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It's the 1990s. Everyone is playing pogs, sporting blue eye shadow, and prepping for Y2K. Believe it or not, '90s kids aren't the only people who remember this iconic decade. But let's see which parts we remember correctly, and which cliches are purely fictional. Host Justin Dodd (@juddtoday) breaks down some common myths and misconceptions about the '90s. 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:37 Furbys could record your conversations 00:03:28 O.J. Simpson got acquitted because of ill-fitting gloves 00:06:36 Y2K fears were completely unfounded 00:08:50 ’90s kid = Millennial 00:10:40 Al Gore claimed he invented the internet 00:14:14 Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are identical twins About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Follow Mental Floss: Website: https://www.mentalfloss.com/ Mental Floss Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Mental Floss Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mental_floss/ Mental Floss TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mental_floss Mental Floss X: https://twitter.com/mental_floss Mental Floss Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss Misconceptions About the '90s | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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0:00
Christmas Day, 1998. You're splayed out on the floor of your family room, surrounded by a sea of crumpled wrapping paper and a fleet of toys and games
0:09
Your older sister's stationed at the bathroom mirror, testing out a new eye shadow. It's blue
0:14
You can hear the tinny, muffled voices of Beastie Boys emanating from the headphones of your older brother's new Sony Walkman
0:20
You've eaten six Christmas cookies, and it's not even 10 a.m. Life is good
0:24
Just then, a team of federal agents sporting dark suits and even darker sunglasses
0:28
burst through the front door and makes a beeline right toward you. You're confused. You're only nine years old. What could they possibly want with you
0:35
But they don't want you. They want your Furby. Sorry, kiddo. This is a matter of national security, one G-man says as he pries the furry animatronic from your hands
0:45
And with that, the agents disappear as quickly as they came. Okay, fine. The government did not go around seizing kids Furbies on Christmas or any other day
0:53
but it did buy into the possibility that the beloved bird-like toy could pose a threat to
0:58
national security. Hi, I'm Justin Dodd, certified 90s kid and former Furby dad. The last decade of
1:05
the second millennium gave us a lot. The rise of the World Wide Web, the fall of the USSR
1:10
multiple rom-coms starring Julia Roberts. I mean, that smile can really light up a room
1:14
No misconception there. But with such seismic shifts in technology and culture came a fair
1:19
number of misconceptions, from the idea that Furbies could function as spies to the myth
1:24
that O.J. Simpson got acquitted all because of some ill-fitting gloves. Let's get into it
1:37
Furbies could record your conversations. In 1997, designers David Hampton and Caleb Chung
1:44
conceived of a Tamagotchi-type toy that you could pet. They imbued this ambiguous creature with the
1:49
power of limited speech and called it a Furby, a variation on their working title, Furball
1:55
The invention soon got sold to Tiger Electronics, which itself soon got sold to Hasbro. By the 1998
2:01
holiday season, Furby was the hottest toy on the market. But the finer workings of this technological
2:06
wonder were lost on the casual consumer, and rumors exaggerated its capabilities
2:11
The simplest misunderstanding was that Furby could record conversations, which it literally could not
2:17
In January 1999, the National Security Agency went so far as to ban the toy from its Maryland headquarters
2:24
According to the NSA's memo, or Furby Alert, as the media dubbed it
2:28
personally-owned photographic, video, and audio recording equipment are prohibited items. This includes toys, such as Furby's, with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound to mimic the original signal
2:39
The fear was that Furbies would pick up classified intel on the premises and start spewing it out willy-nilly whenever NSA employees took them off-site
2:48
Tiger Electronics president Roger Schiffman did his best to set the record straight, saying that
2:53
Although Furby is a clever toy, it does not record or mimic voices
2:57
The NSA did not do their homework. Furby is not a spy
3:01
Furby worries weren't confined to the NSA. day. Some healthcare professionals thought Furby's could mess with medical equipment
3:07
and the FAA banned them during takeoff and landing just in case they could somehow screw
3:12
up plane instruments. And not all the misconceptions were tech-based. Another prevalent claim was
3:17
that Furby fur came from dogs and cats. Folks, the fur was acrylic. As one company's spokesperson
3:24
joked, yep, a lot of acrylics were killed in the name of Furby's
3:28
O.J. Simpson Got Acquitted Because of Ill-Fitting Gloves On June 15, 1995, in the middle of a Los Angeles courtroom, O.J. Simpson tried on a pair of
3:38
leather gloves, one of which was bloodstained. They were kind of small. And in the words of
3:43
Simpson defense attorney Johnny Cochran if it doesn fit you must acquit which is exactly what the jury did in early October Some 150 million people tuned in to watch the former football star
3:53
be declared not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman
3:59
But the verdict was never just about the gloves, nor was the statement, if it doesn't fit
4:04
you must acquit. Sure, it seems strange that Simpson would stab someone to death wearing a
4:08
pair of gloves that he could hardly wriggle his fingers into. So did a number of other details
4:13
about the case. Actually, the whole process to collect and secure evidence was kind of a mess
4:18
Photos were unlabeled, multiple items got tossed in the same bag, and police draped one of Nicole
4:23
Brown Simpson's own blankets over her body, potentially compromising any evidence that
4:29
might have been collected, since her husband presumably could have used the blanket previously
4:34
As the Crime Museum pointed out, sloppy maneuvering at the scene caused more bloody
4:38
shoe prints to be left behind by LAPD than by the perpetrator. A cross-contamination nightmare from
