The 1990s (pronounced "nineteen-nineties"; shortened to "the '90s") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999.
In the absence of world communism, which collapsed in the first two years of the decade, the 1990s was politically defined by a movement towards the right-wing, including increase in support for far-right parties in Europe[1] as well as the advent of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party[2] and cuts in social spending in the United States,[3] Canada,[4] New Zealand,[5] and the UK.[6] The United States also saw a massive revival in the use of the death penalty in the 1990s, which reversed in the early 21st century.[7] During the 1990s the character of the European Union and Euro were formed and codified in treaties.
A combination of factors, including the continued mass mobilization of capital markets through neo-liberalism, the thawing of the decades-long Cold War, the beginning of the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet from the middle of the decade onwards, increasing skepticism towards government, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a realignment and reconsolidation of economic and political power across the world and within countries. The dot-com bubble of 1997–2000 brought wealth to some entrepreneurs before its crash between 2000 and 2001.
The 1990s saw extreme advances in technology, with the World Wide Web, the first gene therapy trial, and the first designer babies[8] all emerging in 1990 and being improved and built upon throughout the decade.
The July 1995 Chicago heat wave led to 739 heat-related deaths in Chicago over a period of five days. Most of the victims of the heat wave were elderly poor residents of the city, who did not have air conditioning, or had air conditioning but could not afford to turn it on, and did not open windows or sleep outside for fear of crime. The heat wave also heavily impacted the wider Midwestern region, with additional deaths in both St. Louis, Missouri and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Full article...)
... that Univel was an early-1990s attempt to compete with Microsoft on the desktop, but one industry consultant said of the company's goal, "they're dreaming"?
... that Bulkboeken ('bulk books') were cheap reprints of Dutch literary classics, published from 1971 to the late 1990s, and again from 2007?
... that just four days before his death in 2004, David B. McCall received a presidential pardon from George W. Bush for fraud charges dating from the 1990s?
After appearing in stage productions and television series, Spears signed with Jive Records in 1997 at age fifteen. Her first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), are among the best-selling albums of all time and made Spears the best-selling teenage artist of all time. With first-week sales of over 1.3 million copies, Oops!... I Did It Again held the record for the fastest-selling album by a female artist in the United States for fifteen years. Spears adopted a more mature and provocative style for her albums Britney (2001) and In the Zone (2003), and starred in the 2002 film Crossroads. She was executive producer of her fifth studio album, Blackout (2007), often referred to as her best work. Following a series of highly publicized personal problems, promotion for the album was limited, and Spears was involuntarily placed in a conservatorship. (Full article...)
Image 12Go-go boots became fashionable again in 1995. They were worn by women of the hip-hop, alternative, and dance subcultures. (from 1990s in fashion)
Image 13Young man in 1995, sporting a short undercut hairstyle. (from 1990s in fashion)
Image 26The federal building that was bombed in the Oklahoma City bombing two days after the bombing, viewed from across the adjacent parking lot. (from 1990s)
Image 27Model wearing a midriff shirt, a silver necklace, low ponytail and straight-leg leggings, 1999. (from 1990s in fashion)
Image 32The catsuit became a trend in the late 1990s. Normally made of latex, PVC, or spandex, it was often worn with high-heeled boots. (from 1990s in fashion)
Image 49Rwandan genocide: Genocide victims in Murambi Technical School. Estimates put the death toll of the Rwandan genocide as high as 800,000 people. (from 1990s)
Image 51The Nasdaq Composite displaying the dot-com bubble, which ballooned between 1997 and 2000. The bubble peaked on Friday, 10 March 2000. (from 1990s)
Image 72The compact disc reached its peak in popularity in the 1990s, and not once did another audio format surpass the CD in music sales from 1991 throughout the remainder of the decade. By 2000, the CD accounted for 92.3% of the entire market share in regard to music sales. (from 1990s)
Image 73Group of young children displaying various fashion trends. Amman, 1998. (from 1990s in fashion)
After numerous unsuccessful attempts to develop a Fantasia sequel, The Walt Disney Company revived the idea shortly after Michael Eisner became chief executive officer in 1984. Development paused until the commercial success of the 1991 home video release of Fantasia convinced Eisner that there was enough public interest and funds for a sequel, to which he assigned Disney as executive producer. The music for six of the film's eight segments is performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Levine. The film includes The Sorcerer's Apprentice from the 1940 original. Each new segment was produced by combining traditional animation with computer-generated imagery. Fantasia 2000 is also generally linked to the Disney Renaissance, as it commemorates to Walt Disney's third animated feature film. (Full article...)
