Is there any way on line to find basically tv listings from years in the '90s?
I ask because I watched a Nostalgia Critic video looking back on "The Disney Afternoon" and he played a clip from Chip N' Dale's Rescue Rangers--the episode about the Cola Cult. I hadn't even known about it--until the clip played and then it jogged a childhood memory of having watched it on TV and I was lost in memory; I knew the Coo Coo Cola song from the episode as it was playing.

But then I looked it up--the episode originally aired in October 1989; I wasn't born until November 1990, so I must've seen a rerun, but when? I'm really curious.

Same goes for another show. I remember being really into the Alvin and the Chipmunks music video of Beat It by MJ. And episode aired before I was born. But I remember seeing it on TV and being into it, and we recently found a candid audio tape of me singing "Beat It" from June 1994. So I just wonder when exactly I watched that, too.

Is there any way on line to find basically tv listings from years in the '90s?


That's an interesting question.  A few people have scanned in random bits of random editions, but I don't know of any attempt to archive every edition of TV guide.  Remember, every TV listing was local to a geographic region - so it's not like there was "the" TV Guide for any given week.  There were dozens of separate editions of TV Guide depending on where you lived. 

The data probably still exists somewhere, but I doubt the current owners of TV Guide are interested in scanning/digitizing it from everything from old microfiche to punched cards to paper tape to 9-track tape to God knows what databases they used to publish it.  The story of how they got that data from whatever format they started with, into phototypesettable form, into ink on paper, must, in and of itself, have posed hard technological problems.

Your question's theoretically answerable; you know where you were that year.  The tricky part is going to be finding the data: on which networks was the show syndicated, which of your local stations picked it up, when did their seasons start, etc.  Because there was no one time at which any station was guaranteed to be running something on syndication, it's a lot harder than an IMDB or Wikipedia lookup.

I know, this does not help you much, but to find out something like this is even hard in Germany. Here, every channel has its schedule and its the same in all geographic regions, however, there is another problem. I have also watched 80s shows in the 90s, but it's hard to find out when exactly because of the high number of reruns. I can estimate the year maybe, but it's not possible to find out the month unless I consider other data (like memories of what I have done on the specific day...).

It's a lot easier with shows that were new and when the initial release date was the date when you have actually watched it.

I myself try to hent down VHS tapes and sometimes come across reruns; it helps if the clues from the promos/commercials tell you when exactly it is from; but generally speaking, TV Guide (or some local newspaper guides) only mentions primetime shows, many syndicated episodes broadcast outside of primetime don't tell you the specific episodes that are aired. It can also lead to interesting lost content and of course stuff, even old classic movies when they were broadcast on AMC (back when it was called American Movie Classics!) or TCM. While a bit harder to find, you can do the same for shows that reran in the '80s.

Is there any way on line to find basically tv listings from years in the '90s?
I ask because I watched a Nostalgia Critic video looking back on "The Disney Afternoon" and he played a clip from Chip N' Dale's Rescue Rangers--the episode about the Cola Cult. I hadn't even known about it--until the clip played and then it jogged a childhood memory of having watched it on TV and I was lost in memory; I knew the Coo Coo Cola song from the episode as it was playing.

But then I looked it up--the episode originally aired in October 1989; I wasn't born until November 1990, so I must've seen a rerun, but when? I'm really curious.
Here are some incomplete listings between 1990 and 1992.

http://kidsblockblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/chip-n-dale-rescue-rangers-schedule-archive-1990-1992/