50 Things Millennials Have Never Heard Of

MC Hammer was already on a downward trajectory when he released "2 Legit 2 Quit" in 1991, but that didn't stop him from dropping millions on a music video that featured cameos from James Brown, James Belushi and a dozen professional athletes as well as a knock at Michael Jackson. Hammer was so deluded at this point that he thought he was on the verge of unseating as the King of Pop. Anyone that saw the videos remembers it mainly for the "2 Legit 2 Quit" hand gesture they show repeatedly. It was ubiquitous for a good six weeks in late 1991, and has been effectively banished from the planet ever since.  

A sphere made of rubber filaments, Koosh products were next-level ball technology. You could throw them, do Hacky Sack — okay they were pretty much like normal rubber balls. 

Long before he was one of the highest paid stars in show business, Mark Wahlberg was simply Donnie Wahlberg's kid brother with amazing abs and a modeling contact with Calvin Klein. He also worked with a rap collective called The Funky Bunch and scored a number one hit with "Good Vibrations." The song was everywhere in 1991, but their follow-up album flopped in 1992 and Wahlberg dropped the "Marky" from the front of his name and wisely moved onto a shockingly successful Hollywood career. 

Before the pop gods gave us Mariah Carey, they blessed us with three stellar years of Taylor Dayne. Between 1987 and 1990 radio was her best friend, turning "Tell It To My Heart," "Love Will Lead You Back," "Don't Rush Me" and many others into enormous hits. She took a three-year break in the early 1990s, and returned to a whole new pop diva marketplace where she just couldn't compete. When her songs come on the radio these days, even many people who grew up with her go, "Who sings this? Don't tell me. Wait, it's on the tip of my tongue…"

Explaining Temple of the Dog to anyone who didn't live through the grunge era requires a series of intricate flow charts, a laser pointer and a thirty minute explanation of the devastating impact of Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood's death on the Seattle music community. Recorded before anyone heard of Eddie Vedder, this Pearl Jam/Soundgarden mash-up band produced one unforgettable song. You either know every word of the thing, or it sounds like one guy screaming and another guy mumbling about their intense appetites. You probably also wonder why a single teardrop falls down your dad's face when it comes on the 1990s channel on Sirius. 

Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in the 1992 presidential election despite only winning 43% of the vote. That's because Texas billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate and actually took 18.9% of the vote. It was a wild campaign and Perot was a Saturday Night Live dream, creating catch phrases like the "giant sucking sound" and picking bumbling Admiral James Stockdale as his running mate. He's still alive and kicking at age eighty-three, though it's been quite a while since he was in the news for any reason. 

He was the Soviet leader who worked with Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War, ushering in a new era of world history. People who paid absolutely no attention to international news still knew about the Russian guy with the weird birthmark on his forehead. Danny DeVito played him on Saturday Night Live and he was mocked in UHF, Naked Gun and many other 1980s comedies, but these scenes must be absolutely baffling to everyone born after the Soviet Union collapsed. 

Longtime character actor Jack Palance was 73-years-old in 1992 when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in City Slickers. A nice story, but it was his acceptance that cemented his place as an early '90s pop culture legend: After taking the stage, Palance dropped and pounded out a series of one-armed push-ups. Telecast host Billy Crystal turned the stunt into a series of running jokes (“Jack Palance is backstage on the Stairmaster”; "Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign"). The following year’s Oscar telecast opened with Palance dragging a giant Acadamy Awards statuette onto the stage — with Crystal riding on top. 

For a brief time in 1993, Heather DeLoach was a very busy ten-year-old girl. It all started when Blind Melon made her the star of their video for "No Rain," where she played a plump outcast in a bee costume who eventually found a commune of like-minded freaks. She reprised the character onstage a the MTV Video Music Awards and Weird Al's "Bedrock Anthem" video, but soon became a normal teenage girl and went to California State University. She's now an event planner. 

What a pain this was. Some photo developing chains did start offering drive-thru service in an effort to ease the inconvenience of having to take your film in for developing before you could actually see the photos you'd taken. Just don't forget to keep the negatives. You might want doubles someday. 

Phil Collins was the King Midas of pop in the 1980s and the very early 1990s. Everything he touched turned to gold, whether it was solo or with his formerly progressive rock band Genesis. In 1991, they released We Can't Dance, their last album with Phil at the helm. "I Can't Dance" reached Number 7 on the Hot 100 and the video featured the three pasty, forty-something guys from Genesis wearing sunglasses and sport coats as they did a stiff, awkward, coordinated walk. They were mocking their aggressive un-coolness, though to anyone under the age of 28 it must look pretty bizarre. 

