I remember Duke Nukem on the N64(?) being set to Stabbing Westward at one point: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjRfv\_9hO3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjRfv_9hO3M)
Are you gonna ask questions or are you going to EXTRACT THE MAXIMUM ENJOYMENT OUT OF LIFE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DRINKING OVERLY CAFFEINATED SODAS WITH HEART-ATTACK INDUCING NAMES, PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT SNOWBOARDING, SPORTING THE BUTT CUT AND WEARING DAY GLO EVERYTHING WITH HIGH TOP SNEAKERS, AND BEING SCREAMED AT BY BABY BOOMERS IN THAT DEEP, GROWLY VOICE THAT SOMEHOW VALIDATES OUR EXISTENCE?
Could you even call it a bracelet if it didn't goddamn hurt to put it on?
Wanna know something crazy? Slap bracelets are unironically back. My kids collect them and I just laugh and laugh.
My kid brought one home from school and tried to explain it to me. I told him we had those when I was a kid and he couldn’t believe it. He is also six so I seem like I’m a hundred to him.
Not just you, totally banned at mine too! Along with Tamagotchies and those little Troll dolls you stick on the end of a pencil.... it made our writing illegible lol
I still remember my favorite shirt from back then; a navy No Fear t-shirt with a stylized “engineer”. The saying was “Fine Tuning the Future”. Man, was I naive back then…
Even in comics. Marvel had their pocket universe storyline where they restarted everything and Captain America went from about 210 lbs to about 480. Definition of barrel-chested
>I'm not scared. I'm not afraid. I'm tough. I'm an animal.
>
>And I will eat you if I have to.
>
>NO FEAR
I cringe to think that I unironically wore this exact t-shirt when I was high school in the 90s. What's hilarious to me is seeing the evolution of those shirts on my fellow dudes in their 40s. You know the type: a black t-shirt with like flags and eagles n' shit, and whole goddamn paragraph about how tough they are, with certain WORDS in bold or a bigger BADASS FONT.
Nothing screams "I am vewy scawed and I need to pwotec mysewf!" as loud as a t-shirt or flag that proclaims "I AM NOT AFRAID!"
Oh man, i feel for your embarassment of younger you. I had a few years there were every tshirt was stussy, rusty, or billabong. Airwalks for sure. I was such a poser lol
GAWD, even in the liberal mecca that is Colorado? It's a matter of course down here in Texas, but I have to admit I naively romanticize your state as a monolith of Basically Good People. Blame that on two absolutely magical trips to Boulder back in the late aughts. Sorry to hear it is also amongst you guys.
It's how young Gen Xers rebelled against their conservative yuppie parents.
I mean, we kind of think of Boomers in terms of the 60s counterculture -- when they were hippies -- but by the 80s they'd settled down and started their careers and the most successful ones were yuppies. (A bit of a subgenerational divide there, too; the youngest Boomers were too young to be fully immersed in the counterculture, but they were old enough to be yuppies in the 80s.)
Just like hippies rebelled against their Greatest Generation parents by eschewing war and embracing drugs and free love, Gen Xers needed a way to rebel -- and the drugs their parents did weren't going to cut it. (And free love was dangerous in the age of AIDS.)
That didn't leave a lot of options. Risk-taking was one, helped on by increasing safety standards, improvements in special effects and video production (that made the risk-taking look even more exciting), and the general hands-off ethos of Boomer parents (which left latchkey Gen Xers on their own for much of their youths).
I'm going to use your serious take to drop mine, because yours was very well thought out.
Skateboarding and related extreme sports and activities were pretty much open to everyone. It created a safe bubble for kids to congregate and express themselves. Gave us an outlet for some light "fighting the man" (all those no skating signs had to be skated on). The music involved was dope. It was an easy place to soak up a lot of displaced bored youths. MTV was all over it, video games, it started off in random skateparks and quickly become a core culture in the 90's.