4:44
start to finish and a golden opportunity for the defense to poke holes in the prosecution's case
4:50
Cochran even went so far as to float the notion that blood and other evidence had been planted
4:55
As Cochran explained, the ill-fitting gloves were a metaphor of sorts for all the other ways in which
5:00
the prosecution's theories just didn't add up. Like the defining moment in this trial, the day
5:06
co-prosecutor Christopher Darden asked Mr. Simpson to try on those gloves and the gloves didn't fit
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remember these words, if it doesn't fit, you must acquit. Now, a little known fact, the idea was
5:18
actually suggested to Cochran by a colleague, Gerald F. Ullman, who wrote that while the glove
5:23
wasn't a home run from an evidentiary standpoint, it gave them a theme for closing arguments
5:28
pointing out that the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt could be paraphrased as
5:33
if it doesn't fit, you must acquit. As Ullman broke it down in his book, If It Doesn't Fit
5:38
Lessons from a Life in the Law, the prosecution faced the challenge. There are lots of places
5:43
where the evidence doesn't fit the picture they want the jury to see. The glove itself might not
5:48
have been as important as leaving the jury with some kind of earworm. According to Cochran
5:53
at one point the team toyed with, if it doesn't make sense, you must fine for the defense
5:58
The catchy couplet they landed on became a mantra that Cochran intoned multiple times during his
6:02
closing argument in late September. By the end, it couldn't have been clear to jurors that if they
6:07
had any doubts about Simpson's guilt, they were legally required to find him innocent, which
6:12
of course, they did. And don't get me wrong, the glove was definitely a factor in the decision
6:17
but jury members weren't swayed by that alone. As juror Lionel Cryer told reporters at the time
6:22
it was garbage in, garbage out. We felt there were a lot of opportunities for either contamination
6:27
of evidence, samples being mixed or stored together. And as I always say, if it's garbage
6:33
in, garbage out, that might equate to reasonable doubt. Y2K fears were completely unfounded. In the spirit of conserving digital storage space
6:42
developers set a lot of early software to use dates with two-digit years rather than the full
6:47
four. 1975 was just 75, 1989 was 89, and so on. As the 90s progressed, people began to wonder what
6:54
what happened in the year 2000. Any program that involved calendar dates would surely interpret the
6:59
year as 1900, leading to, well, problems. And people weren't just worried that this so-called
7:04
Y2K bug would cause a major administrative headache, incorrect records and stuff like that
7:09
They were wary of just about any machine or system that functioned with the help of computer chips
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Could there be plane crashes, power grid failures, medical equipment malfunctions, a full-fledged apocalypse? It wasn't clear exactly how the glitch might manifest
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though that didn't stop enterprising individuals from hawking Y2K survival kits and guides
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But companies and government entities had been working hard to update systems in order to preempt disaster In 1999 the U Department of Commerce estimated that the price tag for this endeavor for the U alone between 1995 and 2001 would be billion
7:45
Plenty of economists felt that was too low. So it all seemed pretty silly when January
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2000 came and went more or less without incident. Okay, there were some incidents. The U.S. Naval
7:56
Observatory website proclaimed the date to be January 1st, 19,100 for like an hour. A Danish
8:02
newborn baby was briefly 100 years old in hospital records. A New York video store charged a guy more
8:07
than $91,000 for a century overdue VHS rental of the general's daughter. He obviously was not
8:13
expected to pay. The errors might seem negligible to the point of being funny, but they do help
8:18
prove that the Y2K bug wasn't a totally baseless generator of societal panic. And tech experts
8:24
generally agree that there would have been way more issues if so much effort hadn't been put
8:28
into preventing them, effort that most people weren't aware of and or didn't understand
8:33
As technology forecaster Paul Sappho told Time, the Y2K crisis didn't happen precisely because
8:39
people started preparing for it over a decade in advance, and the general public, who was busy
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stocking up on supplies and stuff, just didn't have a sense that the programmers were on the job
8:50
90s kid equals millennial. Spend enough time on social media and you'll eventually scroll
8:56
past the picture of, say, Dunkaroos or Pogs or a stack of Disney VHS tapes and clamshell
9:01
cases or any other product that was popular in the 90s. With it is some variation of this
9:06
caption only 90s kids will remember. I could talk about what the ubiquity of those posts say about our collective obsession with
9:12
nostalgia culture or our desperation for community in an increasingly lonely digital world or
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just our potentially troubling fixation on defining personal identity by way of labels
9:23
But you can ponder those happy topics on your own time. I'm here to talk about the term 90s kid
9:30
Some people consider anyone born between 1990 and 1999 to fit the bill
9:34
To others, a true 90s kid is someone whose formative childhood years fell during that decade
9:40
Since there's no formal definition, neither can really be called right or wrong
9:43
But using 90s kid as a straight up synonym for millennial is not really accurate
9:48
Anybody born between 1981 and 1996 is officially a millennial. plenty of those people do see themselves as 90s kids. If 1981 is your birth year
9:57
you definitely spent many of your formative years in the decade. But someone born in 1978
10:02
could say the same, but they're a member of Gen X. If you showed up between 1997 and 1999
10:07
on the other hand, you're a Gen Zer. But you can still claim the 90s kid title on the grounds that
10:12
