First blog: '90s Icon!

Welcome to The '90s Zone blog! For the next ninety days (get it?) we're going to take a trip back through the 1990s and find out what defined that decade the most. Caution, you might feel a little nostalgic...or disgusted...by some of the stuff that permeated these particular ten years. No seriously, I'm warning you now: some of the stuff that came into being during this time period is really awful and it will literally make you nauseous. 




Anyways we're going to kick this off with arguably one of the most iconic things from the 1990s: Pokemon! 


I don't care how old you are, it should be a crime to have existed during that time period and not know what Pokemon was. It exploded from about 1998 to 1999 and for the next couple of years you couldn't be considered a cool kid unless you knew the names of all 150 Pokemon (and if you were really a badass you knew about the 151st and all the Pokegods too, but not let's get spergy here). Kids could waste their feeble allowances on the trading cards, and schools banned the video games after a few uppity parents blamed it for causing satanism. Great times!


Of course like most things it fell out of style as quickly as it came in. Around 2002 if you were caught making reference to Venusaur or Mewtwo or whatever you'd get your ass laughed at. It was until about three or four years ago that everyone remembered how much it owned/stopped caring what people thought. We grew up I guess.


As for that trading card box art, look at how bloody '90s it is. Those fonts just exude awesome. The names of the card collections, "Brushfire", "Blackout", etc...were just so extreme and edgy and cool. It makes me feel awesome just seeing them. 


The bright, complementary colours and the early use of a Photoshop type program too puts these right around 1999. Same with that primitive 3D Pokeball. Don't even get me started on that stock art, either - watercolour stuff like that existed for the majority of video games and early animes that came across the ocean (mostly Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon, actually - nobody really cared about anime until the early 2000s and nor should they have).


Anyways that's enough talking about Pokemon for one day. I guess tomorrow I'll find something else from the 90s to be swoon about. Maybe it'll be old Nintendo games, since we're on the topic right now. Cheers!