The 2000s

106 & Park

BET's live countdown couch — AJ and Free, a screaming studio audience, Freestyle Friday battles, and the top hip-hop and R&B videos of the day. For fourteen years, this was where rap premieres actually happened.

13 Going on 30

A 13-year-old wishes herself "thirty and flirty and thriving" in 1987 and wakes up in 2004 as a magazine editor with no memory of the years between. Jennifer Garner's charm — and one glorious "Thriller" dance — turned it into a millennial comfort classic.

20Q

A palm-sized handheld electronic guessing game by Radica where you think of an object and the toy reads your mind through yes/no questions. Released around 2003–2004 and a holiday best-seller by 2005, it used AI to eerily predict what you were thinking.

24

A high-octane Fox thriller that premiered November 2001, starring Kiefer Sutherland as CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit) agent Jack Bauer. Each season depicts a single continuous 24-hour day with one episode per hour, complete with a ticking on-screen clock and split-screen "meanwhile" shots. The show's relentless pacing, cliffhangers, and post-9/11-era terrorism plots made it a cultural phenomenon that redefined the thriller format for television.

28 Days Later

Cillian Murphy wakes from a coma to an emptied Britain: the Rage virus, grainy DV cameras, and infected that sprint. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's $8 million nightmare reinvented the zombie movie's speed limit — even though, as every pedant will happily tell you, they're infected, not zombies. For a generation this was the scariest thing a friend's older brother ever put on.

300

Zack Snyder's 2007 comic adaptation: 300 Spartans against the Persian king Xerxes, rendered bronze-and-crimson with slow-motion everything. It broke the March box-office record, launched a thousand ab jokes, and gave the internet "This is Sparta!"

3D Doritos

Hollow, puffed, three-dimensional Doritos that dissolved on your tongue the instant you crunched them. They tasted vaguely like all the regular Doritos flavors but somehow better, and then Frito-Lay decided we didn't deserve them anymore.

40 Days and 40 Nights

A romantic comedy built on a very 2002 premise: a heartbroken San Francisco web designer swears off all sexual contact for the 40 days of Lent — right as he meets the perfect woman. Josh Hartnett at the peak of his heartthrob moment, opposite Shannyn Sossamon.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Steve Carell gets his chest waxed for real, screams "Kelly Clarkson!", and a whole era of comedy begins. Judd Apatow's 2005 directing debut turned a sweet-natured premise — a middle-aged guy who never quite got around to it — into the decade's comedy blueprint.

50 Cent

The Queens mixtape king who survived being shot nine times, got signed by Eminem and Dr. Dre, and turned his bulletproof origin story into one of the biggest rap debuts of the decade. For a few years in the mid-2000s, 'In da Club' and 'Get Rich or Die Tryin'' were everywhere, and 50 Cent was the most bankable name in hip-hop.

8 Mile

Eminem's semi-autobiographical 2002 drama, following a broke Detroit kid chasing rap glory from a trailer park to the battle stage. Its climactic freestyle showdown and the Oscar-winning anthem "Lose Yourself" made it far more than a vanity project.

98 Degrees

The boy band that built itself—assembled independently by four guys chasing the dream in Los Angeles, without a Lou Pearlman or corporate svengali telling them who to be. They cracked the charts with 1997's "Invisible Man," then spent 1998–2000 as Motown Records' R&B-leaning answer to the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, delivering a handful of genuine hits including one number-one collaboration with Mariah Carey, then watched their moment fade when Nick Lachey married Jessica Simpson in 2002 and reality TV captured his afterlife.

A Cinderella Story

Hilary Duff waits tables at her wicked stepmother's San Fernando Valley diner while trading anonymous messages with a soulmate — who turns out to be Chad Michael Murray, the most popular boy in school. Critics hated it; an entire generation of sleepovers overruled them.

A Knight's Tale

The 2001 jousting movie that made Heath Ledger a star and opened with a medieval crowd stomping and clapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You." A period adventure that gleefully refused to act its age.

Vanessa Carlton — "A Thousand Miles"

The piano riff every kid who took lessons tried to learn. Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" owned 2002 radio, then got a whole second life in White Chicks, with Terry Crews belting every word in absolute earnest. It belongs equally to burned CDs, karaoke nights, and the meme age that followed.

Abercrombie & Fitch

The dim-lit mall temple with impossibly loud music, a signature cologne so thick it hit you at thirty paces, and shopping bags plastered with shirtless male models. The Abercrombie & Fitch moose logo on polos and tees became a middle-school currency of cool in the 2000s. Wearing it meant you had money, taste, or both—or at least that's what everyone pretended to think. The brand launched its spinoff, Hollister, in 2000, spreading the gospel even wider.

Accelerated Reader Points

Finish the book, march to the library computer, pass the quiz, collect the points. Accelerated Reader turned a generation's independent reading into a full-blown economy — with leaderboards, prize walls, and kids doing cold calculations about whether a fat book was worth the point risk.

AddictingGames.com

The flash-game portal that gave "I'm bored" a URL. AddictingGames launched in 2002 as a constantly updated grid of free browser games, became one of the sites school IT departments most loved to block — and somehow outlived Flash itself.

Adult Swim

Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.

AdventureQuest

The Flash browser RPG you grinded on school computers that blocked real games — turn-based monster fights, gold and XP, and a one-time $19.95 Guardian upgrade you begged your parents for. AdventureQuest is still running.

Aéropostale

The mall-hierarchy middle class: not as expensive as Abercrombie, not as beachy as Hollister, and absolutely everywhere on 2000s middle-school bodies. If your hoodie said AERO in fat letters across the chest, you were dressed.

Age of Empires II

Age of Empires II was the medieval real-time strategy game that defined the genre for a generation. Released in 1999, it put 13 civilizations at your command across historical campaigns spanning Joan of Arc to Genghis Khan. The Conquerors expansion (2000) became the definitive version, adding five new civilizations and cementing the game's legacy. Nearly three decades later, HD remasters and competitive esports tournaments prove this masterpiece never went out of style.

AIM Away Messages

The cryptic, ever-changing status you left up for your buddy list to decode — song lyrics aimed at nobody in particular, inside jokes, coded hints about your mood and your crush. AIM away messages were half diary entry, half performance art, and everyone was reading.

AIM & MSN Messenger

The after-school ritual: logging on to a dial-up modem, scanning your buddy list, typing AIM away messages packed with song lyrics and veiled drama, and knowing your 12-year-old screen name would haunt you forever. AIM and MSN Messenger were the social nervous system of the '90s and 2000s — instant, informal, and utterly addictive.

Akon

The voice on half of late-2000s radio. Akon went from "Locked Up" to "Lonely" to "Smack That" — and guested on 23 Hot 100 hits for other artists while his labels signed Lady Gaga and T-Pain.

Blink-182 — All the Small Things

The perfect parody disguised as a perfect pop song. Blink-182 conquered TRL and the Billboard Hot 100 by mocking the very boy-band videos they shared the countdown with, with a "na-na-na-na" hook so contagious it rewired a million brains. Won Best Group Video at the 2000 MTV VMAs and became the guitar riff every beginner learned.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

A hilariously broken line of video-game English that became one of the internet's first true memes. In February 2001, a techno remix and a Newgrounds video put 'All your base are belong to us' on forum signatures, Photoshopped billboards, and eventually YouTube's own maintenance page.

Allen Iverson

Six feet even, 165 pounds — the crossover, the cornrows, the arm sleeve, and a swagger that rewrote what an NBA player could look like. Allen Iverson didn't just play basketball; he's credited with transforming the league's entire culture.

American Eagle

The dependable middle of the 2000s mall — graphic tees, bootcut jeans, and eagle-emblazoned hoodies pitched right between Abercrombie's attitude and the clearance racks. For millions of teenagers, American Eagle was simply where you shopped.

Green Day — American Idiot

Green Day's 2004 rock opera and concept album that told a story across its tracks while channeling the political frustration of the mid-2000s. A punk-rock comeback powered by the megahits 'American Idiot,' 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams,' 'Holiday,' and 'Wake Me Up When September Ends.' It won the Grammy for Best Rock Album and was later adapted into a Broadway musical.

American Idol

Fox's juggernaut singing competition that made appointment television relevant again. Premiering June 11, 2002, American Idol invited America to vote for the next big pop star—and for most of the 2000s, you couldn't escape it. Kelly Clarkson's season-one victory launched her career and countless memes about Simon Cowell's withering critiques.

American Pie

The teen comedy that launched a thousand locker-room chants and made 'MILF' a dinner-table word—whether your parents were ready or not. A crew of high schoolers make a pact, and the resulting chaos defined the 2000s comedy formula. You either rented this VHS or pretended you didn't watch it on cable.

America's Next Top Model

Tyra Banks turned the fashion industry into a weekly elimination bloodsport: makeover meltdowns, impossible photo shoots, and a panel that could end a dream with one photograph. And in 2005 it produced the eruption that outlived the whole series — "we were all rooting for you!"

Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding

This Xbox launch title did something radical: instead of following preset race tracks, you could pick any line down a whole mountain. The gimmick was fame—impress photographers and film crews, land sponsorships, and become a media sensation. Plus, the hard drive let you load your own music onto the console, a showstopper feature in 2001.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

"Stay classy, San Diego." Will Ferrell's mustachioed 1970s news anchor Ron Burgundy and his idiot news team gave the 2000s an endlessly quotable comedy — "I love lamp," "60% of the time, it works every time."

AND1

Basketball trash-talk tees that grew into a sneaker empire. AND1 turned playground streetball into ESPN programming, and by 2001 it trailed only Nike in US basketball-shoe market share. If you owned the shirt that said "Pass. Save yourself the embarrassment," you know.

Animal Crossing

Nintendo's gentle life-simulation game that reached the US on the GameCube in 2002. You move to a village of animal neighbors, pay off a mortgage to raccoon shopkeeper Tom Nook, and fish, catch bugs, decorate your house, and run errands—all on a real-time clock synced to the console, so the game's day and night and seasons matched real life. No winning, no losing—just a cozy daily routine.

Antitrust

A tech-industry thriller starring Ryan Phillippe as a young programmer recruited by a charming but sinister software CEO (Tim Robbins) who steals code and eliminates threats. Released with Microsoft's real antitrust battle still in the headlines, it became a cult artifact of the dot-com era despite critical and commercial failure.

Apologize

Mournful piano, Ryan Tedder's cracked falsetto, and Timbaland's clicking beat underneath — "it's too late to apologize" was inescapable in 2007. The remix took a dropped band from MySpace to number two on the Hot 100 and a US radio airplay record.

Apples to Apples

The party card game that turned judgment calls into comedy—a deceptively simple game about matching nouns to adjectives, where the humor lives entirely in the judge's increasingly baffled decisions. Published in 1999 and an instant hit, Apples to Apples became the default game of 2000s classrooms, youth groups, and family gatherings, the one clean party game everybody's parents would allow. The golden rule taught a generation: the judge is always right, no matter how absurd.

Aqua Dots

The craft kit where you arranged colored beads on a peg tray and spritzed them with water to fuse them into art—no heat, no ironing. A 2007 hit that turned into one of the decade's most alarming recalls when the beads' coating turned toxic inside the body.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Adult Swim's gleefully nonsensical cartoon about three anthropomorphic fast-food items — a milkshake, a box of fries, and a wad of meat — sharing a house in New Jersey. It made no sense on purpose, and it accidentally shut down Boston.

Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Jeff Foxworthy watching grown adults discover they cannot pass elementary school. Ten questions pulled from grade-school textbooks, a panel of actual fifth graders to lean on, and the walk of shame where you faced the camera and confessed: "I am not smarter than a 5th grader."

Arrested Development

A razor-sharp comedy about a wealthy, deeply dysfunctional real-estate family, canceled after just three seasons on Fox but too clever to fade. Low ratings, massive critical acclaim, and jokes that rewarded rewatching — there was always money in the banana stand. When Netflix revived it, the show's legacy finally caught up to its ambition.

Artemis Fowl

A twelve-year-old criminal mastermind kidnaps a fairy cop and holds her for a ransom of fairy gold. Eoin Colfer's "Die Hard with fairies" gave 2000s bookworms their favorite villain-protagonist — and the coolest cover in the book fair.

As Told by Ginger

The Nicktoon that took middle school seriously — Ginger Foutley navigating the popularity food chain while her characters did something almost no cartoon characters did: aged, grew, and actually changed their clothes.

Asheron's Call

The cult favorite of the first big three MMORPGs — never EverQuest's equal in numbers, but beloved for what it dared. Asheron's Call ran through Microsoft's gaming service, its classless characters and famous monthly story updates drip-feeding new life into one seamless world that stayed open for over seventeen years.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

The middle prequel arrived May 16, 2002 with Hayden Christensen's brooding Anakin, the clone army, and the moment every 2002 audience cheered: Yoda finally drawing a lightsaber against Christopher Lee. It was also a landmark under the hood — one of the first major films shot entirely on digital cameras.

Avatar (2009)

The blue-people movie that broke the all-time box-office record and put 3D glasses on the entire planet. James Cameron waited a decade for the technology to match his vision — then spent a quarter-billion dollars proving it was worth the wait.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Nickelodeon's animated epic about the last Airbender and a world where people bend the four elements. The show's serialized storytelling, humor, and character arcs (especially Zuko's redemption) proved surprisingly mature and acclaimed for kids' television. It ran three seasons from 2005 to 2008 and spawned an enduring fandom.

Avril Lavigne

The Canadian pop-punk singer who defined early-2000s teen rebellion with a necktie knotted over a tank top, chain wallets, and an I-don't-care-what-you-think attitude. Her 2002 debut Let Go crashed onto radio with "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi"—instant anthems—and positioned her as the voice of a generation of mall-goers who wanted to be skaters but shopped at Abercrombie. Follow-ups Under My Skin and The Best Damn Thing kept her reign solid through 2007.