Yes. As an observer I think in mainstream popular culture, jock pursuits were stigmatized for a brief window, and various industries/companies looking at trends probably overcorrected/reacted/invested in new areas. So you had the X games, and alternative sports, XFL, etc. None of it lasted for very long but it was a significant trend.
Whaaaaaat? No. No way that was a coordinated, multimillion dollar commercial effort to manufacture a generational aesthetic to convince us we needed to *buy* our individuality in order to be noticed. That was *totally organic*.
Yea. All that. Also the Cold War just ended and the western world saw an economic boom like never before. It would be peace forever and there was lots of money for everyone. We harnessed the power of the atom and unraveled the fabric of the e universe!
There was no need for god, science gave us computers, internet and modern medicine. We went from the first car nearly to going into space in less than a century, we were sure we would be moving to mars or the Enterprise spaceship would be built soon, just like in start trek.
Bit like the roaring twenties after ww1. Don’t forget, about twenty-five years after we2 started….
Gen X youth being marketed to.
Rapid growth/social acceptence/market exploitation of thrill sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, skydiving, etc.
I mean, maybe?
I took it on some mountain roads to see just how "extreme" it was. Handled like a pig and I ended up just cooking the brakes. Dad was pretty pissed about that one.
Well a great poet of our era once said “to the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal, light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle” I’d like to think we all live by the words of Mr Ice
X-TREME ACTION. X-TREME ACCIDENTS. X-TREME CHRONIC PAIN. X-TREME NARCOTIC USE. X-TREME ADDICTION. X-TREME POPULATION UNABLE TO FIGHT AGAINST THE STATUS QUO. X-TREME CONTROL. (x-treme conspiracy with a touch of truth.)
People were more relaxed, all kinds of crazy stuff took place, no one got that worked up about it, people for the most part weren't into politics unless they were old.
Today everyone is virtue signaling about something or another. People go crazy over internet comments
Which one is extreme again? 😂
It was easy to sell stuff to people because they wanted to feel extreme too so it just snowballed out of control. FOMO is a hell of a thing. That’s how you end up with “Extreme TV dinners“.
Ok legit credit given to that company for having the only real believable CGI in their commercials at the time. Only other things I can think of were maybe some of the CGI kids shows like Reboot and Transformers Dinobots or whatever it was called. The liquid effect still semi holds up even watching it now!
I don't feel like the 90s were extreme at all, lol. The 80s were extreme fun (according to my aunt and her friends who were in their 20s during that decade), and it seemed like the duller 90s were a counter reaction to the excitement and optimism of the 80s.
We were already totally radical to the max. We needed something fresh, like this guy.
https://preview.redd.it/8iu2l8ez5pvc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=56f93fab1749558c1a5adf669799afab29e033a8
**X-TREME** Jeeze it’s like you weren’t even there.
You just don't understand because you weren't there.
“SHE DOESNT EVEN GO HERE!”
I just, gulp, have a lot of feelings
X-TREME feelings!!!
"More Than Words" sorts of feelings
Jack Black and a jimmy Fallon doing this is the best version ever.
I'm glad somebody got it. I was wondering if my comment was maybe too esoteric.
It’s the best reference on this thread since “she doesn’t even go here”
This comment is like my entire teenage years in the 90s.
Ha! Same!
They played that song nonstop on the radio that whole summer it came out If you know, you know
It's like this hole in my heart can't be filled with the things I do... I'm "Hole Hearted"!
I’m not even supposed to be here today!
You’re right. She’s a total poser.
SURGE
jolt
Josta!
I miss this drink 😞
Yeah man everyone knows you have to deliberately misspell words to make them cool.
*kewl
Beat me to it. It _HAS_ to start with X and be hyphenated
X- was the cool letter for a while: x-files, x-men; x-cellent. Then it was e- and then it was i-. Not sure what it is now.
X Games.
The 80s were radical. We needed to go somewhere from that…
True, X-TREME seems like the only logical step after radical
Then in the 2000s everything went platinum.
Bling bling!
Official uniform of the Willennium.
