Ten Things That Were Super Cool That Now Super Aren’t

We’ve teamed up with the new initiative Pretty Shady to create a series of stories that will hopefully inspire you to be part of the generation that stops skin cancer, one summer at a time. It’s all about positive action: shade, clothing, hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen.

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Cool has a shelf life. This is an inescapable fact of life. Fads will fizzle and date at a rate of knots. The big man on campus at your high school will peak at 16, and slide remarkably quickly into an unremarkable life. The things you once thought were the raddest, hippest and most bodacious going around will lose their edge. Sure, you used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what you’re with isn’t it, and what is ‘it’ seems weird and scary to you. In no particular order, here are ten things that were the absolute cat’s pyjamas at one time, but nowadays are nothing more than cringe-worthy relics of a time we’d all rather forget about.

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SeaWorld

THEN: A fun-filled, water park adventure! Part of the mythical string of Gold Coast theme parks that filled every ’90s kid’s dream holiday wishlist, SeaWorld was the height of summer holiday cool. Rides, attractions, thunderously overpriced food and drink… It had it all! The centrepiece of the park, naturally, was its animal inhabitants and the chance to see them in action. Boasting itself to be a marine sanctuary, the park played host to dolphins, penguins, seals, and it was a WHALE* of a time (*author’s note: not even remotely sorry).

NOW: It turns out that far from being a legitimate scientific facility, SeaWorld was principally designed as a machine of profit, reaping the rewards on the backs of remarkably complex animals that no one seems to understand. With the recent release of the harrowing documentary Blackfish — which chronicles the US SeaWorld’s mistreatment and mismanagement of its Killer Whales (in particular, ‘Tillikum’) and the resulting deaths of several trainers — severe clouds have been cast on SeaWorld’s reputation, and the organisation is now suffering very real criticism from a number of public figures.

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Solariums

THEN: You were no one unless you had a regular standing appointment to lie in one of these human bug zappers at least once a week, particularly during winter when maintaining a base tan for the looming warmer months was absolutely essential. You were hip. You were with it. You were toasted medium-brown, baby.

NOW: Three words: basal cell carcinoma. It turns out that swanning about looking like a deep-fried dickhead isn’t exactly the healthiest option in the world. Crispy skin? Great on a well-done piece of salmon; horrible on a human. It’s better to be a cool cucumber and chill out in the shade this summer: it’s free, it’s safe, and there’s significantly less sweating. It’s a tick in every box.

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Hey Hey It’s Saturday

THEN: A watershed program in the annals of Australian broadcast television, Hey Hey It’s Saturday was an institution in the Nine Network’s schedule for 27 years and over 500 episodes. Bringing to life timeless recurring segments such as ‘Chook Lotto’, ‘Molly’s Melodrama’ and ‘Red Faces’, along with characters including Plucka Duck, Ossie Ostrich and Dickie Knee, Hey Hey maintained popularity for the entire length of its run, right up to its untimely cancellation in 1999 (a move that sparked outrage from the viewing public).

NOW: Nostalgia’s kind of a fickle beast. It’s all well and good to gaze upon the halcyon days with rose-coloured glasses, but trying to reclaim some of the old glory tends to make you look exactly like a middle-aged, newly-divorced type in a white sports coat with the sleeves rolled up, smelling vaguely of mothballs and West Coast Coolers. Hey Hey attempted an ill-fated revival in 2010, and its stratospheric initial ratings vanished quicker than the smile on Harry Connick’s face when he realised he was on a show that mystifyingly gave TV airtime to six men in blackface.

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Windsurfing

THEN: Windsurfing exploded in popularity in the ’80s and ’90s, around the same time that air-brushed T-shirts, zinc cream and Poison were all the rage. Continuing a string of trends that had decidedly Californian characteristics, windsurfing drew beach-goers the world over to waters, attached to something halfway between a surfboard and a sailboat, in the hopes that the wind was strong enough to propel you forward but not so strong that the water chopped up beyond use. A sporting fad with total reliance on a narrow path of weather conditions: what could possibly go wrong there?

NOW: Remember the last time you actually saw someone windsurfing? Yeah, neither do we.

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Smoking

THEN: Nothing was as quintessentially cool as smoking. Hollywood’s golden era in particular was a big proponent of smoking as an image enhancer — the public appearances of icons such as James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman and Greta Garbo were intrinsically linked and enhanced by the presence of a cigarette between their fingers, portraying a devil-may-care attitude that solidified their status as some of the most iconic sex symbols of the cinema screen.

