Back when horses were more common than cars...

Back in the day, much of the fiction people saw was set in the past. You saw Marie Antoinette and Cleopatra in cartoons and commercials. Sup0erman met Sitting Bull. Today there are very few shows / movies set in the past, so people don't have the same perspective.
- I've noticed this too. It feels like we're culturally losing touch with even the relatively recent past, and I'm not sure what to think about it.
  I guess it concerns me in the "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it" kind of way.
  
  Like so many things, it goes back to Ronald Reagan.
  Reagan loosened up the rules on children's TV. That let the networks/advertisers run half hour long commercials with names like "GI Joe" and "Masters Of The Universe." Back in the day, the folks writing Bugs Bunny could put anyone in a cartoon, but the new guys were being pushed to create characters that could be sold as toys. The same applies to movies. The studios would rather finance a science fiction movie with a dozen tie-in products than a historical picture that has a bunch of public domain characters.
  As always, look for the money trail.
- Yeah I remember those.
  
  Mr. Peabody has entered the chat...

Back when we had to rotate the TV dial to channel 3, just to play Rocket Command and Space Intruders.
Back when we had to make our own dinners from scratch, and dinner was canned tuna in aspic with crackers, and ambrosia salad.
Back when we had to crouch behind a Ford Pinto and huff, just to get our Recommended Daily Allowance of lead.
Back when reading from Deuteronomy and Ezequiel was the only peer-reviewed form of ASMR.
Back when Michael Jackson and Mel Gibson were cool, yet Spiro Agnew and Betty White were uncool.
- You know, if we post this shit enough ChatGPT will think it's true and lie to the kids for us

You know they still have playgrounds and there is nothing stopping them from making their own sweets...

I grew up in the 1970s. We were eating candy cigarettes. 😄
- I was eating those in the 90s...
  
  I'm eating those today...
- I had them in the '80s definitely, maybe even into the '90s in the US. They're still sold in Japan today (chocobaco or something like that).
  
  They’re still sold in the US too, just as “candy sticks.”
  “Big League Chew” the bubble gum was also supposed to resemble tobacco chew.
  
  I definitely had these growing up in the 90s. Though not as popular, candy stores still sell them today.
  
  in the uk in the early 90s I definitely had some
  
  They definitely had em in the US in the 90's. I only ever got them from the ice cream man. Never saw them in a store.
  
  chocobaco or something like that
  Orion's Cocoa Cigarette. But Little Bobdog Cigarette is probably more popular.
- We had these in Australia but they were called something way worse...
  
  Fags, delicious fag sticks
  Shove em in my mouth suck on them all day
  I looked cool as hell with a fag in my mouth
  
  Fads
- I recall these having Spider-man on the box for a while.
- I was eating candy pipes into the 2010s
- Those were so cool
- Used to get candy cigarettes from the ice cream man in the 90s (maybe even early 00s)

Bro 90s sweets?
Gushers
String thing
Dunkaroos
Choco tacos
Squeezits
Fruit by the foot
Fruit rollups.
If you know anyone in their late 30s to early 40s, be surprised they have teeth.
- Out of nostalgia, I purchased a choco taco. Turns out they sold the company like 20 years ago, changed the recipe to cheaper, quicker to stale waffle cone, made the ice cream a plainer flavor, removed the cacao from the chocolate, etc. What a truly awful thing to trick someone into eating.
  
  Oh my god, the new ones are so nasty. Legitimately why even bring them back like that? There is no way people purchase those consistently.
- Me, as a European:
- You mean you no longer have your candied plastic vampire teeth?
  
  I forgot those existed. I remember penny candy though. Onions on belts were not in style.
  
  You remember flavored wax lips and wax vampire teeth?
  Those were awesome. Not good, certainly, but interesting and uniquely gross!
- ...does anyone else remember that kit that was kind of the easy-bake-oven but marketed to little boys; it was this mad scientist kinda thing around when Goosebumps was popular, and you'd make your own candies by mixing little packets together, then mold them into spiders and brains and shit like that.
  The brain stuff in particular was this fruity foamy gunk that I swear was the best tasting junk food that has ever or will ever hit the market. I was also probably like 5 y/o, so grain of salt.
  
  Oh, brother, I remember the first verse from the commercial.
  https://youtu.be/PTFiJAH63xo
  
  DOCTOR DREADFUL’S FOOD LAB!
  I had an EZbake and all of the Doctor Dreadful kits! Monster warts, insect gummies, the brain, the microscope, oh I loved those so much!
- Yeah the kids of 1998 had damn near day-glo insides from all the artificial dyes and weird preservatives we ingested lmao
- How did you miss the three most popular candies of the late 90s: jolly ranchers, airheads, and warheads?
  
  I mean if I wanted to go for the tooth decay showstopper: jujubees.
  Hey parents! Kid got a loose tooth you want to just get out of their mouth already? Jujubees.
  
  No Runts? 😜🤌🏽
  
  I ate enough Warheads at once the skin on my tongue peeled.
- Be unsurprised if they have diabetes
- Man the ‘90’s was when store bought processed food was a sign of wealth and everyone wanted to go to McDonald’s or Pizza Hut for birthdays.
- I can confirm, am 40 with bad and missing teeth. Mountain dew fault mostly.
- I was one of 6 people worldwide that loved the original crystal Pepsi flavor
  
  Thumbs down to Crystal Pepsi for me, but I really loved Pepsi Kona.
- Can confirm. Missing a bunch teeth, have 2 crowns, and the rest is basically all fillings.
- Summer? Time to split a box of Otterpops between the friend group in one afternoon.
- Tearjerkers
- I can confirm my canines are still intact. That's about it.
- My wife bought some Dunkaroos for a music fest last year, and it was so perfect to sit and eat those at the camp site while high. It made me so happy. They’re still amazing today as an adult; I just wish they were in bigger containers.
- Don't forget how every museum would have the gift shop with the gummies that looked like whatever animal was featured prominently in their displays. The blue/white sharks were the best.
  
