This Sunday, National Geographic Channel will premiere its three-night miniseries “The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?” revisiting the era through interviews with the likes of Roseanne Barr, Vanilla Ice and Colin Powell.
Plenty of seminal events of the decade will be covered — the Gulf War, the LA Riots and the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal. But the miniseries also waxes nostalgic on some of the more fleeting cultural moments of the 1990s.
Here’s a look at nine of the people, products and pop culture trivia you may have forgotten (“The ’90s” airs July 6 through July 8 at 9 p.m. on National Geographic Channel).
The Hummer
The military vehicle was first marketed to civilians back in 1992, in part due to celebrity support from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who bought the first two Hummers off the assembly line.
Despite only getting gas mileage of 9 miles per gallon, the vehicle, marketed as the “Hero of Desert Storm,” was a commercial success.
Bill Clinton plays the sax on ‘Arsenio Hall’
Before Presidents were slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton made history by playing “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone in a June 1992 appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show.”
The day after the jam session, Clinton’s favorability ratings jumped 21 percent and he went on to win the 1992 presidential election.
Lorena Bobbitt
The American news media had a field day with the story of a fed-up wife (claiming abuse) who one night cut off her husband’s penis.
The case and subsequent trial fed six months of continuous news coverage until she was eventually acquitted on a plea of temporary insanity.
Netscape
The company behind the country’s first Web browser had a record-breaking IPO in 1995, with a market value of $2.9 billion after its first day of trading.
But the threat posed by Netscape scared Bill Gates into doubling down on the Internet, and by the end of the decade Microsoft had an 80 percent market share of Web browsers — and Netscape was dead.
The Macarena
Perhaps the most catchy pop song of all time, the Spanish one-hit wonder had the entire nation dancing — even Al Gore showed off his Macarena moves at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
The English-language remix spent 14 weeks at No. 1 and continues to be played at every wedding . . . ever.
‘The Blair Witch Project’
The 1999 horror film was notable for its amateur style — the actors filmed with camcorders, improvised the script and found their locations by GPS, allowing them to operate without a crew.
The movie (made for less than $1 million) was a huge box office success, grossing more than $248 million.
Bob Dole endorses Viagara
The magic blue pill became available in 1998 and was an overnight success, making $522 million in its first six months on the market.
The erectile dysfunction drug even earned a TV endorsement from former presidential candidate Bob Dole (whose wife noted cheekily in a press conference, “It really works!”)
TheGlobe.com
This short-lived Internet startup epitomized the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Founded by two Cornell students in 1994, the early social networking service went public in 1998 and closed more than 600 percent over its initial share price — the largest first-day gain for any IPO at that time.
But though its young founders were worth more that $100 million, it was all just on paper, and the site closed in 2001 when the bubble burst.
Y2K
Remember when everyone thought the world would end in the year 2000?
Because computer programs abbreviated the year to two digits, the impending millennium had everyone warning of a digital meltdown when we exited the 20th century. Y2K survivalists started stocking up for the end-of-times and even a Presidential council was formed.
In the end, companies worldwide upgraded their systems beforehand and nothing much happened.