Ice-T plays a cop on TV these days, but two decades ago he was a pioneering gangsta rapper that stirred up all kinds of trouble with his 1992 song "Cop Killer." That's what got him mainstream attention, but before that hip-hop fans knew him from the movie Breakin' and his long run of classic singles. "Colors," from the soundtrack to the 1988 Sean Penn movie, was his first in the Billboard Hot 100. VH1 labelled it the 19th greatest hip-hop song of all time.  But there's no such thing as Classic Hip Hop radio, and lots of these songs fade into memory when the fall off the charts. 

It's hard to not feel a little bad for David Faustino. Beyond the fact that the Married With Children star (he played Bud Bundy) stopped growing at 5' 3", he's the only member of the cast not to move onto another huge project. Ed O'Neil has Modern Family, Katey Sagal has Sons of Anarchy and his TV sister Christina Applegate has the Anchorman movies. David Fasutino has straight to DVD disasters like Not Another B Movie, which is even worse than it sounds. 

After a long stint playing a sassy maid on The Jeffersons, Marla Gibbs got her own sitcom where she lives in a Washington, DC apartment building with her family and a bunch of nosey neighbors, including frenemy Sandra Clark, memorably played by Jackee Harry. 227 was one of those shows that everyone seemed to watch when it originally aired, but nobody has seen a second of since it was cancelled. Only the biggest 1980s shows (Cheers, The Cosby Show) continue to air regularly these days, leaving sitcoms like 227 confined to YouTube and a bunch of VHS tapes in your aunt's basement. 

Long before HBO changed television forever with The Sopranos, they used to show far crappier fare like Arli$$. Despite having virtually no critical acclaim or anybody that admitted to watching the show, this Robert Wuhl sitcom about a sports agency somehow lasted six seasons between 1996 and 2002. Today, it's largely known from a repeated reference in a great SNL skit where Norm Macdonald played David Letterman. 

There's been a lot of talk these past few weeks about the lack of black women on Saturday Night Live, but back between 1991 and 1995 they didn't need a man to to wear drag to spoof Tina Turner, Toni Morrison or Whoopi Goldberg. That was the brief reign of Ellen Cleghorne, who had the unfortunate task of trying to stand out during the era of Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Phil Hartman and David Spade. She's been almost completely off the grid in the 2000s, though she did call up Family Guy and go insane when they gently mocked her. 

Post-The Simpsons, TV execs were eager to find other left-field takes on the family sitcom. Thus, Dinosaurs, which followed the exploits of the Sinclairs — a family of working class dinosaurs. The show even, sorta, spawned a catchphrase in Baby Sinclair's infectiously obnoxious "I'm the baby, gotta love me!"

Texting and email have rendered voicemail pretty much redundant, and pushed cassette tape-based answering machines even deeper to the bottom of history's dustbin. The best that can be said about them is that answering machines inspired an awesome Replacements song. 

Blossom tackled a lot of deadly serious topics back in the 1990s, but whenever they needed a light moment Six Lemeure (played by Jenna von Oy) entered the screen. She portrayed Blossom's fast-talking, effortlessly cool best friend who had a crush on her older brother Joey. Every once in a while she'd become an alcoholic or worry she was was pregnant, though things were always resolved by the end of the episode. The actress had a brief career as an ass model (no joke), but is now a happily married mother. 

Has there ever been a more pointless TV character than Baywatch's Hobie? Played by Jeremy Jackson, Hobie was the son of David Hasselhoff's character, Mitch Buchannon. In other words, he was the child on a show devoted to the erotic possibilities of adult chests. 

This 1990 film adaptation of the sordid non-fiction rich-people-behaving-badly book by super lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one hell of a timepiece. Featured an amazingly seductive, lizard-like, and ultimately Oscar-winning performance by Jeremy Irons as accused attempted murderer Claus Von Bülow, it's also got Glenn Close still in her left-field sex symbol prime, and Ron Silver, playing Dershowitz, sporting a truly remarkable Jewfro. 

Watch her seminal Bruce-Willis co-starring Eighties sitcom Moonlighting to see why this Seventies sex symbol renewed her career in the Eighties. The following decade's Chuck Lorre-helmed sitcom Cybill also deserves revisiting. 

If you were casting a movie in the 1980s and you wanted a Robert Loggia-type with a little less edge and a little better comic timing, Dabney Coleman was your man. He had crucial roles in WarGames, Nine to Five, Cloak & Dagger, and countless others. He's in his eighties now and hasn't done much of note in the 2000s, but man was he on fire in the days of VCRs.  

This syndicated TV series, which ran from 1984 to 1995, featured oily Aussie host Robin Leach leading viewers on tours of the gaudy manses of business moguls and celebrities. Pre-Cribs, the show presaged our current all-access obsession with the privates lives of the one percent, though Leach’s signature sign-off, “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams”(delivered in his snooty accent), seems embarrassingly tin-eared in these more economically troubled days.

