A few years ago, the sketch comedy show Portlandia did a very funny bit about how the city of Portland Oregon was a little bit stuck in the past.
These days, it feels like the dream of the '90s is alive and well all over the country, with the resurgence of things like bucket hats and baggy jeans, TV shows like "Friends" and "The West Wing," and reinvigorated careers for stars like Parker Posey, Winona Ryder and Brendan Fraser.
So what’s behind this burst of nostalgia for the end of the 20th century? On today’s CultureCap, we’ll explore that very question.
To discuss the resurgence of '90s nostalgia, The Show sat down with Amanda Kehrberg, Ph.D. student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and Ricardo Leon, creative director of the YouTube series "Space For Humans," part of ASU’s interplanetary initiative.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: All right, so I just mentioned some examples of '90s nostalgia that we're seeing around the culture. Where would both of you say we're seeing this crop up the most? What are some more notable examples? Amanda, let's start with you.
AMANDA KEHRBERG: I would say, yeah, in terms of fashion, some other elements would be things like the kind of, ugly sneaker resurgence. We've also got tiny backpacks coming back, windbreakers. Oh my gosh, every time I see a friend out in a windbreaker, like the number of compliments that she's getting, because we're just all so excited to see them.
In terms of television, reboots, blockbuster reboots, like you said, yeah, careers for resurgences for people like Brendan Fraser, Christina Ricci. We're just seeing the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" reboot getting kind of ramped up like we just got our new, our new savior of humanity against the vampires. So, there's just so much in media.
And yeah, "Friends," I think is maybe the quintessential example of like when I talk to my students about what they're watching on TV, I expect it to be like this really, really new cultural stuff and instead, so often it'll be like TikTok and "Friends" over and over and over again.
RICARDO LEON: And it's not even the reboot of "Friends," it's the original episodes of Friends.
KEHRBERG: Original "Friends."
DINGMAN: Friends, yes, yes, and there's, we're seeing a crop of shows, if I'm not mistaken, now that are designed to kind of be the Gen Z version of "Friends," when it seems like what Gen Z actually wants is just "Friends."
LEON: They're very lonely, Sam.
DINGMAN: Ricardo, what about, what about for you? What are some, some notable examples?
LEON: Oh, you know, the way I think of it, there's a few things that I think of that are, are kind of sourced in the '90s, had their big moments in the '90s, that are still pretty — that that just haven't left our screens, you know, we have a Jurassic Park movie coming out this summer and and that's just, but there have been Jurassic Park movies consistently since the original came out.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah, you know, that's interesting. If I'm not mistaken, there was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I guess we called it a reboot right recently, but that seems like another example to me of something that started in the '90s or maybe even the late-80s, it's just stayed with us.
LEON: Yeah, it just never goes away.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah, we just, we love all of the, I mean, even like the Barbie movie, I would argue was so much about, like, us, our generation growing up in the '90s playing with Barbies, playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So, the reboots are such a call back to these really, really happy times in our lives. But like, as, as you guys mentioned, In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie, we had a song from A Tribe Called Quest.
LEON: It was heavily involved in the promotion of the movie.
DINGMAN: Can I kick it?
KEHRBERG: Yeah. Yeah, and then Barbie, of course, had them huddled around campfires listening to the Kens all sing "Push."
LEON: Yeah, by Matchbox 20.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah.
DINGMAN: I'm also interested to get both of your perspectives on kind of the counterfactual here. What are, where are we not seeing resurgence of '90s culture that's interesting to you? This is a very personal example for me, but I have been really hoping that this kind of '90s rebirth moment would be an opportunity to share my love for the Dave Matthews Band with a new generation of listeners. That's me coming out on the radio as a Dave Matthews Band fan.
LEON: All you ants continue marching.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes, but I, I feel like, you know, that group, which was such a big part of '90s culture in my mind, hasn't really caught the wave in the same way some of these other things.