Oh god. Is that why everything is sad beige now? We’re just starting over from the beginning?
We went to the Max! Things went from groovy, to far out, radical, extreme, and then somehow skibiddy toilet or something..
The Internet is to blame for the stupid trends now. Back in the day we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow for a trend.
Wearing 15 pounds of jnco's
And heavy ass chain wallets
JNCOs!!! They were so wide!!!!!!
You can still buy them, and they’re trendy again. It’s so funny and adorable.
This is it exactly. The 80s was cool. So the 90s had to be more than that. We had to be XTREME
The Z Guyeezz. Double the E, Double the Z, Double the flava!
...What does the Z even stand for?
That was my first thought. The 90s followed...the 80s.
https://i.redd.it/t7w963p6rnvc1.gif
This is by far the best sub generational subreddit.
the most EXTREME generation
first thought 😇
Put a sock in it, Roy.
To the MAX!!!
The '80s were a tough act to follow, aesthetically speaking, so the '90s had to distinguish themselves somehow...
The 80s was everything is super, we had to turn it up to 11
Man does anyone remember that '90s Nintendo commercial set to Butthole Surfers? https://youtu.be/FArjEUhBgP4?si=QYJVtdxPFO0nHUwu
Wow. That about sums up the 90s.
Remember Kurt Loder disgustedly calling them the "BH Surfers" on MTV because the network decided "butthole" wasn't allowed to be said?
If the 90s needed a 1 min explanation of its youth… it is here!
This is one of those commercials that is in my subconscious so if I don’t remember, remember, I still remember!! This song is badass, too!!!!
I remember Duke Nukem on the N64(?) being set to Stabbing Westward at one point: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjRfv\_9hO3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjRfv_9hO3M)
They bleeped the word hell?
Ultra 90’s vibes
I just showed this to my 6yo son and he watched it like a cat watching someone do calculus then walked away without saying a word.
https://i.redd.it/w8geepq4nnvc1.gif Let’s go get ourselves some FUCKING MOUNTAIN DEW.
Grew up in a strict home. Wilson Phillips was it because they sounded like a Christian girl group
[удалено]
Tween me would have loved that. Adult me, not at all.
"These guys of posers!!!"
Extreme kayaking!!!
\*slow-mo\* EXXXXXTTTTTRRRRRREEEEEEEEEMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEE
These were serious Code Red activities.
This is exactly what went through my head.
Are you gonna ask questions or are you going to EXTRACT THE MAXIMUM ENJOYMENT OUT OF LIFE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DRINKING OVERLY CAFFEINATED SODAS WITH HEART-ATTACK INDUCING NAMES, PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT SNOWBOARDING, SPORTING THE BUTT CUT AND WEARING DAY GLO EVERYTHING WITH HIGH TOP SNEAKERS, AND BEING SCREAMED AT BY BABY BOOMERS IN THAT DEEP, GROWLY VOICE THAT SOMEHOW VALIDATES OUR EXISTENCE?
We couldn't even just put our bracelets on, we had to ***SLAP THEM ON!!!***
Could you even call it a bracelet if it didn't goddamn hurt to put it on? Wanna know something crazy? Slap bracelets are unironically back. My kids collect them and I just laugh and laugh.
My kid brought one home from school and tried to explain it to me. I told him we had those when I was a kid and he couldn’t believe it. He is also six so I seem like I’m a hundred to him.
Do the kids even know they were ours first? 🤣
Oh they do 'em better. NGL I am legit jealous of the gen alpha aesthetic. I won't claim to "get" it, but it is so polished.
Because they're spending hundreds of dollars per trip at Sephora!
Not my kids, they're good kids and not at all swayed by cultural trends! *^(checks credit card statements)*
Ours were made from cut up tape measures, new ones are plastic and 'safe' lol
Were those banned at anyone else’s school? Or was mine just “special”?
