With grunge styles on the runway, New Kids on the Block headlining a summer tour and spinoffs of family sitcom Boy Meets World and horror franchise Scream bound for the small screen, you’d be tempted to check the calendar to ensure it is indeed 2013 – not 1993.
The decade which saw the ascendancy of boy bands, Britney Spears and plaid shirts as a style statement has permeated the pop cultural landscape of late with a definitive resurgence of all things 1990s.
Old Navy featured 90210 castmates Jennie Garth, Luke Perry and Jason Priestley in humorous TV ads which served as a thinly veiled sendup of their characters from the popular teen soap. And ’90s two-hit wonder Sophie B. Hawkins — best known for “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “As I Lay Me Down” — was central to a recent storyline on NBC sitcom Community, appearing as herself at a dance organized in her name to rival a Sadie Hawkins shindig.
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Some web users have gone digital in expressing their ’90s love, from Buffy and Dawson’s Creek Tumblrs to the Modern Seinfeld Twitter feed, which muses on potential 21st century scenarios and dialogue for Jerry and the gang.
Scott Henderson, associate professor in the department of communication, popular culture and film at Brock University, said while the current fascination with the ’90s may be new, the flashback to the future phenomenon is not.
“I think back to the ’70s and American Graffiti coming out,” he recalled. “That was ’73, and already they’re recycling the 50s…Then Happy Days followed that,” he recalled.
Dawson (James Van Der Beek) crying over Jen, Joey or the way his girlish bangs move in the wind.
Henderson said ’90s nostalgia is a big factor for the present-day resurgence, a movement that seems to be driven by individuals who came of age during the decade.
“It’s almost like reaching back to … a kind of comfort food of pop culture. A familiar, recognizable shared communal element, so that when you meet somebody new you say: ‘Did you watch Pokemon?’ It’s odd that there’s those kinds of connections.”
Matt Stopera, editor of BuzzFeed’s Rewind page, believes the use of social media has also played a key role in reviving current interest.
Stopera pointed to Boy Meets World stars Danielle Fishel (Topanga) and Ben Savage (Cory) whom he said each have a significant social media presence. With the upcoming series spinoff, Girl Meets World, photos were recently posted on Instagram of the cast behind-the-scenes and “everyone just went crazy,” he added.
“One of the coolest things about social media and Twitter and Facebook is all of these old celebrities are on these social networks. So it’s super easy to reach out…and to build a community and a rallying cry around a certain show,” Stopera said from New York.
“You can go onto YouTube and find any old clip that you want. It’s just so accessible and easy. And why I think the ’90s are big is because that’s kind of who’s on social media right now. There’s a lot of young people, a lot of people in their ’20s…(who) generally historically are the tastemakers and who people make stuff around.”
Even those who didn’t grow up during the ’90s have likely been exposed to Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air thanks to prominence of such hits in syndication and DVD box sets. But the on-again, off-again relationship between Rachel and Ross and the comic hijinks of Will and his cousin Carlton tame in comparison to the antics featured in modern-day, envelope-pushing fare like HBO’s Girls.
“We’ve moved into a very different era of television and the way in which we kind of consume media and material that’s on. It seems simple now to look back to that. But that’s always happened as well with TV eras,” said Henderson.