LEON: Well, I, last summer I went to a big concert and it was Weezer and Third Eye Blind, and I think that that's just that cycle that things go through that those become the, the oldies, you know, that's like my dad going to Cheap Trick or something like that, you know. And so, I think that that —
KEHRBERG: Yeah, I think there is, I mean, there's a certain argument that the reason that we get these kinds of cyclical nostalgia moments are that these that that generation that had like peak culture that they had in their like tweens and teenage years, then get spending power 20 years down the line. And then all of a sudden they're ready for these kinds of concerts and stuff. Yeah.
LEON: Well, Sarah Michelle Geller is now at the age where she can have a vampire slayer daughter, who at that age that she was when she was in the original.
KEHRBERG: I don't know. You know what, if I had to pick things that haven't really come back fully that I would like back, maybe that kind of invisible rap technology, you know, like all the kind of cute candy Mac products and stuff. I like, I want, I want to look at all the interior in like outlandish colors again.
DINGMAN: Yes, clear things was a big thing in the '90s. Yeah, I'm thinking about Crystal Pepsi now.
LEON: Absolutely, absolutely.
KEHRBERG: It worked out less well for them.
DINGMAN: Yeah, good, good that some things have not stayed with us.
LEON: Amanda, I think you had mentioned in a conversation that we used to kind of gauge our week by what was on television, gauge our days by what was on television, and now we're free to watch and consume whatever we want at any time of day.
KEHRBERG: Yes, I want, you know what, Sam, that is the real answer to what I want back. I want constraints. I want constraints. I was just thinking today, yes, that, that really, you know, I think maybe one of the genius elements that I've never considered of Baskin-Robbins saying they have 31 flavors is not that it's a lot of flavors, but that it's a finite amount of flavors. I get on streaming and I'm just, I'm overwhelmed and then I'll end up like the other night I was trying to find a TV show or a movie to watch and instead I just watched Patti Lupone singing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" in like the '70s, like just over and over again.
DINGMAN: Right, isn't that interesting? I mean, Baskin-Robbins is such an example of this brand that was defined by its limitations, and I don't know if this is too big of a leap, but that also makes me think of, Amanda, you and I have talked before, and it feels relevant here about, the experience of going to Blockbuster Video, and it doesn't have to be Blockbuster, it could just be any kind of brick and mortar video store, which was also an experience that was defined by limitation.
There was this idea that there are these recognized places where you can go to have a certain kind of experience that will be boundaried in a certain way, and in some ways, I think that made those experiences more intense, because you were like, “I only have a limited range of choices that I can make, and I'm going to engage with these things very deeply.”
KEHRBERG: Oh, I loved that so much. I mean, it's the same with the TV thing. Like, I know I talk a lot about Sunday night HBO as like this, this bounded ritual that in some ways is a little bit of an echo of kind of the monoculture we had in the '90s, but we really grew up with that of just, TGIF, that's when we're all in front of the TV watching, watching these shows, Saturday morning cartoons.
So, even as we have this kind of cultural discussion about the idea that we're losing community and we don't have these kinds of, like, shared third spaces anymore. In a way, we had shared third spaces apart at least because we're all looking at our screens at the same time.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes. Well, and there was a way in which you would talk about, you would come into school on Monday or come into work on Monday, and you would talk about the cultural experiences that you had, the music you'd listen to, the movies you watched.
LEON: The water cooler effect.
DINGMAN: Exactly, because you couldn't talk about them on social media all weekend long, you know, you weren't connected in the same way.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah, my, so my friend Angela always talks about when she was in elementary school, everybody came into school like that following Monday and they had all Learned the Urkel dance from "Family Matters." We were doing it in the hallways, and she was like, “how did you pick this up this fast? These are hard choreographical, this is not easy choreography.”
DINGMAN: You've just awakened a core memory in a similar moment from "Beavis and Butthead" that I, we probably can't talk about on the radio, but yes, that was a thing. It wasn't just the options that we had, it was the options in sharing those experiences with other people who were more boundaried.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, if you're thinking like the water cooler moment, you know, I always think like my idea of the water cooler now is maybe the Zoom waiting room and the amount of saturation and like publicists are talking about this now. The amount of saturation you have to get in culture to have something that people all can talk about in that Zoom waiting room is crazy.