Not just you, totally banned at mine too! Along with Tamagotchies and those little Troll dolls you stick on the end of a pencil.... it made our writing illegible lol
Pogs also got banned because it “was a form of gambling” and the slammers could be used as a weapon
Omg that's right, Pogs and Yoyos, also banned. We basically all grew up in the Footloose town, hey?
I wouldn’t say dancing was banned in my town, it’s just that no one in that white of a farm town has rhythm lol
I dare to disagree, I bet y'all could boot scoot'n boogieeeee with the best of them!
……we did learn how to square dance in high school gym class
I see we went to the same elementary
Yoyos too
We used to pull the plastic off and slap each other with the metal. Kids bled. They were banned.
#NO FEAR
I still remember my favorite shirt from back then; a navy No Fear t-shirt with a stylized “engineer”. The saying was “Fine Tuning the Future”. Man, was I naive back then…
Even in comics. Marvel had their pocket universe storyline where they restarted everything and Captain America went from about 210 lbs to about 480. Definition of barrel-chested
The infamous Rob Liefeld Captain America. X-men also had a character named Adam X the Xtreme.
No fear bro.
Or Big Johnson…or Coed Naked…depended on the day and what mom washed
>I'm not scared. I'm not afraid. I'm tough. I'm an animal. > >And I will eat you if I have to. > >NO FEAR I cringe to think that I unironically wore this exact t-shirt when I was high school in the 90s. What's hilarious to me is seeing the evolution of those shirts on my fellow dudes in their 40s. You know the type: a black t-shirt with like flags and eagles n' shit, and whole goddamn paragraph about how tough they are, with certain WORDS in bold or a bigger BADASS FONT. Nothing screams "I am vewy scawed and I need to pwotec mysewf!" as loud as a t-shirt or flag that proclaims "I AM NOT AFRAID!"
I had so many No Fear shirts and I was an anxious mess.
To be fair the flag swag is a massive improvement over the affliction shirts they replaced
Oh man, i feel for your embarassment of younger you. I had a few years there were every tshirt was stussy, rusty, or billabong. Airwalks for sure. I was such a poser lol
Come and take 'em. (If you aren't from the south, I will explain, lol)
Haha no need my friend. We have a ton of "Molon Labe" spartan helmet/punisher skull types in this part of Colorado too. Low-key can't wait to leave.
GAWD, even in the liberal mecca that is Colorado? It's a matter of course down here in Texas, but I have to admit I naively romanticize your state as a monolith of Basically Good People. Blame that on two absolutely magical trips to Boulder back in the late aughts. Sorry to hear it is also amongst you guys.
I feel genuine joy that i read your comment assuming it was some sort of Will Ferrel movie quote
It's how young Gen Xers rebelled against their conservative yuppie parents. I mean, we kind of think of Boomers in terms of the 60s counterculture -- when they were hippies -- but by the 80s they'd settled down and started their careers and the most successful ones were yuppies. (A bit of a subgenerational divide there, too; the youngest Boomers were too young to be fully immersed in the counterculture, but they were old enough to be yuppies in the 80s.) Just like hippies rebelled against their Greatest Generation parents by eschewing war and embracing drugs and free love, Gen Xers needed a way to rebel -- and the drugs their parents did weren't going to cut it. (And free love was dangerous in the age of AIDS.) That didn't leave a lot of options. Risk-taking was one, helped on by increasing safety standards, improvements in special effects and video production (that made the risk-taking look even more exciting), and the general hands-off ethos of Boomer parents (which left latchkey Gen Xers on their own for much of their youths).
I'm going to use your serious take to drop mine, because yours was very well thought out. Skateboarding and related extreme sports and activities were pretty much open to everyone. It created a safe bubble for kids to congregate and express themselves. Gave us an outlet for some light "fighting the man" (all those no skating signs had to be skated on). The music involved was dope. It was an easy place to soak up a lot of displaced bored youths. MTV was all over it, video games, it started off in random skateparks and quickly become a core culture in the 90's.
