Ah the 90s. It was a simpler time. A time before Ipads and snapchats and newfangled whooziwhatsits. A time where that previous sentence would sound like complete gibberish. A time where sending a dick pic entailed taking a photo of your junk with a disposable camera, getting the film developed at a physical convenience store, and popping that grainy puppy in an actual mailbox (do people still have mailboxes?).
Back then, the toys us 90s kids played with were simpler too. Much simpler. They were so rudimentary, in fact, that kids today probably wouldn’t even consider them toys. They would probably consider them discarded pieces of hobo plastic. And rightly so. Here are 5 toys from the 90s that kids would never play with today. Like ever.
1. Yak Bak
Honestly, I don’t know how to make sense of the popularity of this toy except to say that kids are easily amused and incredibly narcissistic. I mean, the yak bak is just a crappy tape recorder. That’s it. No bells. No whistles. All it does is play back your voice six seconds at a time. Today, if I gave something like this to my little cousin, he’d record a message telling me to “Shove it up my cheap stupid-” and he wouldn’t even be able to finish his ungrateful excuse for a voicemail due to this rinky-dink toy’s limited capabilities.
How did the pitch for pogs go? “Hey guys let’s cut out little circles from these old cardboard boxes, put some shiny sh*t on them, jack up the price, and hock them to kids. They’ll sell like hot cakes.” That toy executive is a freakin’ genius. There are practically no upfront costs in the production of pogs. No major risks or investments needed. Literally, kids paid to take out the toy company’s garbage for them. This would never fly today. Today, kids don’t play with recyclables. They play with alien technology that in the 90s only existed in Contact.
3. Tiger Handheld LCD Games
Tiger’s handheld games are possibly the lowest form of video game ever created. These things predated the GameBoy. The game-play was crap. The graphics were crap. They weren’t even in color. The worst part was each device only allowed you to play one game at a time. Nowadays, kids can choose from an almost infinite selection of games on a rectangle half the size of one of these things with 1,000 times the processing power. I remember being stuck with Tiger’s Bowling game. That’s all it was. Just bowling. Just pressing two buttons and squinting to see the faint outline of a bowling ball blink across a 3-inch screen. Jesus, kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
To this day, I still have no f*cking clue what this stuff is. It’s like radioactive play-doh. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out that Nickelodeon just sourced their gak from some toxic waste dump or poisoned reservoir or Lori-Beth Denberg’s asshole. This is like the stuff that turned Matt Murdock into Daredevil. Erin Brokovich would have a field day with this coagulated discharge. Parents, why in God’s name did you buy this for your kids? What did kids even do with it? Is it just me or was there a particularly strong strain of Down Syndrome going around in the 90s?
5. Water Snakes
This is by far the sorriest excuse for a toy on this entire list. I’ll never understand this one and neither will kids today. Water snakes were nothing more than Ziploc bags filled with water. At least there was some game associated with pogs. Water Snakes served no purpose. I’ve had more fun playing with leaky IV bags. They’re not dolls. They’re not board games. You were too young to try to have sex with them. They’re like portable fish tanks without the fish. I’m sure kids today are glad we left this abortion of a plaything in the 90s where it belongs.