The Totally Sweet ’90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to “Whatever,” the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Brian Bellmont Page A

FACT: A Dippin’ Dots Frozen Dot Maker lets you cook up a version of the treat at home, but actual liquid nitrogen does not seem to be involved.

Discovery Zone
    F orget the mind-numbing bleep-bloop of arcades. At indoor play-center chain Discovery Zone, kids got to run, slide, and jump like the little wild animals they were, burning calories and blasting boredom along the way. Who can forget that first-ever jump into a ball pit, swimming through the brightly colored circles like a happy gumball? Or crawling across the marshmallowy mats that were nothing like the rock-hard versions we knew from gym class? You could swing on trapezes, leap in bounce houses, or chase your little sister through different maze levels like mutant hamsters in a Habitrail.
    Discovery Zone let imaginative kids write their own mentalscreenplays that they’d then enlist friends to help carry out. Okay, we’re moon explorers, and now we’re diving into a crater! Or: There’s a pirate treasure chest buried in this ball pit, and the first person to dive to the bottom gets it! DZ was a crazily creative, gigantic jungle gym, and for a certain segment of 1990s kids, it seems as if every friend you had hosted their birthday party there.
    Of course, it was too good to last. Founded in 1990, the chain filed for bankruptcy mid-decade, and many locations were bought by Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza parlor arcade chain. Is it any wonder that America has a child obesity epidemic? RIP, DZ.
    STATUS: It’s gone, but elements of Discovery Zone live on in places like McDonald’s PlayPlace, Gymboree, certain pizza parlors, and various arcades.
    FUN FACT: An early slogan promised “Funbelievable fitness for kids!”

“Don’t Copy That Floppy!”
    T he two kid stars of this classic anti-piracy video appear to have never seen a computer before in their lives, simply mashing their hands randomly down on its keyboard. When they attempt to copy a game, MC Double Def DP, the whitest black rapper ever, delivers a cringeworthy rap about the evils of piracy, name-checking classic games such as
The Oregon Trail
and
Tetris
, all apparently while suffering a shoulder seizure.
    To send the video over the top, the rap pauses to let nerdy programmers drone on about their jobs, then finishes up with the kind of special effects that used to exist only on AOL home pages with dancing hamsters. We’re pretty sure that for a background, the cameraman just propped up a Lisa Frank folder.
    In the end, the kids decide to pay for the game, since then it will come with a manual. Because that’s what kids of the ’90s really wanted, an unreadable, jargon-filled, phone-book-sized computer game manual. Wrote a commenter on YouTube: “Well, I guess it worked. No one is copying floppies anymore.”
    STATUS: In 2009, “Don’t Copy That 2” was released, in which teens laugh at the original video and learn about how software pirates can go to jail. Also, there are Klingons.
    FUN FACT: M. E. Hart, the actor who plays MC Double Def DP in the video, has a degree in Russian language and a law degree. Nyet!

Doritos 3D
    I magine how excited the food scientists at Frito-Lay must have been when they invented Doritos 3D in 1997, giving each other orange-fingered high-fives and relieved that they finally had a three-dimensional snack to rub in the faces of their Planters Cheez Ball-hawking competitors.
    The snacks were a little Bugle-y, but instead of being horn-shaped, these were puffy pillows of corn that resembled rounded triangles with a bad case of gas. You’d crunch into them, hit the hollow center, and then chomp through the other side. It was like biting into a Christmas ornament, only with shards of zesty ranch-flavored glass. Some of us gobbled them plain. Some of us dipped. Some of us cracked the little guys open and filled them with squirt cheese. And all of us, whether we’ll admit it or not, tossed, flicked, or chucked