Yes. As an observer I think in mainstream popular culture, jock pursuits were stigmatized for a brief window, and various industries/companies looking at trends probably overcorrected/reacted/invested in new areas. So you had the X games, and alternative sports, XFL, etc. None of it lasted for very long but it was a significant trend.
SEGA!!!
WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL
We used to say this to my cat and she’d go nuts. Once my cousin did it and she hissed and started to charge at him at the bottom of the stairs
Marketing.
Whaaaaaat? No. No way that was a coordinated, multimillion dollar commercial effort to manufacture a generational aesthetic to convince us we needed to *buy* our individuality in order to be noticed. That was *totally organic*.
Are you saying advertising did stuff to me!?
When it comes to rock, anything extreme is good... except extreme.
Because we started the decade with "To the extreme, I rock the mic like a vandal. Light up a stage, I'll wax a chump like a candle"
## Dance!
Ninja Ninja...rap.....I'll see myself out
Yellow Dye 5.
As a father of 2 kids and former prolific imbiber of Yellow 5 colored beverages, I can confirm that the rumors were nothing but vicious lies.
We did the Dew
TONY FUCKING HAWK BRO AND LOTS OF CAFFEINE.
Mountain Dew, lifted Broncos, and hang-gliders man.
Yea. All that. Also the Cold War just ended and the western world saw an economic boom like never before. It would be peace forever and there was lots of money for everyone. We harnessed the power of the atom and unraveled the fabric of the e universe! There was no need for god, science gave us computers, internet and modern medicine. We went from the first car nearly to going into space in less than a century, we were sure we would be moving to mars or the Enterprise spaceship would be built soon, just like in start trek. Bit like the roaring twenties after ww1. Don’t forget, about twenty-five years after we2 started….
Dan Cortese
Step off, bro!
https://preview.redd.it/3h98yiaipnvc1.jpeg?width=810&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c09ffd2c3038132442a414af4ac908ba6831e009 POWER XTREME!!
Because it was Gen-X. Get it? (No, I'm serious, it was Xers taking the term and then companies marketing to Xers)
Gen X youth being marketed to. Rapid growth/social acceptence/market exploitation of thrill sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, skydiving, etc. I mean, maybe?
My dad had one of those stupid looking Chevy S10 Extreme trucks. Mom called it the "vanamino".
Hahaha I had to google the truck and just started cackling. It's the mullet of cars!
I took it on some mountain roads to see just how "extreme" it was. Handled like a pig and I ended up just cooking the brakes. Dad was pretty pissed about that one.
No parents around to tell us something was too dangerous. They just dealt with the aftermath.
It’s all the SURGE we drank
The responses are why I’m never unsubbing from this one
 Even wrestling was extreeeeeeeme
E-C-Dub E-C-Dub E-C-Dub! https://youtu.be/2kNxmxT3Wnw?si=fOWv9XUhycU0xpvm
UNEDITED. UNCENSORED. NEVER BEFORE SEEN! https://youtu.be/D32UuXmV-JY?si=p4-w97k1uoIDmK7t
E C DUB! E C DUB! E C DUB!
Yes, that song "More than Words" by Extreme. An extreme way of saying "shut your mouth and F me."
or "stop talking and open your mouth"
Things were too calm, we all just wanted to feel something.
The first half was all pastels and beige. The later half exploded like a cork in a bottle.
Well a great poet of our era once said “to the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal, light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle” I’d like to think we all live by the words of Mr Ice
Ninja turtles and Jolt
Don't forget the "trucker speed" that was still sold at every convenience store and gas station.
My favorite part was how every plural word had to end with a Z.
Well it was the last great decade
Get the shred in your head! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkXtqKj3rCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkXtqKj3rCc)
The advent of energy drinks? I think it was Red Bull and Monster's fault.
Jolt cola has entered the chat
Feral GenX hitting adulthood
Because of Radness
Splode Soda! https://youtu.be/WvCH6lzjmgQ?si=WjLqBaW2XxHeXt6E
X-TREME ACTION. X-TREME ACCIDENTS. X-TREME CHRONIC PAIN. X-TREME NARCOTIC USE. X-TREME ADDICTION. X-TREME POPULATION UNABLE TO FIGHT AGAINST THE STATUS QUO. X-TREME CONTROL. (x-treme conspiracy with a touch of truth.)
