Who can forget hearing Roxettes It Must Have Been Love as Julia Roberts looked wistfully out a car window after bidding her lover adieu in Pretty Woman? Or Toni Braxtons Love Shoulda Brought You Home after Halle Berry epically breaks up with cheating-ass Eddie Murphy in Boomerang? Or even The Muffs Kids in America introducing the teenage spirit of Clueless ?

Theyre just a few of the songs that helped define a golden era for film soundtracks in the 90s, back when the moviegoing experience wasnt only about the film. Chances are that if you went to see a major movie, youd have already worn out its soundtrack so badly that it looked like a dog had gnawed on the cassette tape. Or if you didnt already have the album, you ran to Sam Goody shortly after watching the movie to rectify that.

Because it wasnt enough to just see a film that we loved. Back then, we devoured every extension of it. We had to buy the poster, the T-shirt and the almighty soundtrack comprised of A-to-B-side bangers. It was the era when record labels like LaFace and Arista entered a mutually beneficial collaboration with major film studios such as Paramount and New Line Cinema to take even more of our money. So we could blast Nate Dogg and Warren Gs Regulate from the Above the Rim soundtrack while driving down the street or at home.

It was a great time for albums across all genres, especially as grunge and hip-hop catapulted to the mainstream and Hollywood was determined to be a major part of that. Studios also benefited from our love affair with nostalgia with hits like Aerosmiths Sweet Emotion on Dazed and Confused and The Mamas & the Papas California Dreamin on the Forrest Gump soundtrack. Or drafted some of the greatest pop stars ever, like Cline Dion, to launch a film like Titanic right into the stratosphere.

These soundtracks captured the rage, the heartbreak, the chaos and the emergence of a generation that might not have ever quite realized what it had at the time. Or how fleeting it was.

It completely changed, Chris Hite, a film professor at Allan Hancock College, told HuffPost. Almost in 1999, just like a switch went on and it was over.