Tickle-Me Elmo

"I was pulled under, trampled—the crotch was yanked out of my brand-new jeans [. . .] I was kicked with a white Adidas before I became unconscious."

Sounds pretty scary right? So what was it? Soccer hooligan riot? Controversial political protest gone awry? Student demonstration gone violent?

Or, a race for $28.99 worth of pulsating synthetic fur?

If you answered D, then congratulations. You're a witness to the soulless materialism of sheeplike 90s suburban parents. Yes, that right. Innocent unsuspecting shop clerks were trampled and concussed all for the unworthy cause of an overpriced, overrated toy. Something tells me that guy wasn't laughing nearly as much as these toys. Or TYCO, for that matter. I'm sure we can all imagine that journey to the bank involved a lot of uncontrollable giggling. And I mean all the way there.


Though I was a bit too old (and let's be real here, too cool) to have any remote desire for a Sesame Street themed toy in 1996, I was perplexed and amazed by the impact this single plaything had on our fair nation. Every couple of years or so, a toy comes on to the market that takes off in an unanticipated and astronomical way. While usually the trajectory of a toy's success is pretty stable, every once in a while one comes along that becomes an absolute hands-down no-two-ways-about-it must have item. As in we've got people trading black market kidneys for these things.

It also seems that once this path of toy-crazed destruction begins, it can not be stopped. No rational intervention of any kind seems enough to quell the unquenchable desire to one-up our neighbors. It became about the principle of the thing--or in this case, the lack thereof. People went completely insane, manic under the spell of owning the most coveted holiday item of the year. Congratulations, you Jiminy Cricket-less bastards.



The best part of the whole shebang was the Sophacles-level of irony hiding just beneath the surface. Elmo, as a character, was the ultimate prototype for sweet, kind, good-natured innocence. Never in a million years would he engage in any type of violence--he was a monster in name and bodily fluffiness alone. These were values people wanted to pass down to their kids. So much so, in fact, that they were willing to completely disregard these same values in their unbridled bloodlust for these toys. Smooth move, parents.

I'm sure if my parents had trampled some poor shmoe down at Toys 'R Us without so much asking after his broken bones and resultant disfigurement, I'd be pretty pleased. After all, I'd have Elmo as my moral guide. That pretty much makes up for it, right?

Too bad our Tickle-Me pal didn't offer much in the way of substance, or even any type of real underlying value. Take a look at the toy in question in its natural habitat in its depiction in the original 1996 ad:



What? Really? We're trampling people for that? That thing sort of...sucks. It's not really exceptional in any way. I mean, yeah, it shakes. Great. It laughs in a horribly irritating high-pitched tone. Remind me again why we all want one of these?

Oh, right. Because we're slaves to a competition-driven consumer society. I'd almost forgotten. I suppose if you really get down to it, the vibration was marginally high-tech for the time. It used similar technology to the type of feedback you get now on your Wii when you run over a penguin in Mario Kart*. It was kind of cute in a "I see this thing every day on TV but don't really need one in my own home" sort of way. It didn't seem to have all that much going for it substance-wise outside of the ample hype.

Keep in mind this was not the only Elmo doll on the market. There were dozens of others that for some reason or other had failed to become the almighty chosen one for the holiday season. That vibrating censor and voice chip was just the tipping point to drive this toy to phenomenon status. People who'd been lucky enough to buy one before the craze took over everything and everyone made out pretty nicely overall on the deal. These toys were selling in unofficial markets for upwards of $1000. I'm sorry, if you missed that, that sum was $1000. Given, this was the 90s and the economic climate was a bit less dire, but geez. No wonder people hate America. I blame Tickle-Me Elmo.**


Just like any craze, the hysteria subsided almost as quickly as it had crested. TYCO tried to quickly cash in on the brand by offering up a whole line of Tickle-Me Sesame Street friends, but it seems everyone had had just about as much tickling as they could take. It was time to lay the concept to rest, especially if we ever wanted our late-night talk show hosts to joke about anything else.

This was not, however, the last we saw of Tickle Me Elmo. In 2006, the 10th anniversary of the original release, Fisher Price unleashed TMX limited edition Tickle Me Elmo Extreme. Yep, extreme.



Okay, that one was too creepy, even for me? What's with the Cheaters/Cops-grade blurring? What exactly are they hiding? Let's try that one more time:



Nope, I was right the first time. Still creepy.



*What? I'm really bad at Mario Kart.
**Remember, if you don't buy a Tickle-Me Elmo, the terrorists win.

Children of the 90s One-Hit Wonder Mash-Up: 1994 Edition

You know the drill: one year, uncommonly popular songs, a group of bands whose records rarely saw the light of day by year's end. 1994 was a surprisingly light year for one-hit wonders, but it did give us a few winners. Or losers. Depending on your point of view.

Without further ado, I give you the inexplicable one-time hits of 1994:


Crash Test Dummies: Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

Crash Test Dummies - Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm (Official Music Video) - Watch the top videos of the week here

You've got to give at least a smidgen of credit to a band who's able to make a hit song without having a single actual word in the chorus or name of the song. We've got to give them credit wherever we can find it, really, because this song doesn't have so much going for it. Sure, it's catchy and will play over and over and over again in your head after you hear it, but that's not necessarily a good thing. In this case, especially.