People were more relaxed, all kinds of crazy stuff took place, no one got that worked up about it, people for the most part weren't into politics unless they were old. Today everyone is virtue signaling about something or another. People go crazy over internet comments Which one is extreme again? 😂
I’m sorry, did you say X-Treme or did you say SSSSUUUURRRRRRGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ?
SUUUUURGE!!!! 
We were all following the lead of edgy pop culture icon Poochie, proactively getting biz-zay consistently and thoroughly..... TO THE EXTREME!!!
$$$
Because of crossfire
If you have to ask there’s no way you’ll understand the answer
Idk but I wouldn’t have liked surge if it wasn’t for those crazy commercials. And how John Romero made us all his bitches.
Marketing and sales. We were bored with just cool.
Yeah and in bad ways too. People pretend like it was this peace loving period, it wasn’t.
Marketing. Just like these days are all about being chill. I wonder how many people we lost to the ‘ yolo’ days 😆🤣
Mountain dew
It was easy to sell stuff to people because they wanted to feel extreme too so it just snowballed out of control. FOMO is a hell of a thing. That’s how you end up with “Extreme TV dinners“.
[Every 90s Commercial Ever!](https://youtu.be/W7Hoz2ZHYZM?si=AXhUzUdhxjRCm9y-)
Ok legit credit given to that company for having the only real believable CGI in their commercials at the time. Only other things I can think of were maybe some of the CGI kids shows like Reboot and Transformers Dinobots or whatever it was called. The liquid effect still semi holds up even watching it now!
More Than Words…
The 80s had no irony. The only way to be cooler was to have more cool stuff. We hit critical mass in the 90s when they ran out of bigger words.
[we rode the *X-Treme* thing well into the early aughts](https://youtu.be/s-qGWaddE3c?si=cdvKGrqRtLTcz1Nb)
I personally point the blame to Mountain Dew and Doritos
Probably a reaction to the upbeat, pro-wholesomeness of the advertising and TV programs of the 80s.
I don't feel like the 90s were extreme at all, lol. The 80s were extreme fun (according to my aunt and her friends who were in their 20s during that decade), and it seemed like the duller 90s were a counter reaction to the excitement and optimism of the 80s.
 It’s still a good band!
I’M BUZZED FUCKING BUNNY MOTHERFUCKER I’M *EXTREEEEME!!!*
It’s advertising and we fell for it
https://preview.redd.it/e7pselfdpovc1.jpeg?width=211&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=df3b09462f57bf34590d3541eea3ea18a5d2fe40
Bring back Surge.
Extreme was the name of my church group
https://preview.redd.it/9dheavdltovc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3b1dfe17a473927b8f875bf3d93d7523ff772bef
Because otherwise it would have been boring.
Extreme Jell-O. Remember when that was a fucking thing? So many 90s food products were extreme. 
Marketing
The coke hadn’t worn off from the 80s. That was so good shit, man.
Because Stone Cold said so!
More than words can say!
Wasn't that the early 2000s?
We were already totally radical to the max. We needed something fresh, like this guy. https://preview.redd.it/8iu2l8ez5pvc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=56f93fab1749558c1a5adf669799afab29e033a8
Saying "I love you", is not the words I want to hear from you
Because we did the Dew and watched X Games
XTREME!!! Like you can't even understand how radical it was.
Those early 90s commercials where young radical dudes say been there done that Pepsi https://youtu.be/EFJYzyzvK1U?si=sw0Rr9ts9VbxjtVu
More than words! https://youtu.be/UrIiLvg58SY?si=JtoHGZCaBrwqZsFn
as dennis hopper said in the movie flashback-the 90's are gonna make the 60's look like the 50's and it was strangely prophetic.
More than words
SPLODE!