By Molly Dunn
Assistant City Editor
If I could travel back in time, I would definitely go back to the ’90s. I miss wearing scrunchies, watching awesome Saturday morning cartoons, playing outside until the streetlights came on and hopping around with my Skip It for hours on end. Today’s kids don’t seem to have the wonderful things we had growing up. Nowadays 10-year-olds have iPhones and know how to use them better than their parents do. Technology seems to have taken over the lives of kids, causing them to miss out on the things those who grew up in the ’90s cherished.
One of the things I miss the most were the television shows on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. After watching not even a minute of a current show on Disney Channel, I began to miss the shows I watched as a kid. What happened to “Even Stevens,” “Boy Meets World” or “Lizzy McGuire?” If you ask any kid under the age of 12 if they have heard of these shows, you are most likely going to get a blank stare.
It’s a shame that most of the shows I would run home to see on a Friday afternoon once school got out are no longer aired on TV. I wish there could be a channel dedicated to airing all the shows ’90s kids grew up with. We have TV Land for the shows our parents grew up watching, so why not have an entire channel filled with Saturday morning cartoons like “Hey Arnold!,” “Doug” and “Rugrats,” followed by “All That,” “Full House” and “Bill Nye: The Science Guy”? I can guarantee that not only would people my age watch those shows, but the kids who have never seen these shows before would fall in love with them.
The most we have is a two-hour block of classic Nickelodeon programs broadcast on a channel called TeenNick. That was introduced this past July.
Even though I’ve probably seen every episode of these shows, I’d watch them again and again. These shows have stood the test of time, and it’s a shame they aren’t being played as much on television as they should be. Just as I enjoy watching “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeanie” like my parents did when they were younger, today’s generation of kids will enjoy the shows we enjoyed in the ‘90s.
I don’t know what has happened to television shows for kids these days, but I do know that they do not even come close in comparison to the classics of the ‘90s. Yes, I am calling them classics, because they truly were. We will never forget how awesome the cartoons were, or how legitimately funny the sitcoms and live shows were. Today’s shows don’t have the special charm the ‘90s shows had. As a kid, all the shows I watched brought a smile to my face or made me laugh. Now, TV shows are filled with cheesy humor that sometimes receives an occasional chuckle, if anything.
I’m sorry that kids born after the golden age of the 1990s classic television shows have to watch things that are really not that funny or entertaining at all. Maybe today’s writers should sit down, watch the old Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows, take some notes and learn a thing or two about true entertainment.
Molly Dunn is a junior journalism major from The Woodlands and is the Lariat’s assistant city editor.
