Mental Floss

Every Item in Nickelodeon’s 1992 Time Capsule

The capsule includes everything from VHS tapes to rollerblades.

By Adrienne Crezo|
Burial of the Nickelodeon Time Capsule 4/30/92 c. Nickelodeon/Viacom 1992
Burial of the Nickelodeon Time Capsule 4/30/92 c. Nickelodeon/Viacom 1992 | spindalis79

In 1992, Nickelodeon got together with the Kids World Council to decide what was most important to kids at the time. Then they assembled those items, put them in a big orange time capsule, and buried it in front of Nickelodeon Studios in Universal Studios.

Here's a list of everything inside the time capsule:

  • Movies, including Home Alone and Back to the Future on VHS
  • CDs, including 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, at the request of a Dr. Emmett Brown impersonator, who showed up in a real DeLorean and fake hair
  • One of Joey Lawrence’s “Whoa! ’92” hats, which he stopped by to present
  • News reports, including coverage of the AIDS crisis, Desert Storm, and the end 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 piece of the Berlin Wall
  • A Barbie doll
  • Pencils
  • A skateboard
  • A baseball
  • Twinkies
  • A stick of bubble gum (though no one seems to know which kind)
  • Photos of things too big (or alive) to fit inside, including bicycles, planes, trains, cars, politicians and celebrities
  • A videotape, which was a recording of the live ceremony, shot by a girl named Vicky who stood onstage to operate the Kid Cam
  • The camera recording the tape, which appears to have been unplanned—Mike O’Malley and Joey Lawrence both looked baffled about how to remove the tape from the camera, so the whole setup was tossed in at the last minute

After Nickelodeon Studios closed in 2005, the time capsule was moved to Nickelodeon Suites Resort in Orlando. It will be removed and opened April 30, 2042—50 years after it was first buried. We promise full team coverage that day. In the meantime, you can watch footage of the time capsule ceremony in the video above.

The next year, Nickelodeon got the Kids World Council together in Orlando for a bit of a heftier mission: to discuss the environment. The summit went by the catchy name “Plan it for the Planet” and more than 50 delegates attended.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

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