1990s Nostalgia – A Prose Poem

Well, I thought that I’d write an experimental prose poem/descriptive writing piece about 1990s nostalgia today. Yes, this was inspired by both writer’s block and distracting myself from a bad mood with retro-style computer games. And, since I couldn’t think of an idea for a “proper” article, I decided to do something creative instead. So, let’s get started…

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The real 1990s was ordinary and boring. But the one that lives on in imagination, imported from old TV shows and the rose-tinted distillation of childhood memories and modern daydreams, is something else entirely….

It is a land of bulky game cartridges plugged into translucent orange consoles. Green LEDs lighting up like Christmas. Polygonal 3D models on blurry curved television screens. Citrus-yellow VHS players guzzling chunky cassettes. Whirring and thundering like a freight train. Static snow and glowing green letters.

The bright psychedelia of the 1960s shot through with edgy darkness. Lava lamps in gloomy bedrooms with glow-in-the dark posters shouting “LEGALISE!“. Floral print sheets. Audio cassettes in colourful cardboard sleeves played on a giant obelisk of a boombox. Ten minutes run-time, just a single. Crackling radio static, broken only by jingles and music from ten years earlier.

Gloomy cornershops filled with walls of garish magazines. Advertising posters showing vivid lime green ice lollies, infinitely brighter than the faded olive reality. A cartoon adaptation of “Dilbert” running on early-evening television after “The Fresh Prince” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.

Superheroes being nothing more than bewildering action figures, mysterious hunks of plastic that referenced some Saturday morning cartoon you didn’t watch. Figurines of footballers with gigantic craniums, the real-life version of some quirky videogame trophy from twenty years in the future. Euro ’96 notebooks. Songs about vindaloo. I don’t even find football interesting.

Musicians with attitude, singing pop music in the style of punks. Crop tops and red highlights. A miasma of Lynx body spray. Blond spikes preserved in a thick layer of hair gel. Cinema lobbies filled with the rich musk of popcorn and cigarettes. Giant posters showing Pierce Brosnan saving the world or Mike Myers travelling back to the swinging sixties.

Computer game magazine demo discs with custom-built menus that always auto-ran. Playing one level of “Tomb Raider II” and accidentally hitting a button that turned the game into a texture-less snow cave. A terrible – yet compelling – “Unreal Tournament for kids” game demo involving a bright carnival funhouse and foam dart guns. To the max! Extreme!

Women wearing short silver tinfoil dresses. Computer cases with LCD displays next to the power button that lit up with a bright green “166“. Sky blue plastic holsters for floppy disks. Balls of fur with stick-on googly eyes and paper feet sitting on top of bulky computer monitors. Pressing the “degauss” button and watching the screen shake. Psychedelic screen-savers.

Men with open shirts and floppy hair. Action movies that came up with increasingly goofy villains because the Cold War was over and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. Films where the shadows were gloomier and the lighting was brighter.

Cartoon aliens with bulging brains. Not watching “The X-Files”, but knowing about it because of the references everywhere. An encyclopaedia on a CD-ROM, filled with video clips the size of a postage stamp and a goofy trivia game set in a painted maze filled with medieval jesters.

Fast-food burgers that tasted like delicious cardboard. The smell of swimming pool chlorine and the whirr of vending machine corkscrews. A “Goosebumps” book with a purple cover that told the story of an evil sponge living under someone´s sink. A yellow plastic egg filled with bright green gunge.

Supermarket freezers veiled by thick translucent fronds. Offspring CDs with cartoonish cover art. Novelty mouse mats. Books of optical illusions that required you to hold up a finger, cross your eyes twice and utter ancient incarnations in the vague hope of maybe seeing a 3D shark for a couple of seconds.

Concrete multi-storey car parks with swirling corkscrew ramps to the top floor. Shopping centre concourses with scuffed brown floor tiles. Disposable cameras covered in yellow cardboard. The smell of “pick and mix” sweets. Christmas celebrated with special edition 2D platform game demos that coated their pixellated levels with a dusting of snow and loudly played a MIDI rendition of “Jingle Bells”.

Mobile phones with stubby aerials. Pencil-toppers and sparkly museum gift shop erasers. Hologram keyrings. Pink plastic pistols attached to arcade machines. Triangular headscarves and Pot Noodles. Music videos on early-evening television, accompanied by oven-cooked pizza. Actually caring about the charts.

Tie-dye T-shirts that changed colour with temperature. Glow-in-the-dark stars. Blank VHS tapes in green cardboard sleeves. A poster of someone dressed as Lara Croft. CD singles which played low-resolution music videos when you put the disc into your computer. Posters everywhere. Guitars covered with stickers. Game mags and music mags. A giant pile of supermarket carrier bags.

Three-panel newspaper cartoons pinned to walls. “Animorphs” novels which played a little animation if you flicked the pages in the right way. Laser tag arenas that looked like a post-apocalyptic film set. Cool shades. Off-brand POGs and shiny plastic “slammers”. The grating noise of canned laughter. Baseball caps worn backwards.

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Anyway, I hope that this was fun 🙂