In the '90s, around mid-July, every jerkwad Target, KMart, Sears, Walmart, and Office Depot location would start advertising their "Back to School" stuff right in the middle of summer as a horrible omen of what was to come: the next school year. The only consolation was that the '90s was a decade of loud colors, appealing to kids by making everything into the coolest school supplies.
If you didn't have to most awesome '90s school supplies, you weren't ostracized, but you definitely weren't cool. You'd sit there with your sharpened #2 pencils, off-brand crayons and boring pencil bag, wishing your parents had sprung for the cooler stuff. This is a list of all the cool stuff we either wish we had or remember having in school during the '90s. We would all lose everything by about the third week, but those first three weeks of awesome stationary and every color of gel pen were really, really awesome.
The best '90s school supplies were the ones that they had commercials for on TV, trying to convince young students that normal pens were for old people. These are the greatest, most nostalgia-inducing '90s pencils, '90s stationary, and nostalgic '90s school supplies (Lisa Frank included), ranked in order of awesomeness by voters who knew what it mean to cool for school in the 1990s.
1
2,715316Mr. Sketch Scented Pens
2
2,635339Multi-Colored Push-Up Pens
3
2,507399Scratch N Sniff Stickers
4
2,383403Gel Pens
5
2,012492Trapper Keeper
6
1,920484Lisa Frank Everything
7
1,767501Floppy Disks
8
1,727502Spacemaker Pencil Boxes
9
1,704500Mead's Five Star Notebooks
10
1,620476Gelly Roll Pens
11
1,510470Simple Jansport Backpacks
12
1,473478Colorful Erasers
13
1,593525Neon Colored Pencil Grips
14
1,611545Erasable Pens
15
1,363523Troll Pencil Toppers
16
1,250505Neon Pencil Boxes (Later Used for Make-Up)
17
1,18350318
1,159522Elmer's School Glue GEL
19
947472Mead's Five Star First Gear Binders
20
1,062591Yikes! Pencils
21
930526Crayola Magic Scent Crayons
22
933570Nice-Smelling, Plastic Cartoon-Themed Pencil Bags
23
887541These Electric Organizers
24
846540Cartoon-Themed Pencils (With Sno Globe)
25
818550Sanrio Stationery