Comment by anthk

Same for indie music and culture, except for DB, where in 1990 in Spain Goku was more widely known and read than Superman. We finished DBZ in 1995-6 with the translated manga. Marvel/DC existed, but DB was everywhere. For the rest, almost 100% the same. Mangas were for kids wich cool elder brothers, they were expensive, but shared like drugs. At least regional TV's aired tons of anime back in the day (Sakura, Doraemon, Lupin...), we were covered.

But for the music, the crappy pop was on every radio and TV, altough it was far more variety than today where's 90% reaggeton (even faking Latin American accents from Spaniards) and mediocre pop singers. When I got some discount CD's - Def con Dos, similar to Public Enemy- and the like, it was like crossing to a different universe being myself a son of a blue collar worker.

Oh, and thanks again for the regional TV's in Spain (from autonomous regions), as they reran The Outer Limits in mid 90's instead the usual shitty sitcoms. That drove me into scifi, among getting 1984, Brave New World and the like from dollar stores at very cheap prices in early 2000's. Yes, once they sold classic in "Spanish Dollar Stores" (under a different name), it was glorious to find pulp fiction books, staunch joke books and often an Asimov or Bradbury book. That under ~$1 back in the day, almost the price of a bread baguette or your daily newspaper. A damn bargain compared to the $10 pocket cardboard cover book or worse the normal, thick volume $20 book. Comics from Tintin and Astérix were expensive too. But the English edition of these were also available in these stores, so often I bought them understanding maybe a 30% of it, 80% with a dictionary.

Video games? A single one per year and that's it. Choose wisely. An RPG? Great, tons of replaying. In order to save money, the next year I could get a Chinese pirate 21 in 1 cartridge with platformers and games like Batman, Goal, Metroid II... in order to disconnect from the RPG.

But when I could get scifi games, text adventures and the like from cybercafés 2000-2002 the 1990's felt rancid, outdated and tacky compared to Emule, Soulseek, Deus Ex, the first Linux distros...