Power Walking was an exercise fad that peaked around 1996. It fell somewhere in between a real workout and wearing an electric ab belt.

Power walking was particularly popular amongst the elderly. They must have gotten bored of water aerobics.

Probably the best part about power walking was actually seeing people do it. I remember the power-walkers on the track at my high school. They’d be pumping their arms feverishly, with a look of total Lance-Armstrong-Determination on their faces. All this while being passed by joggers in sweatsuits.

Dennis Rodman: proof that ugly people can make it.

To be honest, I’m not sure how Dennis Rodman stayed so famous for so long. He got started by simply looking weird: crazy tattoos, facial piercings and hair colors really appealed to 90′s audiences. Rodman was also a pretty good basketball player, but even combining the two really should have only yielded 6 months or so of big time fame.

I think it had more to do with the fact that Dennis Rodman was also some kind of bizarre 90′s sex icon. He mostly appealed to girls who really wanted to piss off their parents.

This picture sort of blows my mind (but then again not really):

Virtual reality was just about the coolest thing in the 90′s. I remember standing in line for hours to play fifteen seconds of a really boring game in VIRTUAL REALITY.

Bubble tape was the pretty much the best thing ever when I was a kid, since it meant you could stuff as much gum in your mouth as possible. Sure you could have done this with a bunch of sticks of normal gum, but it’s just not the same.

I think it was supposed to be like a tape measure of gum, which makes sense because all the tape measures in the 90s were being used to make slap bracelets.

Who could forget Trapper Keepers? Let’s face it, in 1992 elementary schools, kids weren’t cool unless they had a Trapper Keeper. And since it was the early 90′s, it had to be a REAL name brand Trapper Keeper, sorry poor kids!

Click here to find out what happens if you feed your Trapper Keeper after midnight

Trapper Keepers that would NOT get you beaten up in 1992:

Please Hammer don’t hurt ‘em!

Who could forget Hammer Pants, these were everything in hip-hop fashion in the early 90′s, and yes, ‘Hammer Pants’ is a proper noun. Back in the late 80′s / early 90′s, ‘more’ really was ‘more’, so the more fabric in your pants the cooler you were. It was simple mathematics.

These people like Hammer Pants too much

And this idiot thinks Hammer Pants are back in style

Oh Janeane Garofalo you were so important in the 90′s. Your angry thing really appealed to Gen-Xers until around 2000 when they all got too old to care.

Wikipedia says Generation X likes Janeane Garofalo because of Reality Bites. It makes sense to me. (When I first saw that movie I was too young to know they smoked a can bowl.)

In any case, do you want to know the truth about cats and dogs? Janeane Garofalo is up to 88 and won’t be coming back.

Remember “air phones”? These used to be on every plane in the 90′s. They were so 90′s too – they looked like the Zach Morris cell phone. And remember the place to swipe your card? That was almost 80′s…

Well air phones haven’t gone completely “up to 88″, I saw them on a plane last week.

Poor Dave Thomas (of the many Wendy’s commercials) has been up to 88 for a while now, ever since he died in 2002.

A few weeks later it was really creepy because they hired this actor who looked like him to continue the commercials. At least that’s what I thought, but I can’t find that anywhere on the internet, so maybe I just made it up. Rumor mill?

Watch a Dave Thomas commercial

Check out the Dave Thomas legacy page on Wendys.com

Don’t you miss dial-up modem noise? EEEEEEEE-OOOOOO-EEEEEE-GHGHGHGHGHGHHGHGHGHG

Did you ever wonder why they made it sound like that? (It was coming out of a speaker after all) It’s like they picked the most annoying sounds possible and played them at random. And at max volume.

Listen to some dial-up modem noise

(Sound clip thanks to Jlew)