Thanks to everyone for entering the Children of the 90s CSN Stores $60 Gift Card Giveaway! I had a lot of fun with it and I hope you all enjoyed your fleeting hope to win. The fun is in the possibility, after all. That's what we say to satiate sore losers, actually, but don't take it too personally. There's always next time.
That said, this will not be the last fun giveaway we do here at Children of the 90s. Remember to check back for exciting opportunities. And to read some high quality 90s nostalgia posts. That's always good, too.
Without further ado, I'm pleased to announce the winner of the CSN $60 Gift Card:
In case you've never had the honor of visiting Nikki's blog, I highly recommend you do so. She was one of the first nostalgia bloggers I connected with, and her posts are always thorough and hilarious. If you were a big reader growing up, you will absolutely love her young adult book reviews. That's my totally unsolicited plug for my randomly selected winner, so you know it must be true. Pure unpaid endorsement. Check her out. Congrats, Nikki! You deserve it. I will email you later today with the information for redeeming your gift certificate!
If anyone is interested in advertising or promotions with Children of the 90s, feel free to shoot me an email at childrenofthe90s@gmail.com. I implore you to please withhold judgment on my shameless plea for sponsorship, I'm not a sellout; I promise to keep bringing you high quality posts about your favorite 90s topics. A girl's got to eat, though, so, you know: sponsorships welcome. If you have any post topic suggestions or just want to say hi, that's totally cool, too. Let's chat.
Thank you all again for entering, following, facebooking, tweeting, and all of the other novelty internet verbage buzzwords applicable to your entries. You guys are the best. See you Monday for a return to your regularly scheduled 90s reminiscing. Until then, have a great weekend!
If only our own high school experiences had come with their own signature soundtrack, we may have had a better idea of how to properly process our emotions. It's tough to try to have a pensive moment without something deep and soulful playing in the background. Believe me, I've tried.
Real life just can't always measure up to the effective power of a good soundtrack. When the moviemakers choose just the right song, it can skillfully set the mood for a crucial moment. From that point on, whenever we hear that song out of the context of the movie, our minds are likely to transport us back to the scene. A solid song choice has the power to cement the moment in our heads forever, iconic for posterity,
Some of these teen movie moments are silly and some are serious, but they all have one thing in common: they're highly memorable. Without the music, many of these scenes may not be especially worthy of remembering. With the music, though, they create defining moments in the teen movie canon. To create an exhaustive list would be, well, exhausting, so consider these to be a mere skimming of the teen movie music moment surface.
She's All That: Rockafeller Skank
This scene is undoubtedly cheesy, but it's enough to make a tiny part of us wish our own proms had included a highly choreographed school-wide dance number. Granted, most of our peers in high school probably weren't capable of professional-level dance moves, but it may have been fun to watch them try.
10 Things I Hate About You: Can't Take My Eyes Off of You
It's more than enough to make us all mourn the loss of Heath Ledger. He just oozes charm in this scene, allowing us to suspend our disbelief that a high school boy might actually have thought up something legitimately romantic. To be fair, Ledger was 20 years old at the time, so no wonder's his musical seduction outstrips the average high school boy's in maturity.
Can't Hardly Wait: Can't Get Enough of You Baby
Smashmouth must have written this song with the racially deluded white rapper Kenny Fisher in Mind. Seth Green plays this moment to absolute perfection. I suppose if I had to practice romancing myself in the mirror, I could use some good musical motivation, too. Granted, most of us don't need quite as much musical lubrication as Kenny to woo our own reflections. Then again, most of us don't wear goggle/JNCO jeans combos.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Twist and Shout
Next time I come across a Von Steuben Day parade, I am totally pulling a Ferris. If the band doesn't know "Twist and Shout," I'm willing to settle for "Danke Schoen." Anything else would just clash with the float girls' Heidi-esque German barmaid ensembles.
