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For me, it's difficult to know who as popular back then, I wasn't even alive! lol. I just use box office mojo to see which films were doing well in a month then check to see the leading female stars in those films. But I guess that makes me unbiased as I'm ignorant to most of these names. As for the stars of Friends, you'll see their names appearing soon enough
I hadn't planned on running this as a tournament, more like an ever-changing roster like how it would have been back in 1996. When musicians or actresses drop off the radar for a while then they get removed as their popularity of the time wanes, but chances are they come back with a new film or album soon enough. My thoughts were to introduce championships sort of like WWE. Film studios, record labels, and TV could all have their own in time once there are enough names.
However, I'm writing this for you guys and I'm always open to suggestions and ideas if what I've mentioned here doesn't sound like you think it will work I'm happy to tweak and change it to popular opinion.
I'm aware this is a huge task and it's going to go on for months and months, and if enough people enjoy reading it I hope it can go on for years. I'm hoping to get the first story written and posted this weekend.
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There are always firsts unless I'm told, this is the first time I'm talking to someone who wasn't around in '96
In a nutshell, the '90s literally split in half in 1995. The first half was about entertainment finding not just its own voice after the '80s, but also about serving the new markets (half of Europe and Russia, meanwhile on the fetish market, DWW and others found a lot of girls from there). How to put this best... when parents lecture their kids what to stay away from, at some points some kids will claim to know that kissing makes a girl pregnant. So, there were quite a few movies, which studios have dumped on people in the knowledge they can't know it's a bad movie (compared with the Soviet schlock, even Adam Sandler movies look good). In the late '90s, the internet started to become a thing, but so did early viral marketing. They made us believe Sinbad is as good an actor, as he's a comedian, Shaq can act as swiftly as he plays, but most importantly they made us believe Schwarzenegger and Stallone can carry a comedy. This is because here's what we got to see: a trailer in the movies, a review, unbeknownst to us paid for by studios and a making of in the television. We needed to rely on buddies to know if it was good or not.
That's why word of mouth back then was as important as box office numbers. Just one example, in 1997, two years before the premiere, the first teaser dropped for The Phantom Menace and it promised to be awesome. Haters don't admit this, but back then the CGI, since it came from the same company that did Jurassic Park, promised to be quality... and then we got Jar Jar Binks and pod racing. Yet, because in lack of broadband and online piracy, by the time the first good pirated copy came out, ticket sales went through the roof, ardent fans have seen it 6 times in a row. I remember there being a 2 or 3-month preorder at some point.
One other thing. Since studios were no longer required to produce jingoistic action like Rambo, Chuck Norris or Schwarzenegger movies, they used their leverage to replace these actors with classically trained ones and opened the then-one way door from TV to movies. Back then, doing TV after movies were considered a career ender. That's how Jim Carrey and George Clooney got onto the big screen. As a matter of fact, Jim Carrey knows Jennifer Lopez personally, as they both left the same show to do movies (and to this date, never did one together). Heck, speaking of Carrey, the Lauren Holly vs Renee Zellweger story has written itself way back when... was it Diana the Valkyrie or TinaDiane's site... I can't recall exactly. I'm not saying look it up, but catfight stories of that era are a pretty good indicator who was famous.