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[nineties-youth]

"The Power Is Yours!"

Captain Planet and the Planeteers was an American animated environmentalist television program that aired from 1990-96. Plot: Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, is awakened from a long sleep by Hoggish Greedly. Realizing that the damage is extensive, Gaia sends five magic rings, four with the power to control an element of nature and one controlling the element of Heart, to five chosen youths across the globe: Kwame from Africa, Wheeler from North America, Linka from the Soviet Union (changed to Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union's collapse), Gi from Asia, and Ma-Ti from South America.

Their (plastic) rings came in cereal boxes----how exciting to get your own!

These five are dubbed the Planeteers and are tasked with defending the Earth from the greatest of disasters and making efforts to educate mankind to keep others from happening.

[nineties-youth]

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail.

In 1971 Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught a history class as a student teacher.[1] He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on an HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on 3 December 1971. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service

The version I remember playing in my Grade 3 classroom was the 1992 version The Oregon Trail Deluxe (DOS).

[nineties-youth]

POGS

Pogs were flat, circular, cardboard discs decorated with images on one or both sides that you collect and play the Pogs game with. They were reintroduced in the early 1990s by the World POG Federation and the Canada Games Company. The pog fad soared, peaking in the mid 1990s before rapidly fading out.

The name originates from POG, a brand of juice made from passionfruit, orange and guava; the use of the POG bottle caps to play the game pre-dated the game's commercialization. The game of pogs possibly originated in Hawaii in the 1920s or 1930s, or possibly much earlier as the Japanese card game Menko from the 17th century.

 Most POGs feature the POG mascot, called Pogman. Pogs proved to be a major distraction at school which led to the banning of pogs from various schools across North America. Below: Your very own Pog-maker!

[nineties-youth]

YTV & the PJs

PJ Phresh Phil & Snit (w/ Phil, 1992-98)

PJ Katie of YTV's The Treehouse (1997-98)

The Fuzzpaws from The Treehouse

The Zone is a weekday afternoon programming block on the Canadian television channel YTV. It airs between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. ET in Canada. The block itself can be considered a show as it hosted by a personality formerly called a PJ (program jockey) that airs in the space between television shows, often in lieu of commercials. The Zone began its life as the Afterschool Zone on YTV in 1992, with its first host Phil Guerrero. Eventually, the PJs were joined by a variety of puppets named the Grogs, most famous of which, was Warren a mossy, turtle-like, cynical character.

Treehouse TV is a Canadian English language cable television specialty channel with programming targeted towards children ages 7 and under, that was launched on October 17, 1997. Its name comes from YTV's former children's programming block, The Treehouse. It aired weekday mornings until 1998.  Treehouse had three PJs (Program Jockeys) and was also co-hosted by The Fuzzpaws, which were stuffed animal puppets. As the name suggests, it was set in a tree house. PJ Katie had her own show, called PJ Katie's Farm, where she acted out stories with clay animals.