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Parasite Eve (Japanese: パラサイト・イヴ, Hepburn: Parasaito Ivu) is a 1997 Japanese science fiction film that was directed by Masayuki Ochiai and is based on the 1995 novel Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena. Kiyomi (Riona Hazuki), the wife of Toshiaki Nagashima (Hiroshi Mikami), is left brain dead after a traffic accident on the day of their first wedding anniversary. Nagashima attempts to make Kiyomi live again by making a deal with a doctor who wants to harvest Kiyomi's kidneys for transplanting into a young girl in the same hospital. Nagashima agrees on the condition that he can have his wife's liver. While Nagashima experiments with the organ, the doctor finds one night the samples have emerged as a gelatinous form in the form of Toshiaki's dead wife and reveal themselves as an organization of sentient mitochondria that are bent on making a new species that will wipe out humanity.
In 1997, Kadokawa Shoten decided to use the film production side of its business to develop a film version of Parasite Eve, making it its first film in three years. The film was co-produced by Kadokawa and Fuji TV's Motion Picture Division. Ochiai made his debut as a feature film director, having worked in Japanese television on horror series such as Night Head. Parasite Eve was filmed in eight weeks with a budget of ¥550 million. Ochiai was not entirely pleased with the result of the film, feeling he was pressured to push the love story element of the story, later saying there were "so many compromises I had to make that it couldn't be a true horror movie". The film was released in Japan on February 1, 1997, with limited release outside the country. It received mixed reviews; The Daily Yomiuri found the film "mildly enjoyable at times" and Fangoria called it "flawed but fascinating". (Full article...)
Lyricist Howard Ashman pitched the idea, and the screenplay went through three drafts before Disney Studios president, Jeffrey Katzenberg, agreed to its production. The animators based their designs on the work of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and computers were used for both finishing the artwork and creating some animated elements. The musical score was composed by Alan Menken, and features six songs with lyrics written by both Ashman and Tim Rice, the latter of whom took over following Ashman's death. (Full article...)
Following the success of the 1993 television adaptation of the stage musical Gypsy (1959), Houston approached Gypsy's producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron about starring in a remake of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella for CBS. However, development was delayed for several years, during which time the network grew disinterested in the project. By the time the film was greenlit by Disney for ABC, Houston felt that she had outgrown the title role, which she offered to Brandy instead. The decision to use a color-blind casting approach originated among the producers to reflect how society had evolved by the 1990s, with Brandy becoming the first black actress to portray Cinderella on screen. Among the most significant changes made to the musical, several songs from other Rodgers and Hammerstein productions were interpolated into the film to augment its score. With a production budget of $12 million, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella ranks among the most expensive television films ever made. (Full article...)
The plot follows the interrogation of Roger "Verbal" Kint, a small-time con man, who is one of only two survivors of a massacre and fire on a ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles. Through flashback and narration, Kint tells an interrogator a convoluted story of events that led him and his criminal companions to the boat, and of a mysterious crime lord—known as Keyser Söze—who controlled them. The film was shot on a $6 million budget and began as a title taken from a column in Spy magazine called The Usual Suspects, after one of Claude Rains' most memorable lines in the classic film Casablanca, and Singer thought that it would make a good title for a film. (Full article...)
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Rushmore is a 1998 American comedy film directed by Wes Anderson about a teenager named Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman in his film debut), his friendship with rich industrialist Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and their shared affection for elementary school teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). The film was co-written by Anderson and Owen Wilson. The soundtrack features multiple songs by bands associated with the British Invasion of the 1960s. Filming began in November 1997 around Houston, Texas, and lasted 50 days, until late January 1998.
