It was Tickle Me Elmo, a Sesame Street spinoff that launched a must-have craze not seen since the Cabbage Patch Kids a decade prior. In the winter of 1996, parents across America trampled each other on Black Friday and scoured stores in vain for the hottest Christmas toy of the year-and perhaps of all time. Although Milton Bradley first unveiled a version of the game in the 1970s, Crossfire gained worldwide fame during, and is still associated with, the 1990s. Combatants blasted metal balls from opposite sides of the board to score pucks in the opponent's net. Tabletop action game Crossfire was a staple of rainy days in the '90s. The devious and unsupervised McCallister used Talkboy to slow down the playback speed and change the pitch of his voice to mimic that of an adult, which let him reserve a luxury hotel suite over the phone. Macaulay Culkin's character Kevin McCallister made Talkboy a must-have toy when he showed off the technology in the movie's sequel. Toy cassette player/recorder Talkboy was originally created in 1992 as a non-working prop for that year's blockbuster Christmas movie Home Alone. The ball counted the repetitions so kids could keep score. Any kids who had one used their leg to whip the ball around and skip over it with the other foot. Sort of a lazy person's jump rope, Skip-It-which debuted in the late '80s but rose to stardom in the '90s-went around one ankle like a rubbery ball and chain. Soon, children across the United States were racing to keep up with increasingly fast and anxiety-provoking directives to "twist it," "pass it," and, of course, "bop it." Skip-It Unlike those that came before, the clunky, handheld contraption was a multiplayer game. Games like Simon had long challenged kids to keep up with electronic commands, but Bop It upped the ante when it arrived on the scene in 1997. In 1991, the world met the Nerf bow and arrow, followed by guns, missiles, and blasters, all of which caused surprisingly little damage as they whizzed across living rooms for the rest of the decade and beyond. In 1989, however, the company triggered an arms race among children everywhere with the introduction of Blast-a-Ball, which could shoot foam projectiles. billed as "the world's first indoor ball," Nerf was a round ball until the game-changing Nerf football arrived in 1972. Originally invented in 1969 as what Parker Bros. The first Super Soaker went on sale in 1990, turning backyards into battlefields across the world-about 200 million have been sold to date. A mechanical and nuclear engineer named Lonnie Johnson invented the device while working on a water-based heat pump for NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter. You may also like: Best '90s cartoons Super SoakerĪ member of the National Toy Hall of Fame since 2015, the Super Soaker made all water guns that came before it look feeble and meek-and the hydro-cannon's roots are anything but humble. Here's a look at the toys that defined the '90s. Some toys, like Tamagotchi and Pogs, came and went, while others, like Nerf and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are still staples in bedrooms and backyards today. Dolls, stuffed animals, and action figures were as popular in the '90s as they'd been in the '80s, '70s, and earlier-in fact, some of the biggest Christmas crazes of the decade were as low-tech as the Cabbage Patch Kids or mood rings that came before them. Some of the biggest toys of the decade, however, were just modified versions of things that had been around forever. Personalized interactive toys and pocket-sized electronic games made the blocks, Slinkys, and Lincoln logs of old feel like relics. By the end of the decade, those same people were sending text messages, downloading songs onto MP3 players, and using high-speed modems to perform Google searches online. At the beginning of the '90s, people stopped at payphones to check in with loved ones during long car rides, which they survived with cassette tapes and FM radios. In terms of technology, the 1990s was one of the most transformative decades in human history-it was the bridge between the analog and digital eras. The Star Wars x Barbie Doll is seen during the "Barbie's Dream House" at Galeries Lafayette Haussmann on Novemin Paris, France.
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