We Hate the '90s

Arriving on January 16, 2019 as the first series of that year, We Hate the '90s served as a thematic sequel to the previous year's release, turning its satirical focus toward the fads, cartoons, fashion, and television of the following decade. The set was the final series shaped by outgoing art director Colin Walton before Jessica Kanzer took over to guide it through production. Even the outer packaging marked a shift for the brand, introducing the first crooked logo alongside wrapper and display art by John Pound, who painted all-new characters for the box art rather than repurposing classic personalities from the original 1980s run.

Planned gravity feed boxes intended for retail chains like Target were cancelled shortly after solicitation began. Collectors instead broke into eight-sticker packs across twenty-four-count hobby display and retail boxes, value blasters housing five packs and three exclusive bonus stickers, and double-sized fat packs. The gags took aim across the decade's pop landscape with stickers like Powdered-Toast STAN, Wrestled REN, DOUG Rat, Chomped CHUCKY, TAYLOR Moon, and the comic book spoof Extreme-LEE, featuring painted artwork from series regulars including Junghwa Im, Brent Engstrom, Layron DeJarnette, and Miran Kim.

Topps distributed its parallels and insert sets across specific pack varieties, making the Hobby Collector boxes the sole destination for patch cards limited to 50 copies, black Bruised borders, and the ten-card '90s Wax Pack Parodies set. Blaster boxes served as the exclusive home for eight Bathroom Buddies stickers, marking the final entry for that run, while fat packs carried purple Jelly parallels and the twenty-card Wacky Pails insert. Parallel chases ranged from common green Puke borders in retail packs to yellow Phlegm borders rerouted to retail display boxes, joined by serial-numbered hits including blue Spit borders out of 99, red Bloody Nose borders out of 75, and Fool's Gold borders limited to 50. Printing plates, artist autographs, and original sketch cards from fifty-six different artists, who contributed standard sketches along with shaped, panoramic, and puzzle drawings, rounded out the chase.

Production increased notably over the preceding series, with pack estimates rising to roughly 473,000 total packs as retail production expanded even as collector boxes grew tighter. That print run produced distinct quirks on the pack wrappers, where published insert odds proved far more pessimistic than reality, resulting in gold borders falling at roughly twice the rate printed on the packaging. Standard hobby boxes also emerged without distinguishing marks, leaving them identical to retail display cartons on store shelves.