The song details three minor hard-luck stories of three unique children, allotting each child's tale a single lyrical verse. The song doesn't exactly have a point, per se, but it does tell three disparate stories in great, unnecessary detail. Really, just so unnecessary. In the first, we learn of a boy whose hair has suddenly turned white after a car accident. In the second, we hear about a girl who avoids changing in gym class for fear of her classmates berating her unseemly birthmarks. In the last, a boy's family belongs to an odd religious sect for which participants shake and quiver about on the church floor.

Wait, I'm sorry. What? This is a song? I remember liking the music video as a kid, but that's probably just because it's so damn literal. Children act out the scenes exactly as they're described in the song. There's no deeper meaning. There's no point whatsoever. To all the struggling musicians out there putting out lyrical gold, let me apologize on behalf of the Crash Test Dummies for pushing you out of the spotlight so we could hear, well, this.



69 Boyz: Tootsee Roll


I'm going to come right out and say it: any song backed up by the Quad City DJs is pure beat-thumping genius in my mind. Thus perhaps I'm a little biased in my assessment of the 69 Boyz' song "Tootsee Roll", but seriously, doesn't it just make you want to dance a little bit? No? Just me? Okay then. The song starts out strong with a hearty:

The butterfly? Uh-uh, that's old!
Let me see the Tootsee Roll!

Then, just a mere chorus and few shouted lines later, they reiterate the previous statement by explaining:

I don't know what you've been told
It ain't the butterfly, it's the Tootsee Roll
A brand new dance

Wait, wait, wait. I'm confused. Maybe they should explain it one more time. So you're saying it's not the butterfly? I'm not sure who exactly has been trying to convince us of otherwise since their initial introductory proclamation, but at least that's settled now. It's not the butterfly, everyone. It's just not.

Anyway, I've always been a fan of dance songs where they shout out specific dance directions in the lyrics. It means I don't have to think of what I'm going to do next. There's no awkward moment where I'm wondering if I should throw the dice one time. No, no. I'll just dip, baby. Dip.



Ahmad: Back in the Day


Okay, okay, I know this song was not quite as popular as the others, but I just have to throw it in there for its dedication to the preservation of nostalgia. This Ahmad is a guy after my own heart. We're all about the back in the day here at Children of the 90s. I must say based on the song that I didn't have much in common with Ahmad, but it's the sentiment that really counts.




Big Mountain: Baby I love your Way



You know you've really made it in the one-hit wonder world when you don't even have to come up with the tune or lyrics of the song that buys you your fifteen minutes of fame. Such was the case with Big Mountain, whose cover of Peter Frampton's 1974 hit "Baby I Love Your Way" earned them a top ten spot on the Billboard charts in 1994. The song was featured in Reality Bites, thus forever preserving it as a piece of 90s history. Reality Bites was one of those prototypical 90s movies encapsulating all things Gen X, giving the song automatic 90s clout by mere association.

The movie soundtrack also introduced most of us to Lisa Loeb with her hit "Stay", so it's got some 90s credibility. "Baby I Love Your Way" was reinterpreted as a light-rock reggae song, a slight twist on the original Frampton version. It was catchy and infectious in the normal manner of airborne musical contagions, but it didn't make much of Big Mountain. They may have been dropped by their label a few years later, but at least they managed to give us some semi-soothing 90s reggae-inspired 70s covers. Wait, is that a genre?




Deadeye Dick:


(I couldn't find a good embeddable version of the video, so enjoy the lyrics on a red background!)

I've already covered this one here, so I'll be brief. I love this song. Sure, I didn't quite get the not-so-subtle innuendo as a kid, but it's all in good fun. It's just a fun song, plain and simple. It wasn't enough to give Deadeye Dick much of a blip on the radar of musical history, but it did get quite a bit of radio play. And it was in Dumb and Dumber. You can't get much better than that, can you?




Us3: Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)


Some might say Jazz-Rap is an odd musical filing subcategory, and they may be right. Regardless of the uncommon characterization, it's a pretty catchy tune. So much so that it occasionally pops into my head and I can't remember any words except for "flip fantasia". Whatever that means. The song is a reincarnation of the 1960s Herbie Hancock tune "Cantaloupe Island". As you can see, 1994 was a great year for people low on originality and high on music rights purchasing power. It is a fun song, thought.




Culture Beat: Mr Vain


Confession: this song is on every one of my workout mixes. Now that I've been officially deemed unbroken by medical professionals, I'm going to be hearing a whole lot more Mr. Vain. Theoretically, that is. I'd forgotten about this song completely until I was in Poland one summer and turned on the TV. If you've ever been to Poland, I assume you know this was my first mistake. They're not overly keen on television censors. Anyhoo, this song was playing and the memories just flooded back. Music can do that to you. Even really terrible, horrible, 90s era technopop.

