Camp Nowhere
The ultimate '90s-kid fantasy on film: a group of kids fake an entire summer camp with no parents, no rules, and no adults — except a broke ex-drama teacher paid to answer the phone and pretend to be in charge.
#Summer Camp
8 items
Crazy Creek Chair
The legless, fold-flat fabric chair that turned any patch of ground into a seat — clip the side buckles, lean back, and the straps hold you in a recline on dirt, sand, bleachers or gym floors. If you sat "in" something at summer camp in the 90s, it was probably a Crazy Creek.
Friendship bracelets
Embroidery floss, a safety pin through your jeans, and forty minutes of tiny knots: the candy-stripe band you made at camp or recess and tied onto a friend's wrist for keeps. The rules were sacred — they make a wish, and it comes true only when the bracelet finally falls off on its own.
Heavyweights
The Disney summer-camp comedy where a fat camp gets bought by a manic infomercial fitness guru — Ben Stiller as Tony Perkis, one of the great over-the-top '90s comedy villains. A modest release that became a genuine cult classic on cable and video.
Lanyards
The plastic-lace keychain craft that ran on camp tables and classroom desks — box stitch, cobra, Chinese staircase — in every neon color the gift-shop rack sold. Depending on where you grew up you called it gimp, boondoggle, or scoubidou, and you made yards of it you had no use for.
Salute Your Shorts
Nickelodeon's summer-camp sitcom set at Camp Anawanna, where the campers ran circles around counselor Ug and bully Bobby Budnick ruled the bunk. The theme song — "Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts" — is permanently lodged in every '90s kid's memory.
The Parent Trap
One eleven-year-old, two accents, one very elaborate scheme. Lindsay Lohan's double-role debut as twins separated at birth — reunited at summer camp and determined to swap lives and re-trap their parents — turned a 1961 Disney classic into a 90s comfort-movie institution.
Total Drama Island
Survivor for cartoons: 22 teenagers, one crummy summer camp, a sadistic host named Chris McLean, and a hundred grand on the line. The animated reality-show parody that late-2000s kids treated as completely, unironically real drama.