“After a couple of years no one will even remember”: 16 pop-culture windows into the world of 1993

1. The Fugitive finds the sweet spot between box office and critical acclaim
Blockbusters haven’t always been anathema to the Oscars, though it’s increasingly seemed that way in the past few decades. Yet for most of the Academy Awards’ existence, the Hollywood community was usually happy to toss a Best Picture nomination to a well-made movie that also made a lot of money. That movie rarely won, but it was the ultimate “nice to be nominated” prize. Yet the Oscars struggled as the movies making the big bucks increasingly were in less Academy-friendly genres like action movies and remakes of TV shows. One of the increasingly few exceptions to this rule? Andrew Davis’ relentlessly entertaining adaptation of the TV show The Fugitive. Positioning its big action sequences for maximum impact and telling a surprisingly involving story in between, the film cemented Harrison Ford’s star cachet for another decade and won Tommy Lee Jones an Oscar for playing the man chasing Ford. It was the only Oscar the film won, but the fact that it was nominated for seven—including Best Picture—showed how thoroughly it had found the rare Venn diagram intersection of being mindless enough for a mass audience, thoughtful enough for critics, and middlebrow enough for the Academy.
2. The Firm movie marks the arrival of “peak Grisham”
The summer movie season of 1993 was a good one for the blockbuster novelists of the ’90s. In addition to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Rising Sun, the first-ever film adapted from a John Grisham novel, The Firm, was released to theaters; the Tom Cruise vehicle knocked Crichton’s dinosaur clones from the top of the weekly box-office rankings. Grisham’s legal thrillers were the biggest books of the early ’90s, built around peculiar facets of the law by the attorney-turned-author. (One of the major plot points in The Firm involves the hero trying to thwart the mob without violating attorney-client confidentiality.) The public’s demand for such courtroom minutiae hit a fever pitch in ’93, with The Firm grossing more than $270 million on its way to two Oscar nominations. And for much of the summer, Grisham would split the top six spots on the New York Times bestseller list with—who else?—Michael Crichton.
3. Four dumb farces denote the movie-going public’s lust for laughs
With notable exceptions like Manhattan Murder Mystery and Groundhog Day, big-screen comedies released in 1993 were far from highbrow. The year saw the release of four slapstick spoofs, proving that audiences in 1993 just wanted to laugh at something they had maybe already laughed at before. Hot Shots! Part Deux is the hokier, gorier sequel to 1991’s Hot Shots!, an Airplane!-style take on Top Gun. National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 (because they knew there’d be sequels) made the increasingly silly Lethal Weapon movies look even sillier as Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson went after William Shatner’s evil General Mortars. Fatal Instinct starred Sean Young as not-Sharon Stone in a send-up of erotic thrillers. Finally, with Robin Hood: Men In Tights, Mel Brooks took on the Robin Hood legend in general and Kevin Costner’s laughable Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves in specific. Cary Elwes is almost decent as the arrow-slinging renegade, but his supporting cast of characters—Richard Lewis as Prince John, Roger Rees as the Sheriff of Rottingham, and Dave Chappelle and Isaac Hayes as Ahchoo and Asneeze, respectively—just make the whole thing too, too ridiculous.
4. Joel Hodgson leaves Mystery Science Theater 3000—and TV fandom screams its way into the Internet age
After approximately 160 hours of hurling jokes at the worst films ever made, Joel Robinson escaped the Satellite Of Love on October 23, 1993—taking his off-screen alter ego, Mystery Science Theater 3000 host and creator Joel Hodgson, with him. One week later, his seat was occupied by towheaded MST3K head writer Michael J. Nelson, and the movie-riffing series began its sometimes rocky—but ultimately successful—transition into a new era. On the burgeoning Information Superhighway, however, it was an entirely different story: The show’s online fandom fell into the so-called Great Joel vs. Mike Flame War, a battle of opinion that grew so heated, merely posing the question “Who’s the better host?” was a major faux pas in the MSTie community for years. Although not uncommon at the time—the emotional arguments and personal attacks that occasionally stemmed from them recalled similar “Kirk versus Picard” debates among the Star Trek faithful—it was the first experience many participants had with a testy type of discourse that became more prevalent alongside the proliferation of Internet access.
5. Invasion of the sci-fi TV shows
At the start of the ’90s, two types of science fiction succeeded on TV: anthologies series in The Twilight Zone vein, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. That all changed in 1993, with several series premieres kicking off a decade-long golden age of spaceships on the small screen. The Star Trek franchise made its most daring move, leaving the Enterprise behind for the stationary Deep Space 9. Another series set on a space station, Babylon 5, also came to air, with a dismal pilot movie that nonetheless showed flashes of the great show it would become. Even the major networks got in on the act: NBC debuted seaQuest DSV, an underwater Star Trek at its best (and a godawful Star Trek underwater at its worst). The biggest cultural phenomenon of the lot, The X-Files, started that year as well. This wasn’t just a great time for science-fiction fans; it was also fruitful for television overall: The experiments in serialized storytelling and characterization in sci-fi TV of the ’90s eventually laid the groundwork for the great dramas of the 2000s.
6. The Fox ascends
At the start of 1993, the Fox Broadcasting Company was still considered an irreverent upstart—but that impression was changing. Married… With Children and The Simpsons were hitting their peaks, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place offered appealing, trashy fun, and The X-Files’ premiere would give it a major drama series. But the network’s challenge to the Big Three reached a new height when Fox outbid CBS for NFL broadcast rights. From that moment on, it was no longer a pretender—it was a fourth monarch. Saturday Night Live, that comedic representative of the mainstream media’s id, thought to parody the acquisition by doing an NFL promo in the style of 90210’s credits. Twenty years later, the NFL On Fox is an institution—although those 90210 credits have aged better than the “Extreme!” robots used in Fox’s telecasts.