Axe Body Spray

One part deodorant, three parts marketing, applied in quantities visible from space. Axe hit American shelves in 2002 and turned every middle-school locker room into a chemical event — while its ads promised that one spray would summon stampedes of women.

OutKast — "B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad)"

Stankonia's impossible lead single—drum'n'bass breakbeats, wailing guitar, organ, gospel choir—that radio was too scared to play in 2000. The song critics eventually crowned the decade's best.

Baby Bottle Pop

A lollipop shaped like a baby bottle's nipple, sitting in a tub of flavored powder you were meant to dunk it into. The jingle did the rest. Filed by everyone under 90s candy — which it isn't, quite.

Backyard Baseball

The kid-league sports game where you could draft a nine-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. — and still take Pablo Sanchez first overall. Humongous Entertainment's sandlot sim owned elementary-school computer labs, and its legend has only grown.

"Bad Day" — Daniel Powter

'Cause you had a bad day, you're taking one down... The piano lament that conquered European radio in 2005, topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006, and soundtracked every single American Idol elimination that season. It was everywhere, for everyone, about nothing in particular — and that was exactly the point.

Badger Badger Badger

Twelve cartoon badgers do calisthenics to a chant that never stops, interrupted by a mushroom and a snake. The joke is that it loops forever and you cannot escape it — one of the great earworms of the early internet.

Mountain Dew Baja Blast

A teal-colored tropical-lime Mountain Dew created by PepsiCo and born as a Taco Bell fountain exclusive in 2004. The exclusivity gave it instant cult appeal—you could only get it at the Bell, which made every trip feel like a special occasion. Fans begged for wider release, clamored online, and eventually got their wish: bottled and retail runs, though the Taco Bell version remained the holy grail. A pure 2000s fast-food icon.

Bakugan

The spring-loaded battle-toy franchise from Spin Master and Sega Toys (Bakugan Battle Brawlers), tied to an anime series that launched in Japan in 2007 and on Cartoon Network in the U.S. in 2008. The toys were marble-like orbs that popped open into fierce little figures when rolled onto magnetic metal battle cards — a successor to the Pokémon and Beyblade collect-and-battle craze.

Bear in the Big Blue House

A honey-colored giant of a bear leans into the camera, sniffs, and announces you smell nice today. Jim Henson Television's gentle giant anchored Playhouse Disney mornings, and ended every episode on the balcony singing goodbye with Luna the moon.

"Beautiful Girls" — Sean Kingston

The doo-wop bassline of "Stand by Me" under a Jamaican-American teenager crooning that beautiful girls have him "suicidal, suicidal" — the inescapable song of summer 2007. Every school hallway sang the hook; half of radio wasn't sure it was allowed to.

"Beautiful Soul" (Jesse McCartney)

I don't want another pretty face. The blond swoop of hair, the earnest guitar-pop chorus, the song scrawled on a million middle-school binders — Jesse McCartney's debut single was the official crush anthem of 2005.

Bebo

The social network that beat MySpace in Britain, sold to AOL for $850 million at the top, and got bought back by its own founders for $1 million five years later. America barely noticed Bebo; for a few years the UK and Ireland barely used anything else.

Bedside Alarm Clocks

The glowing red digits on the nightstand, the snooze bar slapped in the dark, the 12:00 blink after every power outage — a device so mundane you didn't think of it as technology until it vanished from every bedroom at once. The smartphone didn't just beat the bedside alarm clock; it quietly deleted the whole category.

Beerfest

An international drinking competition disguised as a sports movie. Two brothers spread their grandfather's ashes at Oktoberfest and accidentally stumble into Beerfest—a secret underground tournament where nations compete in beer games—then return home to assemble an American dream team. Like Super Troopers before it, its cult life was lived on DVD, in dorm rooms and at beer-soaked parties.

"Before He Cheats"

Key the truck, carve your name in the seats, take a Louisville Slugger to the headlights. Carrie Underwood's revenge anthem crossed over from country radio to everywhere in 2006–07, spent 64 straight weeks on the Hot 100, and became — for a time — the best-selling country song, period.

Bejeweled

Swap two gems, line up three, watch them vanish and the rest cascade down. PopCap's match-three puzzle turned a simple web game into one of the most-copied ideas in casual gaming.

Ben 10

Ten-year-old Ben Tennyson's summer road trip becomes an alien adventure when he finds the Omnitrix — an alien watch that locks onto his wrist and transforms him into ten different heroes. Every kid wanted the Omnitrix toy, and every playground became a forum for debating which alien was the coolest.

Berries and Cream Starburst

A 2007 candy commercial became a 2021 TikTok explosion. The Little Lad — a grown man in old-fashioned page-boy clothes chanting "berries and cream" with a marionette dance — sat dormant for 14 years before the internet crowned him. The flavor was fine; the ad is immortal.

Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans

Jelly beans that might be blueberry — or might be Vomit. Jelly Belly made the Harry Potter books' candy gamble real, gruesome flavors and all, and turned every playground into a dare arena: take one blind, make the face, sprint to the trash can.

Alice Deejay — "Better Off Alone"

"Do you think you're better off alone?" Seven words, one heart-piercing synth riff, and the whole Y2K dance floor materializes around you. Alice Deejay wasn't a person — it was a Dutch studio project with singer Judith Pronk as its face — and its one perfect single conquered Europe in 1999 before burrowing into American radio in 2000.

Beyblades

These spinning-top battle toys from Takara launched a worldwide mania in the early 2000s. You loaded a Beyblade into a rip-cord launcher, shouted "Let it rip!", and battled rivals in plastic arena bowls called Beystadiums. Customizable parts (attack, defense, stamina types) and the anime tie-in made them trading-post essentials.

Beyoncé

The girl-group superstar who bet on herself and became simply the biggest star in music. From "Crazy in Love" in the summer of 2003 to "Single Ladies" closing out 2008, Beyoncé's solo run WAS the sound of the decade.

Big Fish

Tim Burton's warmest film: a dying father who has always told his life as a series of tall tales — a giant, a witch who shows your death in her eye, a perfect hidden town called Spectre — and the grown son trying to sort truth from myth before it's too late. Ewan McGregor plays the young father in the fables, Albert Finney the old man telling them.

Big Momma's House

Martin Lawrence as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a gun-toting Southern grandmother, prosthetics and fat suit and all. Critics groaned, but the one-joke premise turned into a $170-million summer smash and launched a franchise.

Bike Pegs

Metal stunt pegs that bolted onto bike wheel axles — the essential accessory for grinding rails and the iconic move of doubling up by having a friend stand on your rear pegs. Cheap, ubiquitous, and a rite of passage for any kid with a BMX.

Billy Mays

The black beard, the blue shirt and khakis, and the friendly bellow that opened every pitch: "Hi, Billy Mays here!" He was the face and voice of the entire As-Seen-On-TV universe — the man who made OxiClean a household word by sheer force of enthusiasm.

Bionicle

LEGO's buildable biomechanical warriors, sold in collectible canisters and wrapped in a sprawling island mythology kids argued about at recess. Part toy, part epic saga — you built the heroes, collected their masks, and followed the lore across comics, books, and films.

BioShock

A plane crash, a lighthouse, and a descent into Rapture — a ruined Art Deco utopia at the bottom of the sea. Ken Levine's 2007 shooter gave players plasmids, Big Daddies, one devastating twist, and the era's best argument that video games could be art. Would you kindly?

Black Eyed Peas

An underground L.A. hip-hop crew added a singer named Fergie and became the sound coming out of every speaker in the 2000s. From "Where Is the Love?" to "I Gotta Feeling," the Black Eyed Peas owned graduation parties, sports arenas, and wedding dance floors for the better part of a decade.

Black Knight

The 2001 Martin Lawrence comedy where a modern theme-park worker falls in a moat and wakes up in medieval England, fish-out-of-water antics ensuing. A critical flop that a whole generation still somehow watched on cable a dozen times.

BlackBerry

The thumb-typed email machine that owned the boardroom, then the teen universe — the hottest phone in America right up until the iPhone ate it. Push email, the blinking red light, BBM: BlackBerry was so addictive that Webster's New World made "CrackBerry" its 2006 Word of the Year.

Blades of Glory

Will Ferrell's leather-clad, lone-wolf skating stallion and Jon Heder's golden-boy prodigy — banned from men's singles for life, reborn through a loophole as figure skating's first all-male pair. Sequined costumes, forbidden moves, and the most quotable ice ever skated.

Blink-182

Pop-punk pioneers who mixed juvenile toilet humor with real melodic craft and suburban-teen honesty. From scrappy San Diego garage band to first punk album atop the Billboard 200. Their untitled third album was the moodier reinvention; the hiatus in 2005 felt less like goodbye and more like a pause in a story everyone knew would resume.

Bloons Tower Defense

Monkeys throw darts at balloons. That's it — and it was enough to devour a billion study halls. Bloons Tower Defense loaded in any browser, ran fine on a school computer, and turned "one more round" into the defining lie of 2000s homework time.

Bluetooth Headset Guy

The blinking blue earpiece, worn everywhere, forever. Mid-2000s America's most confident man: standing in the cereal aisle, gesturing, talking loudly to absolutely no one you could see.

BonziBuddy

A purple gorilla who lived on your desktop, told you jokes, and quietly went through your business. BonziBuddy is the friendliest thing ever classified as adware by two antivirus companies. Half the internet remembers installing it on purpose.

Borat

Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary phenomenon: his clueless Kazakh TV journalist Borat rampages across America interviewing real, unsuspecting people, exposing what they'll say to a "foreigner." Spun off from Da Ali G Show, it was a critical smash, a quoting machine ("Very nice!"), and a diplomatic incident all at once.

Borders

Three hours in the armchairs with a stack of books you never bought, a chai from the café, and a lap through the CD listening stations — Borders wasn't a store so much as a place to be. Then it was gone, all of it, in a single September.

"1985" by Bowling for Soup

Pop-punk's sneakiest hit started as an SR-71 album track before Bowling for Soup rebuilt it into a double-Platinum sing-along about a suburban mom stuck in the era of "Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana." The cruel joke wrote itself: the song about being nostalgic for the wrong decade is now the thing you're nostalgic for.

Brain Age

The game that put a Nintendo DS in your mom's hands. You held the DS like a book, scribbled math answers with the stylus, and a floating polygonal professor told you your brain was 47 years old — so you came back tomorrow, and so did every parent and grandparent in America.

Bratz

Fashion dolls from MGA Entertainment launched in 2001; the original four 'girls with a passion for fashion' (Yasmin, Cloe, Jade, Sasha) had oversized heads, big almond eyes, glossy pouty lips, and removable snap-off feet, with edgy trend-forward outfits. They seriously challenged Barbie's dominance in the mid-2000s and sparked a long legal battle with Mattel.

Bridge to Terabithia

Disney sold you a Narnia fantasy, and you got your heart broken instead. Bridge to Terabithia arrived in theaters February 2007 with trailers promising whimsy, woods adventures, and an imaginary kingdom. The film lied—or rather, Hollywood lied for it—and a generation of kids learned that sometimes the magical ending is grief.

Bring It On

A new cheer captain inherits her high school's trophy-winning squad — then discovers the entire championship legacy is built on stolen routines, and the team that had them first is coming to take back what's theirs. A cheerleader movie that turned out to be a conversation about who gets credit.

"Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence

Amy Lee's voice pierces through a dark, orchestral surge; Paul McCoy's shout answers it back. That trade-off — her ethereal plea met by his aggressive roar — became the signature of Evanescence's breakthrough. The song exploded in 2003, hitting #5 in America, #1 in the UK for four weeks, and perfectly captured a moment when goth-tinged rock finally cracked mainstream radio.

Britney Spears

A former Mickey Mouse Club kid whose debut single '...Baby One More Time' (September 1998) and January 1999 album catapulted her to megastardom as the defining pop voice of the millennium. TRL countdown staple, Rolling Stone covers, Pepsi deals, and cultural omnipresence through the early 2000s with 'Oops!... I Did It Again' (2000) and 'Toxic' (2003–04).

Budweiser "Whassup?!"

Friends on the phone, watching the game, having a Bud — tongues out, "Whassaaaap!" Budweiser's campaign turned a real short film about real friends into the catchphrase that ate the year 2000, when every phone call, hallway, and sitcom in America did the bit.

Build-A-Bear Workshop

Maxine Clark left her job running a shoe empire to open a store where kids could build their own stuffed animals. The ritual — picking the unstuffed animal, watching it fill at a machine, kissing a fabric heart and placing it inside, printing a birth certificate — became a pilgrimage rite for generations.

Burger King Chicken Fries

Chicken shaped like french fries, sold in a fry box with a hole for sauce — a dumb idea so perfect it built a cult. When Burger King killed them in 2012, the internet staged a years-long resurrection campaign. The internet won.

Butterfly

Crazy Town's tattooed valentine — a rap-rock love song floated on a borrowed Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar loop all the way to #1 in spring 2001. The softest thing the nu-metal era ever sent up the charts, from a band that never landed another hit.

Californication

David Duchovny returned to TV as Hank Moody, a washed-up novelist spiraling through LA hedonism. Showtime's 2007 comedy-drama was cynical, sexy, and won him a Golden Globe.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The game that changed multiplayer shooters forever. Call of Duty 4 ditched WWII for the modern day and invented the template everyone has copied since — killstreaks, custom loadouts, Prestige mode. By 2008, every Xbox 360 household was living in its lobbies.

Camp Rock

Demi Lovato's big break, the Jonas Brothers as a fictional band called Connect 3, and a summer camp where every problem gets solved at Final Jam. Disney Channel's 2008 answer to its own High School Musical phenomenon.

Candystand

Life Savers' secret weapon for brand loyalty: genuinely good Flash games, free for anyone, with the advertising hiding inside the games themselves. The mini golf alone kept a generation of school computer labs quietly clicking.

Cargo Pants

Baggy, khaki, and covered in pockets you never put anything in. Six to eight compartments, minimum, most of them flapping empty against your thigh. For a few years in the early 2000s they were simply what pants were, and then everyone agreed to never mention it again — until they came back.

