Types Of '90s Clubs You Started With Your Friends

The '90s were all about clubs. When you were a kid or even a teen in the '90s, having a club was cool. And not just some boring old "fan" club. Your club was pro-active and had a purpose. Clubs in the '90s weren't about being exclusionary or naughty — they were generally about contributing to the community or developing some kind of skill with your friends. Yes, we were that freaking adorable. The '90s were an innocent time when kids formed clubs, long before kids spent their formative years begging their parents for things like smart phones (although I'm not going to lie, I did beg for King's Quest on floppy disk on more than one occasion).

If you grew up in the '90s, you probably remember putting together a club. There would have been a president, a vice president, and a secretary. Kid clubs in the '90s were hyper organized, of course. At your weekly meetings (sometimes held during recess at school, sometimes after school if someone's mom would let you all come over), the secretary would take notes while you worked out your strategy to reach your goals as a team. Sometimes you'd make flyers and get someone's parents to photocopy them at work. Yes, it is all as stupidly adorable as it sounds. Here are seven types of clubs you started in the '90s (whether you only started one type, or all types).

1. Babysitter's Club

Every '90s child worth their salt started a Babysitter's Club. I started one with my best friend when we were still young enough to need baby sitters ourselves. We hand drew a flyer with really creepy demonic looking babies on it and charged $5 a night. It wasn't particularly lucrative. But we loyally had our weekly meetings, religiously read all the Babysitter's Club books, watched the movie, and even tried to recruit more club members so we could all lie in the grass with our heads in the middle while someone took a bird's eye view photo of us like the poster for the movie.

2. Spy Club

I'm not sure what it was about the '90s, but kids were really into spying. I blame Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? Spying was cool as hell, and even if you didn't really have anything to spy on, you'd find it. My spy club and I used to hide behind bushes at school with a different mark every lunch time, trying not to be seen. It was always unclear exactly what we were trying to ascertain by spying, but we were sure we would know when we saw it.

3. Survival Club

Even before Bear Grylls and our obsession with the zombie apocalypse, survival skills were a big deal. Nineties kids spent a lot of time in the library, looking for reference books about survival skills. My local library weirdly had a lot of survival skill books specifically for children, which taught you how to stare at sharks if you were suddenly confronted by one while in the water. Some of us got so into learning basic survival skills (and some more obscure ones), that we revolved our clubs around the art of survivalism. I, for instance, may more may not have spent a day at the park with my friends trying to track wild animals by looking for their poo (mostly the pellets of possums). It didn't make a whole lot of sense.

4. Mystery Club

Mystery club is what happens when spy club and survival club have a baby. You would use all your spy skills and survival skills to solve mysteries, like on Scooby Doo. Except that you'd have to try to fabricate mysteries, because let's face it, kid life generally isn't all that mysterious. So you'd notice innocuous changes in the environment and world around you, and your club would make it their business to find out why things were different from one day to the next.

5. Planeteers Club

Planeteers (yes, as in the characters from Captain Planet) were a popular club choice. Not only would club members all choose their "character" (I was a Linka, a role I had to fight hard for), you'd go about doing good things for the environment. When I was in my Planeteers club, we used to pick up trash from the school yard and police the water fountains, making sure no one was wasting water by having water fights and spraying it at one another. It might not have been the coolest club, but it certainly was the most environmentally friendly one.

6. [Name Of Your Favorite Band Here] Club

Like the Planeteers club, you probably had a favorite band club too. Mine was an Australian girl group called Girlfriend (kind of like the Spice Girls before the Spice Girls), and each member of the club represented a different band member. Club meetings would include rehearsal (learning the songs and making up dance moves), and trying to book gigs, obvi.

7. A Computer Club

Getting together with your friends to play games, make websites and otherwise mess around on huge, industrial-sized computers, was definitely a kind of club kids had in the '90s. My school actually had a computer club that you went to at lunch time once a week, and everyone sat around at those old Macs that looked like bricks and do projects together. Kids are basically born with computer skills these days, so I guess computer clubs aren't really in style any more.

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