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Seventeen sticks of gum inside a colorful plastic pager you could clip to your jeans, at the exact moment real beepers were the coolest thing a kid could carry. Some parents saw a drug-dealer toy, and their protests got it pulled from stores, 7-Eleven among them.
Chalky sugar sticks with a painted red tip, sold in cigarette-style packs straight to kids at the corner store — plus bubble-gum versions whose paper wrappers let you puff out powdered-sugar "smoke." The most "you had to be there" candy of the entire era.
Lavender mesh shirt, purple pleather vest, streaked blond hair, an earring in his left ear and a chrome ring on a chain around his neck. Mattel's 1993 attempt to make Ken "cooler" for little girls instead made him a camp icon, bought up by gay men until he sold out by Christmas.
Marshall Mathers from Detroit, a white rapper in a Black art form, exploded into stardom with shock-rap alter ego Slim Shady and relentless rhymes. The blond buzzcut, unapologetic controversy, Dr. Dre mentorship, and hits like 'Stan' and 'The Real Slim Shady' made him the biggest and most polarizing star in music during the early 2000s.
A pot-bellied doll with a long rubbery neck, a shock of colored hair and a groan-tube inside: grab it by the throat, shake, and it made a wobbling, gargling, strangled noise. Ertl's Jibba Jabber was sold as a stress reliever in 1994, until child-abuse experts pointed out what the box was actually teaching.
Press the button and Barbie chirped one of her four phrases: pizza party, dream wedding, meet me at the mall. About one doll in a hundred carried "Math class is tough," and in 1992 that single line got Mattel scolded by math teachers, condemned by the AAUW, and parodied on The Simpsons.