Before I Cared About Ebooks and Social Media

    “46 Reasons ’90s Kids Had The Best Childhood”, “39 Awesome Things Only ’90s Kids Will Remember”, “30 Things Only Those Who Are True ’90s Kids Would Understand”. These are just few of the all-too familiar feature articles I encounter all over my Facebook news feed in between breaks of my relentless college work. As a millennial born in the year 1994, I was triggered by the sheer impulse and curiosity to leave the present time in exchange for a virtual feels trip for a minute or two. As I clicked the website link, it suddenly flashed an article embellished with images of ‘90s cartoon characters, TV shows, music, and everything related to the ‘90s pop culture. Normally, I will blame the Facebook news feed algorithm for knowing what I want and serving it to me right at my lowliest moment.

Being a millennial allowed me to live the life of a time traveler – moving forwards and backwards in between two disparate worlds: the plain and simple life of the ‘90s era and the tech-saturated world of the 21st century. Despite the growing cultural gap between the two eras, the cultural legacy brought by the bygone decade continues to haunt every Gen X and Y’ers. From cartoons, animes, game consoles, all these images can be seen around the Internet inciting nostalgia from its audience.  It was the year when the technological advancements and the kids themselves were both on their formative years catching up on each other on a very quick time frame of a decade.

Although the media consumption is already picking up its pace in the ‘90s, the lives of every millennial kid never revolve around the digital mediums compared today. Our life was marked by the balanced presence of the wide array of entertainment from children’s TV programming, VHS tapes, game consoles, and larong kalye.

But if I were to list the things how the ‘90s media culture defined my life as a 90’s kid, it will probably be like this:

(1) Video City, one of the best-selling video record stores where it allows its customers with membership cards to rent movies in large cassette tapes called video home system or VHS. One of my classic favorite was the Mickey Mouse Collection and Jim Carrey films.

I used to spend a whole week watching the same movie over and over on our 21 inch SONY TV. By the end of the week, my mom returns the VHS tapes along with the penalty payment for returning the VHS beyond its renting period (it was much expensive than the renting fee itself). Cassette tapes were also popular back then. It is a small, rectangular plastic case containing two mini spools of film which could play dozen of songs by flipping either side of the tape (Side A and Side B). On Sunday mornings, my sister and I play the entire Spice Girl’s cassette tape on our our beat-up radio cassette player to its maximum volume from 9AM to 11AM.

During the ‘90s, when a movie is released in the theatres, we have to wait for several agonizing months before we can finally watch it in our home TV screens. But in the age of instant digital downloads, everything seems to be available in just a few clicks in the Internet. We can watch movies even before its premier release in the movie theatres or even through a pirated copy. Everything used to be about the struggle of waiting and the test of patience, but it never really mattered for us back then.

(2) Powerbooks used to be my family’s favorite hang over. The taxi usually drops us off at the nearest taxi bay of SM Megamall which is adjacent to the entrance of the bookstore. The line of bookshelves inside PowerBooks was something I knew by heart. The children’s section was located at the farthest side of the children’s library decorated by pastel colored nursery chairs and tables perfect for a tea party dining set.

One of the reasons that I could actually brag about being a ‘90s kid is that owning several printed books is like keeping hundreds of physical reminders of your life. Every book that I own conjures memories of its fictional journeys as well as my childhood. The pleasure of perusing the bookshelves of our local bookstore, bringing it home, and reading each page as I curl up at the sofa is always the best part. When I finally got my own Ebook a couple of years ago, I rarely visited any bookstores anymore. I thought spending money for a book that I can finish in a few days is impractical. But ever since I started giving up printed books for a digital copy, I constantly yearned for the presence of the books that I never got to own. They could have been hidden along my bookshelves somewhere, waiting to be read once again.

(3) Before Google and Wikipedia, there used to be large volumes of hardbound encyclopedias found in the bookshelves of every household. These hard bound books were extremely expensive that families use it as a decoration in the living room for that added “posh” atmosphere. My half brother and I used to own a 32-volume Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia to help him in homework during first-grade.

Children today will never understand the struggles of owning a 30-volume encyclopedia at home. A search query means perusing the entire collection and looking up at the alphabetically arranged entries (you will have to be careful, because you don’t want to repeat the same routine all over again). People these days even refer to encyclopedias as the Google version “way back in the day”.

(4) If having an Xbox console can earn a kid’s popularity among his playmates these days, during the ‘90s it was no different from owning the earliest version of the Game Boy Original. My cousins Aldrich and Ian own two different versions – the GameBoy original and the GameBoy Color. It was the original GameBoy version they got from Japan released in 1998. It was a handheld game console with four operation buttons and a directional pad. At the back was a slot for game cartridges.

The late 1990s also used to be the Golden Age of cartoons and animes. I used to ask my mom to wake me up at 7 in the morning to watch “Batibot” and “Sesame Street”. On Friday afternoons, my mom drops me off at my cousin’s house where we could watch Voltez V and Ghost Fighter. Watching it with them was always the fun part where we sang the opening theme with our loud, off-tune voices.

Tatoe arashi ga hukou tomo

Tatoe oonami areru tomo

Kogidasou tatakai no umi he!

Tobikomou tatakai no uzu he…

        A writer once quoted that 1990s will always be the happiest decade to live in as a child. Every ‘90s kids will claim that they were able to get a taste of the bittersweet ups and downs of modern technology – we clearly remember having technologies from huge corded phones with antennas to a small computer that could fit inside our pockets. Indeed, the rapid development of the media culture became the triggering points of nostalgia from our simple childhood. It is the decade where we learned everything (the hardest way) while contented on what we have.

One day, while I was waiting for my classmates, I suddenly heard a loud cry from a child inside a building. A small boy of around seven years old was sprawled faced down on the floor, with his Tablet lying a few meters away from him. His tear-stricken eyes were enough to let his mother know that he came from a bad fall from the stairs. But instead of nursing his wounds, the boy immediately approached his Tablet to check for any cracks. While I was watching him, I realized: the lives of children today became centered on gadgets. They instantly cry and throw a tantrum for not letting them play in your phone. They will not make any single word or even budge from the screen because they think bagging the highest score in an Android game is far more important than having an actual conversation. When I was his age, I usually fall down for playing the bicycle or for playing hide and seek with my friends. Operating a computer almost took me years before I finally learned how to use one. It was quite a foolish sight to witness a small child trip down the stairs for being so engrossed with a mobile game.

And for the millionth time, I felt how good my childhood life was during the ‘90s, happy and unscarred.

Photo credits

CBS Los Angeles

Holy Kaw!