Halloween: 10 Terrifying Things From The 90s

By Allan Johnstone / October 31, 2013

1. Yer Actual Proper End Times

The 90s might have been a boom time, but having nothing to worry about is boring. Boredom is why Ren was compelled to brutally assault Stimpy. Boredom is why a man spent hundreds of pounds faking an alien autopsy. Boredom is why millions of people around the world started paying attention to the sub-literate musings of a French mentalist who died hundreds of years before Tazos were invented. For those millions of people, the year 2000 wasn't going to be a new beginning. It was going to be the year after the year when everything ended. Nostradamus, a 16th century scholar from Provence, left behind a series of prophecies that predicted, amongst other things, the rise of Hitler and the atomic bomb. As long as you don't pay any attention to any of the words he uses, it certainly looks like he nailed it. Tabloid editors, trying to pass the time after Clinton put his John Thomas away, seized on an especially tenuous sonnet that predicted:

'In the year 1999 and seven months, From the sky will come the great King of Terror.'

The rest of the prophecy goes on to refer to Genghis Khan as said Great King Terror, the same Genghis Khan who had been dead for 276 years before Nosters was born. Not wishing to spoil the little doomsday panic they were engineering, the tabloids omitted that sentence. In spite of the lack of cast iron evidence that 1999 was shaping up as the Apocalypse, there was a great deal of semi-serious, half-jokey 'I'm going to steal a police car and drive it all over the school playing field' kind of chat, and this slightly uneasy scepticism had a massive effect on me, naught but a simple tyke. I remember standing up in class one day and initiating a debate on the upcoming doomsday, before sitting down seconds later to a chorus of shrugs. I was almost disappointed to wake up on July 25th to find that my house hadn't been devoured by Genghis Khan. The tabloids, for their part, moved onto a new scare €“ the Millennium Bug €“ that turned out to be the biggest fuss over nothing in recorded human history. If only Nostradamus had predicted that, he might've saved us all a lot of faffing around with VCRs and digital clocks. If anything good came of the world not ending in 1999, it's probably that I'm able to write down all these amazing memories and relive what a fun and exciting time the 90s was. Oh wait, no. It was hell.