hidden image. If you were ocularly challenged in a manner that hindered your useless ability to view a supposedly three dimensional image amongst a repetitive sea of two-dimensional images, you were relegated to endless ridicule and social alienation. God help you if you suffered from the curse of poor binocular disparity, as you were likely headed for a sad and lonely existence devoid of exciting jump-from-the-page imagery. A seemingly pointless skill of blank staring suddenly set apart the Haves from the Have Nots.
In bookstores and classrooms across the nation, the same conversation was taking place between increasingly frustrated pairs of children:
Kid #1: Look at the picture. Kid #2: Okay, I'm looking. (long pause) So, what's supposed to happen here? Kid #1: You'll see something. Kid #2: I'll see what? Kid #1: Just look at it! Kid #2: I am looking. Kid #1: No, look past it. Kid #2: Oh, I think I kind of... Kid #1: Do you see it now? Kid #2: Um, yeah, I think so. Kid #1: So what is it? Kid #2: A...whale? Kid #1: Ugh, it's the Statue of Liberty. Man, you suck at these things.
(Kid #2 walks off with pounding eye strain-based headache and wounded pride)
And...scene.
Nobody really seemed to know how these things worked, and no one really seemed to care. The real test of 90s childhood street credibility was an uncanny capacity to descramble austereogramatic images. I know, it makes perfect sense. How else are we supposed to prioritize our social structure? Brains? Looks? Give me a break. It was Magic Eye or nothing.
The burning shame of not being one of the Chosen Ones was both crippling and inescapable. Living with the constant fear that our mothers' old adages of our crossed eyes forever sticking that way was not enough to deter us from staring intently until our brains were set to burst. We were determined that this would be the time that we would finally see what everyone was raving about. Those who were skilled in the ways of the Magic Eye were constantly coaching us, insisting that we were doing it wrong. Despite our protests of poor depth perception or an inability to visually construct convergent images, the Seers were neverendingly giving us all sorts of well-meaning contradictory viewing tips:
"Cross your eyes a little!" "Eyeballs further apart!"
"Look to the left of it!" "The other left!"
"Try to focus on one spot!" "Don't focus your eyes on anything at all!" "Try to look past it!"
That last one was always my favorite. Oh, you want me to look past it? I was foolishly looking at it. Alrighty, no problem. I knew this x-ray vision would eventually come in handy. I'll just gaze straight through the paper to the next page and I'll be set.
Unfortunately, this brand sarcasm was lost on our persistent Magic Eye instructors. After all, who cares about attitude when you've got magical pictures? Hopeful that their Magic Eye proteges may have finally blossomed into fully evolved viewers capable of perceiving 3D imagery, the Seers would eagerly ask, "Can you see it now?" Horribly embarrassed by our ineptitude, we would have to grudgingly admit time and time again that we still lacked the basic ogling skills necessary to deconstruct a series of seemingly meaningless colored dots. Try as we might, we would never be content to simply accept it as a moderately attractive example of pointilistic art. We knew it was so much more, and we wanted in.
Thankfully, our dear uploading friends over at YouTube have put together an instructional video of sorts. Don't let the soothing music and whimsical font fool you. This thing is serious. I followed the instructions to a T, but somewhere along the way my plan to see a glorious hidden three-dimensional image took a turn for the worst. It brought me right back to 1995, with all my Seeing friends telling me, "You're thinking about it too much. Just stare at it. Don't think about it at all." Right. Because telling me not to think too much about it leads me to think about it prominently and intently. Why don't you give it a try and see what you see:
Isn't that nice? They offer that little consolatory image at the end to offset the continued wrenching humiliation of those of us unable to see the 3D picture. If you can see it, congratulations. Your ocular capacity clearly exceeds mine, and I respect your visual superiority. However, if you failed to see the image, you are not alone; in fact, many of our celebrated television personalities faced the same issue, sometimes as a minor offshoot plotline!
On the original Ellen show, Ellen Degeneres desperately tried to hide her secret inability to Magic Eye. An episode of Seinfeld left George and others so transfixed by the Magic Eye task at hand that they were unable to complete the rudimentary functions of their everyday lives. And of course, we can't forget out beloved Friend Ross Gellar, who was chastised by the whole group for his incompetence at drawing out the 3D Statue of Liberty in one of the most popular Magic Eye pictures. US magazine has been right all along, they really are just like us! And they say there are no relatable characters in sitcoms.
Thus if you're feeling down about your lack of Magical Eyes, rest your weary sockets. You're among good company. For those of you who can see the mythical images, well, continue to bask in your transcendent ability. A skill you thought had been laid to rest years ago has briefly returned just long enough for you to reassert your superiority over the Blind. By tomorrow your so-called skill will reclaim its rightful place in obsolescence and your gloating rights will dissolve like the two dimensional dots from the three dimensional Statue of Liberty.
