Throwback: 12 Of My Favorite Toys From the 90's/2000's!

Photo by Angelina on Unspash

Ah, childhood. We all have such nostalgia for when we were younger, no matter what age or generation we came from. Times were just simpler then. We didn’t have to work, pay bills, pay taxes, or buy groceries, or just worry about life in general like we all do now (why is that a thing? Who decided that adulting should be so complicated and difficult? I’d like to have a word with them!) All we had to do was go to school and then play. And playing was the best. Whether it was just being creative and using our imagination or playing with toys and using our imaginations, you have to admit, that there was something magical about toys from the 90’s and 2000’s (or at least I think so!). It was right on the cusp of old school toys and technology, so we had the both of best worlds. A magical, wonderful mix of toys that were both classic and modern and just perfect for us grown up millennials.

Here are a few of my very favorite toys from when I was a kid back in the 90’s (and I’m just adding the 2000’s, just in case. There was a bit of a crossover back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, plus, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Not that I’m old. I just...have better things to remember now! Good save, self!)

Barbies

I swear, I had this Barbie as a kid! Remember how those birds that balanced on your fingers were a thing then??

Oh, Barbie. We loved you and yet had no idea how bad you were for our body image later on. But you had the most fashion forward outfits and hair (at the time), the neatest accessories, and the coolest jobs ever! (Who else could be an astronaut, ice skater, Olympic gymnast, teacher, and a doctor? Only Barbie!) Thanks to Barbie, her forever boyfriend Ken, her friends and family (why did Barbie have so many sisters? Skipper, Kelly, and probably more? Who were her parents and why did they keep popping out kids?), we were able to imagine fantastic scenarios with our friends and create our own little almost grown-up worlds. And who can forget dreaming of owning a Barbie Dreamhouse with a freaking elevator? I’m still jealous of any girl who had that growing up! And who could forget that wonderful plastic smell when you opened up a brand new Barbie from her box. Ah. There was nothing like it!

Pound Puppies & Pound Purries

Look at those sad, "adopt me!" puppy dog eyes. No wonder all of us millennials love our pets more than our significant others!

To be fair, I believe these toys were first released in the 80’s but I remember loving them in the 90’s! These sad, big eyed puppies and kittens all needed homes and would look at you desperately and lovingly from their cardboard kennels in the toy section. How could you not want to adopt one and take one home? I remember having both Pound Puppies and Pound Purries and loving them to no end. It’s also made me realize why I now want to adopt every stray animal I see as an adult and give them a home. Damn you, Pound Puppies and Purries! I don’t have enough money for all that kibble!

Tamagotchi & Nano Pets

I think the secret jobs of Nano Pets and Tamagotchis were to really train us to take care of ourselves as adults. Sadly, in real life, we can't start over and get a new life- I mean, pet.

Now here we get to the early and wonderful technology of the 90’s/2000’s! Stuffed animals like Pound Puppies were cool and all, but what if you could take that animal and make it a digital little pet of black pixels on a screen in a round piece of plastic that was also a keychain, and play with it, clean up after it, and feed it through a series of pressing little buttons? Even better! Tamagotchis and Nano Pets were all the rage when I was in grade school and all the coolest kids had them. I remember wanting one so bad, but I really wanted a Nano Pet, since you could pick your animal, whereas Tamagotchis were little alien creatures (or so I remember). Then I finally got a Nano Pet on one of my birthdays from a classmate and it was- a Nano baby. A little disappointed, I still relished the idea of having my own Nano Pet. It was such a status symbol! And then I lost it. I lost my Nano Baby. I think this may be the reason I don’t want kids. I’d just lose them like I lost my Nano Baby. Gosh, I hope she’s doing alright. She must be in her twenties by now! They grow up so fast...

Sky Dancers

She's beauty, she's grace, she'll fly up into your face and take your eye out- said all of our moms.

 If you don’t know what a Sky Dancer is, I’m so, so sorry. A Sky Dancer was the coolest toy from my childhood (well, one of them anyway) and it was basically a fairy (or a water nymph or something very girly and cutesy) with wings that were located in the front and back, and when you put her on her base, you could pull a string and she’d spin around and around, lifting off and flying around with her wings spread out. They were very hard to control, but also so much fun to set flying. This was also another must have toy and status symbol of being a kid. “Oh, you have one Sky Dancer? That’s cute, I have five!” Also, if you can find it, please check out the video of the little girl playing with her Sky Dancer and it flying into the fireplace. It makes me laugh so hard every time.

