THE 1990s were rife with dumb rumours and myths, often promulgated by the new-fangled Worldwide Web. Here are some you’re not proud to admit you did sort-of believe.
The kid who got hit by a javelin at school and died
Every school had an apocryphal tale of a kid – always from a year group that left before you started, curiously – who got hit by a stray javelin during sports day and died. Versions varied from county to county, like Native American folk tales. In some it was a mere stab in the heart, in others he’d somehow been near-decapitated. RIP, javelin kid who strangely was never on the news.
Saying ‘Candyman’ into a mirror five times got you murdered
Obviously the Bloody Mary myth reworked in Candyman. Just one problem – Candyman was definitely fictional. The 1992 film unambiguously has writing credits for director Bernard Rose and Candyman himself is played by the fairly famous actor Tony Todd, who was in Platoon and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s basically the same as worrying John Wick will mistakenly come after you.
Drinking too much Sunny Delight turned you orange
Launched in the 90s, Sunny Delight was a phenomenon. It tasted f**king disgusting but kids loved it because it was mostly sugar and only five per cent juice. Then it got banned. But that’s not the real story, it’s the ‘turning orange’ one. It can’t have been true, or British primary schools in 1998 would have had whole classes that appeared to be as addicted to fake tan as the Oompa Loompas on TOWIE.
Richard Gere and the gerbil
Richard Gere, star of Pretty Woman and American Gigolo, definitely put gerbils in his rectum to stimulate his prostate. With hindsight it’s obviously spite directed at a particularly good-looking male actor, if only because it’s a huge faff and Gere could have had all the bum fun he wanted with attractive women and skipped having to remove a dead rodent from his arse. A true cultural phenomenon, though, and even today you can’t look at your kids’ gerbil Mr Nibbles without idly wondering if he’d ‘fit’.
Prince had ribs removed to you-know-what
Another rumour that defies logic is that Prince had ribs removed so he could give himself blowjobs. Something about this doesn’t really stack up. Why would a man with a cavalcade of Kim Basinger-level conquests need to gobble his own knob? And does being minus a rib give you that much more reach? This rumour reignited in the 00s when Marilyn Manson was claimed to have done the same. But they also said he was in The Wonder Years, so we can now chalk up all three of these as patent bollocks.
The Millennium Bug
According to Michael Buerk planes would fall from the sky and the world would be destroyed when the nukes spontaneously set themselves off. In reality, IT blokes fixed it because banks didn’t want to risk losing money. So the actual story was more like ‘Man successfully avoids mid-morning hunger with large breakfast’. How silly to think mass deaths and martial law clampdowns were just around the corner – you’d have to wait for Covid for that, and it was a lot more hassle than resetting the clock on your VCR.