Like, you don't just need advertising, you need like this complex media mix that is like Evan Ross Katz doing memes on Instagram, you need like thirst trap TikTok, you need, you know, multiple podcasts that are about eating chicken with someone like, it's so complicated to reach that moment where you get the water cooler effect. It's hard.
DINGMAN: And a moment ago we were talking about this phenomenon of cultural boundaries that used to exist that arguably enriched a lot of our cultural engagement with some of these things that we were talking about, whether it was television shows or music, and that makes me want to ask, and Ricardo, let's start with you for this one.
Do you think there is something different about 1990s nostalgia? Because obviously, we see nostalgia booms for lots of decades, '60s, '70s, '80s culture have all kind of had their moment of resurgence. What, for you, is different about the way we're re-experiencing the '90s?
LEON: You know, in the '90s there were, in the '80s as well, but there were a lot of, there was a big push towards the '60s nostalgia, I think there was the "Wonder Years," there was "Stand by Me" and there was this, this feeling that the past was so different than it is now.
And somehow, I feel like the '90s doesn't feel that different from where we are today. I mean, of course, we can look at fashion, a few things are different, but really I feel like, you know, we, we had the internet. We had the starts, the beginnings of the internet. We had, you know, 24-hour cable news at that time as well. I don't know that it feels as different as it felt in the '60s where things just seemed radically different from the way things were in the 90s.
DINGMAN: That's very interesting. There is a media sense, I think, in which our re-experiencing of the '60s or maybe the '70s when we were coming of age in the '90s was mediated more significantly but you know, grainy footage of Woodstock, like old, you know, radio recordings of certain kinds of music. Whereas in the '90s, we're already in the era, as you mentioned, of the internet, the personal computer, the era of the screen.
So, there's this way in which reality felt more present, though it was still, of course, mediated, that gap maybe wasn't as significant. Amanda, would you agree?
KEHRBERG: Yes. No, I think that's a really important point. And I mean, if that begs the question of what future nostalgia is going to look like as we have more and more content. So, there's less that you're bringing to the nostalgia of your imagination, which I think means in some ways, there's less opportunity to over aggrandize the idea of this lost era. Because these nostalgic moments that we have do kind of follow this pattern where we long for something that's more authentic, maybe slower, but again, yeah, quintessentially different. But it being different also involves the idea that there're a lot of it that you maybe don't have archived, and so you're filling in gaps.
And, and with the '90s, we have so many TV show recaps that are like the '90s, with YouTube videos. There's so much more of it that's recorded in quality. And so, as we get nostalgic for times that had social media, my goodness, I mean, that's going to look very different.
But yeah, I think, for me, also one of the, one of the errors we were really nostalgic for in the '90s was the '70s and it followed that very same pattern of “we're nostalgic,” and this applies to the '60s as well for these, these moments of kind of really true counter cultural movements that felt more authentic and felt more grounded and really pushing against, you know, power structures.
And I think the '90s, when we're looking back on it now, we are looking back at these kinds of counter cultural movements, too, but what was different about the '90s is that they were, that was really the beginning of kind of subsuming counterculture into commercialized culture and mainstreaming, I mean mainstreaming hip hop music, mainstreaming like emo, mainstreaming punk, mainstreaming grunge, like just in here, we're selling it to you at Target now, right?
DINGMAN: Right. You're also making me think as you're saying that there perhaps was a way in which the advent, Ricardo, you were mentioning cable news coming onto the scene in the '90s. We've talked about the internet. MTV is also such a phenomenon of the '90s, and there at E Entertainment Television, Court TV, these kind of always on steady stream of stimuli.
Obviously, you know, this is before the time of YouTube, before the time of TikTok and things that we kind of take for granted now, but perhaps there was a way in which the '90s was training us to be 2025 media consumers, because the there the switch to always-on entertainment arguably was sort of flipped, on screens at least.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, I think that's true. I think absolutely we are getting this sense of like “you're never leaving media. Media is always, always in some way a part of your life,” becomes the case more and more and more. I, yeah, I, you know, the famous public service announcement that spoke to, kind of the way Gen X was raised, that “it's 10 p.m. Do you know where your kids are?” Like we make fun of that, that's because they didn't know where their kids were like, it's like you knew where we were because of the TV watching.
LEON: And they had no way of finding out.
