Yahoo Lifestyle 17 Absolutely Fascinating '90s Pop Culture Facts You Never Knew You Needed To Know
1.Tickle Me Elmo was almost Tickle Me Taz — as in the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes. The creators of Tickle Me Elmo, Greg Hyman and Ron Dubren, initially created a chimp that laughed as a prototype toy for Tyco and thought it would make a great Elmo toy. Tyco liked the idea of the toy. However, they didn't have the rights to make Sesame Street plush toys (only plastic toys), but they did have the rights to make Looney Tune plush toys and thought Taz would work great for it.
Six months later, while Tickle Me Taz was still in development, Tyco got the rights to create Sesame Street plush toys, and they pitched Tickle Me Elmo as a toy they could create if they had the rights.
2.The Spice Girls did not come up with their nicknames. It was actually a magazine editor and his staff who came up with them as part of a feature they were running on the group.
According to Scary Spice, the journalist who wrote the feature (for the UK's Top of the Pops magazine) was "too lazy" to remember their names and just gave them all nicknames. Honestly, the journalist's laziness was probably one of the best things that could have happened to them.
3.TRL was actually a combination of two shows that had run in the summer of '98: Total Request and The Carson Daly Show.
The two shows were experiments because, at the time, MTV was in a "real down period," and MTV executives were "trying to figure out what MTV should be." Bob Kusbit, a production executive who came to MTV in 1997, thought of combining the shows into a live countdown show and putting it on in the afternoon when kids were coming home from school. According to Kusbit it started as a very simple idea, saying, "When we started TRL it was just Carson, the camera guys, and a floor director. There wasn’t a studio audience. And we never thought about people showing up to Times Square."
4.Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis paid for two Forrest Gump scenes (one was the scene where Forrest runs across the US) to be filmed out of their own pockets. According to Hanks, Paramount refused to increase the film's budget, so he and Zemeckis agreed to pay for the scenes in return for a larger percentage of the film's box office gross.
Hanks said that they both put in a lot of money, but it paid off! Reportedly, Hanks earned $65 million dollars from his percentage of the box office gross.
5.It was shooting Harriet the Spy that led Rosie O'Donnell to create The Rosie O'Donnell Show — but it was actually more out of necessity. The film was shot in Toronto and had long hours. At the end of the shooting days, Rosie noticed that her infant son, Parker, was more attached to their housekeeper. This made her realize she needed a New York–based job with shorter hours in order to spend more time with him.
So Rosie came up with the idea of doing a daytime talk show as the solution. As Vulture puts it, it was a "then-radical daytime-television experiment" to do a talk show that was centered on interviewing celebrities and engaging with the live studio audience. But it worked, and the show would go on to change television.
6.The Return of Jafar is the reason Disney made so many direct-to-video sequels. It was the second animated sequel Disney ever made and the first to be released just on home video. It was also an incredible success, costing just $5 million to make and grossing $120 million in sales. This led to Disney making lots of direct-to-video sequels for the next decade-plus.
Also, Dan Castellaneta, who is best-known as the voice of Homer Simpson, did the voice of the Genie, as Robin Williams was fighting with the studio at the time.
7.Robin Williams got into a huge fight with Disney shortly after the release of Aladdin. The source of the argument came from him taking a huge pay cut in order to voice the Genie (which he did because he wanted to do it for his kids). The one thing he asked for in return was that his voice not be used for merchandising products or marketing. Disney agreed but then realized that the Genie was really the star of the movie, and ended up using his voice for both of those things.
Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images, Walt Disney Co. / ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
As an apology to Williams, Disney sent him a Picasso worth over $1 million as a gift. Eventually, the two did make up, with Robin returning to voice the Genie in the third movie, Aladdin and the King of Thieves
8."Believe" is not only one of the most iconic songs of the '90s, but also one that would change music forever. However, Cher wasn't interested in doing a dance song. Still, Rob Dickins, who was the then-president of her label, Warner Music U.K., felt that since her last album (which was rock ballads) had been a disappointment, she should focus on her gay audience and told her to do a dance album. Dickins then reached out to songwriter Brian Higgins to submit songs for a Cher dance album, and "Believe" was among one of the songs he sent in.
After several rewrites, Cher recorded the song. However, she was unaware that the producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, had created a version with the signature Auto-Tune effect in it. Afraid that Cher would HATE the Auto-Tune sound, they only shared it with her after having a few beers.
Cher loved it and told them to keep it in. Dickins, however, disliked the Auto-Tune sound and told them to take it out. When Cher found out that they were going to take the Auto-Tune effect out, she said, "You can change that part of it, over my dead body! Don't let anyone touch this track, or I'm going to rip your throat out."
