I was born in 1975 so my childhood was pretty much in the 1980s and I was a teenager and young adult during the 1990s. As a result this one kind of flew under the radar with me, having apparently been around at a time when I was moving out of the target audience, though I was enough of a nerd where I did follow some cartoons from around the same time period (I believe) like say "The Bionic Six" and other "super hero" type fare, a lot of which wasn't great, but you pretty much take what you can get.
To be honest, I find a lot of irony in the whole "90s sucked" mentality. I do understand it though, after all it's cool for kids to diss the previous generation, and "Generation X" is the lost generation and pretty much got skipped over economically and socially for reasons well beyond it's control.... screwed to irrelevency from birth in a very really sense.
The irony comes from the simple fact that when it comes to geek culture, the 1990s were probably one of the biggest periods of actual innovation we've ever seen. The 00s and 10s largely just aping off of what happened in the 90s, while producing very little of it's own in an increasing culture drought. You see this in things like video games where people still talk about, play, and refurbish things like "Black Isle" games and go through epic feats of engineering to create programs like Exult to play things like "Ultima 7" on modern machines. Graphics and sound and such might have progressed but from an actual concept and gameplay perspective old games were simply better, and typically that's what people are looking back towards when talking about the dumbing down and degeneration of quality inherant in current games. This is also when we started to really see things like "The Comics Code Authority" fall and the birth of what was a true golden age for comics, with things like the X-men catapulting from relative obscurity to major success, and mature, violent storylines starting to appear once again in comics. To a large extent recent comics culture, movies, etc... seems to be an attempt to return to that status quo.
I can see how a lot of the surrounding culture is confusing to post-gen-Xers who actually have hope. The combination of angst over irrelevency, combined with overly upbeat attempts at "hip escapism" just doesn't make sense to someone who isn't lost in a social sense. However even so from those stories when there was genuine angst involved among the fan base you see people trying to recapture it (or ape it badly) in current media. Not getting that if your not Gen-X you really can't "get it" or have it apply to you, because your inherantly something differant. No generation is going to even be capable of understanding until another "lost generation" arrives for sociological reasons.
The 1990s were also when we saw things like "The Buffyverse" start, "Charmed", Trek was still being made on TV, and Anime and Manga were starting to seriously appear in the geek culture in a big way, with people paying upwards of $30 for a couple of episodes on a subtitled VHS tape, which began the evolving trend of eastern culture and those kind of geedkdom conventions intermeshing more heavily with out own, leading to some of the hybrids and stylization you see now. To be honest there haven't been as many periods as good as the 1990s from a geekdom/escapism perspective with that many science fiction/fantasy TV shows on all at once, at the same time things like comics were also flourishing, and we were seeing an innovative drive in video games and such, with games like "Torment" and "Baldur's Gate" still being held up as examples of what gaming should aspire to be as opposed to the "dialed in" crap that dominates today, 90s quality of gameplay and depth combined with 2010 technology is pretty much the holy grail of gaming, and what the industry has been reluctant to produce due to the work it involves (and a lot of the talent of the time period having sold out, and being resistant to new talent coming in to replace them).
Such are my thoughts at any rate.
One thing I do agree with is that in the 1990s children's programming did well and truely blow chips, taking negative trends that started in the 1980s to an extreme. The whole "30 minute toy commercial" criticisms are pretty valid, and honestly when you consider shows like the one is Bob is talking about kind of exists to shill video games beyond anything else, it shouldn't surprise anyone.
This trend however does show one important sociological truth, the baby boomers held all the real power and Gen X was viewed as being more or less irrelevent. There was less concern over wanting to build up a sense of loyalty, nostolgia, and long term marketing with Gen X than with any other generation before it due to complete and total irrelevency. The idea being the Baby Boomers had the money, and Generation Y would wind up with it. Thus the only real value in Gen X children was seen to be in getting them to whine to get their Baby Boomer parents to buy them things. When you got into High School and started taking Civics, Sociology, and similar things and basically spend hours listening to teachers tell you how irrelevent you are, and explain why in detail (in ironic competition to the upbeat messages of self validation others would bombard you with), you can see why the 1990s youth culture was what it was, especially in the mainstream. Nobody in the mainstream media or marketing wanted YOU, they wanted your parents money, in a far more direct way that these trends existed before (and they always did, and still do, just not like then). To be honest I think the proliferation of geek culture for that generation was because the non-mainstream media was for about 15 minutes happy to be a little more genuine than the rest of it, happy to have a willingly paying audience, when it had been neglected in the past. A sort of perfect story of events that lead to a golden age of all of the things nerds love, and what amounts to a post millenium decade+ long cycle of "monkey see, monkey do" trying to recapture it, while maintaining an increasingly ruthless corperate mentality throughout geekdom reminiscent of a lot of the trends that people wanted to get away from when it got that boost during the 1990s (though to be fair it was still present, just not to the current extent).