NOW: Has there ever been a piece of iconography that’s seen as stunning a fall from grace as smoking? Once people found out that it tends to have a nasty habit of killing you (Paul Newman himself died of smoking-related ailments, as did Hollywood star Yul Brynner who recorded this famous ad before his death), the slick images associated with smoking were replaced by ones outlining its terrible risks. Smokers themselves were slowly forced outdoors, and what was once the epitome of cool is now seen as a foul affectation. Whilst some people may complain about the restriction of personal choice, on the whole it’s been a beneficial move in the interest of public health.

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Hitchhiking

THEN: Harking back to a more romantic, carefree time, this age-old practice was once the domain of free-spirited, free-wheeling youth. Pretty much everyone with even the most remote interest in literature at one time harboured thoughts of leaving everything behind and going Kerouac all over the place — taking a backpack, sticking a thumb out, and seeing where you wound up.

NOW: …and then everyone saw Wolf Creek, and realised that hitching a ride with a stranger is potentially not the safest idea in the world. Sure, it might just be a mistrusting paranoia forged by years of repressed social anxiety, but a much more likely assumption is that everyone in the world is actually a crazed murderer, and if you get into a stranger’s car they absolutely are going to drive across seven states wearing your liver as a hat.

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Apple

THEN: You want to talk about cool? Apple revolutionised cool. In the ’90s, the fledgling technology conglomerate took the bold step of placing equal weight on form as it did function, and put a sleek, attractive new sheen on the cold, sterile personal computers of yore. Soon enough, Apple wasn’t merely just another computer manufacturer — Apple was fashion, Apple was hip, Apple was everything. The company revolutionised the way we communicate, the way we consume and listen to music, and the way we go about our daily lives.

NOW: The honeymoon is over. Though scores of screaming fanboys and fangirls would be loath to admit it, Apple isn’t the edgy cat it once was. With Samsung recently taking over the lion’s share of the market in the smartphone race, and with implementation of Google’s Android platform now dwarfing that of Apple’s iOS, the finger-on-the-pulse crowd of early adopters that Apple relied so heavily on to create buzz are moving away from their beloved i-merchandise and onto newer and sleeker technologies. Apple, who bolted ahead when the race began, is now very much in danger of being swallowed up by the pack.

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Winamp

THEN: This handy, endlessly customisable early champion of the media player industry was the absolute bees knees. Who among us can say they didn’t feel like the hippest cat in the land when they threw a Sisqo skin over the top of it whilst fiddling for hours with the EQ to get the bass punching on OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’ just right? No one, that’s who.

NOW: Like most technology from the late ’90s, Winamp fell victim to every imitator and successor that followed in the digital music revolution. To its credit, it bravely hung on for dear life as iTunes took over the world, but after 15 years of whipping the llama’s ass, the company finally shut down late last year.

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Dylan Lewis

THEN: The host of ABC’s live morning music show Recovery, Dylan Lewis was the young, edgy epitome of late ’90s cool. His staggered cadence and refusal to conform to stuffy, old world television standards like sitting on a chair properly propelled him to unheard of heights in the youth demographic. The ’90s was a good time to be Dylan Lewis.

NOW: Everyone else might have left the ’90s, but he sure as hell didn’t. After Recovery’s demise, he floated around the ever-changing landscape of Australian media, all the while holding tight to his ’90s sense of style. It was cool for a while, but now it’s getting weird. Still, credit where credit’s due: like the hands of an armorer in a superglue factory, he’s stuck to his guns.

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Undercuts

THEN: I’m talking the proper, mid-’90s, straight as an arrow, Jonathan Taylor Thomas has one undercut. The kinda haircut that you could set your watch to, as well as land yourself a date with Katie Hudson from first period science. You absolutely were not cool unless you rocked yourself an undercut, preferably matched with a pair of crisp Pump sneakers with those elastic curly laces instead of the pedestrian ol’ regular ones. Did we mention that Jonathan Taylor Thomas had one? JTT. Jay. Tee. Tee.

NOW: The undercut may have evolved along with fashion, but it left its bowl-shaped ancestors in the dirt without so much as a bus fare. Sure, JTT may have rocked one, but the number of people in the world who happened to be JTT maxed out at one, dooming those gawky weirdos to a lifetime of cringing at their old high school photos. Oof.

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Cam Tyeson is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian who still holds out hope that this year will be the one that his parents finally crack and get him the Ninja Turtle blimp for his birthday. He tweets at @camtyeson.