1993 A to Z: D is for…
Hello, and welcome back to my series . . .
1993 A to Z!
Here we’re talking about all things 1993, one letter at a time. Everything here is something my protagonist McKinley encounters when she finds herself thrown back in time in my new novel Rewind.
Shall we begin?
D is for . . .
[Image courtesy of dunkaroos.com]
Dunkaroos“Dunkaroos, Dunkaroos, you don’t just dunk, you Dunkaroos!”
Made popular by their awesome commercials and cartoon kangaroo mascot, Dunkaroos were a two-treat snack—cookies that you dunked into actual frosting. I looooooved Dunkaroos as a kid, but I didn’t get them very often. Even my mom, who subscribed to the “stuff whatever junk they’ll eat in their lunchboxes, I’m a single mom and I don’t have time for this nonsense” school of thinking couldn’t quite get behind a cookie that came pre-packaged with even more sugar.
Apparently I’m not the only grown-up with fond memories of this guilty pleasure snack. One of my favorite tidbits I discovered while researching for Rewind was that, after Dunkaroos were discontinued in the U.S. in 2012, General Mills launched a campaign called “Smuggleroos” (yes, really) in which they encouraged Canadians to smuggle the cookies across the border (yes, really) to their poor Dunkaroo-less American friends. There was a website and everything (yes, really). The good news is that Dunkaroos are back, baby! The cookies are once again being sold (legally) in U.S. stores. The bad news is that they only feature round cookies with the “D” logo on them, not the way-cooler kangaroo-shaped cookies. But I guess beggars can’t be choosers, right?
Special props to . . .
[Image courtesy of Vice.com]
D.A.R.E. t-shirtsIn the early 80s in Los Angeles (near where I grew up in Big Bear, California), the drug-education program “D.A.R.E.” (or Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was launched to teach children about the dangers of drugs. Actual policemen and policewomen would come into your classroom and talk about the horrors they’d seen in the field, and that when it came to drugs, abstinence was cool, dude. By the mid-90s, the program was in 75% of schools across the nation. Unfortunately, the program kind of sucked and by all accounts did not work at all. But if you went to public school in the 90s, there’s a very good chance you were handed one of these lame (or are they super cool?) T-shirts. I think I had like 40 of them.
With additional props to . . .
[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]
Doc Martens bootsI definitely wasn’t cool enough to wear Doc Martens in the 90s—but I knew people who were! These heavy boots with the yellow stitching around the sole were the footwear item for kids and teens who were too independent to follow the crowd. (I see the irony.) Even though they were created in the 1940s and remain a popular shoe today, they still scream 90s to me.
With even more props to . . .
[Image courtesy of babysittersclub.fandom.com]
Dawn and the Surfer GhostWhen I was a kid I wasn’t much of a reader—until I discovered The Baby-Sitters Club series. Ann M. Martin is still my hero for creating Kristy, Mary Ann, Claudia, and Stacey (and later Dawn), and luring me into books with their awesome babysitting adventures. The Baby-Sitters Club, of course, went on to spawn 213 novels, one movie, and two TV series. (The 2020 reboot was so good! Did you watch it???) With all that goodness, though, there’s bound to be a few duds here and there—and the twelfth book in The Baby-Sitters Club: Mysteries series is definitely one of those. Published in 1993, Dawn and the Surfer Ghost tells the story of Dawn . . . thinking she sees a ghost surfing? Despite basically no evidence that’s what’s happening? With a paper-thin plot and lacking most of the other babysitters (who maybe could’ve informed Dawn her theories were a tad bit off base), this book is now an infamous stinker. So of course I had to give it a shout-out in Rewind. Not everything about 1993 was so great—but when things failed, they did so in style.
(Fun fact: I got to meet Ann M. Martin a few years back at an NCTE conference, when my novel, Absolutely Almost, was named the inaugural Charlotte Huck Honor Book, and her book, Rain Reign, was the winner! Despite the fact that I was a full-on adult at this point—and a fellow published author—I fan-girled out on her hard and basically forgot how to say words. Ann M. Martin, as you can imagine, was gracious and lovely and kind, and even went so far as to pretend that I was not totally embarrassing myself. :) Basically, she’s the best and I love her.)
But wait, there's more!
[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]
dot matrix printersMan, there was a lot of good stuff from 1993 that started with “D”! But this is the last one, I swear . . .
Back in my day, the internet was called books and we didn’t print stuff using lasers. In the early 90s, if you were lucky enough to have a printer in your home, it was most likely a dot matrix version. These puppies were slow, and they were loud. (Did someone post a video on YouTube of a dot matrix printer doing its thing? Of course they did.) My favorite part was always the weird holey tabs that you’d have to carefully peel off the sides of the paper before you turned in your school report—I spent hours folding those things into elaborate gum-wrapper type chains.
Phew, we finished letter “D”! Did I forget your favorite? Let me know in the comments. (Also feel free to just wax poetic about The Baby-Sitters Club there. I promise I won’t mind!) Tomorrow we’ll be tackling “E.” In the meantime, be sure to check out Rewind!
Happy reading!
♥ Lisa
P.S. To read all the posts in the “1993 A to Z” series, click here!
