“Could it be anymore 90s?”
4 Feb 2025
Buffy Revamped hits the stage this month so who better to take us back to the decade of PopTarts, Britpop and Friends than the one and only Brendan Murphy, writer and performer of Buffy Revamped.
He's also inspired some of the team here to share their ultimate 90s pop-culture moments. Admittedly, most of them weren't born yet, but we managed to track down some of the more 'retro' team members to share anything they can remember (not much as it turns out)...
BRENDAN'S TOP FIVE
Buffy The Vampire Slayer - The clothes, the music, the first-ever use of the term "Googled" on TV! Buffy The Vampire Slayer is absolutely swimming in 90s and early 00s nostalgia. Every element of the show, from it's razor sharp dialogue jam-packed with 90s cultural references, to it's pitch-perfect presentation of High School as Hell, BTVS was never not on trend and somehow miraculously manages to stand the test of time to this day (ignoring anything Xander says in Season One, naturally). In the immortal words of Buffy Summers, "If the apocalypse comes, beep me!"
Tamagotchis - If you didn’t have a tiny, pixelated pet constantly demanding your attention (and then inevitably dying because you forgot to feed it), did you even grow up in the 90s? Tamagotchis were the ultimate playground status symbol—until they got banned in schools for being too distracting. The heartbreak of losing one was real, but at least you could always reset it and start again. A digital pet may not have been as cool as a real Pikachu, but in 1997, it was close enough.
The Spice Girls - No band captured the 90s quite like the Spice Girls. With their platform shoes, Union Jack dresses, and insistence that “girl power” was the movement of the decade, they dominated everything from the charts to lunchboxes.
Every friendship group had a self-declared Baby, Scary, Sporty, Ginger, or Posh, and their 1997 movie Spice World remains a chaotic, deeply weird masterpiece. Love them or roll your eyes at them, the Spice Girls were an unstoppable force of pop culture magic.
Dial-Up Internet - The sweet, screechy sound of dial-up connecting was the soundtrack of early internet life. Trying to load a single image took ages, and God forbid someone picked up the landline mid-download—boom, instant disconnection. Whether you were updating your GeoCities page, lurking in AOL chatrooms, or waiting 45 minutes for a single Pokémon cheat code to load, dial-up was both magical and maddening. And yes, we all lived in fear of a phone bill that revealed just how many hours we’d spent online.
Blockbuster Video - Before Netflix and Disney+ put the entire world’s entertainment at our fingertips, there was only one true weekend ritual: hitting up Blockbuster Video. You’d roam the aisles, hoping Titanic wasn’t already rented out, and trying to convince your parents to let you get Scream. If you were really lucky, you’d snag a copy of GoldenEye 007 for the N64 before someone else did. Of course, forgetting to rewind your VHS tape? That was a crime punishable by passive-aggressive fines. So remember, folks... Be Kind, Rewind!
BOV'S TOP FIVE
The 90s hardcore rave scene in the UK was a cultural phenomenon, giving rise to a generation of DJs, producers and artists (like The Prodigy and Orbital) who shaped the landscape as we know it today. Lucy remembers (most) of it well...
"Dance music and the rave scene in the 90s was the best thing – parties were in fields and woods and completely free with dancing happening all night unless the police stopped it!
The music scene changed forever with house music coming to the UK and then our own versions developing including Drum and Bass."
Ben was a bit younger so his tastes are more innocent..
Beanie Babies are probably the defining image of the 90s for my family. We had an obsession that bordered on unhealthy. We (literally) hoarded them and displayed them proudly in the window of our house, facing the main road where everyone could marvel at our plushie zoo. We could not be stopped. The house became an unofficial landmark of the town, identifiable to my friends at school as; 'the one with all the beanie babies in the window'. It all ended in tears of course, as my sibling's mega tantrum in a local shop brought this dangerous obsession into the public eye. Like so many other children of the 90s, a few of them are probably still waiting patiently in storage for the moment when they might actually fulfil their promised destiny to become 'collector's items' - a quick check on ebay demonstrates that - yep - that moment is still some way off yet...
Just scraping into the last year of the decade, Andy remembers The Matrix...
From the opening scene with Trinity in the Heart Of The City hotel, right to the blaring of Rage Against The Machine's Wake Up, as Neo puts the phone receiver down and flies away, my jaw didn't leave the floor. The Kung Fu, the gun fights, the Eastern philosophy in the narrative, all of it blew my little mind. In the years that followed, there were countless movies that followed the precedent set in The Matrix, be it in the use of East Asian fighting styles in the action scenes or even in the heavy use of black coats and sunglasses for the character wardrobe. Needless to say, The Matrix, along with the release of the Buffy spin-off Angel, began what became known as the long-black-coat era of my life. This lasted approximately 730 days. A stark contrast to the Limp Bizkit-inspired backwards-red-cap era of the previous 730 days...
Anonymous producer...
Unless you wanted to go all out and double denim like Britney, the only acceptable way to wear your jeans in the mid 90s was the low-rise, ultra flare. This particular style was only authentic if when you sat down you showed off your pants and the hems so long that you could track exactly where you'd walked the day before from the distribution of rainwater, beer and mud that had soaked halfway up your leg.
Beautifully complemented by the plastic choker (which could sometimes mean you resembled those poor otters caught in fishing lines).
Troy is still eating BN biscuits
I can literally remember the time that CiTV was on every day, because of that theme song “it’s twenty past three, it’s CiTV” Every day after school: ZAP, Hey Arnold, Bodger and Badger, Sooty and Sweep, Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids, and the best of them all Roger and The Rottentrolls.
It was the absolute best time to be a kid and anyone who says otherwise is just coping. Eating my BN biscuits while glued to the screen watching the peak of kids telly for a few hours. Good times.