Cars

Pixar stranded a hotshot race car in a faded Route 66 town and somehow produced one of the biggest toy machines of the decade — nearly $10 billion in merchandise inside five years. Lightning McQueen, Mater, Doc Hudson: every family of the era had a bin of them.

Cash Cab

You hail a New York taxi, the ceiling erupts in lights, and Ben Bailey booms that you're in the Cash Cab. Answer trivia to your destination and you leave with cash; three strikes and you're out on the sidewalk, wherever that happens to be.

CashWars

A browser-based play-to-earn game where you built an empire in the fictional world of Akzar, drilled for oil barrels, raised stats by spending resources, and raided rival players — with the wild promise that you could cash out and receive a real cheque in the mail.

Cast Away

Tom Hanks, a desert island, and a volleyball named Wilson. Robert Zemeckis stranded America's most trusted movie star alone on screen for the better part of two hours — and made one of the biggest hits of 2000 out of silence, sunburn, and a volleyball with a face.

CD Burners

The drive that made every PC a record-pressing plant. You fed in a blank CD-R, dragged your downloads into Nero or Easy CD Creator, and held your breath: one buffer underrun mid-burn and the disc was a coaster. When it worked, you walked away with a fresh mix CD and the quiet pride of having pressed it yourself.

Cereal Straws

Kellogg's answer to a question every kid had already asked: what if the straw itself tasted like Froot Loops? Crunchy cereal tubes with a sweet milky lining that turned any glass of milk into dessert — gone in two years, mourned for a decade.

Cha Cha Slide

A song that came with built-in instructions. Chicago's DJ Casper wrote the routine as an aerobics exercise for his nephew in 1998; the 2000 release hit radio and never left. It didn't need to be a big chart hit — it became the one dance every wedding, school event, and skating rink could count on, because the song tells you exactly what to move.

ChalkZone

Rudy's got the chalk! One piece of magic white chalk, a doorway drawn on any blackboard, and you're in ChalkZone — the dimension where every erased chalk drawing lives on. The Nicktoon that made a generation eye the classroom chalkboard with real suspicion.

Chappelle's Show

The sketch show that owned the mid-2000s. Dave Chappelle's Comedy Central juggernaut turned razor-sharp racial satire and absurd characters into the most-quoted comedy of the decade — "I'm Rick James, b****!" echoing down every school hallway.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's uncanny riff on Roald Dahl arrived in 2005 as the alternative to Gene Wilder's 1971 warmth — pale, lush, and polarizing in the way only Burton films manage. The Dahl estate approved wholeheartedly; audiences argued about it all summer.

Charlie Bit My Finger

A dad filming his toddlers in England. The youngest bites the oldest's finger. "Ouch, Charlie! Charlie, that really hurt!" The giggle that followed became the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — and held the crown into 2011.

Charlie the Unicorn

A grumpy unicorn gets badgered into a Candy Mountain quest in this absurdist fever dream. They wanted his kidney. Time magazine marveled that something so nonsensical could earn a cultlike following — and for once, the magazine was right.

Cheaper by the Dozen

Steve Martin versus twelve kids, one frog, and a dog with a taste for Ashton Kutcher. The Christmas 2003 family comedy that became a basic-cable perennial — and a time capsule of an absurdly stacked early-2000s cast.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Let it rain, and clear it out. "Chicken Noodle Soup" rode a Harlem dance from the block to grainy YouTube uploads to the Billboard charts — part of the first wave of dance crazes the internet taught America.

Chocolate Rain

Tay Zonday's impossibly deep baritone over a looping piano, delivered stone-faced into a home microphone. The joke was the caption: "I move away from the mic to breathe in." Beneath the meme, the lyrics were a metaphor about racism in America — a fact most people quoting it never noticed.

"Chop Suey!" by System of a Down

A nu-metal song too weird for the genre, with a suicide reference chopped into its very title. 'Chop Suey!' landed on Clear Channel's post-9/11 list of songs radio was told to avoid — and became the defining track of every Kazaa queue and school-bus headphone share anyway.

Christina Aguilera

The Mickey Mouse Club grad who became the 2000s' designated voice—every critic conceded she could really sing, which was the whole point of the rivalry with Britney Spears. She went from a 1999 debut that shipped ten million records to the leather-chaps reinvention of Stripped, proving she was more than a pretty face with pipes.

Chuck Norris Facts

Chuck Norris can divide by zero. The absurdist one-liner engine of 2005 colonized forum signatures, email chains, and lunchrooms — hyperbolic "facts" about one man's toughness that became a shared vocabulary for the whole internet.

Chunky Highlights

Thick, bleached stripes in stark contrast against your natural color — the opposite of subtle. Chunky highlights ruled the late '90s and early 2000s, applied at sleepovers with box dye and a plastic cap, and every 2003 yearbook photo proves it.

Ciara

The First Lady of Crunk&B. Ciara arrived in 2004 with "Goodies" and a run of singles that owned school dances for half a decade — icy vocals over crunk beats, and choreography so sharp the music-video channels basically belonged to her.

The Classroom Recorder

The squeaky plastic soprano recorder — cheap, indestructible, handed to every third-grader in America. 'Hot Cross Buns' lives in your muscle memory whether you want it there or not, and if you came up in the 2000s, there's a good chance yours had karate belts tied to it.

Clippy

"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?" Clippy, Microsoft Office's animated paperclip assistant, was the most helpful thing nobody asked for — so universally mocked that Microsoft built an ad campaign around firing him, and so fondly remembered that he came back as an emoji.

Cloverfield

The last great movie mystery born from a teaser with no title, just a date: 1-18-08. Message boards dissected every frame for months before anyone knew what it was.

Club Penguin

The online hangout where millions of kids waddled around as cartoon penguins, decorated their igloos, adopted puffle pets, and played mini-games for coins in a safety-focused chat environment. Club Penguin was one of the first MMOs designed specifically for kids, and it became an after-school addiction that defined a generation's online childhood.

Coca-Cola BlāK

Coke's coffee-flavored "carbonated fusion beverage" in a sleek little glass bottle — the drink that asked "what if espresso, but soda?" in 2006 and got its answer by 2008. You probably tried it exactly once, and you remember the aftertaste either way.

Coca-Cola C2

The Atkins diet's cola — half the carbs, half the calories, half the appeal. It got the Rolling Stones and Queen on the TV spots and NASCAR paint schemes at the 2004 Pepsi 400. But America wanted the real thing or nothing at all, and a year later Coke Zero made "half" obsolete.

Code Lyoko

Four boarding-school kids, a supercomputer in an abandoned factory, and a virtual world under attack by a rogue AI. The French import where every episode could end with a 'Return to the Past' — and only the heroes remembered any of it.

Codename: Kids Next Door

Five ten-year-olds with code numbers, a high-tech treehouse, and an arsenal built from household junk: Sector V spent six seasons on Cartoon Network waging glorious war on adult tyranny. And it was the show the viewers themselves voted onto the air.

Cold Stone Creamery

Pick your ice cream, pile on mix-ins, and watch a scooper fold it all together on a frozen slab of granite — then tip them and they sing. Cold Stone Creamery turned dessert into a performance across 2000s America.

Coldplay

Four university friends from London who turned quiet melancholy into the biggest sound of the decade. From "Yellow" to "Clocks" to "Fix You" to "Viva la Vida," Coldplay was the default soundtrack of the 2000s — the band on every mixtape, every TV drama's saddest scene, and every iPod's most-played list, whether you admitted it or not.

Cooking Mama

Chop the vegetables, crack the eggs, flip the pan at exactly the right second — or watch Mama's eyes literally catch fire. The DS stylus-cooking game that made "Don't worry, Mama will fix it!" a generational catchphrase.

Cool Math Games

The web filter loophole that became a school institution. Cool Math Games' "math" branding kept it off the blocked-site list while every other gaming site got nuked, making it the de facto arcade of every school computer lab in the mid-2000s.

Cory in the House

The That's So Raven spinoff that moved Cory Baxter into the White House — and, a decade later, got crowned the internet's favorite ironic 'best anime ever.' Kyle Massey ran get-rich-quick schemes out of the presidential kitchen for two seasons of peak Disney Channel.

Counter-Strike

The free Half-Life mod that conquered every LAN party and cybercafé of the 2000s. Terrorists versus counter-terrorists, five on five, one life per round, buy your weapons and don't miss — for a whole generation, Counter-Strike means version 1.6.

Nelly — "Country Grammar"

"I'm goin' down down baby, yo' street in a Range Rover..." — Nelly built his breakout single on the playground clap chant every kid already knew, and it carried St. Louis rap onto every radio in America in the summer of 2000.

Courage the Cowardly Dog

A timid pink dog protecting elderly Muriel from genuinely terrifying supernatural threats on a Kansas farm. Courage the Cowardly Dog was a kids' show that made no apologies for being *scary*—featuring the King Ramses curse, creepy spirits, and a level of psychological horror that had no business airing at 3 p.m.

Coyote Ugly

Piper Perabo dancing on a Manhattan bar, Jerry Bruckheimer lighting it like a music video, and LeAnn Rimes secretly singing the songs. Critics gave it 23% — opening-weekend audiences graded it A− and memorized the soundtrack. The Y2K fantasy of moving to New York and being discovered lives here.

Cranium

The party game that let everyone shine — one box combining sculpting, sketching, humming, acting, trivia, and word puzzles so the artist, the know-it-all, and the ham all got a moment. Famously sold at the Starbucks counter before it ever hit a toy-store shelf.

Cranium Hullabaloo

The bossy talking cone that ran every playdate. Sixteen colored pads scattered across the living-room floor, a plastic console barking orders — bounce to a blue pad, spin, high-five, dance — then the sudden "freeze!" and the agonizing wait to hear which pad was the lucky one.

Crayola Color Wonder

The markers that scribbled clear on skin, walls, and car seats — and bloomed into color only on the special paper. Crayola's chemistry trick, launched in 1993, became the road-trip and restaurant salvation of every 2000s parent.

Creative Zen & Nomad Jukebox

Your Nomad Jukebox or Creative Zen sounded better than any iPod — more formats, zero iTunes, pure PC-forum credibility — and it battled the white earbuds in every comment thread of the 2000s. Then came the wildest ending in the MP3 wars: Creative sued Apple over a music-navigation patent, and Apple paid $100 million to settle.

Creed — Higher

The arena-rock anthem that felt both deeply sincere and faintly ridiculous, and proved Creed were simultaneously the most mocked and most inescapable band in America. Scott Stapp's arms-wide-open delivery of lyrics about lucid dreaming somehow dominated rock radio for over a year.

Creme Savers

The swirled hard candy that paired fruit with cream — and ruled checkout lanes and grandmas' purses from the late '90s into the 2000s. Strawberries & Creme was the icon, its red-and-cream spiral instantly recognizable. Discontinued in 2011, mourned for a decade, and back on shelves since 2021.

Criss Angel Mindfreak

Black shag haircut, eyeliner, chain wallet — and a man apparently floating between Las Vegas rooftops. Mindfreak made Criss Angel the definitive 2000s magician: half goth rock star, half street illusionist, all catchphrase.

Crocs

Foam clogs with signature ventilation holes and a pivoting heel strap, born on the water but conquered the streets. Crocs became a 2000s icon — beloved for their squishy comfort, mercilessly mocked for their appearance, and customizable with Jibbitz charms that clipped into the holes.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

The Vegas crime lab that took over primetime. CSI premiered on CBS in 2000 and turned forensic science into television's dominant formula — William Petersen's Gil Grissom, The Who's "Who Are You" over the credits, and spinoffs from Miami to New York. It got so big that real juries started expecting what the show delivered every week.

Cupid's Chokehold

"Take a look at my girlfriend" — a hook borrowed from Supertramp, sung by Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump, rapped around by Travie McCoy. "Cupid's Chokehold" shouldn't have worked, and then it was everywhere in 2007.

Cyberchase

Three kids get sucked into Cyberspace to defend Motherboard from the scheming Hacker — voiced with maximum ham by Christopher Lloyd — and the only weapon that ever works is math. PBS somehow made estimating and pattern-finding feel like saving the world.

Cybiko

A translucent pocket computer for teens with a rubber QWERTY keyboard and its own two-way radio — Cybikos within about a hundred meters could text each other and join wireless chatrooms, years before teens had phones. Over 430 games and apps, all free. Half a million sold in 2000 alone, then the moment passed as fast as it arrived.

D12 — Purple Pills

The goofy hip-hop anthem that existed in two versions simultaneously — and somehow that made it more legendary. Eminem and his Detroit crew D12 dropped a track so unapologetically silly that radio stations invented an entirely different song around it, and nobody minded.

Da Ali G Show

Sacha Baron Cohen's ambush-interview show, and the launchpad for three of comedy's most infamous characters. Beginning on Britain's Channel 4 in 2000 and crossing to HBO in 2003, it sent Cohen — in character as faux-streetwise poseur Ali G, Kazakh reporter Borat, or Austrian fashionista Brüno — into real interviews with unsuspecting politicians, celebrities, and experts who had no idea they were being had. The results were excruciating, brilliant, and eventually spun off into a string of hit films.

Daft Punk

The mysterious French duo who hid their faces, invented the robot identity, and detonated dance music into the mainstream. Their chrome-and-gold helmets became one of pop culture's enduring enigmas. Two guys, a sampler, and a myth they refused to break.

Daft Punk — Discovery

The album that made dance music unavoidable in mainstream culture—and the only one that came with a full-length anime film. "One More Time" was everywhere, filtered into oblivion but instantly recognizable. Every kid with a burned CD knew this album.

Dance Dance Revolution

Konami's iconic rhythm game where players step on a four-arrow dance pad in time with on-screen cues and music. Debuting in Japanese arcades in 1998, DDR became a global phenomenon—from arcade halls to living rooms—defining an entire genre of music-timing games.