you were born in that decade. Plus, it's not like all the cultural touchstones of the 90s
10:16
vanished on January 1st, 2000. Dunkaroos weren't discontinued in the U.S. until 2012
10:22
and I'm happy to report they've since been brought back. In other words, you elder Gen Zers have roughly as much right to call yourself a 90s kid
10:29
as someone born in, say, 91 or 92. Just don't do it on Facebook, or elder millennials will probably start arguing with you in the comments
10:37
Who am I kidding? You don't use Facebook. Al Gore claimed he invented the internet
10:43
In March 1999, then-Vice President Al Gore appeared on CNN's Late Edition
10:47
to talk about his presidential aspirations, When host Wolf Blitzer asked why Democrats should back Gore for the nomination over former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, this was part of his answer
10:58
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet
11:03
Largely thanks to a Wired article that spotlighted that portion of the interview, politicians and pundits started roasting Gore for the claim that he invented the Internet
11:12
What he probably should have said was something like, I helped secure important government funding for the Internet at a key point in its development
11:19
which he did by sponsoring the 1991 High Performance Computing and Communications Act Some of the cool million that the Act granted to high performance computing went to the National Center for Supercomputing
11:32
Applications. Its developers, including future Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, ended up making Mosaic, the first popular web browser to feature inline images
11:41
So if Al Gore didn't invent the internet, who did? Thomas Edison? Iron Man's dad? A Furby
11:47
none of the above. It wasn't really any one person. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. Department
11:52
of Defense developed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET. Considered
11:58
a precursor of today's internet, ARPANET used phone lines to connect physically distant computers
12:03
within the Pentagon's research network. That said, Vinton Kerff, who worked on ARPANET
12:08
and his collaborator Robert Kahn are sometimes cited as the fathers of the internet we know and
12:13
love. In the 1970s, they devised two new processes that worked together to package and transmit data
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Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, often abbreviated as TCPIP. The protocols didn't rely on phone lines or require computers to be the same brand or even on the same
12:29
network in order to swap information. It was a whole new mode of communication for the world's
12:34
computers. For what it's worth, Kerf and Khan aren't salty about Gore taking credit for making
12:39
the internet a thing. They actually supported his claim. In the wake of the controversy
12:44
the pair released a statement detailing his role as an early internet champion dating back to the
12:48
1970s, saying, Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the internet
12:54
and to promote and support its development. The vice president deserves credit for his long-term
12:59
and consistent articulation of the potential value of the internet to American citizens and industry
13:05
and, indeed, to the rest of the world. Gore might have been guilty in one interview of inflating his role in the birth of the Internet
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but his contributions were important enough to earn him a place in the Internet Hall of Fame
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He, Kerf, and Khan were all part of the very first induction class in 2012
13:21
Also on the list that year was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist
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who invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Not long after that, he developed HTML, the markup language used to create webpages
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and make your MySpace look really rad. Bonus misconception, World Wide Web is not a cute, catchy synonym for internet
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I mean, it is cute and catchy, but it's part of a larger whole. Basically, the internet is a massive global network
13:46
where information gets shared between computers. The World Wide Web is one place you can go to access that information
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In other words, the World Wide Web comprises websites full of content that gets transmitted across the internet
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It's not unlike how a Walmart houses Lunchables that traveled across many a highway in a delivery truck
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Okay, it's a little unlike that. You know, maybe Sir Tim could invent a way to teleport Lunchables across the internet next
14:11
I am getting off topic. Next misconception. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are identical twins
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Finally, here's some vindication for all the people who've spent the last 30 years or so boasting
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about how easy it is to tell Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen apart
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The breakout stars of Full House and countless twin-tastic tween movies are not identical twins at all. They're fraternal or dizygotic, meaning they came from two separate
14:37
eggs. In other words, they only share half their genome and should only really look as similar as
14:42
any other two close-in-age siblings. Apparently, they're slightly different heights. They don't
14:46
have the same dominant hand either. Ashley is right-handed. Mary-Kate is left-handed
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I personally was rocked by this revelation. I also learned that there are Olsen truthers out
14:56
there who insist that the sisters are, in fact, identical. They look the same to me. I don't know
15:01
what to believe anymore. Does it even take two? That's it for this episode of Misconceptions
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If you've got an idea for a future installment of the series, drop it in the comments below. Seriously, we're running out of decades to do
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