You know you were a child of the 80’s or 90’s when just hearing the words “Je suis la jeune fille” brings back a flood of memories of Muzzy. Those Muzzy commercials seemed be be everywhere for a good 10 years. Everyone knew the commercials by heart, but no one I knew ever actually had it. Whatever happened to Muzzy? Well it turns out he never really went anywhere, just adapted. And by the way, “Je suis la jeune fille” means “I am a young girl”.

Today while surfing around in Wikipedia, like I tend to do, one of the footnotes in the article I was reading was a link to a GeoCities page in the Wayback Machine. It was my understanding that individual GeoCities sites did not get archived, so imagine my delight when I did a search and the first website I ever designed after teaching myself HTML using AOL’s online tutorial back in the summer of 1994 was still available. What was that site? It was the Original Amy Jo Johnson Webring. I was originally going to steal and rewrite like the one good Amy Jo Johnson website because it was all frames and had a horrible layout, but halfway through he beat me to it, so I decided to make a Webring and have his site be the inaugural member. Yes, it’s embarrassing, but I’m not ashamed. I listed it as an extracurricular activity on my application to the National Honor Society, right along with Knowledge Bowl and being JV Chess Captain. Needless to say, I did not get in. That’s all the setup we need for today’s look back to the very dawn of the internet, where I shall endeavor to answer: Whatever Happened To Webrings?

Welcome to a new column here at InsufficientScotty, Whatever Happened To. . . ? where I examine all those cool things from back when you were a kid that were totally awesome, but which you’ve probably since forgotten. This won’t necessarily be as nerdy as our other columns, but it should still be fun. If it doesn’t elicit at least a few “AWWWWWWW YEAHHHHS, I remember those, they were awesome!”, you had a very sheltered childhood.

My first Whatever Happened To. . . entry is on the Wendy’s Superbar. If you’re too young remember, there was once a time when in addition to Frosty’s and the best fast food fries (before they changed to the new recipe recently), Wendy’s dabbled in also being an Old Country Buffet, and they had a buffet bar called the “SuperBar”, pictured below.