Danimals

Dannon built a kids' yogurt brand around wild-animal characters and a simple mission: turn children into lifelong yogurt eaters. By the 2000s the drinkable little bottles were the centerpiece of the elementary-school lunchbox, chugged in one go before the sandwich was even unwrapped.

Danny Phantom

A 14-year-old turns half-ghost in an accident with his parents' ghost portal, gets an alter ego, and starts protecting his town — all while his own ghost-hunting parents think he's the enemy. The theme song is one millennials still recite word for word.

Dark Age of Camelot

A fantasy MMORPG that replaced chaotic open-world ganking with Realm vs. Realm warfare—three mythologically themed nations (Albion, Midgard, Hibernia) fighting over contested keeps and relics in structured, large-scale PvP.

Dashboard GPS Units

Before your phone knew where you were going, a suction-cupped gadget on the windshield did. Punch in an address, obey the robotic voice, and brace for the deadpan "Recalculating…" every time you missed a turn. It ruled the dashboard for a decade — then evaporated into the phone.

Deadliest Catch

Crab boats in the Bering Sea, forty-foot waves, and captains chain-smoking through the worst commute on Earth. Discovery's deckhand documentary turned Sig Hansen and Captain Phil into household names and made armchair viewers experts on pot counts and ice-covered rigging.

Deal or No Deal

Twenty-six briefcases, a wall of identically dressed models, a shadowy Banker on the phone, and Howie Mandel asking the only question that mattered. No trivia, no skill — just a fist bump, a gut feeling, and America yelling "NO DEAL!" at the television.

Degrassi: The Next Generation

The Canadian teen drama that tackled real issues—sex, drugs, violence, identity—with frankness American TV wouldn't touch. Canadian-made, it ran 14 seasons and 385 episodes — and reached US millennials through Noggin's teen block The N, launching (among others) a young rapper-to-be named Aubrey Graham.

Dentyne Ice

The intense-mint pellet gum in the push-through foil blister pack — and the flirty, close-quarters ads that came with it. Launched in the late 1990s, Dentyne Ice built its whole identity on ice-cold breath and the nervous seconds before a first kiss.

Desperate Housewives

Wisteria Lane looked perfect — the lawns, the casseroles, the cul-de-sac waves — and every bit of it was a cover story. Narrated by a neighbor who takes her own life in the show's first minutes, ABC's suburban satire-soap made Sunday night appointment television again and turned four housewives into the biggest stars on TV.

Destiny's Child

One of the best-selling girl groups of all time and the defining R&B girl group of the late 1990s and early 2000s, famous for the powerhouse lineup of Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Williams. With hits like 'Say My Name,' 'Bills, Bills, Bills,' 'Independent Women,' 'Survivor,' and 'Bootylicious,' they defined an era of confident, sexually liberated pop music while launching Beyoncé toward her eventual superstardom.

Deus Ex

The cyberpunk immersive sim that let you play your way — stealth, hacking, or firepower. As cybernetically enhanced agent JC Denton, you untangled plagues and conspiracies beneath a ruined Statue of Liberty. It feels like the ultimate '90s PC game, but it actually shipped in June 2000 — and it has ranked among the greatest games ever since.

DeviantArt

Before Instagram, before TikTok, there was DeviantArt — launched in August 2000 as a software-skinning offshoot and grown into the gallery where every teenager who'd ever held a stylus posted their first drawing and got their first comment. Anime, fan art, original characters, wallpapers — the site called submissions "deviations," and being different was the point.

Diablo II

The dark, click-to-loot dungeon crawler whose endless hunt for better gear defined turn-of-the-millennium PC gaming. You clicked, monsters died, loot rained, and Battle.net kept you up until dawn.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Middle-schooler Greg Heffley's hand-lettered diary, drawn in stick figures, became the book that made reluctant readers into readers. Every school library's most dog-eared spine.

Diet Coke & Mentos

Drop Mentos into Diet Coke and the bottle erupts into a foaming geyser. The science is simple — the candy triggers the release of the soda's dissolved gas — but the magic belonged to 2006, when two performers from Maine turned a backyard trick into one of the internet's first great viral videos. Every kid who saw it begged for a 2-liter and a roll of Mentos.

Digg

The social-news front page of the mid-2000s web, where users submitted links and "dugg" them up or buried them. A single spot on the front page could bury a small website under a flood of traffic — and then a redesign everyone hated handed Digg's entire audience to Reddit.

Dirty Jobs

Mike Rowe in a sewer, cheerfully. Discovery's ode to the people who do the work nobody wants — and the host who spent a full day doing every job right alongside them, badly, gratefully, and narrating the whole time.

Discman & CD Binders

The ritual of portable CD life: a Sony Discman clipped to your waist or backpack, Electronic Skip Protection bragged on the box, and a zip-up CD binder holding exactly 24 discs — the ones that defined you. CD binders like Case Logic wallets replaced jewel cases, turning your music taste into curated, tangible proof of personality.

Disney Channel Original Movies

The made-for-TV Disney Channel movies you cleared your Friday night for — Halloweentown, Zenon, Smart House, and eventually the High School Musical juggernaut. The premiere was an event, and you'd seen it ten more times by the next weekend.

Diva Starz

Mattel's chatty animatronic fashion dolls that gossiped about clothes, boys, and shopping—and actually "knew" what you'd dressed them in. Sensors in their outfits and accessories let them react, and infrared in their shoes let them talk to each other.

dnL

Take the 7 UP logo and flip it upside down: dnL. Take the drink and flip it too — green soda in a clear bottle instead of clear soda in a green one, with caffeine instead of none and an extra citrus kick. The most committed-to-the-bit soft drink of the early 2000s lasted four years and left behind a small, devoted cult.

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Vince Vaughn owns a scrappy neighborhood gym, Ben Stiller owns a corporate monstrosity, and the only way to save Average Joe's is to win a Vegas dodgeball tournament against all odds. Rip Torn shouts training mantras. The "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball" line became instantly quotable. A $20 million gamble that returned $168 million at the global box office.

Donnie Darko

The film that nearly died at the box office six weeks after 9/11, then rose from the dead through midnight screenings and DVD to become the 2000s' defining cult artifact. A nightmarish fever dream about time loops and a rabbit suit that you'd lend to friends with just 'watch it' and argue about until 3 a.m.

Dora the Explorer

A little Latina girl and her monkey friend Boots set out to solve puzzles and teach you Spanish — after pausing mid-episode to stare into the camera and wait for your answer. The franchise grew into a preschool juggernaut, but the real legacy is twofold: the little-sibling memory, and the meme of the Dora pause itself.

Dr. Phil

Television's tough-love Texan — the bald psychologist Oprah discovered in a courtroom and turned loose on daytime TV in 2002. For 21 seasons he grilled feuding families and troubled teens with folksy bluntness, until 'getting sent to Dr. Phil' became the culture's shorthand for an intervention.

Dragon Ball Z

The after-school anime that taught a generation of American kids the words "Super Saiyan." Adapted from Akira Toriyama's manga and animated by Toei, Dragon Ball Z turned multi-episode power-ups, screaming energy charges, and glowing gold hair into appointment television — most of all on Cartoon Network's Toonami block.

Dragon Tales

The magic rhyme you can still recite by heart. This Sesame Workshop gem brought five dragons to PBS preschool: Cassie, Ord, the squabbling twins Zak and Wheezie, and wise old Quetzal. Three seasons, ninety-four episodes, one eternal earworm.

Drake & Josh

The odd-couple sitcom that dominated Nickelodeon screens in the early 2000s. Drake Bell and Josh Peck as mismatched step-brothers—one cool and laid-back, one neurotic and anxious—got into schemes that escalated from household mishaps to ridiculous chaos, and it was impossible not to laugh along.

Dramatic Chipmunk

A prairie dog — not actually a chipmunk — whips its head toward the camera in slow menace, scored with a sinister orchestral sting from a 1974 Mel Brooks film. Five seconds of pure reaction gold that became the internet's shorthand for "something just happened."

"Drop It Like It's Hot" by Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell

Tongue clicks, a skeletal beat, and total confidence. The Neptunes stripped hip-hop down to almost nothing in 2004, and it became the biggest rap song of the decade — and, incredibly, Snoop Dogg's first #1 ever.

"Drops of Jupiter" by Train

She's back in the atmosphere with drops of Jupiter in her hair — the piano-and-strings ballad that soaked every radio format in 2001 and never really left. Pat Monahan wrote it after dreaming of his late mother, which is why a song about swimming through planets and fried chicken can still make people cry at a grocery store.

"Dude, You're Gettin' a Dell"

Dell's TV campaign starring Ben Curtis as Steven, the shaggy slacker who hyped desktops to hesitant buyers and sealed every spot with "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" For three years the line was a national catchphrase you couldn't escape.

Early Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from a Harvard dorm in 2004, and it spread to college campuses like a virus — exclusive, intimate, and gated behind a .edu email address. By 2006, when it opened to anyone with an email address, the velvet rope had fallen and the era was over.

Early MP3 Players

The flash-memory bricks that freed your MP3s from the desktop. Diamond's Rio PMP300, arriving in September 1998 at $200, was the first MP3 player that actually caught on — deck-of-cards sized, running forever on one AA battery, holding maybe eight or ten songs. No moving parts meant no skips, a revelation after a decade of portable CD players. The RIAA sued to kill it; the courts sided with you instead.

Early YouTube

The video platform that made viral content a daily ritual. YouTube launched in 2005 as low-res, ad-free, and gloriously weird—a space where "Lazy Sunday," "Chocolate Rain," and "Charlie Bit My Finger" became the lingua franca of internet culture.

Eastbound & Down

A profane, darkly funny HBO series about a washed-up baseball pitcher who returns to his hometown with nothing but a mullet and monumental delusions. Created by Danny McBride (who also stars), it turned small-town mediocrity into comedy gold.

Easy Mac

Single-serve mac and cheese that needed only water and a microwave — no stove, no permission, no waiting. Kraft's 1999 invention turned the famous blue box into a food a kid could make completely alone, then became the default dorm-room dinner.

eBaum's World

The early-2000s comedy and media dump every kid browsed instead of doing homework. Flash cartoons, prank-call soundboards, funny clips, and simple games — all stamped with the site's inescapable watermark, which became the running joke and the scandal at once.

Ed, Edd n Eddy

Three kids with the same name and one unstoppable goal: scam the neighborhood kids out of quarters for jawbreakers. Ed, Edd n Eddy ran a full decade on Cartoon Network and turned suburban con artistry into an art form.

Ed Hardy

The 2000s fashion brand built around the iconic tattoo artwork of 'Godfather of modern tattooing' Don Ed Hardy and turned into a celebrity phenomenon by designer Christian Audigier from 2005 — tigers, skulls, roses, and hearts splashed across rhinestone-studded t-shirts, hoodies, and trucker hats. Loudly branded and worn by celebrities, it became the defining symbol of late-2000s flashy excess and later, of hilariously dated taste.

Elf

Elf (2003) is the Christmas comedy directed by Jon Favreau starring Will Ferrell as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole who travels to New York City to find his real father. Buddy's childlike wonder and confusion about human culture—from his syrup-on-spaghetti diet to iconic lines like "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?"—made it an instant, endlessly-rewatched holiday classic.

Eminem

Marshall Mathers from Detroit, a white rapper in a Black art form, exploded into stardom with shock-rap alter ego Slim Shady and relentless rhymes. The blond buzzcut, unapologetic controversy, Dr. Dre mentorship, and hits like 'Stan' and 'The Real Slim Shady' made him the biggest and most polarizing star in music during the early 2000s.

Emo / Scene-Kid Wave

The mid-to-late-2000s youth subculture built around emo and pop-punk bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Dashboard Confessional. The look: long side-swept bangs over one eye, black skinny jeans, band tees, studded belts, thick eyeliner, Converse, and dyed or straightened hair. It lived on MySpace through dramatic high-angle selfies and Top 8 drama, shaping a generation's teenage aesthetic.

The Emperor's New Groove

A spoiled Incan emperor gets turned into a llama by his scheming ex-advisor and her dim, kind-hearted henchman — and has to trek home with the village leader whose home he planned to bulldoze. A box-office underperformer that became one of Disney's most beloved cult comedies.

Entourage

One movie star, his three guys from Queens, and the super-agent screaming them all toward the top. Entourage was HBO's mid-2000s fantasy of Hollywood — Maseratis, premieres, Malibu — and Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold turned "let's hug it out" into the decade's boardroom catchphrase. Aspiration as entertainment, and for a few years it absolutely worked.

EuroTrip

A post-graduation beer-fueled romp across Europe in search of a German pen pal who turns out to be a girl. The premise is thin and the plot is chaos, but it left behind "Scotty Doesn't Know"—a breakup anthem so infectious it outgrew the movie—and earned itself a permanent slot in the dorm-room DVD rotation.

Eva Mendes

Before she became a name, Eva Mendes was the girl in the music videos—Aerosmith, Will Smith, Pet Shop Boys. Then she broke into film at exactly the right moment to become a defining screen presence of the 2000s multiplex.

Even Stevens

Louis versus Ren, chaos versus perfectionism — the Disney Channel sitcom that let a young Shia LaBeouf demolish every scene he was in. Three seasons of schemes, a beloved musical episode, and a send-off movie, all before anyone knew what a Transformer was.

EverQuest

The first massively successful 3D MMORPG, a game that proved millions would live together in a virtual world. The world of Norrath, corpse runs, the brutal grind, and "EverCrack" addiction became the template for everything that followed.

"Everytime We Touch" — Cascada

The eurodance sugar-rush that soundtracked every mid-2000s school dance, roller rink, and flip-phone ringtone. Cascada's Natalie Horler belting over hammering synths made "Everytime We Touch" inescapable — and nobody could stay off the floor when it hit.

