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- Movies, including Home Alone and Back to the Future on VHS
- CDs, including Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em by MC Hammer and Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album
- A Nintendo Game Boy
- Rollerblades
- Reebok Pump sneakers
- A jar of Gak, at the request of a Dr. Emmett Brown impersonator, who showed up in a real DeLorean and fake hair
- One of Joey Lawrence’s “Whoa! ’92” hats, which he stopped by to present
- News reports, including coverage of the AIDS crisis, Desert Storm, and the end of the Soviet Union
- Books, including a world atlas, history book, comic book, phone book, the Orlando TV Guide for the week of April 30, 1992, and a copy of the Book of - Endangered Species
- An issue of Nickelodeon magazine
- A Nicktoons t-shirt featuring Ren & Stimpy
- A piece of the Berlin Wall
- A Barbie doll
- Pencils
- A skateboard
- A baseball
- Twinkies
- A stick of bubble gum (though no one seems to know which kind)
- Photos of things too big (or alive) to fit inside, including bicycles, planes, trains, cars, politicians and celebrities
- A videotape, which was a recording of the live ceremony, shot by a girl named Vicky who stood onstage to operate the Kid Cam
- The camera recording the tape, which appears to have been unplanned—Mike O’Malley and Joey Lawrence both looked baffled about how to remove the tape from the camera, so the whole setup was tossed in at the last minute
I think 2042 might still be too early to open it, but it will be nice for anyone there to watch it be opened, if they care!
Is this a real list? Obviously in 1992 they didn’t know that the Internet would preserve the memory of a lot of this stuff so yeah, feels too early. But imagine the world with no Internet that had moved on and forgotten about Joey’s “whoa!”
Spoilers!!!
The twinkies should still be edible
What are twinkies? I see them referenced a lot in popular media and then depiction appears to be of a glazed eclair, so the worst possible version of an eclair, baked goods like wrap tend to go stale after about 10 minutes I’m not sure why they’re supposed to last for so long.
Twinkies are cream-filled sponge cake fingers. They aren’t glazed or iced. First introduced by the Hostess company in 1930, the cream filling was originally banana flavored but it was switched to vanilla during WWII rationing.
Twinkies, among many other similar cake-based snacks are made with emulsified shortening rather than butter or vegetable oil as you might bake a cake at home, which keeps them from going stale when stored at room temperature. This has led to an urban legend that they have an infinite shelf life, that they might even survive a nuclear war. 20th century Twinkies had a stated shelf life of 7 to 10 days; in 2012 a preservative was added which upped it to 45, but they do indeed spoil.
I’ll be my early 50s, that’s not even a good times capsule, I’ll still know all of the things that are.
I suppose it’s aimed at children, “this is what your parents thought was important”, presumably everyone will then have a good laugh at the VCR in the cassette tape that will inevitably be in there and no one will have any way to play.
50 years is a really good timeline for a time capsule. Close enough that parents or grandparents were there and lived it, far enough out that it’s decades before you existed.
Time capsules are never meant for the people who were there when they were sealed. That would defeat the purpose of a time capsule…
No shit you remember it. You were there. That’s the whole damn point. That there will be people around that lived it and can actually explain it all firsthand. That’s why they’re not super long-timeline things. It’s not for you. It’s nostalgia for the people that buried it, and a good passing down of information from generation to generation. But the primary point of time capsules are showing new generations history.
It’s like how the 90s are an exhibit at museums now. I took my kids to one. It was fun explaining all the shit they saw and thought was wild, because I lived it firsthand and it was just life.
It’ll be fun when it’s my grandkids too.