iGeneration: Why 2000s Kids Can't Hang

If you know me personally, which let's face it, most of you do because you read this blog as a personal favor to me (which in no way diminishes my appreciation), then you know that I am often surrounded by an entourage of dance marathoners. But while it may come as a surprise that there are people who voluntarily spend time with me, I do have other friends at Carolina. Most of my time on campus not spent in the Carolina FTK office was spent in Carroll Hall, home of the UNC J School. So for the record, I would like it noted that I have exactly 1 friend in the J School. I have plenty of friends that I met and then later discovered that they were Journalism majors but our paths initially crossed elsewhere. And there are several classmates of mine who were forced to be my friend thanks to group projects, partner work and in-class discussions. In fact, thanks to a remarkable dedication to group projects and the many talents of my colleagues, my group message history reads like a future who's who of Ad Age. But my friend Sarah is the only person who willingly entered into a friendship with me before her GPA depended on it, and for that, we thank you.

Today's blogpost is inspired by a conversation I had with Sarah among the toy aisles in Wal-Mart, where we do some of our best work. Sarah and I have worked on many an assignment together with her doing all the technical work and contributing fantastic ideas while I tell jokes and struggle with the pen tool in Illustrator. We reminisced about how the toys of our youth were so much better than the crap kids play with today. We scoffed at the teddy bears with a pocket to charge baby's first iPhone and the robots that serve as speakers for your toddler's iPod. In the words of white girls everywhere "I literally can't". And if you've bought your small child an electronic device worth over $20 don't tell me it's so they can learn to use technology. I didn't have a smart phone until I was in college and I'm plenty tech-savvy, I can hashtag and I can filter, what more could I need? Disregarding of course the fact that I'm typing this post on my phone because I can't get my laptop to open Firefox and my only known solution (a restart) failed. Our main revelation was that the toys we had growing up, while of a much higher quality, would never work with 2000s kids for a plethora of semi-obvious reasons. You 2000s kids can look up "plethora" on your tablet's dictionary. Maybe you even have a toy that will read the definition for you.

Here are the top 5 toys of my 90s childhood and the reasons why 2000s kids just wouldn't love them like I do. 

Easy-Bake Oven

Every girl my age remembers her Easy-Bake Oven, or at least remembers her mother giving it away (thnx Missy). I used to love whipping up treats that allegedly always tasted vaguely of hand soap because from a very young age my dedication to sanitation was unyielding. But I would never want to use it for anything other than nostalgic baking today, as brought to light by a recent pretzel-nuggets-that-could-double-as-bullets incident. The problem with Easy-Baking is that it literally consists of waiting on a lightbulb to cook a brownie or a cake or a Cornish game hen or whatever mixes they make for these spoiled 2000s kids that have iPads and Uggs before they can read. But in their defense, this lack of patience isn't entirely their fault. We have made numerous scientific advancements in the past 2 decades that are making waiting a thing of the past, no one survives unaffected. In the 1990s I had no problem waiting 30 minutes for that lightbulb to heat my heart-shaped brownie to perfection. In the 2000s I can't wait the recommended 2 minutes after microwaving a Hot Pocket, I bite right in each time, scorching off another layer of tongue skin in the process.

HitClips

HitClips were indisputably the coolest thing about me in my formative years. I didn't grow hair till I was 3, my own mother gave away my Easy-Bake Oven, and I did not wear "cool" clothes (unless you consider Lion King and 101 Dalmatians hand-me-downs from my cousins cool when my favorite movie was Aladdin and every outfit featuring Simba or Perdita felt like a lie, if you think that's cool then I was pretty rad). Thus, HitClips were my solitary claim to fame. But HitClips could never survive the current music market because only the top songs became HitClips, they aren’t called FlopHits, ya dig? Today’s HitClips would be Arianna Grande, Sam Smith and Taylor Swift tunes.  To better meet the audio needs of today’s tweens they would need to evolve into HipsterClips and would feature artists like Death Cab For Cutie and George Ezra. This theory of course ignores the most pressing issue facing HitClips...they did not play entire songs but rather a select 60 seconds.

Skip-It

Skip-Its. Now there's a toy that would serve Michelle Obama better than a turnip in a children's health video. At the peak of my adolescent fitness, a Skip-It could provide hours of entertainment, but they wouldn’t work with kids today for a few reasons. First of all, the kids would have to actually go outside. Perhaps a Skip-It Wii game could find moderate success? Additionally, if Skip-Its wanted to achieve high sales quotas today they would have to get rid of the tracker that counts the number of successful skips. That kind of quantifiable success data isn’t aligned with the “everyone’s a winner” mantra of today’s parents. But perhaps the biggest reason that the Skip-It could never make a 2000s comeback is that the very nature of skipping does not allow for quality photos, and we all know kids today are more likely to do it for the ‘gram than the game. I could see some good Skip-It vines though. Someone get too turnt tina on this.

View-Master

How great were these? I wish I still had mine. My little brother got an early 2000s version for Christmas one year that projected the images onto the wall and I played with it more than he did. I had Toy Story discs, ocean life discs, Animal Planet discs, dinosaur discs, and not so many friends. I miss these so much. But today’s kids would never appreciate the View-Master because the consist of images with no captions or hashtags. If 2000s kids got ahold of the design for a new View-Master they would probably include discs that show the same image in different Instagram filters and the toy would be used to settle on one.

Rock Tumbler

This was my favorite toy for such a long time and that is due largely to the fact that the process of rock tumbling takes such a long time. As soon as my high expectations for this contraption were shattered (so sometime during my first use) I moved on to a jewelry making kit. I’m pretty sure that 8-year-old me was so obsessed with my Rock Tumbler because I loved gemstones and I thought that given time, patience, and a never-ending supply of ordinary rocks, I could soon possess the world’s largest supply of diamonds. Unfortunately, try as I might to mass produce sapphires and rubies and emeralds, after 2 weeks, the handful of rocks from my driveway had transformed into slightly smoother rocks that inevitably went back to my driveway. So to be fair, Rock Tumbler kind of sucked and that's why it will never have a 2000s revival. However I do not think that the 2000s kids accustomed to electronics and iEverything would wait 14 days to play with rocks. Which makes them at least marginally smarter than my adolescent self.