Evolution of Dance

One man, a black T-shirt, a spotlight, and a six-minute journey through decades of dance moves. Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" was the video everyone forwarded to everyone else — proof that YouTube could make a star out of anybody with an idea and a camcorder.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

A family facing hardship gets sent on vacation while a crew of designers completely rebuilds their house into a dream home — then comes the reveal, a crowd gathers, and the chant erupts: "Bus driver, move that bus!" This was comfort-food television at its warmest, the feel-good juggernaut of the 2000s.

EyeToy

A little silver camera perched on the TV, and suddenly YOU were in the game — flailing at ninjas, washing virtual windows, waving both arms like you were landing a plane. The EyeToy turned the PlayStation 2 into a mirror that fought back, and turned every living room into a very sweaty arcade.

Fable

The Xbox RPG where your choices showed on your face: play good and grow a halo, play evil and sprout horns. Peter Molyneux promised you could watch an acorn grow into an oak — no acorns grew, he publicly apologized, and the gap between promise and game became legend.

The Fairly OddParents

Timmy Turner's fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda granted every wish—and every wish went catastrophically wrong. Nickelodeon's absurdist comedy about a miserable kid with unlimited magical wishes became a juggernaut that somehow survived 16 years, backseat-driven by evil babysitter Vicky and Mr. Crocker's obsessive screams.

Fall Out Boy

Pete Wentz's swoopy black fringe, Patrick Stump's soaring voice, and song titles that ran on forever. "Sugar, We're Goin Down" ruled TRL and Warped Tour, making Fall Out Boy the pop-punk face of the MySpace era.

Family Guy

The Griffin family of Quahog, Rhode Island—led by bumbling dad Peter, his wife Lois, and their motley crew of kids and pets—became a Fox phenomenon after its Super Bowl XXXIII premiere in 1999. A sharp departure from typical sitcom fare, Family Guy was built on rapid-fire cutaway gags and irreverent humor. Though Fox canceled it after just three seasons, a DVD renaissance in 2003 became so successful it sparked a network reversal—the show's comeback is considered television's first revival based on DVD sales.

FanFiction.net

Before AO3, before Wattpad, there was FanFiction.net: the site where every fandom on Earth kept its stories. Disclaimer at the top, "R&R please!" at the bottom, and somewhere in the middle, a fourteen-year-old quietly becoming a writer.

FarmVille

The Facebook farming game that took over the late-2000s: plow, plant, harvest, repeat — and pester your friends to be your neighbors. At its height tens of millions of people logged in daily to water virtual crops.

Fear Factor

Six strangers, three progressively insane stunts, $50,000 on the line. Fear Factor turned watching people eat bugs and face their worst nightmares into appointment television, and Joe Rogan's deadpan 'Evidently, fear is not a factor for you' became the phrase you repeated at anyone who hesitated at anything.

Fergie

Stacy Ann Ferguson went from Saturday-morning TV to the voice that powered the Black Eyed Peas' commercial earthquake, then walked straight into solo stardom in 2006. "London Bridge," "Glamorous," "Big Girls Don't Cry" — three Hot 100 chart-toppers off one album — sewed her into the fabric of 2000s pop.

Fight Club

David Fincher's anti-consumerist fever dream — Edward Norton's insomniac narrator, Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, and a basement club with rules you weren't supposed to talk about. It bombed with critics split down the middle and underwhelmed in theaters, then the DVD turned it into the defining cult movie of its generation.

Final Fantasy X

The first Final Fantasy where the characters actually spoke — and the awkward forced-laugh scene became legendary for all the wrong reasons. A summoner's doomed pilgrimage, a sport played underwater, and an ending that broke a generation of PS2 owners.

Finding Nemo

A clownfish searches an ocean for his kidnapped son, guided by a forgetful blue tang with the most memorable catchphrase of the decade. Pixar's Finding Nemo won instant hearts with its vibrant coral-reef world, stellar voice acting, and emotional stakes that proved animated films could make you cry.

Subway $5 Footlong

A jingle so relentless it's still in your head, and a promotion timed to the exact moment America needed a five-dollar meal. The $5 Footlong went national on March 23, 2008, just as the recession was setting in — and the hand gesture did the rest.

Flash Game Sites

A corner of the web where anyone could upload a game, the community voted, and you could lose hours flicking through hand-coded animations and wildly unpolished experiments. Flash game sites were the internet's scrappy basement arcade.

Flight of the Conchords

Flight of the Conchords stars Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement as fictionalized versions of themselves—a deadpan New Zealand musical-comedy duo struggling to break into the NYC music scene while writing and performing original songs. Created by James Bobin, Jemaine Clement, and Bret McKenzie, the show aired on HBO from 2007 to 2009 with a small but devoted cult following. Their oddball manager Murray Hewitt (Rhys Darby) and their lone superfan Mel (Kristen Schaal) round out their world. Signature songs like 'Business Time' and 'Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros' became instant cult classics.

Flip Phone Charms

Your flip phone looked exactly like everyone else's — until a charm swung from it. The habit came straight from Japan, where "keitai straps" had been phone culture since the late 1990s, and by the mid-2000s crystal danglies, plush animals, and cartoon characters hung off every clamshell in the mall.

Flip Video

The pocket camcorder of the early YouTube era. Just press record, flip out the USB arm, plug into your computer — that was the whole idea. Barely any buttons, cheap, and it became the best-selling camcorder in America before its own parent company killed it.

"Low" by Flo Rida ft. T-Pain

Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur. One line, and Flo Rida's 2007 debut single became the ringtone anthem of school cafeterias and bus seats everywhere — ten straight weeks at number one, and Billboard's #1 song of 2008.

"Float On" by Modest Mouse

"And we'll all float on, okay?" — the shrugging, off-kilter singalong that carried indie rock onto every radio station, mall speaker, and burned CD of 2004. A decade-old cult band from Washington state suddenly had the most reassuring song in America.

FML (FMyLife)

"Today, [something humiliating happened]. FML." The confessional site where strangers shared their tiny daily disasters as one-sentence anecdotes, and you voted on whether their life truly sucked — or whether they totally deserved it. The three-letter sign-off outgrew the website and became everyday slang.

Follow Me (Uncle Kracker)

Kid Rock's turntablist stepped out solo with a breezy acoustic sleeper that hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and owned the radio in summer 2001. Under the sunny singalong hook lurked something darker—Uncle Kracker himself called it "a dirty picture painted with a pretty brush." It went to No. 1 in eight countries and never really left American radio.

Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends

What happens to your imaginary friend when you grow up? At Madame Foster's home, they wait to be adopted — and there are a LOT of abandoned imaginary friends. A found-family show with one of the great cartoon casts of the 2000s.

Freaky Friday

Mother and daughter wake up in each other's bodies, and a Disney remake becomes a generational classic. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan spar, swap, and shred — the finale hands Lohan's garage band Pink Slip the stage — and somehow a fortune cookie made everyone cry.

Fred Figglehorn

The squealing, sped-up voice that ruled early YouTube and echoed off every playground. Fred Figglehorn — teenager Lucas Cruikshank's hyperactive six-year-old alter ego — turned pitch-shifted freakouts into the platform's first million-subscriber empire, and kids either quoted him constantly or begged them to stop.

Free Nights & Weekends

The entire cell-phone economy of the 2000s, distilled into one ritual: watching the clock tick toward 9 p.m. so a call wouldn't burn a daytime minute. Anytime minutes were precious. Nights and weekends were free. Every family had someone doing the math.

The FreeCreditReport.com Band

The floppy-haired slacker singing cheerful songs about his ruined credit — stuck working a pirate-themed seafood restaurant, driving a beater, living with his in-laws. Experian's jingle campaign was catchy enough to get stuck in the whole country's head, and misleading enough that a 2009 law made the ads carry a disclaimer.

Freewebs

Before anyone had heard the word "platform," there was Freewebs — the place where a twelve-year-old could build a real website in an afternoon. Guestbooks, glitter cursors, tiled backgrounds, an autoplay MIDI you couldn't turn off: if you had a fan site, a clan page, or a shrine to your Neopets in the mid-2000s, there's a decent chance it lived at freewebs.com slash something.

Friendster

The social network you joined before you even knew what a social network was. Millions made their first-ever online "profile" on Friendster — then MySpace came along, and the site that started it all became the cautionary tale.

Frosted Tips

Short hair gelled into stiff spikes with the tips bleached pale blond — the signature boy-band-era men's look. If a guy on TRL had it, so did half the boys at your school.

Funbrain

The educational-games website that teachers actually let you play during computer lab and indoor recess. Funbrain was the golden ticket: games disguised as learning, enough fun to feel like cheating the system, legitimate enough that authority figures signed off.

FurReal Friends

Robotic plush pets that responded to your touch—purring, nuzzling, blinking, and dozing off if you left them alone. The line started with an uncannily lifelike cat and grew into the big-ticket rideable Butterscotch pony that topped a lot of 2000s wish lists.

Futurama

Delivery boy Fry cryogenically freezes and wakes in the year 3000 to join a space-shipping crew led by the sardonic Leela and foul-mouthed robot Bender. Created by Matt Groening, this sci-fi comedy was staffed with Ph.D.s—the writers brought genuine math-smart humor and surprising emotional depth. Fox premiered it in 1999, but it became a cult phenomenon on Comedy Central; episodes like 'Jurassic Bark' showed its tearjerking side, and it won six Emmy Awards over its life.

Game Boy Advance

Nintendo's 32-bit handheld released June 2001, with a landscape shape and full backward compatibility with the entire Game Boy and Game Boy Color library. The screen was notoriously hard to see until the GBA SP (2003) added a front-lit clamshell. Around 80 million sold across the GBA, SP, and Micro variants.

GameFAQs

A vast library of fan-written, plain-text walkthroughs in monospaced ASCII — hand-drawn text maps, boss strategies, and the one password you needed. Players printed fifty-page guides on the family printer or scrolled giant text files over dial-up. GameFAQs was how you beat the unbeatable.

GameStop Midnight Releases

The line outside the strip mall at 11:45 PM, the pre-order receipt clutched like a ticket, the countdown, the cheer. Midnight launches at GameStop were gaming's midnight movie premiere — plus the counter where your old games became seven dollars.

Garden State

A numbed-out actor comes home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, meets a girl who lies compulsively and feels everything, and slowly wakes up. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in his 2004 indie debut while playing J.D. on Scrubs — and its Grammy-winning Shins-and-Coldplay soundtrack became the mixtape of the mid-2000s.

"Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee

Daddy Yankee's reggaeton anthem that went global, a top-10 hit across Europe that opened the door for an entire genre to break into the mainstream. "Dame más gasolina" became a rallying cry at every school dance, party, and car window of 2004–2005.

Gears of War

A third-person shooter where you crouch behind waist-high walls and leapfrog between them, firing a gun with a chainsaw bayonet at an underground species called the Locust Horde. Gears of War was the killer app that proved the Xbox 360 had arrived.

GEICO Cavemen

"So easy a caveman can do it" — and the sophisticated, deeply offended cavemen who kept overhearing it. The insurance ads that became a cultural in-joke, then flew too close to the sun as an actual ABC sitcom.

The George Lopez Show

A comedian playing himself, a factory job, a meddling mom, and War's "Low Rider" kicking off every episode. Championed by Sandra Bullock and built from George Lopez's real San Fernando Valley childhood, the show became one of the rare network comedies with a Latino lead — then ran nearly thirteen more years on Nick at Nite after ABC was done with it.

"Get a Mac" Ads

"Hello, I'm a Mac." "And I'm a PC." Two guys, a white void, thirty seconds of the suit losing to the hoodie. Apple's 2006–2009 campaign turned an operating-system rivalry into the most quotable sitcom on television — and made John Hodgman's crashing, virus-riddled PC the most lovable loser of the decade.

50 Cent — Get Rich or Die Tryin'

50 Cent's explosive 2003 debut album, released on Eminem's and Dr. Dre's labels (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), became one of the best-selling albums of the era. Anchored by massive hits like "In da Club," "21 Questions," and "P.I.M.P.," the album announced 50 Cent as a superstar and defined early 2000s rap radio. His backstory — surviving being shot nine times — became central to his larger-than-life persona.

Gilmore Girls

The mother-daughter show that talked faster than anything else on television. Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a small Connecticut town full of lovable cranks, Luke's coffee, Friday-night dinners — Gilmore Girls premiered on The WB in 2000 as an underdog and became the comfort-watch a whole generation never stopped rewatching.

Gizmondo

The handheld with everything: GPS, a camera, cellular, celebrity launch parties — and, it turned out, an executive with a past in Swedish organized crime. The company collapsed under $300 million of debt in 2006, and weeks later that executive crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo at 162 mph. Fewer than 25,000 were ever sold, by GamePro's count.

Gladiator

Ridley Scott's Roman revenge epic — the general who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, and the movie every dad quoted for a decade. Five Oscars, including Best Picture, and a Hans Zimmer score that turned every commute into a chariot ride.

Gmail (Invite-Only Launch)

Google's email that launched with a then-unthinkable gigabyte of free storage — so much that people assumed it was an April Fools' joke. During the invite-only beta, a Gmail invite was a genuine status symbol.

"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley

CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse built a soul earthquake on a spaghetti-western sample, watched it make chart history — then deliberately pulled it from stores so nobody would get sick of it. It worked.

Go-Gurt

Yogurt in a squeezable plastic tube you slurped without a spoon; introduced by Yoplait/General Mills in 1999 and marketed straight at kids as portable, fun, and freezable. Go-Gurt became a lunchbox staple and the gateway snack for a generation that grew up with the freedom to eat dessert-adjacent dairy before middle school.

God of War

Kratos, a Spartan warrior betrayed by Ares, tears through Greek myth with chained blades and rage. Santa Monica Studio's 2005 PS2 epic scored a 94, sold millions, and turned the quick-time finisher into an industry standard.

Good Charlotte

The Madden twins in eyeliner, sneering at celebrities while becoming celebrities — Good Charlotte's "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" and "The Anthem" were the sound of every mall, mixtape, and middle-school rebellion of 2003. Waldorf, Maryland's finest export.