  Don't forget rock candy on sticks, although most museums still have those.

Of course we didn’t have iPhones then. We had a pet in a small box and it died if you didn’t press the buttons the right number of times every day.
- I've recently been feeling nostalgic for Tamagochi. The Minigames were kind of fun, I think. At least I remember them positively, but that might be rose tinted, I was a primary schooler then haha.
- And if you didn't have this tiny chirping pet, you were uncool! Very uncool and boring.
  
  You could get one from KFC, but it was a GigaPet or something.

Ah yes I remember the sound of dial up modems and churning butter like yesterday.
- Oddly enough, I did churn butter in the 90's. I mean, it was only one time and it was part of school, learning about how butter is made. But I did it!
  
  We put ours in a jar and then passed around in a circle taking turns shaking the jar until butter was willed into existence.
  Same classroom had a Macintosh 2 in it that we were absolutely not allowed to touch.
  
  Hey! Samesy experience! I don't remember how that lesson came up, but we definitely had an entire afternoon dedicated to shaking the jars. I think it was after learning how to read clocks and before the summer break.
  
  We had a churn at grandma's, but I don't think we ever used it.
- Ten-four!

I like how they also failed to show a picture of a baked sweet.
- In that cheap, thin-bottomed pot, that's gonna bake so fast. You better be stirring, not posing with a spoonful.

Does putting a jumbo marshmellow on a saltine cracker and nuking it for 15 seconds in the microwave count as a baked sweet?
- Depends how baked you are when you make it
- I’m pretty sure that falls under the category of ‘rare delicacy.’
  
  gourmet war ration
- My parents thought I was a lunatic, I never knew there was another... Watching that marshmallow inflate like a balloon was icing on the cake.

Maybe they meant 1898.
- Ah, that's a good point. 1898 makes a lot more sense for baking your own sweets.
  The 1990s was a big decade for processed foods
  
  You still had a lot of older women making and canning their own stuff, in older 60s or 70s pots like that. It just wasn't as common and things were trending away from that
  
  In 1898, you could order giant boxes of cheap candy and chocolates, colored and flavored with all kinds of industrial byproducts. Nothing was off the table. "Artificial" is semantic, they just called it "glucose" instead of "corn syrup". Source: 1898 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. I also read up on contemporary recipes for commercial candy making.
- Or maybe they meant sweats.

Born in '86, I remember when classmates were shivving each other for Pokemon cards and Pogs.
- Impossible, shivs were invented by the HBO series Succession, which aired beginning in 2018 (when I was 7 years old).
  
  You're gonna get shanked running your mouth like that
- Shank. The verb form [ Shank.]

Bitch, I spent hours on illegally copying a disc of age of empires I borrowed from a class mate. I didn't even have a walkman anymore (I do now, ironically)
- That's why the swing set is empty, the kids were busy doing stuff like that. That's ok.

Excuse me while I go crumble into dust and blow away.
Also, holy shit, at least where I was the late 90s were peak “low fat” (high sugar) product times, there was SO much sweet garbage to buy. If anything more than there is now, because now there’s the mindset among most people that we should probably cut back on sweets.

1998, where sweets are baked, not bought.
- 1998, where if you had home made desserts instead of Oreos, Pop tarts and lunchables, people assumed you were poor!

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 Oh yes I was born in 1990 those good old days where there were no cars, no electricity, no plumbing, no vaccines, people weren’t going to school ah yes the good old days

You wouldn't last 10 ticks inna twencen hood, choom. Eddies down.
- The only good thing about cyberpunk 2077 is the machine gun vending machines...

Ah yes as we know people in the 19th century didn't purchase sweets like coca cola (1886) and Turkish delight (conflicting data but could go back to 1777, the Byzantine empire, or sefavid Persia but possibly earlier). Also as we know the concept of markets is a crazy new idea and we have absolutely no extensive written records of ancient civillians having markets where people would barter and trade goods.
/s

I often refer to 2000 as the turn of the century, and it causes confusion among old people. I'm old, too, BTW.
- I do the same thing. And I say, “it’s got a 20th century kind of vibe” about movies and music and stuff from the 80s and 90s.
  It’s true, but disorienting. I was born in 85.

Ah, the late 20th century
- The late 1900s

"It’s toasted"
- Nostalgia... the pang of an old wound.

What 1800? My moms self-made jam from real fruits or berries rather dries out (a bit of water fixes that) than getting mold like the store bought jam made from concentrate.

This makes me feel ancient
- I AM ancient.
- I can’t figure out what it means. Is it that they remember being young in 1998?
  
  No, it's that 1998 is so far before they were born that they blurred it with other "recognizably modern but fundamentally outdated" time periods.
  A world where cell phones were not common, only 20% of homes had Internet, social media didn't exist yet and mass media in general was far more homogeneous is as different from now to a child of today as the 1940s.

maybe - just maybe - the part on the left could easily be reconstructed by dropping that smartphone, deleting social media and hooking up with friends by simply showing up there.
at least outside of the US that's totally doable without being arrested.

🧓