Fads in Belgium

Whatever was the fad of the day strongly defined my childhood. This article roughly covers the period between 1999 and 2005.

Furby

Furby was a fad here, as people older than me have clarified. I recall owning one, though I remember finding it a tad confusing. I've grown to appreciate the brand more during my adult years.

Pokémon and Digimon

Pokémon is the first fad I truly remember, though that's something I've already talked about in great detail elsewhere. I recall that later on, there was a schoolyard rivalry with Digimon. I very much liked the Digimon anime, but was barely able to find any of the cards.

While I obviously played the Pokémon games, I don't think I was even aware that Digimon had games.

Beyblade

Ah, Beyblade, another fad fueled by a TV show. I don't actually recall ever having seen the toys in stores. Just knock-offs during a school trip to the beach. We'd mostly play with Beyblade spinners, which came in bags of chips.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

Now this was a big one for me. They weren't Pokémon cards, so they were not banned at school, and there was this crafts shop that sold decks and packs. I revisited the card game again later, long after the fad had ended.

Marbles

I don't recall the exact timeline here, but for a brief while everyone at the playground was playing with marbles. I don't know what caused it, maybe there was a brief lull inbetween commercial fads. I was able to play along using my dad's old marbles, which he had kept in a big bucket.

Diddl

This is probably the odd one out. The fads I mentioned before were pretty universal, but what on earth is a Diddl?

Diddl's a really cute German merchandise character, a mouse with really big feet, with a bunch of equally cute side characters. This was definitely a girl-coded fad, but dang, I was all in. I'm kinda proud of my younger self for ignoring what other boys said.

The main collectible here was stationery. Yeah. I'm serious. People would buy a block of lined paper, with illustrations on them (and sometimes even scents), and would then trade individual sheets with others. They were all very beautiful, and I also fondly remember the German catalogs with checkmarks. You'd of course save your pieces of paper in dedicated perforated sheets not unlike TCG binders, which were very solidly built and probably expensive as heck.

One of my first ever hand-coded websites was dedicated to Diddl. I don't recall what I had on there, though. Sometime after the height of the fad, I did pick up a Diddl magazine at Center Parcs. Probably during my second-to-last visit.

Things That Fadn't

There were also some fads that never really took off. Right now I can only think of one specific example, though I'll be sure to update this page once I think of more.

Spring BreaKeys

While the local TV production Spring was hugely popular, the studio's attempt to cash in on that with collectibles failed miserably. Studio 100 got a license to produce BreaKeys with the IP. These were plastic keys, and you had to twist two together. If your key broke, you lost.

From what I've read, Studio 100 was stuck with tons of these. I also remember having an entire bag of these and not knowing what to do with them.