Skip-It

This was a legit toy and the outfit this girl was wearing was legit too. At the time. Now, I can't vouch for it. But scrunchies are back in style, so who's laughing now?

No no, this isn’t a cousin to the Bop-It (though that was also a cool- and frustrating- toy back in the day!). The Skip-It was the cool version of a jump rope, where you put the round plastic ring around your foot, and swung the ball type thing at the end around your feet, using your outer leg to skip over ball. If you were really cool, you had the kind with the counter on it, which counts every time you skipped over the ball. And guess what- mine had the counter on it. Oh yeah. I was a pretty awesome kid back then! The only problem with Skip-Its was when you missed the skip and the hard ball slammed into the back of your heel or your shin. OUCH.

Polly Pocket

I had this exact one as a kid and the fact that it lit up (batteries not included!) made it even more special! Plus the gazebo lit up too. I love gazebos.

A classic. What little 90's girl didn’t want or have at least one or two Polly Pocket toys? I know I had quite a few (thanks to hand me downs from my older sister). Each Polly Pocket came in either a shell like case (or another fun shaped case) and opened up into a small scene or scenario. Think Cinderella-esque castle that lit up and came with a princess and a prince (see above), or a pool park with a lazy river and little moving rides (I also had that one!). Each Polly Pocket character was teeny-tiny and bent at the waist and was a total choking hazard, which was why years later they redid Miss Polly and friends and made her bigger, so she could now wear different items of clothing. But it just doesn't match the mini-magic worlds that Little Polly and those Pockets held.

Littlest Pet Shop

I swear, I had a few Littlest Pet Shop cat/kitten sets, a bird cage one, a bunny burrow one, and a hamster one. I loved that the cat ones usually came with litter boxes AND a scratching post. How realistic! But where's the pooper scooper? And the vet bill(s)?

If you were anything like me as a kid, when you grew up, you either wanted to be an artist or a veterinarian (those two go hand in hand, obviously). Or a close second, you wanted to own a pet store! (Even though now we know to adopt, not shop, when choosing a pet!) But the Littlest Pet Shop toys certainly made me want to be the proud business owner of a pet store that sold animals of all kinds, including dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, fish, probably reptiles and probably even some weird exotic ones too, like arctic creatures such as whales and penguins. The toys were all super cute and small and you could buy them as a set of one animal toy with accessories, or even a set with parts of the store or little habitats for your animals. They still sell Littlest Pet Shop toys, but sadly they’ve had a makeover and are now bigger (again, must have been a choking hazard thing again!) with weird, large eyes and overly large heads, too. Sigh. Remember when we used to make toys look like the actual animals they actually resemble? Kids these days!

Quints

I don't remember the Quints AND bed sold separately! What a scam! Anyway, MY Quints toys were brunettes. Just FYI.

How do I describe Quints? They were the strangest concept and yet so popular! They were a set of five, very small baby dolls, a mix of boy and girl dolls (sometimes. Or maybe some were all girls or all boys? Who knows!), and they were quintuplets. Why any child would want to play with five tiny baby siblings confuses me now, but I remember loving my Quints dolls! In the box, they all came in one bed, and mine were a special kind where you could feed them water from a bottle and then they “peed” out the water. I thoroughly enjoyed feeding them, sans diaper, and just enjoyed watching the water come out their bottoms. Weird? Yes. But then again, I was a weird child. I also loved tucking them into that giant bed that they all shared, which thinking about that now, seems very unsafe for five babies. But I guess five individual cribs would not have been as cute.

Beanie Babies

I never had a Beanie Baby bear, but oh did I want one. But what kind of kid wanted the Jerry Garcia bear? Except for me, the daughter of a Grateful dead fan. I love my dad, but I really don't understand him.

Beanie Babies!!!! The holy grail of 90’s and 2000’s toys! They took the world by storm and not just kids! Adults were in on the action too! The adults were all for Beanie Babies for their value (because apparently everyone thought that Beanie Babies would be the equivalent of gold bars in the not-so-distant future), but kids were all for collecting. You had to have one of each and as many as you could. I didn’t have the biggest collection of them, but I treasured each and every one of them as if they were holy relics of some bygone saint that grants miracles. I even had the clear display boxes and tag protectors! Sadly, Beanie Babies did not increase in value over time, and my collection slowly disappeared as I lost interest and gave them away. But I will never forget that rush of getting a new Beanie Baby and adding it to my collection. Plus, who could forget the adorable names they all had plus the cute little poems that were included on each tag??