Gorillaz

A band made entirely of cartoons — four animated characters with biographies and feuds, fronting music made by people you never saw. Their videos ran on MTV like Saturday-morning cartoons for teenagers, and when Gorillaz opened the 2006 Grammys as life-size projections, a genuinely new kind of pop star had arrived.

Gossip Girl

An anonymous blogger narrates the scheming and social apocalypses of Manhattan's prep-school royalty, and every scandal ends the same way: "xoxo, Gossip Girl." The guilty pleasure that had parents clutching pearls and teens clutching their DVRs.

göt2b Hair Gel

The screaming-yellow tube in the drugstore hair aisle that promised — and delivered — spikes that could survive a school day, gym class, and a thunderstorm. Schwarzkopf's göt2b Glued was industrial adhesive masquerading as styling product, and every spiked, flipped, faux-hawked head of the 2000s knew it on sight.

Grand Theft Auto (PS2 Era)

Three cities, endless possibility, and radio stations you'd sit in a parked car to keep listening to. The PS2 Grand Theft Auto trilogy — III, Vice City, San Andreas — turned the open-world game into a cultural phenomenon: a world that said, "do whatever you want," back when that freedom felt genuinely revolutionary.

Grandma's Boy

A 36-year-old video-game tester gets evicted and moves in with his grandma and her roommates, where he's surrounded by pajama-wearing grandmothers, a dealer named Dante with a pet chimp, and the crushing weight of being a grown man living with his grandma. Critics absolutely eviscerated it. Then the DVD turned it into a canonical stoner comedy.

Dave Matthews Band — "Grey Street"

The song that leaked before it was ever released, spreading across Napster as fans organized a campaign to free the shelved album it came from. A fan uprising before fan uprisings were a standard industry crisis—dark, brooding, and worth the fight.

Grey's Anatomy

The medical drama that owned the mid-2000s, built on a textbook pun, powered by "McDreamy," and anchored by a romance storyline so devastating it wrecked living rooms nationwide. Shonda Rhimes' midseason gamble became appointment television — and it still hasn't stopped.

Grillz

Removable gold and diamond teeth went from Southern hip-hop signature to national obsession, and for a couple of years the shiniest thing at the mall kiosk was dental. Nelly put the moment on wax — "Grillz" hit number one — and every yearbook from 2006 has at least one kid flashing a mouthful of metal.

Guitar Hero

The plastic guitar controller that turned living rooms into rock venues and made you feel like you could shred—Guitar Hero arrived in November 2005 with just five fret buttons and a strum bar, playing note-scrolling highways to licensed rock songs. It became a living-room phenomenon. Guitar Hero III (2007) and its brutal finale 'Through the Fire and Flames' defined the genre's peak before the plastic-instrument bubble burst from over-saturation around 2010.

Gwen Stefani (Solo Era)

After a decade fronting No Doubt, Gwen Stefani reinvented herself as a solo pop force in 2004 — dropping "Hollaback Girl," parading her Harajuku Girls, and launching a fashion empire. It was maximalist, brand-savvy 2000s pop at its peak.

Habbo Hotel

A giant isometric pixel-art hotel you checked into as a blocky avatar — decorating rooms with "furni," chatting in the lobby, and guarding the virtual pool. One of the first massively popular online social worlds built for teenagers.

Half-Life 2

The game that made Steam essential. Silent physicist Gordon Freeman, armed with a gravity gun that weaponized the environment — sawblades, radiators, physics itself — fought an alien occupation in the Eastern European City 17. Five years in development, a $40 million budget, 39 Game of the Year awards — and it required Steam activation, becoming the Trojan horse that made the world install the platform.

Halloweentown

The Disney Channel movie that turned every October into a ritual. Halloweentown premiered in 1998, but its real reign was the 2000s — three sequels, endless reruns, and a generation's gateway to comfort-food spookiness with Debbie Reynolds as the world's best witch grandma.

Halo 2

When Bungie's sequel launched on Xbox in November 2004, 1.5 million people had pre-ordered it. Midnight launches erupted at 7,000 stores across North America. And its matchmaking system became the template that online shooters copied for years afterward.

Halo 3

Bungie's trilogy-closer exploded into a September 2007 phenomenon that had entire dorm floors in line the night it launched. "Finish the Fight" did exactly that — Master Chief, the Covenant, the Flood, and forty million marketing dollars behind a "Believe" campaign built around a sprawling hand-made diorama. The numbers were untouchable: $170 million in one day, $300 million in a week, a million players on Xbox Live before anyone had slept.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Bungie's sci-fi FPS that proved console shooters could rival their PC counterparts. Released November 15, 2001 as an Xbox launch title, Halo: Combat Evolved sent you to a mysterious ringworld as Master Chief to fight the alien Covenant—and turned LAN parties into a rite of passage.

Hannah Montana

The Disney Channel sitcom where Miley Stewart lived a secret double life as pop star Hannah Montana, complete with the unforgettable theme "The Best of Both Worlds." It premiered March 24, 2006 and ran until January 16, 2011, launching Miley Cyrus's career and creating a merchandising phenomenon.

Happy Feet

A fuzzy emperor penguin who can't sing a note but can tap-dance like his life depends on it — because it does. Happy Feet was 2006's inescapable penguin musical, the movie that put Savion Glover's feet on an animated bird and walked away with the Oscar that everyone assumed belonged to Pixar.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Two best friends, one impossible late-night craving, and an obstacle course of absurdity standing between them and White Castle sliders. A modest $9 million theatrical release that became a genuine DVD phenomenon — and a quietly groundbreaking one: a mainstream studio comedy carried by two Asian-American leads, at a time when the industry insisted that couldn't work.

Harry Potter

J.K. Rowling's magical phenomenon launched June 1997 in the UK as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the US). Three books released before the decade ended; by 1999 the series topped global bestseller lists and sparked a franchise that never stopped—within a year, midnight release parties were a cultural tradition.

HeadOn

A wax stick rubbed on your forehead while a voice repeated the same phrase three times and never explained what it did. The most annoying ad on television—and it somehow worked.

Heelys

Sneakers with a hidden wheel in the heel that made kids feel like they were gliding through the mall in ways shoes were never meant to allow. Schools banned them almost as fast as they sold, malls put up 'no Heelys' signs, and the fad burned from the early 2000s to its 2006–07 peak before the cool factor evaporated.

Heinz EZ Squirt

Ketchup, but Blastin' Green — then Funky Purple, and a rainbow of colors after that. Heinz put the condiment in a skinny-nozzled squeeze bottle so kids could draw with it, and for a few early-2000s years, dinner plates got weird.

Heroes

Ordinary people wake up with extraordinary powers, and NBC's 2006 serial made watching them find each other appointment television. "Save the cheerleader, save the world" became the rallying cry of a show that felt, for exactly one season, like it could save television too.

Hershey's Kissables

Miniature Hershey's Kisses in a crunchy candy shell — red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, poured straight from the pouch. Hershey's answer to M&M's lasted less than four years before quietly vanishing in 2009, leaving behind one of the 2000s' most specifically mourned candies.

Hershey's Swoops

Chocolate slices shaped like Pringles potato chips, for reasons nobody could explain — and almost nobody knew they existed anyway. From 2003 to 2006 they came in snack cups, flavored like the Hershey lineup: Milk Chocolate, Reese's, York, Almond Joy. The perfect 2000s grocery-aisle experiment: an idea that made sense on a whiteboard and nowhere else.

"Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's

One guy, one acoustic guitar, and a song about a girl who turned him down. Two years after it appeared on an album, it was the #1 song in America — and the real Delilah had to live with being everyone's idealized dream girl.

High School Musical

The Disney Channel musical that launched a thousand hairbrush-microphone performances. When a basketball star and a brainy new student auditioned for the school musical, their chemistry and catchy songs—especially "Breaking Free"—captivated millions of kids and turned Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens into instant teen icons.

Hilary Duff

Lizzie McGuire on TV, platinum pop star on the radio, and the face on every 2003 tween's binder. Hilary Duff was the blueprint Disney Channel superstar, running the show-to-albums-to-movies pipeline that a whole generation of stars followed.

HitClips

Pay $3–4 to hear ONE MINUTE of a pop hit in lo-fi mono from a thumbnail-size cartridge clipped to your backpack. HitClips was the absurd perfect artifact of early-2000s teen culture—clipping a McDonald's-promoted player to your belt loop and trading cartridges with friends like they cost a fortune.

Holes

A puzzle-box novel that shouldn't have worked, a film adaptation that shouldn't have worked, and somehow both did. Louis Sachar's Holes won the 1998 National Book Award and the 1999 Newbery Medal — then became an honest-to-god good movie.

Hollister Co.

Abercrombie & Fitch's Southern-California-surf-themed spinoff brand, launched in 2000 and aimed at teens. Hollister stores were deliberately dim, cave-like spaces with beachy decor, a seagull logo, and an overwhelming signature cologne. Logo hoodies and tees were a 2000s teen status marker.

Hollywood Video

The video rental chain that played Blockbuster's biggest shadow competitor, with blue-and-gold membership cards that lived in junk drawers nationwide. Founded in 1988 and headquartered in Oregon, it grew into a national Blockbuster rival — and gave gamers GameCrazy, the buy-sell-trade store-within-a-store. It was the other card to carry, the place that often had the tape you needed when Blockbuster was cleaned out.

Homestar Runner

The Flash cartoon empire that ran on merch and goodwill — no ads, ever. The Chapman brothers' site built its voice through Strong Bad's absurd email replies, one of which spawned Trogdor the Burninator, a scribbled one-armed dragon that became internet legend.

Homies

Two-inch figurines from the supermarket vending machine — Smiley, Droopy, Eight Ball and the rest of the barrio crew, each with a stance and a story. You fed the machine pocket change, cranked the knob, and hoped the capsule held the one Homie you were missing.

Hot Pockets

Molten on the outside, frozen in the middle, and somehow both at once: the microwave turnover that fed every dorm room and latchkey afternoon. Then Jim Gaffigan sang "Hot Pockets!" in falsetto, and a freezer-aisle staple became a permanent piece of comedy history.

Hot Topic

The black-walled store at the end of the mall where the music was too loud and the T-shirts had bands your parents had never heard of. Studded belts, band merch, hair dye, and a smell of incense you could identify from thirty feet away. For a certain kind of teenager, walking in felt like finding your people.

Hotmail

Email you could check from ANY browser, anywhere — revolutionary in 1996, when email lived inside your ISP's software. Your first email address was probably a Hotmail address with numbers in it. It still works. It just says outlook.com now.

House, M.D.

The cane-tapping misanthrope, the puzzle-box cases, the Vicodin addiction, the mantra that everybody lies, and the rule that it's never lupus — House was the prestige procedural where every disease was a mystery to solve. Hugh Laurie's imperious Dr. Gregory House became appointment television for the 2000s and the most-watched show in the world in 2008.

How I Met Your Mother

Nine seasons of Ted Mosby and his friends navigating love, jobs, and growing up in New York, all framed as a 2030 father telling his kids the long, winding story of how he finally met their mom. Barney's "legen—wait for it—dary" catchphrase became a cultural reflex, and that yellow umbrella haunted the fan forums for years. The 2014 finale split the internet like few series endings ever have, but the journey itself became the real nostalgia.

Nickelback — How You Remind Me

The opening growl — 'Never made it as a wise man' — that became the sound of 2001, and the song that proved Nickelback were simultaneously the internet's favorite punching bag and the actual soundtrack to the decade. Mathematically the most-played song of the 2000s on US radio, and everyone hated it, and everyone still knows every word.

Linkin Park — Hybrid Theory

Linkin Park's landmark debut album, released October 24, 2000, blending Chester Bennington's soaring vocals with Mike Shinoda's aggressive rapping over heavy guitars and electronic production. The best-selling album of 2001 in the US, Hybrid Theory became the soundtrack to countless angsty bedrooms and defined nu-metal for a generation.

"I Write Sins Not Tragedies" by Panic! at the Disco

The song that was everywhere in 2006, with the earworm chorus radio had to censor. Brendon Urie in a ringmaster's top hat, a circus crashing a wedding, and enough theatrical energy to define an era of emo-pop — every kid noticed what the stations cut out and learned the uncensored lyrics anyway.

iCarly

The Nickelodeon sitcom about a teenage girl running a web show from her apartment, perfectly capturing the moment when online video became the new fame. Carly, Sam, and Freddie's shenanigans and random web-show bits defined what a generation thought being internet-famous looked like—before YouTube influencers made it real.

Ice Age

The prehistoric buddy comedy that put Blue Sky Studios on the map: a woolly mammoth, a sloth, and a saber-toothed tiger reluctantly team up to return a lost human baby to its tribe, while a nut-obsessed squirrel named Scrat wages an eternal, silent war against a single acorn. A surprise blockbuster that launched one of animation's biggest franchises.

iDog

Plug your MP3 player into the little white robot dog and watch it come alive — seven LED lights flashing across its face, ears wiggling, head bobbing to the beat. The iDog was the iPod era's must-have desk pet: part speaker, part Tamagotchi, all 2005.

The ILOVEYOU Virus

The email you absolutely should not have opened. On May 4, 2000, an email landed in inboxes worldwide with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and an attachment promising a love letter — then it quietly sent itself to everyone in your address book and overwrote your files. Within ten days, tens of millions of computers were infected, and the damage estimates eventually climbed toward $10 billion. It was the moment the internet learned not to trust attachments.

iMac G3

Jony Ive's teardrop iMac: translucent Bondi Blue plastic, USB ports, and no floppy drive — a total break from beige-box monotony. By 1999 it had exploded into five candy colors, and school computer labs filled with rows of the gumdrops. A computer that looked like it came from the future, parked in your classroom.

