6 Sounds That Defined October in the 1990s

Back in the 1990s, fall announced itself through the TV set and the front yard as much as through the trees, from the X-Files theme to the rustling of leaves. Here are eight audio throwback that serve as reminders of the month of October in the ‘90s.

1. Hank Williams Jr. Asking If You Were Ready for Some Football
2. “Touch ’Em All, Joe,” and Then Nothing
3. The X-Men Theme, Premiering on Halloween
4. The Goosebumps Theme After School
5. A Xylophone Playing “Spooky, Scary Skeletons”
6. A Gas Leaf Blower Next Door

Hank Williams Jr. Asking If You Were Ready for Some Football

Starting in 1989, Monday Night Football opened every week with Hank Williams Jr. and a song he had already recorded once: after ABC came calling, he rewrote his 1984 hit “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” into “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night.”

It won him four straight Emmys starting in 1991 and stayed with the broadcast through its move to ESPN, until the network dropped him in 2011 over remarks he made on Fox News. ESPN brought him back in 2017 and cut him loose again in 2020.

“Touch ’Em All, Joe,” and Then Nothing

On October 23, 1993, Toronto Blue Jays radio voice Tom Cheek called Joe Carter’s ninth-inning, three-run home run to win the World Series at SkyDome, and he signed off with the line Carter still recites: “Touch ’em all, Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”

It was the last World Series call anyone made for two years. The players went on strike in August 1994, and on September 14 Major League Baseball canceled the rest of the season, playoffs and World Series included, the first time since 1904 that a season ended without a champion.

The X-Men Theme, Premiering on Halloween

X-Men: The Animated Series debuted on Fox Kids on October 31, 1992, with “Night of the Sentinels, Pt. 1,” and its instrumental theme took more work than it sounds like.

Composer Ron Wasserman, then working for Saban Entertainment, said the producers kept asking for more: “We ended up with 80 or 90 tracks for that thing. They just kept trying to get more and more energy out of it.”

He played every part himself on “a MIDI keyboard, and a computer,” and in 2019 a lawsuit claimed the theme copied the music from a 1980s Hungarian cartoon called Linda. Wasserman was dismissed from the case on jurisdiction, and the remaining defendants settled.

The Goosebumps Theme After School

Fox brought R.L. Stine’s books to TV with an hourlong prime-time special, “The Haunted Mask,” on October 27, 1995, four days before Halloween: an 11-year-old named Carly Beth buys a scary Halloween mask to get back at the boys who tease her, and it turns out to be more than a mask.

The special was a prelude to a weekly half-hour series that started November 3 on Friday afternoons. The Goosebumps books were already selling 1.25 million copies a month, with more than 71 million sold since 1992.

A Xylophone Playing “Spooky, Scary Skeletons”

Andrew Gold recorded “Spooky, Scary Skeletons” for his 1996 album Halloween Howls: Fun & Scary Music, one of nine original songs he wrote to fill what he saw as a shortage of fun Halloween music. He sang it and played every instrument, with a xylophone standing in for rattling bones and his daughters Emily and Victoria on backing vocals.

In 1998, Disney paired the song with Ub Iwerks’s 1929 cartoon The Skeleton Dance on a home-video release, and in the 2010s it came back as an internet meme that Gold, who died in 2011, only got a glimpse of.

A Gas Leaf Blower Next Door

Leaf season in the 1990s came with a two-stroke engine, and Los Angeles tried to switch it off. The city passed a 1996 ban on gas-powered leaf blowers within 500 feet of a home, with penalties as steep as a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, then put it on hold while it worked out enforcement.

When the City Council voted 9-6 to enforce it in January 1998, about a dozen gardeners were on a hunger strike on the City Hall lawn, and supporters of the ban were led by Peter Graves of Mission: Impossible. The council kept the ban but cut the penalty to a $100 fine plus $170 in court costs.