NBA icon Clyde Drexler didn't have the flashy personality of Charley Barkley, the endorsement deals of Michael Jordan, the huge ego of Magic Johnson or the tear-jerking backstory of Larry Bird. He was simply Clyde the Glide, a key member of the 1992 Dream Team who lead the 1995 Houston Rockets to an NBA Championship. He's a color commentator for Rockers home games today and, unlike Sir Charles, nobody is asking him to host Saturday Night Live these days.

Sometimes a sitcom character comes around that's only meant to last for a few episodes, but the public falls instantly in love with him and he's upgraded to regular cast member. Inevitably, it's someone with a loud personality and some sort of schtick. That's pretty much the story of Nick Moore on Family Ties. Played by Scott Valentine, he was the leather jacket/earring-rocking boyfriend of Mallory Keaton, played by Justine Bateman. He was monosyllabic and the nightmare of her father, but America loved him, though his 1987 spinoff  The Art of Being Nick was extremely short-lived. The Nick Moore experience was like eating a giant bag of marshmallows for dinner. Some things are better in small doses. 

For many millennials, Ferris Bueller's Day Off is about as old a movie as they're likely to watch. Well, imagine an early-1990s TV Ferris Bueller with crazy shirts, gelled hair, near-magical powers and a nerdy sidekick. This was the main character from Parker Lewis Can't Lose, a goofy high school show that's been widely forgotten by everybody that wasn't ten years old in 1991. Nemec was in a near-fatal boating accident earlier this year, but he recovered. 

Holly scored key roles on highly regarded efforts like CBS' Picket Fences (1992-96), the lovely ensemble comedy Beautiful Girls (1996), and hits like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). But it was the actress's relationship with Jim Carrey, her co-star in 1994's Dumb & Dumber, in which the two shared an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss, that made her a brief tabloid fixation. Holly and Carey were married from 1996 to 1997.

Blessed with long flowing golden locks and their father's teen idol looks, Ricky Nelson's teenage sons Gunnar and Matthew Nelson had a monster debut LP in 1990 with After the Rain. Their two hits "After The Rain" and "(Can't Live Without You) Love and Affection" are actually pretty great, but soon grunge hit and they seemed hopelessly dated just one year after they were hot new thing. Today they tour the country with a musical tribute to their father. 

As a member of the Geto Boys, the 3'8" Jamaica-born Bushwick Bill helped usher in the era of Dirty South hip-hop. He shot out one of his eyes during an altercation with his girlfriend, but they used that to their advantage by putting him on the cover of their 1991 LP We Can't Be Stopped getting wheeled around hospital on a bed. The incident led to lots of press and the highest sales of their career. He became a born-again Christian in 2006, though four years after that he was busted with coke. 

Few young actors had a better 1980s than Judge Reinhold. He was in Stripes, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Beverly Hills Cop and even the criminally underrated father-son mind transfer comedy Vice Versa. He was every bit as famous as Tom Hanks, until the 1990s hit him like a ton of bricks. He's spent the last two decades in direct-to-video purgatory as he prays for the long-rumored Beverly Hills Cop IV.  

Once the driving force behind, and main face of, the groundbreaking early '90s FOX sketch comedy show In Living Color, which kicked off the careers of Jim Carrey and Jennifer Lopez, among others, Wayans has focused on behind-the-scenes activities since directing Scary Movie in 2000. Now, he's probably the fifth most recognizable member of his own family, after his brothers Damon Wayans, Marlon Wayans, and Shawn Wayans, as well as his nephew Damon Wayans, Jr.

This raunchy computer game, in which players attempted to help the sleazy title character seduce women, was a key rite of passage for many an adolescent boy. All that cartoonish, pixelated skin!

Back in 1990, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez were equally famous. The two sons of Hollywood legend Martin Sheen graduated from Brat Back movies to blockbusters like Wall Street (Charlie) and Young Guns (Emilio). They teamed up in 1990 for Men At Work, the best movie ever made about two lazy garbage men who stumble into a criminal underworld after finding a toxic waste dumping operation. For whatever reason, nobody has referenced this movie in any capacity since sometime in early 1992. 

Jason London starred as Randall "Pink" Floyd in 1993's Dazed and Confused and as an early virtual reality adopter in the video for Aerosmith's "Amazing," which helped launch Alicia Silverstone's career. He is not to be confused with Jeremy London, his identical twin brother, who played key roles in Kevin Smith's Mallrats and as Neve Campell's bad-boy boyfriend on Party of Five. It's easy to wonder if casting directors knew these were two different actors. 

Long before he became a mildly irascible judge on America's Got Talent, Howard Stern was actually an infamous provocateur. One of his most outrageous moments occurred when the shock jock showed up at the 1992 MTV Music Award dressed as his long-running Fartman character, complete with butt cheeks bared. That moment was re-enacted as the opening for the 1997 film version of Stern's autobiography, Private Parts.

