Blurp Balls
Squeeze the grinning monster head and it spat a ball across the room. ERTL's 1991 Blurp Balls were the gross-out toy in the Madballs mold — a squishy creature you loaded through the mouth and fired at your friends.
#Novelty
16 items
Chia Pets
Ch-ch-ch-Chia! Smear seed paste on a terracotta ram, water it, and watch it grow a green afro. Nobody ever asked for a Chia Pet — they materialized under Christmas trees anyway, summoned by a jingle that aired every December like clockwork.
Dippin' Dots
Beaded "ice cream of the future" invented in 1988 by microbiologist Curt Jones, who flash-froze ice cream mix in liquid nitrogen into tiny spheres. Served in a cup and eaten with a spoon, Dippin' Dots became a quintessential 1990s amusement park and mall treat — a novelty that felt futuristic and tasted like the 90s.
![Video thumbnail — Groan tube sfx [1 Hour]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VxoK96OLUpM/hqdefault.jpg)
Groan Tubes
The neon plastic tube that let out a long, mournful groan every time you tipped it over. A birthday goody-bag and pizza-party staple — flip it end over end and the sound came from a weighted reed sliding down inside.
Lava Lamps
The glowing bottle of slow-drifting wax blobs that anchored every '90s bedroom and dorm-room shelf. Invented in 1963, it lay dormant for years before a wave of retro nostalgia made it the mood-lighting must-have of the decade all over again.
Moon Shoes
Springy platforms strapped to your shoes that promised to make you bounce like an astronaut on the moon. The concept was ancient—1950s 'satellite jumping shoes' started it all—but the neon plastic 1990s version, constantly advertised on kids' TV and backed by pure fantasy, became a playground staple. Execution never quite matched the hype, but that never stopped anyone from trying.
Orbitz (Drink)
The 'potable lava lamp' — a clear fruit drink with little colored gel balls eerily suspended throughout the bottle. It looked incredible on the shelf, tasted divisive, and vanished almost as fast as it appeared.
Pin Art
The boxed grid of thousands of sliding metal pins — press your hand, or your whole face, into one side and a shiny 3D relief pops out the other. The desk toy that lived on every science-museum gift-shop shelf and dared you not to make an impression of your face.
Plasma Ball
The glass sphere full of purple-pink lightning that reached out to follow your hand across the glass — half science exhibit, half bedroom mood light. A fixture of Spencer's Gifts, museum shops, and every desk that wanted to look a little bit like a mad scientist's.
Popcorn Shirts
The shirt that lived scrunched into a ball the size of your fist and stretched to fit almost anyone who pulled it on. Covered in tiny raised bumps, made of stretchy polyester, and sold 'one size fits all' — you bought it crumpled, wore it snug, and it sprang right back to a lump the second you took it off.
Ricochet
The RC stunt car with enormous inflatable tires that was literally designed to crash. Kenner's Ricochet bounced, rebounded, flipped and kept driving — every collision was the point — and its 1994 TV commercial burned the image into a generation's heads long after the name faded.
Snapping & Shock Gum
You offer a friend a stick of gum; they pull it, and a spring-loaded bar snaps down on their finger like a tiny mousetrap. The joke-shop classic came in two flavors of betrayal — the snap, and the battery-powered shock version that delivered a genuine little zap.
Socker Boppers
Oversized inflatable boxing gloves that slipped over your fists for consequence-free slugging. Known to many kids as "Sock'em Boppers" from the jingle "more fun than a pillow fight!", these neon-colored punching pillows turned any recess into a boxing match and survive today under the Socker Boppers brand.
Spencer Gifts
The dark, loud, faintly disreputable novelty store your parents walked past and you did not. Lava lamps, gag gifts, rude T-shirts, Halloween masks, and a whole lot of merchandise a twelve-year-old had no business examining closely. Every mall had one, and going in was its own small act of rebellion.
Squeeze Breeze
A squeeze bottle with a battery-powered fan on top—pump the trigger and get a weak, faintly warm cloud of mist on a scorching day. O2COOL's signature gadget rode the line between toy and survival gear, showing up everywhere from theme-park lines to Little League sidelines. The soft foam blades were safe to touch, even when a sibling grabbed for it mid-spray.
Talkboy
The handheld cassette recorder that Kevin McCallister made famous in Home Alone 2—a toy Tiger Electronics built for the movie before kids could buy it. Tape your voice, rewind it, slow it down: every kid who owned one immediately did the voice trick from the movie, and that simple gimmick was the entire appeal. Tiger Electronics' most beloved and oddly random toy, it came perilously close to being just a footnote in cinema history.