Pocahontas EVERYTHING

I had this doll! And a Pocahontas lunchbox that I sadly can't find a picture of but it was really cool, you guys!

If you thought Frozen was a phenomenon now, then you weren’t a kid in the 90’s when Pocahontas came out. It was the sh*t. And I mean that in the best way possible, considering that the movie was incredibly historically inaccurate and actually very disrespectful to Pocahontas’s actual true and tragic story (I guess they tried to make up for that in the sequel but apparently that flopped because it leaned more towards the truth. No one wants that, right?). I remember being obsessed with the movie. My very first CD I ever owned was the Pocahontas soundtrack. I had Pocahontas hiking boots, a Pocahontas lunch box, and a Pocahontas Barbie doll. I was Pocahontas obsessed and is probably the reason why I still want a pet raccoon, despite them being very troublesome, but cute, pets. And illegal where I live. Dang it!

Pokemon Cards

Apparently, there's a game to be played with these, not just to collect them. Huh.

Gotta catch ‘em all! And boy did we try back in the day! Even if you didn’t play the card game, you had to collect the cards, regardless of whether you understood it or not (okay, so I knew some of the Pokemon monsters/creatures/things and watched the show sometimes, but the cards were where it was at). All us kids really knew was that some of the cards were valuable, and we needed all of the cards. You were pretty cool (and organized) if you had your cards in a really cool binder with clear card holders so you could display your super rare and holographic cards for all to see. The whole thing was such a phenomenon that it spawned toys, movies, golden Pokemon cards in their own Pokeballs at Burger King (yes, I had one and cherished it), soundtracks featuring the best late 90’s pop artists EVER (Baby Spice, B*Witched, M2M, anyone?). And it still blows my mind to this day that Pokemon is back and better than ever with kids like it was back in my day. Maybe not with cards, but with Pokemon Go, memorabilia, collectibles, toys, and the Detective Pickachu movie- Pokemon lives on! (And probably never really went away, I just didn’t realize it. I guess the world doesn't revolve around me and my interests, sadly.)

Sand Art

Was there a point to this? Who knows! But it was soooo cool at the time!

Okay, this is a weird one, but I needed to include it! As a kid, amongst all the other toys I loved, I also was obsessed with craft making kits. Whether it was that weird pot-holder kit that almost every kid had and parents begrudgingly used them (not because they didn’t love their kids, but because the pot-holder themselves were so misshapen and ugly) and friendship bracelet kids (or if you were really lucky- make your own lip gloss or candy kits!), kits were my jam! (Yet there were no jam making kit for kids. Huh. Lost opportunity there.) I loved being creative as a kid and kits were my way of expressing myself in a total company manufactured way. But one of the kits I most remember from my youth were sand art kits! Essentially, the kit came with multiple plastic bottles of varying sizes and shapes, and with packs of different colored sand. You could then pour the sand, layer by layer, with a funnel, into the bottles, making different layered designs. What were you supposed to do with these beautifully colored bottles after you popped the plastic cork in ‘em? I guess just display your wonderful artistic talent for putting different colored sand in bottles in a somewhat pretty pattern? Also, some of the bottles were small and could be made into necklaces, which is something I’m sure every kid wanted to wear and none of the colored sand ever spilled out. The 90’s were a weird time, you guys.

Those were just twelve of some of the toys I could think of (I’m sure if I had given myself more time I could have come up with so many more toys!) that I loved as a kid back in the 90's/2000's! These posts are always such a trip down memory lane and reminds me of how much toys have changed from then and till now (I feel like all the toys they have today talk and make noise. With waaaay better technology. These lucky kiddos nowadays!) Plus, it’s amazing to realize how important toys were in our lives! They really dictated who you were in school, your “status” if you had this toy or that. Oh, fads. Let’s just let toys be toys and be fun to play with! (Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!)

What were your favorite toys from back in the day? And what was the coolest toy that you could own back when you were a kid? Let me know in the comments and thank you for reading this total random nostalgia trip! If you have any other 90's/2000's nostalgia ideas for blog posts ideas for me to write, let me know!

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