Say Anything: Your Eyes
Ah, the moment that inspired a generation of young girls to daydream about the moment a boy would stand in their yard with a boombox held persistently over their heads. This is a moment that might lose of of its recreatability over time. What are kids today supposed to do? Hold wireless iPod speakers over their head? Please. It just isn't the same.
Breakfast Club: Don't You (Forget About Me)
Simple Minds recorded "Don't You (Forget About Me)" specifically for the Breakfast Club, so it's no wonder it comes across as particularly poignant in this coming of age film. Simple Minds may not have gone on to do great things, but they're probably rolling in royalties from all of the many, many Breakfast Club parodies in movies and TV in the years since the original.
Clueless: Kids in America
So you're probably thinking to yourself, "Is this like a Noxema commerical or what?" Cher claims the answer is "or what," but I'm tempted to believe otherwise. No real high schoolers ever frollick in their backyard waterfalls. At least none who attended my high school. Maybe you all grew up in heavily waterfall-populated neighborhoods.
Center Stage: The Way You Make Me Feel
Michael Jackson may have released "The Way You Make Me Feel" back in 1987, but a new generation of teens fell in love with the song after hearing it in the climactic dance performance in the 2000 ballet film Center Stage. It was almost enough to distract us from Jody's impossible pink-to-red shoe switcharoo.
Cruel Intentions: Bittersweet Symphony
Exposing the popular girl in school for dipping into the secret cocaine stash in her cross necklace may not seem like a particularly poignant moment, but back it up with the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" and prepare to be moved. Really.
Pretty in Pink: If You Leave
It's pretty much impossible to hear Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "If You Leave" without immediately recalling the final scene in Pretty in Pink. Runner-up for most impossible? Spelling "manoeuvres". That's a tough one, at least for the ignorant Americans among us.
Romeo and Juliet: Lovefool
The Cardigan's major hit single aptly set the mood for the romantic meeting moment between Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio as Juliet and Romeo. Their eyes lock across an aquarium, which sounds highly unromantic without "Lovefool" playing in the background. It just works.
Note: Yes, I realize some of these videos don't contain the actual scenes. It's the best we can do with the YouTube copyright crackdown. Thanks for your understanding.
Don't forget to enter Children of the 90s $60 CSN Store Gift Certificate Giveaway! You have until this Friday to qualify for the prize, so put your entry in today!
The results are in! Well, sort of--perhaps we should say the preliminary results are in; there's still time to let me know your favorites for a follow-up post. In the case of short term memory failure, allow me to remind you about Children of the 90s' impromptu polling for your favorite childhood movies. A few days back, we asked for your write-in votes for the movies you most loved growing up. That is, these movies don't necessarily have to be the most objectively good movies out there, but ones that effectively bring us back to our respective childhoods.
This list doesn't represent any actual empirical data; I'm willing to admit our methods were a bit haphazard. That's part of the fun, though. If you want your voice heard, lurkers, the comment section is beckoning. Don't stew quietly over the omission of your opinions--let us know. In the spirit of true interactivity, share a bit. Really, it's fun.
Based on those of you I did hear from, it's pretty fair to judge the way the readership demographic skews. Much to the chagrin of my boyfriend (who, to his credit, did his part in participating in this democratic experiment by submitting the only vote for Independence Day) this list speaks volumes on the female-dominated fan base here at Children of the 90s. Unless a major contingency of young men have a spot reserved in their hearts from A Little Princess and Troop Beverly Hills, it seems safe to surmise the majority of the voters are female. Sorry, guys. This is what happens if you don't comment. Lesson learned, I assume. No hard feelings.
Here are your choices, in some particular order. That's the opposite of no particular order, right? Whatever the expression that conveys they're sorted by tabulated votes but that Excel has alphabetized the ties. Don't fight it, it makes perfect sense. You with me? Great. Let's begin:
When your and your friends' parents are dead set on sending you to variations on dreaded summer camp, you pretty much have no other option other than to stage an elaborate kid-run ruse rich in wacky misunderstanding and parent-free fun. If you can think of another solution, I'm willing to hear you out, but I'm almost positive this zany scheme is it--though it could possibly be classified as a last resort. Yes, I said resort, and it was totally a camp pun. Admit it, you loved it.
