Worthless in the End

Anyway, here’s a bunch of 90s toy/game crazes that absorbed our money but ended up being completely worthless.

Pogs were popular in my school in 1st or 2nd grade, but were quickly banned because the game was pretty much a gateway drug to internet poker. Kids liked them for two reasons: they were cheap and it was really easy to make someone cry (either by winning all their Pogs or hitting them with the slammer). Even though they were pretty inexpensive, they make the list because kids would collect thousands of these stupid things. I have about 30 full tubes sitting at home in my closet which I obviously can’t throw away. I’d try to sell them but you can get a bag of 1000 on ebay for only $5 so it’s pretty obvious that no one wants them anymore. But if anyone does want my collection let me know. The bidding starts at $5.01.

Because I’m a guy, I’m obviously not going to admit that I had a pretty sizeable Beanie Baby collection back in ’95. So we’ll just say it was my little sister who was batshit crazy about those things. There wasn’t a kid in elementary school who didn’t own at least one and I knew people who had collections of hundreds. Like any other collectibles there were rare ones that everyone wanted and no one had and common ones that everyone had and no one wanted. According to the Collectors Value Guide (and Wikipedia), the rarest beanie baby was the dark blue version of Peanut the Elephant. If you want to own such a rare specimen, you can get him on ebay for $2000…or $6.60.

I was a little old for this toy when it came out, but it makes the list because it was always so entertaining to turn on the news and see videos of mothers punching each other in the face or trampling employees over the last Tickle Me Elmo in the store. The dolls sold for around $30 in stores and up to $1500 on the internet during the ’96 Christmas season, officially making American parents some of the dumbest in the world for spending hundreds of dollars on something their toddler was just going to play with once, vomit all over, and then fall asleep next to. You can find an original Tickle Me Elmo online for 1/1000 of what some people were paying back then.

At the time Furby was popular, I was old enough to decide that I didn’t particularly want a toy that was smart enough to learn English, watched you as you slept, and could survive being set aflame in a frighteningly Terminator-esque way. Like Tickle Me Elmo, Furbies (Furbys?) were the hot toy of the ’98 holiday season, which means that people were paying up to $300 for the creepy little bastards. Good job Mom and Dad, I just bought 60 of them for that price – and promptly drowned them in holy water. PS – youtube “microwave furby” it’s totally worth it.

In 1999 I was earning nine dollars a week in allowance money, which meant that if I scrounged up some extra change I could get two packs of Pokémon cards every Friday after school before heading off to a friend’s house to trade and play. I repeated this process every week for almost an entire school year, which means I spent somewhere around $350 (that’s an Xbox 360) on Pokémon cards. The cards have since been donated to my little brother, who has never touched them. It was fun at the time, but Xbox will always be cool. Lesson learned. Oh, and Justin, that Charizard hologram I sold you for 80 bucks…you can get it for $7.50 now. Sorry dude.