While the box office results were modest, the film had a positive reception among film critics. The film helped launch Schwartzman's career while establishing a "second career" for Murray as a respected actor in independent cinema. At the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, Anderson won the Best Director award and Murray won Best Supporting Male award. Murray also earned a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. Starting from Rushmore, both Murray and Schwartzman became two of Anderson's most frequent collaborators, appearing in eight and six subsequent films, respectively. In 2016, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (Full article...)
Bound was the first film directed by the Wachowskis, and they took inspiration from Billy Wilder to tell a noir story filled with sex and violence. Financed by Dino De Laurentiis, the film was made on a tight budget with the help of frugal crew members including cinematographer Bill Pope. The directors initially struggled to cast the lesbian characters of Violet and Corky before securing Tilly and Gershon. To choreograph the sex scenes, the directors employed sex educator Susie Bright as an ad hocintimacy coordinator, and she also made a cameo appearance in the film. (Full article...)
Frankenheimer signed to direct Zeik's screenplay, which Mamet rewrote to expand De Niro's role and develop plot details, in 1997. The film was photographed by Robert Fraisse in his native France from November 3, 1997, to March 3, 1998. Professional racing car drivers coordinated and performed the vehicle stunts, and Elia Cmiral scored the film, his first for a major studio. (Full article...)
The film was conceived by Feldman in 1987, and was originally pitched as a film treatment in the style of a police procedural, entitled The Message. When The Message failed to attract the studios, Feldman re-wrote it as a spec script, which ultimately led to the making of the film. The extraterrestrial aspect of Sil's character was created by H. R. Giger, who was also responsible for the beings from the Alien franchise. The effects combined practical models designed by Giger collaborator Steve Johnson and XFX, with computer-generated imagery done by Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios. Giger felt that the film and the character were too similar to Alien, so he pushed for script changes. (Full article...)
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Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (HAHK, transl. Who am I to you?) is a 1994 Indian Hindi-language musicalromantic drama film written and directed by Sooraj Barjatya and produced by Rajshri Productions. The film stars Madhuri Dixit and Salman Khan and celebrates Indian wedding traditions by means of a story of a married couple and the relationship between their families; a story about sacrificing one's love for one's family. The basic plot is based on studio's earlier film Nadiya Ke Paar (1982), which was based on Keshav Prasad Mishra's Hindi novel Kohbar Ki Shart. The film features music by Raamlaxman who also composed a 14-song soundtrack, an unusually large number of songs for that period.
Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! released on 5 August 1994, and became the highest-grossing film of the year, having grossed between ₹2 billion ($63.8 million) and ₹2.5 billion ($82 million) worldwide, It also became the highest-grossing Indian film at the time of its release. It contributed to a change in the Indian film industry, with new methods of distribution and a turn towards less violent stories. It was the first film to gross over ₹1 billion in India, and when adjusted for inflation, is the highest-grossing Indian film of the 1990s and also one of the highest-earning Bollywood films ever. Box Office India described it as "the biggest blockbuster of the modern era." (Full article...)
Disney came up with the idea to make a theatrical animated film starring Goofy while considering ideas for a potential Goof Troop TV special. Lima wanted to expand Goofy as a character and "give him an emotional side" that would resonate with audiences. Most of the cast from the show, including Farmer, Paulsen, and Cummings, reprised their roles while Dana Hill was replaced by Marsden as Max's voice due to the character's age difference. Furthermore, R&B artist Tevin Campbell provided the vocals for Powerline, a fictional celebrity musician who prominently appears in the film, performing the songs "Stand Out" and "I 2 I". (Full article...)
Beauty and the Beast focuses on the relationship between the Beast, a prince who is magically transformed into a monster and his servants into household objects as punishment for his arrogance and cruelty, and Belle, a young woman whom he imprisons in his castle in exchange for her father's freedom. To break the curse, the Beast must learn to love Belle and earn her love in return before the last petal from an enchanted rose falls, or else he will remain a monster forever. The film stars Paige O'Hara and Robby Benson as the voices of Belle and the Beast, respectively, as well as the ensemble voices of Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Jesse Corti, Rex Everhart, and Angela Lansbury. (Full article...)
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