KEHRBERG: And they needed the TV to remind them. But by the time you got '90s kids like us, you knew where we were because the TV was watching us.
DINGMAN: They were watching TGIF, parked.
LEON: Something that changed the '90s was the advent of technologies that are tied to personal media. So we look at, you know, someone documenting Woodstock. That was a large production crew documenting that. But now, in the '90s, you have personal camcorders that you can document every part of your life, you know, and that anyone can do it. And then they submitted to "America's Funniest Home Videos" and then a million dollars off of it.
DINGMAN: Yes, kind of the proto version of user-generated content, right?
KEHRBERG: That’s so true. And even, like, user consumed content too, like Walkmans like being in public spaces, just consuming content by yourself, too. That really gets off, yeah, in the '90s.
DINGMAN: That's another interesting example. I think the Walkman, the discman of that thing we were talking about, the sort of blockbuster phenomenon of like a boundaried or maybe the Baskin-Robbins phenomenon, a boundaried experience with something that is also very personal and arguably because of that more intense. And, you know, now, we're in a world where it's a personal experience and there's no limit to what you can listen to or watch. But again, we were sort of trained by this 1990s moment.
KEHRBERG: Yeah. And I do think there's a lot of because yeah that point about kind of user generated and like home media making it's so important, but I think there's also a lot that's happening in the '90s with MTV as well, that is preparing us for the idea that the content of everyday people is going to be consumed for like the masses.
So, like this this kind of breakdown of public versus private that we see with like the "Real World," and the kinds of conversations they're having on the "Real World," about, you know, diversity and sexuality and like very personal matters that all of a sudden are being fed to, you know, wide audiences, but especially, kids growing up.
But again, the idea that reality television is just kind of beginning to form and, and the idea that everyday people's personal lives could be something for public consumption, that we could also be the product, yeah.
DINGMAN: Well, we just have about a minute left here, and I want to ask you both, Amanda, you were mentioning earlier this idea that the '90s were kind of a last good time for a lot of people of a certain age. People may be figuring out that's the age of the three of us who are having this conversation.
KEHRBERG: It’s all downhill from there, folks.
DINGMAN: But, as you look ahead, and we kind of predict the fact that early-2000s nostalgia is probably somewhere out there in the offing. What do you think for both of you, we'll start with you, Amanda, are some of the elements of that period of time that are likely to resonate?
KEHRBERG: I think that's such an interesting one. I'm, because there is a lot of overlap, I think between the late-90s and the early 2000s. And of course then what begins to happen in the early 2000s that kind of shapes this push against counter cultural movements and this kind of reinforcement of patriotism.
But at the same time, you have an internet that has grown up enough to the point where people can really start to participate, create their own websites, you know, create their own MySpace pages, but before we get this heavily, heavily commercialized, kind of, you know, sanitized version of social media that we have now.
So we have the sense of the internet as this really fun playground, but we don't feel so constrained yet. I think there's this moment in the 2000s that really captures this kind of pre- overwhelming smartphone, you know. Always connected, always doomscrolling kind of moment where the internet still had a lot of hope in it, I think.
And then at the same time, yeah, I think maybe a nostalgia for the early-2000s will be like the last time where we really see radical fashion changes, because fashion has become in a lot of ways kind of like a consistent thread. Like, when you look back at the 2010s, people don't look that different, but if you look back at the 2000s, you have those like going-out tops and Peplum and, oof.
DINGMAN: Ricardo, what about you?
LEON: I mean, I think in some ways we're already seeing it, you know, we look at some of the programs from 2000s that were on MTV "Jackass," the "Tom Green Show" and that same, you know, attitude, that kind of anarchic attitude of being just ridiculous and in conveying a sense of fun, but we're seeing that all over TikTok and all of our social media platforms. I think that the era of the idiot is going to. I predict that — that's my prediction for our next nostalgia cycle.
DINGMAN: Well, what year did Green Day’s “American Idiot” come out? I think it was like 2002, 2003.
KEHRBERG: That's so good. Shout out to Mr. Beast, who just became the youngest self-made billionaire.
DINGMAN: Well, we'll have another CultureCap to talk about that.