90s Gap Commercials

If you're seeking evidence that times were simpler in the 90s, look no further than the then-mega brand GAP. While the store has done a fair bit of backsliding over the past decade, it enjoyed some serious popularity back in the 90s. I'm not completely certain that our 2000s-era brains can even wrap themselves around the notion of a prehipster era, but there really was a time before ironic poseur stylings a la American Apparel ruled the roost. Once upon a time, simplicity was cool. They didn't try to sell us a mindset or mentality or lifestyle: they just tried to sell us some khakis and corduroys.

In the 90s, Gap developed a well-conceived strategy for convincing young people everywhere to go out and buy whatever marginally overpriced plain-as-white-bread product they were hawking that week. They were wise in realizing that if their product itself was less than revolutionary, they may as well go out and create some highly calculated ads intended to suggest themselves as edgy and representative of youth culture. They recognized that cool in itself was a relatively poorly defined product, so they might as well just swoop in and claim their unwarranted share of it.

They were keen on the suggestibility of young people, so they unleashed a slew of commercials whose end tagline claimed "everyone" to be in some particular item of clothing. The commercials themselves were clean and simple and appropriately over-serious in a way that suggests they were so cool the actors couldn't be bothered to crack a smile. Each of these ads featured the same well-groomed crowd of ethnically diverse young adults all sporting minor variations of the same Gap item. Someone who obviously had experience staging high school plays blocked the cast into well-maintained formations from which they could stare blankly and nonchalantly at the audience.

Each of these commercials featured a single song, but rather than utilizing the convenient ready-made version of the song they offered each semi-surly young person the star-making opportunity to sing a single line of each. I'm not quite sure if these commercials were supposed to be based on any sort of actual real-life organic situation, but my instinct tells me the answer is probably no. My friends and I wanted to be cool, sure, but we never got together in matching outfits to stare pensively into the expansive abyss in well-organized groupings and come in just on cue for our turn to belt out a fragment of our favorite song.

In this spot, "Everybody in Leather", Gap launched the first portion of its 90s trademark ad campaign:



The synthesizers! The bouncing camera changes! The stone-faced expressions of our attractive stars! I don't know about you, but I just can't get enough. The ad had all the critical ingredients for successfully breaking through the cool barrier. If you're thinking you see a few familiar faces, you may be right. The outstandingly attractive Twilight-hairstyled fellow who gets a lot of face time in these slots is none other than Phantom Planet frontman Alex Greenwald. You know, of the OC theme song? And a bunch of other stuff I would have heard of if I either knew anything about the band or was more diligent in my research?

There's another little lady in the crowd who some of us may know, but she wasn't featured so prominently in the leather spot. Once everybody gets to wear cords and sing "Mellow Yellow" she gets a prime spot in the front right.



Rashida Jones! What on earth are you doing in my 90s Gap ads before I knew who you were and you awkwardly interfered with the heavenly alignment of fated Office romances? Who knew?

There was another in this series in which everyone wore cords and got dressed up in love, Madonna style. Rashida even gets her own line at :16, so play careful attention if you're into that sort of thing:



This ad was the be-all-end-all declaration of a generation's brief but torrid love affair with wholly unattractive fleece vests. I mean, you saw the kids in the commercial. Don't you want to be like them? Not necessarily standing staggered with windows to see the people behind you like in a dance recital, but more just hanging out with your ultra-sleek multicultural gang of unsmiling pals? I was pretty convinced. The fleece vest wasn't necessarily functional clothing (what of my cold arms?) but it was certainly popular.

Aside from this campaign, Gap had a concurrent khaki campaign that differed slightly while similarly emphasizing coolness in the simplicity of Gap clothing. They also subtly suggest that wearing Gap khakis inevitably leads to impromptu well-choreographed dance-offs, which certainly never happened to me when I wore mine. I guess I was just never in the right place at the right time. I could have swing danced* my little heart out.

The khaki ads didn't feature as much singing, but there was a lot more dancing to all types of khaki-lovin' music. We had our country:



I mean, honestly. They don't even fit those models that well, nor they seem especially flattering. Regardless, the commercials had us hooked. We were under the Gap spell and no one could shake it off. We needed these khakis.

The khakis demonstrated their dancing versatility a-go-go:



They rocked:



They souled:



They hip hopped:



But most of all, they swung:



That's right, the Gap actually paid a significant contribution to the swing revival movement of the late 90s. Well played, Gap. Retro purists hated this garbage, of course. If you've ever seen the Daria episode "Life in the Past Lane", Jane actually meets a retro-centric guy who asserts, "I was pre-khakis commercial and don't you forget it!" Sorry, retro fiends. Gap mainstreamed it.

So there you have it. The Gap may be struggling to define itself now, but back in the 90s it had a well-established reputation for coolness largely based on the simplicity of its ad campaign. If any of you with a business plan are taking notes, though, forget it. This would never work today. After all, nowadays we all fast forward through commercials. In the 90s, however, we watched TV to see our favorite commercials. Yes, it was a simpler time. When we could all just sit on in a blank white space and express ourselves through the non-smiling art of song.





*Swung dance? Swung danced? Someone please past tense-icize this phrase for me.