Infantry Online

The top-down, sprite-based online combat game where large teams fought across sprawling battlefields with infantry, vehicles, and aircraft. Born from the makers of SubSpace, it became a Sony Online Entertainment fixture on Station.com and outlived its era through a fan-run revival.

Invader Zim

Zim is an alien invader from the Irken empire sent to conquer Earth, except he's terrible at it — and his malfunctioning robot servant GIR, disguised as a green dog, is somehow worse. Jhonen Vasquez's creation was Nickelodeon's darkest, weirdest cartoon, and the network killed it fast. The kids who found it never let go.

iPhone Launch (2007)

"Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone." Steve Jobs said it on January 9, 2007, and by June 29 thousands were camped outside stores to find out if he meant it. The lines, the keynote, the $599 price tag — the moment phones changed overnight.

iPod

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, promising "1,000 songs in your pocket." The original model packed a 5GB hard drive, mechanical scroll wheel, and FireWire connection—Mac-only, $399. The click wheel, iTunes Music Store (2003), and later Windows support made it the gateway device to digital music and one of the most influential electronics ever built.

iPod Shuffle

A gum-stick iPod with no screen: you loaded it with iTunes' AutoFill, hung it around your neck, pressed play and took what it gave you. Announced in 2005 as the first iPod under $100, sold with the tagline "Life is random." It bet that surrendering control of your music could feel like freedom — which is roughly how everyone listens now.

Iron Man

The risky bet that built an empire. Marvel Studios' first self-produced movie hired Robert Downey Jr. — a comeback story playing a comeback story — and let him improvise his way into "I am Iron Man." Then Samuel L. Jackson showed up after the credits, and sitting through credits became a national habit.

Italian Charm Bracelets

A stretchy steel band of flat little links, each one snapped out and swapped for a charm — your initial, a soccer ball, a ladybug, your best friend's name. Italian charm bracelets turned a wrist into a customizable scrapbook, and for a few years in the early 2000s every girl in school was comparing links.

NSYNC — "It's Gonna Be Me"

NSYNC's only Billboard Hot 100 number one—a fact that still surprises people because "Bye Bye Bye" felt bigger. Released May 2000 as the second single from No Strings Attached, it rode the Cheiron formula to the top for two weeks that summer, then spawned one of the most baffling memes of the 2010s when "It's Gonna Be May" took over the internet every April 30.

Jackass

MTV's notorious stunt-and-prank show, in which a crew of grown men hurt themselves for your entertainment. Premiering on October 1, 2000, it strung together shopping-cart crashes, ill-advised dares, and gross-out gags performed by Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, and the rest of the gang. Wrapped in stern on-screen warnings not to try any of it at home, it was appointment viewing for a generation of teenagers — and the launchpad for a movie franchise that's still going.

Jak and Daxter

Naughty Dog's PS2 platformer arrived in December 2001 with no loading screens and no seams — just one continuous world for a silent hero and his motor-mouthed otter-weasel sidekick. Critics adored it, and with Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper it formed the PS2's beloved platformer trinity.

Jake Gyllenhaal

Born into Hollywood royalty but broke through on his own terms—as the troubled daydreamer who became every indie film's favorite wunderkind. By mid-decade, he'd pivoted into blockbusters without losing the arthouse credibility, proving the 2000s' best leading men didn't have to pick a lane.

Jay-Z

Shawn Corey Carter rose from Marcy Projects hustler to rap's defining CEO, making the 2000s the decade when hip-hop conquered the boardroom. His Imperial period—from Hard Knock Life through The Black Album and beyond—turned street rap into stadium singalongs and Grammy gold. Jay-Z didn't just make hits; he made an industry, proving rappers could own their own records and empires. The 2000s belonged to him.

99 Problems

Rick Rubin stripped Jay-Z down to bare guitar and cowbell, and the Marcy Projects kid recited a real 1994 traffic stop so precisely that a law professor later published a journal article dissecting it. "99 Problems" was endlessly quotable, taught in law schools, and inescapable in 2004—the sound of Jay-Z staging his own exit.

Big Pimpin'

Timbaland looped a flute line from a 1957 Egyptian melody, Houston's UGK traded verses with Jay-Z, and the result was the yacht-party anthem of 2000. The song was iconic enough to fuel a decade-long copyright fight—and brash enough that Jay-Z himself later disowned the lyrics in the Wall Street Journal.

Jessica Biel

The church-family daughter from 7th Heaven who shed her wholesome image and fought her way into 2000s movie stardom. Cast at fourteen as Mary Camden, she became one of The WB's defining faces—and by her early twenties she was headlining studio films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blade: Trinity.

Jessica Simpson

The third lane of the late-90s teen-pop trinity—Britney, Christina, and Jessica Simpson, marketed above all on that big Texas church-choir voice. Her debut album was a platinum hit, but her real dominance came via a reality TV show that turned her marriage into ratings gold and a Chicken of the Sea moment into the decade's defining soundbite.

Jimmy Neutron

Boy genius with the impossible ice-cream-swirl hair, a robot dog named Goddard, and a lab under the clubhouse. "Gotta blast!" carried a movie, three seasons of the TV show, and every kid who ever wished their science-fair project actually worked. It was Nickelodeon's first cartoon drawn entirely in CGI — and it looked like nothing else on the channel.

Joe Dirt

A mullet-wearing janitor drifts across America searching for the parents who lost him at the Grand Canyon. Panned by critics but reborn as a cable classic, Joe Dirt proved that weird comedies find their people eventually—they just needed TBS and a Saturday night.

John Q

Denzel Washington as a working father who takes an emergency room hostage when his insurance won't cover his young son's life-saving heart transplant. A blunt, angry drama that critics panned and audiences turned into a hit — and that landed as a lightning rod in America's healthcare debate.

JoJo — Leave (Get Out)

A thirteen-year-old telling off a no-good boyfriend with the vocal control of a grown soul singer. "Get out — right now!" was the kiss-off anthem of 2004, belted into a million hairbrushes by kids exactly JoJo's age.

Jones Soda

The indie soda in a glass bottle with a customer-submitted photo on every label — weird, grainy snapshots of real life where the big brands would have put a logo. And once a year, flavors like Turkey & Gravy turned the whole company into performance art.

Josh Hartnett

A Minnesota kid who exploded into stardom in 2001 with Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down, then famously stepped away. Josh Hartnett was the rare leading man who'd had enough of the machinery by 2006, turning down Superman and Batman to reclaim his life. His withdrawal was deliberate—a quiet rejection of what the moment demanded.

Juicy Couture Tracksuits

Matching velour or terrycloth tracksuits — zip hoodie and low-rise pants, often with "JUICY" emblazoned across the back — that screamed early-2000s louder than any other garment. Worn by celebrities like Paris Hilton and Jennifer Lopez, the Juicy tracksuit was the status symbol of the mall, equal parts comfort and conspicuous consumption.

Julia Stiles

Born 1981, she was the teen-Shakespeare queen of the late 90s and early 2000s—flinty and wry where others were bubbly, older-souled than the wave around her. From Kat Stratford's taming to Ophelia to Desdemona to a ballerina's breakthrough, she was the thinking kid's teen-movie star.

Junie B. Jones

That Junie B. Jones is a kindergartner with a MOUTH on her, and that's why everybody loved her books. Barbara Park's first-person tornado narrated school exactly the way kids actually talk — bad grammar and all — which made her a 55-million-copy juggernaut AND a banned-books-list regular.

Juno

Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.

Justice League

Seven superheroes, the voices that defined a generation, and Bruce Timm's vision of what DC could be on its own terms. Justice League premiered on November 17, 2001, and became the epic centerpiece of the DC Animated Universe.

Justin Timberlake

The NSYNC kid who went solo in 2002 and owned the decade. Justified, the Super Bowl, "SexyBack," "Dick in a Box" — by 2007 nobody thought of Justin Timberlake as the boy-band guy anymore.

Kanye West — The College Dropout

An in-house producer known for chopping soul samples into "chipmunk soul" beats insists he's also a rapper. Nobody buys it. Then he nearly dies in a car crash, records a single about it with his jaw wired shut, and delivers one of the defining debuts in hip-hop history.

Katamari Damacy

The gloriously weird PS2 game where you roll a sticky ball that picks up thumbtacks, then cats, then cars, then whole skyscrapers. A candy-colored oddity with an unforgettable soundtrack that became an instant cult classic.

Katy Perry

The candy-striped retro-pinup pop star who opened summer 2008 with a song that topped charts for seven straight weeks and didn't let go all year. Katy Perry was inescapable.

"Milkshake" by Kelis

"My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard." The hook that launched a thousand ringtones and playground chants, Kelis's 2003 smash — produced by The Neptunes — became one of the decade's most quoted lines before anyone even agreed on what it meant.

"Shoes" — Kelly

"Shoes. Shoes. OH MY GOD. SHOES." Comedian Liam Kyle Sullivan's deadpan drag creation Kelly growls her way through a birthday shoe rampage in one of YouTube's first true viral videos — the clip a whole generation quoted at every mall for years.

"Tik Tok" by Ke$ha

One song, one glitter-caked hook, and the exact second the 2000s became the 2010s. "Tik Tok" arrived on August 7, 2009, as Kesha's debut single — then spent nine weeks at number one making sure everyone on earth had heard it.

KFC Famous Bowls

Mashed potatoes, corn, popcorn chicken, gravy, cheese — the whole KFC menu stacked in one container, no apologies. It became a menu staple and an immortal punchline the moment Patton Oswalt called it "a failure pile in a sadness bowl."

Kidz Bop

Kids singing scrubbed-clean covers of the current Top 40, sold by TV commercials shouting "KIDZ BOP KIDS!" on a loop. You either begged for one or begged to make it stop—there was no third option.

Kill Bill

A woman in a yellow tracksuit walks out of a coma seeking revenge on the people who shot her. Tarantino split one revenge epic across two films, mining 1970s exploitation and martial-arts cinema to create a revenge fantasy that became a dorm-room poster staple.

Kim Possible

The Disney Channel animated series about high-school cheerleader and part-time crime-fighter Kim Possible, her clumsy best-friend sidekick Ron Stoppable, and his naked mole rat Rufus, foiling villains like Dr. Drakken and Shego. Catchphrases 'What's the sitch?' and 'So not the drama' became part of the language; created by Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle.

Kingdom Hearts

A PlayStation 2 action RPG born from an unlikely collaboration between Square and Disney, where you wield a key-shaped weapon called the Keyblade and travel through Disney film worlds with Donald Duck and Goofy. You play as Sora, fighting shadow creatures called the Heartless across an imaginative mashup of Disney magic and Final Fantasy gameplay. The franchise grew into a beloved epic across multiple platforms and sequels.

Knights of the Old Republic

BioWare's Star Wars epic, set 4,000 years before the films and freed from movie canon entirely. Released in July 2003, it asked a question no Star Wars game had really asked before: what if your choices actually mattered? And then it hit you with THAT twist.

Knocked Up

A one-night stand with immediate, life-rearranging consequences. Judd Apatow's follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin crashed slacker comedy into romantic comedy and somehow made you believe both. Seth Rogen graduated from stoner sidekick to leading man in real time, opposite Katherine Heigl as the career-focused woman suddenly sharing a future with him.

Krispy Kreme Craze

The "Hot Doughnuts Now" neon sign meant fresh Original Glazed were rolling off the line right now, and you pulled the car over. In the early 2000s that ritual became a full national mania — lines around the block at every new store, a soaring stock, local news trucks at doughnut openings — until the bubble burst spectacularly. The doughnuts were always good; the craze was the stock.

"Kryptonite" by 3 Doors Down

At fifteen, Brad Arnold of 3 Doors Down wrote "Kryptonite" during math class — and ended up with one of the inescapable rock songs of the decade. From a Mississippi radio station's runaway request line to an eight-times-platinum single, this was the sound of the year 2000 on every rock station in America. You probably knew every word before you fully understood them.

Kung Fu Panda

Jack Black's Po — a noodle-shop panda accidentally anointed the legendary Dragon Warrior — turned out to be DreamWorks at its best. 'Skadoosh' entered the vocabulary, the Wuxi Finger Hold entered recess, and there is no charge for awesomeness.

Lady Gaga

A New York songwriter who wrote for Britney and the Pussycat Dolls — and got dropped by Def Jam — reinvented herself as Lady Gaga and detonated across 2008–09. The Fame sent "Just Dance" and "Poker Face" to #1, and within a year she'd gone from songwriter-for-hire to the sound of pop.

Laguna Beach

MTV's answer to The O.C. was real: Laguna Beach High School students, sun-bleached and cinematic, playing out a triangle nobody could stop watching. Everyone picked a side—Team LC or Team Kristin—and the drama was nothing like real life.

LAN Parties

You hauled your full tower, CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse to a friend's basement, plugged into the network, and played until sunrise. Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament — the trash talk was live, the pizza was cold, and nobody believed online gaming could ever replace the room.

LazyTown

Icelandic aerobics champion Magnús Scheving created this live-action-and-puppet carnival as an impossibly expensive argument for why kids should move. Sportacus, the flipping mustachioed hero elf, wages an eternal campaign against Robbie Rotten, whose sole mission is engineering town-wide laziness. When it hit Nick Jr. in 2004, its premiere week was Nickelodeon's highest-rated in three years.

LeapPad

The talking book that read along as you touched the page with a magic pen — and somehow made phonics feel like a toy. For a few Christmases in the early 2000s, the LeapPad was the present under every tree.

Leeroy Jenkins

A World of Warcraft guild meticulously plans a raid — and then Leeroy Jenkins, back from making chicken, bellows his own name and charges in alone, wiping everyone. "At least I have chicken" became the internet's shorthand for glorious reckless abandon.

Left 4 Dead

Four survivors, a horde of sprinting infected, and an invisible AI puppetmaster deciding exactly when to ruin your night. Left 4 Dead turned the zombie apocalypse into the definitive couch-and-headset co-op experience of the late 2000s — the game where friendships were forged in safe rooms and destroyed by one person startling the Witch.

