The Most 90s Moments of the 90s
December 4, 2025
Soon, my friends, we will hit the high seas and celebrate a great and gorgeous decade with the second voyage of The 90s Cruise. By now, we’ve had a couple decades’ worth of Buzzfeed listicles and VH1 countdowns telling us the best or the worst moments of the decade, and I know this because I have read and watched them all twice. So that’s been done. But what about the moments that really synthesized all that the 90s really were? What about the events that contain the purest essence of the decade? As we prepare for our time on the Gulf of Mexico (and Nassau and Key West), I believe it is time to give these things their time in the sun.
Therefore, I give youTHE NINE MOST NINETIES MOMENTS OF THE NINETIES.(They are in no particular order, except that the last one is the best thing that has ever happened in history.)
The Bronco Chase
On Friday, June 17, 1994, OJ Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings led the LAPD on a chase through the freeways of Los Angeles, and we were riveted. The story had everything that made the 90s the 90s: it was true crime, it was sports and celebrity, it was unfolding in real time, it was news, and it was entertainment right at the end of the time when we still considered news and entertainment separate things. Here is my experience of it: I had just graduated college and started a job in New York City, and that Friday was my first happy hour out with my co-workers. We went to some bar in the West Village to watch the NBA Finals, and the news coverage broke into it. I swear this is true: people were bummed out. At first, anyway. But before long, we knew we were watching some strange new kind of history being made. Could you make it more 90s? I could: on the way back to my apartment, I stopped by Tower Records to pick up the week’s big new release: Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple.
The Simpsons Moves to Thursdays
For its first season in 1990, the animated Fox sitcom aired on Sunday nights and immediately became a sensation. In season two, Fox moved the show to the 8 PM slot on Thursday, a night on which it had just begun airing programming. This was a big deal, because a) it put the show up against what was then the number one show on television: The Cosby Show, and b) there was no such thing as a DVR yet, and none of us ever really learned how to program our VCRs, so watching one thing meant missing another. Only one family sitcom would survive. In 2025, The Simpsons is now the longest-running scripted show in television history, and Bill Cosby is…gosh, look at the time, let’s move on to the next thing.
The Debut of Beanie Babies
In 1993, a company called Ty came out with a line of tiny plushies, and a world still smarting from the age of the Cabbage Patch Kid found a new reason to get in fights at shopping centers. These little babies were cute, sure. But they also held the promise of future value if you managed to snag the right one. Nobody knew how, or when, they just knew they had to get some, and the payout would come later. Nowadays, we call this “cryptocurrency.”
Space Jam
In 1996, a movie combined celebrity-athlete culture, a peak-of-the-multiplex summer blockbuster budget, the NBA, and Looney Tunes, and the result was greater than the sum of its parts. The plot was very simple and it went like this: there’s a bad guy or something, and Bugs Bunny needs to win the basketball game, and Michael Jordan is the best one, so they kidnap him so they can win, which probably they do, and the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld is also there, I think. Space Jam was a sensation, and you only needed to see every kid in America wearing basketball shoes and Tasmanian Devil t-shirts for the rest of the 90s to know it.
Nevermind Goes to Number One
…And the walls came down. After Nirvana topped the charts, it was anything goes on the radio for the rest of the decade. And here’s a fun fact about that: Billboard magazine had just changed the way they compiled their album charts, using a point-of-sale service called SoundScan to tabulate what people were actually buying, rather than relying on verbal reports from record stores as they had in the past. So the charts got way more accurate overnight, and what they found in late December 1991 was that hundreds of thousands of kids were going to record stores and exchanging the copies of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous they’d been given for Christmas by out-of-touch relatives for copies of Nevermind. Power to the people!
Bill Clinton Plays Saxophone on Arsenio
In the 1992 presidential election, only one candidate seemed to acknowledge that there was such a thing as a voter under the age of 40. While George H. W. Bush played by the traditional rules, Bill Clinton went on MTV News and answered the question “Boxers or briefs?” He did a bus tour and stopped at colleges. And he went on the Arsenio Hall Show to blow a little sax. For all his Hollywood training, Ronald Reagan could never have done such a thing. It worked: in January 1993, Bill celebrated his victory with a performance by Fleetwood Mac and a swing by MTV’s Inaugural Ball with performances by 10,000 Maniacs and En Vogue. You could feel the ground shifting under your feet.
Pulp Fiction
A vibrant independent-cinema movement was already coming together in the early 1990s, with Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Kathryn Bigelow, and Quentin Tarantino himself doing groundbreaking work on the cheap. But in 1994, Tarantino released the cinematic Pulp Fiction, as a wild, filthy, violent, time-jumping short-story collection of a movie broke out and debuted at number one at the box office. All those indie directors suddenly got bigger budgets, actors like Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey became mainstream stars, the underground became the ground. Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Academy Award to Forrest Gump, but hey, some things are slow to change. I saw it the Friday night it came out, at the Angelica in New York City where the indie movies played, and at the exact moment when Uma Thurman was about to get the hypodermic needle to the sternum, the F train passed underneath us and rumbled our seats. I can’t prove it, but I think that was the beginning of 4DX.
Susan Powter Stops The Insanity
Late-night infomercials were nothing new in 1992. The FCC had lifted the prohibition on show-length commercials in 1984, and soon we would become familiar with the strange appliances of Ron Popeil, the slimming magic of the Thighmaster, the hairdo-butchering simplicity of the Flowbee. But who would bring the chaos? Susan Powter, that’s who. Her demand to STOP THE INSANITY, fists pressed to her temples, was a rallying cry for…some kind of exercise or diet program, nobody can really be sure. But her success made the world safe for the Bedazzler, the RolyKit, the Topsy Tail. Now it’s 2025 and the ShamWow Guy is running for Congress. The insanity has maybe not stopped.
Bill Clinton’s sickest sax work couldn’t have saved this one. Picture it: it’s the 1996 Christmas Tree Lighting on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and Patti LaBelle is here to sing “This Christmas” and get us in the holiday mood. Unfortunately, nobody else is ready: the cue cards aren’t cueing, the background singers are out to lunch, even the guy who introduces her seems to have no idea how to introduce a person, sending Patti out a moment too early. The only thing that goes right is Patti: she makes no mistake of her frustration, she delivers flawless ad-libs in place of the lyrics she keeps telling us she does not know, she serves. Is this really one of the MOST 90s moments in history? Okay, maybe not. But it is the holiday season, and this video is the gift that keeps on giving.
Make sure you’re in on all of the 90s nostalgia–secure your spot on The 90s Cruise today. Remember to use codeBESTto set sail at our best rate yet!