Day 0: It's on like Donkey Kong (Country...)

I hope you brought some trash to stick in the doohickey on top of your DeLorean because if you want to hang with me this month, you’re going to need to zip back to 1994 for the full 28 days of February. Some of you just said, “Well, I’ll just wait until you get back,” and that’s fine. But that’s also a weak, loser-like mentality. Be a winner, do drugs, and come to 1994 with me.

If you have decided you want to come hang out in 1994, that’s awesome! Thank you for humoring me on this pointless endeavor. I can’t wait to share and discuss our experiences with each other (on Discord, Twitter, and using a landline phone tree – I’ll call you, you call Tommy, Chris, and Megan, and they’ll each call three people) as we dig through the dusty bins from that year. If I made it sound fun last year when I went to 1996 for a month, I’m truly sorry. While this experience can be fun and operating under self-imposed parameters can play interesting tricks on your psyche, I must warn you that there will be moments when you will want out. You will have heard the same songs too many times, you will have become tired of low fidelity graphics, you will want to watch that newly released movie, listen to that brand new song, and you will long to see a hairstyle from this century.

Just a lot more hair back then. Blobs of it.

Ultimately, it’s up to you how hard you go. I go about 95-97% in, meaning an overwhelming majority of the media I consume will be from 1994. However, my wife and I will probably continue to watch a few episodes of the second season of The Witcher and I will keep up with my favorite podcasts in real time. Everything else I consume, including movies, TV shows that aren’t The Witcher, video games that are not for NESfriend videos, music, and books, will all have been released in the calendar year of 1994.

1994 already looks to be way better than 1996. Immediately better. Look at a list of movies, books, TV shows, and video games. The list of movies I want to see is so long, there’s no way I can fit them all into one month and still have time for all the other stuff. Video games spanned over a dozen systems in this year of console generation overlap where there were at least ten gaming consoles selling over 500,000 units and three others selling over 5 million worldwide. That year alone, Nintendo had the Game Boy, Super Nintendo, and NES still on shelves with new games being sold. Panasonic’s 3DO was, uh, in existence. Sony’s PlayStation was already out in Japan but had not crossed the ocean yet. Sega was the real power player of ’94 with five active systems: Genesis, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Game Gear, and the 32X. And let’s not forget about the PC that saw games like Doom II and Warcraft released that year.

More like “3D-Oh No!”

1994 was a fantastic year for books as well. While I’m not a prolific literary scholar, I’ve at least heard of a few of the best sellers from that year which tells me they must be pretty decent, right? Sure, maybe I recall the names because of the movie version that came later but if it was good enough to have a movie, doesn’t that mean it was a fairly good book, too? Let’s pretend it does mean that. In 1994, there’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and a book recommended to me as I am writing this very sentence, The Alienist by Caleb Carr. I rely on audiobooks for reading and three is about all I can get through in a month so this might be my three!

Music in 1994 is banger after banger after banger. This is the era that shaped my musical tastes to this day and explains why I’m so out of touch with the youngins. Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies, Green Day’s Dookie, NIN’s The Downward Spiral, and The Offspring’s Smash are just a few influential albums for me. That’s not counting the top-heavy list of pop titles that graced the charts like All-4-One’s I Swear that played at every sock-hop on the planet for the next 13 years. Regulate by Warren G and Fantastic Voyage by Coolio were two songs I specifically learned all the words to so I could sound cool around the popular kids at school. It didn’t work. 

Somewhat unfortunately, although “bless her heart”, 1994 has even more Mariah Carrey and her stinking Christmas album. After enduring her throughout 1996, I must say I’m not thrilled she will end up in even more playlists this soon after Christmas. I am hoping to dodge her as much as possible.

Time travel month is largely about the consumption of media but is also about taking in the world as it happened. I enjoy visiting The New York Times repository of articles and scanning month by month, soaking in the headlines, and occasionally reading an article about an important event. For better or worse, I can’t recall many significant things that happened in 1994 outside of Kurt Cobain, OJ Simpson, Nancy Kerrigan, the MLB strike, and Clinton’s sex scandal. While those are significant headlines that most of us remember, and are generally bad things that happened, they are less abhorrent than things like school shootings and Olympic Park bombings that 1996 endured. Yes, we will be having an OJ Simpson chase watch-along in the Discord some night.

“Honey, is that O.J. behind us? Ah, nah. Looks like Al Cowlings. Nevermind.”

Lastly, and most importantly, time travel month is a great time for reflection. I no longer have much of a family around to help me remember what times were like when I was young, but as I found last year in 1996, when I surround myself with the vibes, sights, sounds, and noises from the time, little nuggets of recollection build into memories once long forgotten. As of now, all I recall about myself in 1994 is that I was a chunky, awkward, weirdly tanned, little nine-year-old redneck. I followed NASCAR, the Dallas Cowboys, and bologna sandwiches. I played junior league baseball and was pretty good. 1994 was also the first year I suited up for little league football and came home in the evenings battered and bruised from being undersized and generally bad. I loved it though. I think. Also, 1994 was a strange year at home for me. It was a year where both of my brothers and both of my sisters became estranged from my family and I had my parents all to myself. My household growing up was not ordinary for several reasons (no household is) but at any rate, I remember having a decent time all around in 1994. I was probably too young to understand anything going on around me that didn’t directly affect me negatively. This might have been my last year of pure bliss.