“Honey, it’s the ’90s, remember? Microchips, microwaves, faxes, air phones … ” says Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) to hubby and action god John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard 2. Indeed it was. It’s Hammer time to stroll down memory lane with some of TV and film’s most memorable characters from the ’90s in this new supercut from Everything is Terrible. The ’90s was no time to play hero, you could be anything you wanted to be, and nobody was getting laid — at least according to these guys. Check it.

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Oh, Angela Chase. No one — truly, no one — has been able to wear the scrunchy-faced angst of teenage girlhood quite like her. With her philosophizing voiceovers that constantly walked the line between profoundness and self-absorption, the too-believable My So-Called Life star and her arguably even more lovable cast of friends, enemies, and, well, Brian Krakows were some of the ’90s finest creations. Sure, sometimes MSCL got a little preachy, but the beauty of the show is that it was unafraid to just do high school: no exuberant wealth, no too-attractive 30-year-old stars, no tiptoeing around ugliness. The gang was made of living, breathing high schoolers we could identify with.

The cult favorite was canceled after just 19 episodes, and we doting fans never got to know what happened to our  friends over at Liberty High when they finally grew up. But the injustice ends here: check out where we think they’d be today below.

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Billy Corgan may be known by modern-day tweens as a borderline weirdo who dates the likes of Jessica Simpson, maintains an inter-spiritual website, and does stuff on Twitter (but, hey, what sentient being doesn’t do that, from a tween’s point of view?), yet back in the ’90s, Corgan was renowned for making great music as the lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins — a band that is currently in the process of releasing an 11-EP magnum opus called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. Today is Corgan’s 44th birthday, and to both celebrate and educate we bring you 44 facts about his life.

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1. Everyone seems pleased by how not boring last night’s Emmy Awards were. Especially this opening number featuring Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Jon Hamm, Betty White, Joel McHale, Jorge Garcia, and the cast of Glee. Also worth watching: Jimmy’s farewell in song to the shows we lost: 24, Lost, and Law & Order.
2. This week Pitchfork is going to be counting down their list of the top 200 tracks of the 1990s. Here are the first 50 tracks.
3. John Cusack reports that he’ll play the role of Edgar Allan Poe in a film called The Raven. [via Twitter]
4. Publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have confirmed that the third edition — which a team of 80 lexicographers began working on back in 1989 — may never appear in print. [via The Guardian]
5. Saturday Night Live is adding three new cast members this season: Taran Killam from Scrubs and two comedians from Chicago — Paul Brittain and Vanessa Bayer. [via NYP]

Bonus link: Jersey Circus

It’s no secret that children have ridiculously bad taste. They wear towels as capes, favor pigtails with scrunchies, and worship at the altars of false pop idols. They talk to their stuffed animals. They eat pasta with butter — exclusively. At least we did. So it’s not too surprising then that in the last 50 years there have been a lot of really tacky gift crazes catering to that most tasteless of all age groups.

Check out our list of the ten most retrospectively embarrassing toys — each of these was a top seller at Christmas — if not the top seller — and each makes us cringe deeply when we think about how badly we (or our parents) wanted them. What were we thinking?

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On Friday night the New Museum and n + 1 bring you The ’90s vs. the ’90s, a panel talk that will include Michael Azerrad, Mark Greif, Emily Gould, A.S. Hamrah, Marisa Meltzer, and Aaron Lake Smith, and will examine the legacy of the decade’s pop culture touchstones — from the “Dirty Boots” video to Kurt Cobain’s suicide note to those Tickle Me Elmo dolls — on who we are today. After the jump we talk to Aaron, whose popular fanzines Big Hands have been called “an ongoing treatise on disappointment,” about the ubiquitous obsession with Generation X, the WTO riots in Seattle, and the blue hair he rocked back in high school. Read More »