Buzz
In 1992, Nickelodeon teamed up with the Kids World Council to identify what mattered most to kids back then. They gathered these items, placed them in a large orange time capsule, and buried it outside Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios.
Here’s everything that was packed inside the time capsule:
- Movies, such as Home Alone and Back to the Future on VHS
- CDs like 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, added at the request of a Dr. Emmett Brown look-alike who showed up in a real DeLorean with fake hair
- One of Joey Lawrence’s “Whoa! ’92” hats, presented by Joey himself
- News reports on key events, including the AIDS crisis, Desert Storm, and the fall 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 fragment of the Berlin Wall
- A Barbie doll
- Pencils
- A skateboard
- A baseball
- Twinkies
- A piece of bubble gum (though no one knows which flavor)
- Photographs of things too big (or alive) to fit inside, like bicycles, planes, trains, cars, politicians, and celebrities
- A videotape recording the live ceremony, shot by a girl named Vicky, who stood onstage to operate the Kid Cam
- The camera used to record the tape, which was apparently added at the last minute—Mike O’Malley and Joey Lawrence were both confused on how to remove the tape from the camera, so the whole setup was thrown in without much planning
When Nickelodeon Studios closed its doors in 2005, the time capsule was relocated to Nickelodeon Suites Resort in Orlando. It’s scheduled to be opened on April 30, 2042—exactly 50 years after it was originally buried. We’ll provide complete coverage of the event that day. Until then, you can catch the footage of the time capsule ceremony in the video above.
The following year, Nickelodeon brought the Kids World Council together in Orlando for a larger mission: to focus on the environment. The summit was named “Plan it for the Planet” and attracted over 50 delegates.