9."Don't Turn Around" was a huge hit for Ace of Base in 1994 — when it peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. But the song is actually a cover of a Tina Turner B-side.
Tina recorded "Don't Turn Around" in 1986 as a B-side to her single "Typical Male." The song was cowritten by Diane Warren and coproduced by Bryan Adams.
10.The original Polly Pockets were tiny because Chris Wiggs, who created the toy for his daughter, used a makeup powder compact to create a portable dollhouse for his daughter.
Wiggs created the toy in 1983 for his then 3-year-old daughter. He later sold the idea to Bluebird Toys in the late '80s.
11.Sony originally developed PlayStation as a CD-ROM add-on to Super Nintendo. It was actually called Play Station (two words instead of one) and had a port for SNES cartridge games and a CD-ROM drive for Sony games.
Nintendo got into a dispute with Sony and canceled its contract with them. They then announced that they were working with Phillips to develop its disc games (that deal would fall apart, too). Sony was mad and decided to produce the PlayStation on its own.
12.One of the biggest things about The Phantom Menace (I mean, of course, aside from being the first new Star Wars film in 16 years) was that it marked the return of George Lucas as the director — which is something he hadn't done since the original film, A New Hope. However, Lucas had some doubts about returning to the director's chair, so he asked Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Ron Howard to see if they would want to direct it.
According to Howard, all three directors said no because they felt Lucas should be the one to do it.
13."...Baby One More Time" has the somewhat confusing "Hit me, baby, one more time" lyrics. Well, that was actually a mistake. The Swedish songwriters of the song, Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, thought that "hit" me was brand new American slang for "call" (as is in "call me on the phone"). So, Britney is actually singing about begging her ex-boyfriend to call her on the phone.
Martin and Yacoub wrote the song for TLC (who famously turned it down) because they were inspired by the group's single "Baby-Baby-Baby."
14.RuPaul met Nirvana for the first time at the 1993 MTV VMAs. According to Ru, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love approached her on the red carpet and told her that they had tried to see her nightclub show in Seattle but got there too late and missed it. Ru would go on to have a friendship with the band who really appreciated her (they even appeared on SNL together).
Cobain also really liked Ru's "Supermodel (You Better Work)" and called it one of his favorite songs of 1993. Nirvana would even go on to appear on RuPaul's Christmas special.
15.Timon and Pumbaa were originally the ones who were supposed to sing "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" in The Lion King. Ernie Sabella and Nathan Lane (the voices of the characters) even recorded the whole song. However, when Elton John found out about it he killed the idea, saying, "I don't want a big, stinky warthog singing my love song!"
About four weeks before The Lion King opened, John saw a screening of the movie, and the entire "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" scene had been cut out. He got upset and told Jeffrey Katzenberg, the then-chairman of Walt Disney Studios, that he needed to include it. According to John, "I was so upset, and I told him so. And he put it back in and it won an Oscar."
16.James Cameron wanted to make/direct Jurassic Park, which he envisioned as a much darker and "nastier" movie. According to him, it "would have been Aliens with dinosaurs." However, Steven Spielberg beat him to the film rights by a few hours.
Vinnie Zuffante / Getty Images, Murray Close / Sygma via Getty Images
Spielberg had a decadeslong friendship and working relationship with Jurassic Park's author, Michael Crichton. In fact, Spielberg had heard about the book from Crichton a few years before it was even published, and he loved the story so much that he made sure to buy the film rights as soon as they were available.
For his part, Cameron felt it all worked out in the end, saying, "When I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film, he was."
17.And lastly, Steve Jobs wanted to call the iMac MacMan. In fact, according to Ken Segall, who was the creative director at Apple’s ad agency, TBWAChiatDay, and came up with the name iMac, Jobs really liked the name MacMan and was "fixated" on it. Jobs did approach the agency just to see if they had any better suggestions, saying, "I have a name that I really like, we’re going to go with it, but if you guys can do better we need you to do better within the next two weeks."
Segall said that a week later, they met with Jobs and presented him with five names, saving iMac for last because he thought "it was the killer name." However, Jobs hated the name iMac, too.
A week later, Segall presented Jobs with three more names and also brought up that he still liked iMac as a name. Jobs hated the three new names, but said about iMac, "I don’t hate it this week, but I don’t like it either, so now you’ve got two days." Segall said that the next day, a friend at Apple called him to tell him Jobs had used iMac on one of the models and that it was getting good reactions. The rest was history.
