The 1990s in the back catalogue

The nineties are well represented in the back catalogue, which makes sense: it is a decade almost everyone has watched their way through. Here are the puzzles that landed in that ten-year stretch, by number.

#0045, from 1992, is one of the Disney Renaissance musicals, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker and set in a fictional Arabian city, where a street thief comes across a lamp and the spirit trapped inside it. Its lasting fame is Robin Williams as that spirit, a performance so heavily improvised, reportedly some sixteen hours of recorded ad-libbing, that the animators built the character around his riffs. It changed how studios cast and used voice actors, though Williams fell out publicly with Disney afterward over the use of his voice in advertising, and the two only made peace years later. Alan Menken wrote the score with two lyricists, Howard Ashman, who died before the film was finished, and Tim Rice, who completed the songs. It was the highest-grossing film in the world that year, taking around half a billion dollars, and it won two Oscars, for its score and for its best-known song.

#0031, from 1993, is a comedy directed by Harold Ramis and written with Danny Rubin, in which a cynical television weatherman, sent to cover a small-town winter festival he despises, finds himself living the same day over and over with no explanation and no way out. Bill Murray plays the weatherman and Andie MacDowell his producer. It received no Oscar nominations at all, now seen as one of the Academy's stranger oversights, though it did win the BAFTA for best original screenplay and has since been added to the American National Film Registry. Its real legacy is in the language, where its title became an everyday phrase for any situation that repeats itself endlessly and miserably, something almost no other film has managed. Murray, for the record, was bitten by the groundhog twice during filming.

#0021, from 1994, is directed by Robert Zemeckis and follows a good-natured man of limited intelligence who, more or less by accident, keeps turning up at the defining moments of postwar American history. Tom Hanks won Best Actor for the lead, his second in a row after the year before, which made him the first man since Spencer Tracy in the 1930s to take the award in consecutive years. The film used then-new visual effects to drop him into real archive footage beside real presidents, work that won it the effects Oscar. Robin Wright, Gary Sinise and Sally Field fill out the main cast. It was one of the biggest films of the year, took well over six hundred million dollars, and won six Oscars from thirteen nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.

#0029, also from 1994, is the other great Disney film of that year, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, the story of a young cub driven into exile by the uncle who murders his father, and his eventual return to claim what is his. James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons and Matthew Broderick lead the voice cast. Hans Zimmer won Best Original Score, and Elton John and Tim Rice won Best Original Song for its central ballad, one of three of the film's own songs nominated in that category. It was the highest-earning film in the world in 1994 and, for years afterward, the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film ever made, a record it still holds. The stage version that followed became the highest-grossing theatrical production in history. Not bad for a project the studio had treated as its second string, with the senior animators assigned elsewhere.

#0041, from 1994, is the sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, following six twenty-somethings in New York who spend most of their time in the same coffee house, working out their careers and relationships as they go. It ran for ten seasons to 2004 and won six Emmys from sixty-two nominations, though its bigger mark was on the business of television. By the final two seasons the six leads, who bargained over their pay together as a block, were each earning a million dollars an episode, and the last episode drew around fifty-two million viewers in the United States. It is one of the most rerun and most quoted comedies ever made, which is what makes it a fair puzzle, because almost everyone has seen it.

#0042, from 1997, closed the decade as the biggest film in the world. James Cameron wrote and directed it, setting a fictional romance between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet against the real 1912 sinking, and spending more on it than any film before, somewhere around two hundred million dollars. It was the first film ever to take a billion dollars worldwide and held the record as the highest-earning film ever made for twelve years, until Cameron beat it himself. It won eleven Oscars from fourteen nominations, matching the all-time record, and yet for all that it won nothing at all for acting. One small thing people forget: the pencil sketch of Winslet that appears in the film was drawn by Cameron's own hand. Whatever you make of it, it is one of the few films almost everyone alive has seen.

That is a lot of what the decade did best in one place, which is why a nineties puzzle rarely lasts long: the familiarity is already there, so the year and a single clue are often enough.