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The fat fanned deck of question-and-answer cards, graded by school grade, that quizzed you on math, science, English, and history. The gifted-kid flex, the backseat road-trip time-killer, and the thing a teacher pulled out to make learning feel like a game.
The fill-in-the-blank word game in book form: someone asks for "a noun… a plural noun… an adjective," you shout out words with no idea of the story, and then they read back something gloriously absurd. A road-trip, sleepover, and rainy-day-classroom staple for generations.
The backseat road-trip luxury before tablets existed. A portable DVD player strapped to the back of a headrest — or a dual-screen set for two kids — meant the family minivan finally had in-flight entertainment, as long as the disc didn't skip over every pothole.
The Real World's road-trip sibling, and one of MTV's defining 90s reality shows. Premiering on July 19, 1995, it stripped five or six strangers aged 18 to 24 of their money and packed them into an RV, sending them from place to place to complete missions and chase clues. The Winnebago, the cramped quarters, and the scavenger-hunt format made it its own thing — and it spun off the long-running competition series that would eventually outlast both of its parents.