9. The Lion King
There was a surprising deficit of Disney in the write-in voting results, but I assume most of us take the animated films of the 90s' Disney Renaissance to be something of a given. Many of them not only won universal approval from indiscriminate children, but appealed to adults as well. The Lion King is a particularly creative and visually impressive film, full of deep messages for the parents and comic relief warthog farting references for the kiddos.
8. Annie
The 1982 film adaptation of the popular musical may have received mixed reviews from critics, but as kids anything with songs to sing along to ranked pretty high on our favorites. Plus, it gave us a great start on learning all the words to Jay Z's "Hard Knock Life" a decade and a half later. Even if we couldn't all relate to his experiences, we could at least pantomime sweeping along to the chorus like the orphans did in the movie.
7. Matilda
Matilda differed in many ways from the original Roald Dahl story, giving us an Americanized and slightly toned-down version of the darkly humorous children's novel. Then-child star Mara Wilson stars as a prodigy raised by ignorant and uninterested parents in a sufficiently adorable way. They did manage to keep in a bit of the creepiness--I still occasionally have nightmares about being locked in the Chokey.
6. My Girl
Frequent movie cryers, rejoice. My Girl is one of those movies that made it okay to cry in the theater, most likely because everyone else was sobbing along with you. That's what they get for tragically killing off one of their lovable characters with a bee sting allergy--a flood of tears. Thankfully, the humor counter-balances the malady. If nothing else, we all learned to open our mouths, reveal our partially chewed food, and declare it "see-food."
5. A Little Princess
As a child, I wondered why I constantly confused this movie with The Secret Garden. Turns out they were both based on books written by Frances Hodgseon Burnett. Considering I read them both, you would think I would have put the pieces together. You would think wrong. In both of these films, I deeply envied the young girls' life in India and subsequent quiet coming of age adventures. I'm still torn on whether I'd rather have a key to an overgrown forgotten garden or be the most popular girl in boarding school. It's safe to say both remain fairly attractive options.
4. The Princess Bride
To those of you out there who told me you've never seen this one, you need to buckle down and settle in for a viewing. It's truly a classic, from its quirky characters to a preadolescent Fred Savage. The Princess Bride deftly maneuvers its positions as both a fairy tale in its own right and a parody of the genre. Needless to say, if you have not watched it since childhood, you might want to dust off the old VHS; it has a cleverness and wit we did not all pick up on as young kids.
This movie was like girlhood gospel to my friends and I, so imagine my surprise to find it was absolutely ripped apart by critics. They refused to even crack a smile at Shelly Long's ridiculous get-ups or the "Cookie Time" song. The only likely verdict is that they all have hearts of stone. That "Cookie Time" song is pure gold.
Films we loved as kids defy a need for logic, usually requiring a heaping helping of suspension of disbelief. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is a classic example, with its that-would-absolutely-never-happen premise and the dumping of their old lady babysitter's body on the steps of a funeral home. Aside from all of that, it's a fun movie that appeals to kids in the classic no-parents style. Sue Ellen Crandell is still my fashion icon, just for the record.
This was the standout winner in our pseudo-scientific poll, receiving by far the most votes for favorite childhood movie. It's no wonder we all loved it so much, considering its impact on our generation. Without Cher Horowitz, who knows? We may never have uttered the words "As if!" while wearing a pair of knee socks. A sad prospect, indeed.
Honorable Mentions: TMNT, Neverending Story, Mrs. Doubtfire, All of the Home Alone Movies--unfortunately none of you could agree on which one was the foremost contender in the series, diluting the votes over the three installments. Better luck next time, Home Alone fans. I recommend banding together with purpose next time around.