In the age of astoundingly immersive video games, books that gave readers choices may seem about as impressive as a cart-and-horse seems to an F1 driver, but during the Choose Your Own Adventure fantasy series' heyday in the '80s and '90s, the idea that a book presented narrative options was honestly really cool. Do you believe me? If so, go to page 19. If not, go to page 31. 

During U2's great Achtung Baby!/Zooropa-era embrace of Euro affection and role-playing, Bono often adopted the on-stage guise of Mister MacPhisto, a devilish aristocratic character. At stops on the 1993 leg of the band's massive Zoo TV tour, the frontman, clad in creepy white face make-up and red devil horns, would make prank phone calls from the stage. Bono thought enough of MacPhisto that the ghoulish figure appeared in animated form in the video for the band's 1995 single "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." The old devil hasn't been seen since.  

Androgyny and cross-dressing were still considered shocking enough in 1992 that the Davidson's gender-bending performance in that year's The Crying Game resulted in the actor's having a moment in the cultural spotlight. It didn't last much beyond his follow-up role as a pseudo-Egyptian demi-god in the 1994 sci-fi flick Stargate. 

Put it this way: gymnast Kerri Strug was sorta like the 1996 version of Gabby Douglas, with the added bonus of overcoming an injury during the Olympics and then being born aloft by her bear-like Hungarian coach, Bela Karolyi. 

These were about four times bigger than DVDs, way more expensive than VHS tapes, and had to be turned over like vinyl records. So no, they didn't have a long shelf-life as a movie-watching method. 

Spurred by the wild '80s success of Nike's Air Jordans, the sports shoe industry turned into a footwear, uh, arms race by the early '90s. The Reebok Pumps are the most famous example, but upstart shoe company L.A. Gear developed such supposedly high tech lines as the Regulator, the Catapult, and, most infamously, L.A. Lights, which featured LED lights in the heel of the shoe. 

Even rapidly obsolescing digital storage technology like flash drives make floppy discs seem clunky and inefficient. Thank goodness for the cloud. 

A television comedy show about a tiny airport  in Nantucket might seem like a horrible idea, but somehow Wings lasted for eight seasons on NBC. These were the salad days of the network, and despite high ratings it was always buried beneath NBC giants like Seinfeld, Friends and Cheers. Show stars Tim Daly, Steven Weber, Crystal Bernard and Thomas Haden Church continued to work with varying degrees of success, Wings never had much of a second life and even faithful viewers from the 1990s probably can't remember much about it. 

Beep-boop-bip-bip-bip-bip-bip. Creee-yaaaaaa-bzzzzzzz–zowwwww. 

It's highly likely that millennials would recognize the catchy main guitar riff from Dire Straits' 1985 hit "Money for Nothing." But we'll admit that it might be a stretch to expect them to understand how band frontman Mark Knopfler, a balding thirtysomething given to wearing headbands and wristbands, used to  fill arenas full of young people. Pop stars don't really look like dads as much as they used to. 

Before stereos fit in our pockets and stored thousands of songs, they cost hundreds of dollars and required their own shelving units. Most people had a CD changer, a cassette table, a turn table, a receiver and a bunch of speakers, but super fancy folks also had a graphic equalizer. It made anyone feel like a record producer, allowing you to adjust the bass, treble and about eight other things people pretended to understand. It also looked really cool on the shelf, though today it's about as useful as a telegraph machine. 

Children in the early 1990s faced a tough dilemma: Which 16-bit gaming system to buy? Super Nintendo had Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda, but Sega Genesis had the awesomely violent Mortal Kombat. Then there was TurboGrafx-16. It was the RC Cola of the gaming systems, but it did have Bonk's Adventure. That was a pretty cool game where a baby caveman banged enemies with his giant head. It was cool enough that some kids actually bought TurboGrafx-16. It was a decision they lived to regret . Cooler games didn't follow and the system quietly folded in 1994. If your parents refused to buy you a  Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, you were absolutely fucked.

Players used their knowledge of geography and research skills in order to decipher clues that would help them apprehend criminal mastermind Carmen Sandiego in this computer game, which was spun off into a popular children's TV game show. Host Greg Lee and actress Lynne Thigpen, who played the Chief, are pictured here. Do it, Rockapella!

Minuscule boxer Little Mac faces some pretty tough competitors in the Nintendo game Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, from the stampeding King Hippo to Iron Mike Tyson himself. But things start out very easy with Glass Joe, a thirty-eight year old French Boxer with a record of 1 win and 99 losses. It doesn't take many punches to knock him down (he has a bit of a glass jaw, get it?), but things get progressively tougher from there. Anyone who actually lost to Glass Joe had to live with that shame for the rest of their lives.