Legally Blonde

Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, the pink-clad sorority queen who follows her ex to Harvard Law and out-lawyers everyone. A 2001 sleeper hit that made "bend and snap" a catchphrase and launched a franchise.

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game

You and your sibling on the couch, dropping in and out whenever someone's mom called dinner, one of you smashing everything for studs while the other solved the puzzles. This wasn't the grim prequels — this was pantomime comedy and fifty-nine characters to unlock.

LG Chocolate

The glossy black slider whose touch keys glowed red like something from the future — half phone, half candy bar, all status symbol. In the gap between the RAZR and the iPhone, the LG Chocolate was the coolest object in the mall.

Lifehouse

The Los Angeles radio-rock band behind "Hanging by a Moment" — a famous Billboard chart anomaly. Frontman Jason Wade's five-minute songwriting session produced a single that never hit weekly No. 1 yet finished as Billboard's No. 1 song of 2001. Earnest, huge-chorused, everywhere.

Like Mike

An orphan finds a pair of beat-up sneakers initialed 'MJ,' takes a lightning strike while rescuing them from a power line, and wakes up able to dunk on NBA starters. Lil' Bow Wow's 2002 fantasy was every playground daydream with a soundtrack.

Lil Jon

Crunk's king — jeweled goblet, dark shades, dreads, and a three-word vocabulary delivered at maximum volume. Jonathan Smith came up through Atlanta's rap scene and spent the mid-2000s making the loudest, most fun records on the radio. He didn't just ride the decade; he supplied its energy.

Lilo & Stitch

A lonely girl named Lilo adopts what she thinks is a small dog in Hawaii — it's actually Experiment 626, an alien on the run — and their chaotic, heartwarming bond redefines what family means. Disney went back to watercolor-painted backgrounds for the first time since the 1940s, Elvis Presley's music soundtracked the tropics, and the core message stuck with a generation: Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind.

LimeWire & Napster

The lawless era of free music: you queued up a download that would take three hours on dial-up, crossed your fingers it wasn't mislabeled, and hoped even harder it wasn't a virus. Napster and LimeWire were the P2P revolution that detonated the music industry, made kids into accidental outlaws, and eventually gave way to iTunes.

Limited Too

Created in 1987 as an offshoot of The Limited, it grew into the tween mall temple — the glittery, flared-jeans cathedral where girls a few years too old for kids' stores but too young for juniors discovered who they wanted to become. Then, between 2008 and 2010, it vanished.

Lindsay Lohan

America's freckled sweetheart of the mid-2000s — Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, a pop album, and a tabloid spotlight that never switched off. For a few years, Lindsay Lohan was the reigning teen-movie queen.

Line Rider

Draw freehand lines and watch a tiny scarf-wearing sledder named Bosh ride them, obeying nothing but momentum and gravity. No goal, no score, no way to win — just physics and creativity in a browser. It was a toy, not a game, and that was exactly the point.

Lineage II

The Korean MMORPG where hundreds of players threw themselves at a castle wall and the grind between sieges was measured in months. Lineage II arrived in the West in 2004 with a reputation for being enormous, beautiful and utterly unforgiving of anyone with a job. It is still running, more than twenty years on.

Lips of an Angel

Hinder's whispered phone call to an ex — "honey, why you calling me so late?" — that owned radio and ringtones in the fall of 2006. The power ballad every flip phone in America seemed to erupt with, guilty premise and all.

Listerine PocketPaks

Postage-stamp-sized strips that melted on your tongue in seconds and tasted like menthol fury in the best way. Launched in the US in 2001, they were an instant fad that made TIME's Best Inventions of 2002 list — in every drugstore and backpack until the craze cooled and left them oddly still around forever.

Little Einsteins

Four preschoolers and their sentient red rocket ship blasted off every episode to a soundtrack of actual classical music. You remember the theme — "We're going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship" — and the way each mission smuggled a museum masterpiece and a classical movement into the adventure.

Mumford & Sons — "Little Lion Man"

The song that made banjos cool again: Mumford & Sons kicked down the door for the entire early-2010s folk boom with a kick-drum-and-banjo confessional featuring one memorable expletive planted right in the chorus hook.

Livestrong Bands

The yellow silicone gel wristband launched in 2004 by the Lance Armstrong Foundation with Nike, sold for $1 to support people affected by cancer. Tens of millions sold, and it ignited the entire cause-awareness rubber-bracelet craze—soon every color stood for a different charity, and everyone stacked them on their wrists like a visible moral portfolio.

Lizzie McGuire

Disney Channel's '00s tween sensation starring Hilary Duff as awkward Lizzie, with an animated cartoon version of Lizzie voicing her inner thoughts. The relatable humor and heart made it a cornerstone of early-2000s children's television and rocketed Hilary Duff to stardom, leading to the 2003 theatrical movie and a music career.

Lolcats / I Can Has Cheezburger?

A grey cat with a caption. In 2007, a website launched around a single image of a cat asking "I can has cheezburger?" — broken English, instant appeal, zero cynicism. Within months the site was pulling over a million hits a day, and a niche 4chan tradition became a phenomenon covered by Time magazine. Lolcats became the grammar of internet humor for a decade, the template for every image macro that followed.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Peter Jackson's monumental film trilogy adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003). Filmed entirely in New Zealand, it defined epic fantasy for a generation with breathtaking scale, iconic performances, and midnight premieres that felt like cultural events.

Lost

The ABC serial drama that turned network TV into a mystery box for six seasons. When Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, survivors discovered that their new home held impossible secrets—a smoke monster, a hidden hatch, a shadowy group called "the Others"—and a mythology so complex that fans spent years theorizing about every detail.

Low-Rise Jeans

The denim silhouette that exposed everything — waistbands that barely qualified as clothing. Low-rise jeans paired with visible thongs and belly-button rings was THE Y2K uniform, and photos from this era still make you cringe.

Luigi's Mansion

Mario's brother finally got top billing—as the nervous lead of Nintendo's GameCube launch. Luigi wins a mansion in a contest he never entered, finds it haunted, loses Mario inside, and armed with a ghost-catching vacuum cleaner, nervously hums his way through rooms of poltergeists. The Poltergust 3000 was ingenious enough to spawn a franchise.

Madagascar

Four spoiled zoo animals, one island, and a lemur king ordering everyone to move it, move it. Madagascar arrived on May 27, 2005, as a DreamWorks bet on pure silliness that landed with kids and never quite left.

Magic Tree House

Jack and Annie climb into a tree house full of books, point at a picture, and the whole thing spins off to dinosaurs, knights, or the deck of the Titanic. Mary Pope Osborne's chapter-book series turned a generation of kids into readers — one 'research trip' at a time.

Malcolm in the Middle

Malcolm's a genius, he lives with a gloriously chaotic family, and yes, he's going to tell you about it — directly, to your face. "Life is unfair" was the whole thesis. Fox's Malcolm in the Middle reinvented the family sitcom by ditching the laugh track and the studio audience, and its second episode pulled 26 million viewers.

Man vs. Wild

Bear Grylls gets dropped somewhere terrible, finds the one thing no human should eat, and eats it on camera. Discovery's late-2000s survival hit — equal parts genuine expertise and irresistible showmanship.

Mandy Moore

"Candy" arrived in 1999, when she was fifteen, in the same debut class as Britney, Christina, and Jessica Simpson. Critics sorted her into the softest lane of the four — and then she spent the early 2000s playing mean girls on screen, walked away from teen pop with an album of 70s and 80s covers, and quietly outlasted the category she'd been filed under.

MapleStory

A cute 2D side-scrolling MMORPG where you leveled for hours grinding snails and mushrooms instead of slaying dragons in 3D. Free-to-play, but the Cash Shop meant everyone knew who was spending real money on their outfit. After-school hangout, guild headquarters, and grinding treadmill all at once — the game your parents thought was a cartoon and you knew was a second life.

MapQuest

Before your phone knew where you were, you printed directions from MapQuest and prayed you didn't miss step 14. The pre-GPS road-trip ritual, in a stack of warm printer paper.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

Nintendo's mad-genius take on kart racing: two drivers per kart, split duties, and the ability to hand off control mid-race. Double Dash!! turned couch multiplayer into pure chaos and became the GameCube's second-best-selling game.

Mars 2112

A 33,000-square-foot spaceship restaurant in Times Square where you literally flew to Mars on a motion-simulator shuttle before tumbling into a three-story underground Martian cavern. It was the largest space-themed restaurant on Earth when it opened, and it felt like it — a pure sci-fi fever dream.

Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen

They started sharing one sitcom role as nine-month-olds and ended up sharing a tween-media empire: direct-to-video mysteries, sleepover parties on VHS, and a clothing line in every Walmart. For girls of a certain era, Mary-Kate and Ashley weren't celebrities — they were the brand of childhood itself.

Maury

Maury Povich opening an envelope while the studio holds its breath, then delivering the line that launched a thousand memes: "You are NOT the father!" Cue the victory dance, the backstage sprint, the audience losing its mind — an entire genre of internet humor was born on this stage.

Maxim

The "lad mag" that lived on every barbershop shelf and older brother's bedroom floor. Maxim brought cover models, cheeky lists, gear reviews, and the famous Hot 100 to millions of readers in the early 2000s—a condensed, irreverent take on lifestyle media that dominated dorms and waiting rooms.

McCain Smiles

The smiley-face potatoes: crispy mashed-potato discs with two punched eyes and a grin, beaming up from a million cafeteria trays. On Smiles day, the hot-lunch line moved a little faster.

McDonald's Dollar Menu

Two double cheeseburgers for $2—the economic lifeline of broke teens everywhere. McDonald's launched an entire era on a single strategic bet that cheap meant survival.

McDonald's Snack Wrap

A crispy chicken strip, lettuce, shredded cheese, and ranch in a soft tortilla, engineered for one-handed drive-thru eating. Discontinued in 2016 — and mourned so loudly for so long that McDonald's finally surrendered and brought it back.

McGriddles

A breakfast sandwich that divided people instantly: bacon, egg, and cheese between two maple-flavored griddle cakes with syrup crystallized inside the bread, each embossed with the McDonald's logo. Launched in 2003, it was sweet, savory, and unapologetic — and more than twenty years later it's still on the menu, still dividing opinion.

Mean Girls

The teen comedy that defined 2000s school social hierarchies — cliques, calculation, and the crushing realization that you might be the problem. Mean Girls premiered in April 2004, written by SNL's Tina Fey, and immediately became the movie every middle and high school student quoted obsessively for the next decade.

Meebo

The browser tab that ran AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ all at once — no download, no install, no getting caught. On locked-down school and library computers, Meebo was the loophole: the IT department could block installers, but the browser was always open.

Meet the Parents

Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.

Metroid Prime

A Texas studio took the Metroid series, turned it first-person, and made a masterpiece nobody expected. Lonely, atmospheric, built for scanning every detail—Samus's visor rain effects became what exploration felt like.

Michelle Branch — "Everywhere"

A teenager who wrote her own songs and played her own guitar in a sea of choreographed teen-pop — Michelle Branch's "Everywhere" was the anti-TRL anthem that somehow became peak TRL. That driving guitar, the spy-on-the-cute-neighbor video, and the fact that she wrote it herself made her the authentic alternative of fall 2001.

Microsoft Zune

Microsoft's answer to the iPod arrived in November 2006 — thicker, later, and available in brown. The Zune became tech's favorite punchline, but the punchline hid real ideas: wireless song-sharing, a subscription music pass years before streaming won, and a UI so good it became the design language of Windows Phone.

Mighty Beanz

Tiny weighted plastic beans with painted faces that flipped, wobbled, and raced down plastic tracks. "Play 'em, race 'em, collect 'em" — a pocketful of these got traded around every 2003 playground.

Mike Jones

A Houston rapper who said his own name until you couldn't forget it — "Who? Mike Jones!" — then gave out his real cell number and actually answered when you called. Before social media, Mike Jones WAS the direct line.

Milk 'n Cereal Bars

A bowl of cereal impersonating a candy bar: two cereal layers with a white "milk" cream stripe through the middle, eaten with your hands in the back seat. For a few years in the early 2000s they were everywhere — lunchboxes, gas stations, vending machines — and then they quietly weren't.

Miniclip

The browser-games portal you loaded the second the teacher turned around — a wall of free Flash games for every spare ten minutes, from stick-figure violence to pool. If one game got blocked at school, Miniclip was where you found ten more.

Miracle

Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, molding college kids into the team that beat the unbeatable Soviets in 1980. Disney's Miracle on Ice movie — the one that made every gym teacher yell a little more meaningfully for a few years.

Miss Cleo

The Jamaican-accented tarot reader who ruled late-night cable — 'Call me now!' — as the face of the Psychic Readers Network. For a few years around the turn of the millennium, Miss Cleo's pay-per-minute readings were an inescapable TV-ad fixture, until the whole operation collapsed under federal scrutiny.

Missy Elliott

A shape-shifting visionary who moved between producer, rapper, and video icon — the futurist behind "The Rain," "Get Ur Freak On," and "Work It," whose jaw-dropping videos defined how hip-hop looked in the early 2000s. Simultaneously avant-garde and wildly successful.

Mix CDs

The mixtape of the CD-R era: download MP3s from file-sharing sites, burn them to a blank disc in Nero or iTunes, label it with Sharpie, and pray it didn't skip. Mix CDs were the late-90s and 2000s ritual—track order agonized over, burnable only by those with a CD-R drive, given as love offerings and road-trip soundtracks.

Monsters, Inc.

Your closet door really was a portal to a monster city — and the scariest part was that the monsters were just doing their jobs. Pixar's Monsters, Inc. imagined a metropolis powered by children's screams, then let one giggling toddler named Boo dismantle the whole economy.

Moon Sand

The moldable indoor "sand" that played like dough and, famously, never dried out. You could pack it into molds and crumble it back apart again and again—no water needed—which is exactly why it ended up ground into so many living-room carpets.

Motorola Razr

The Razr V3 launched in late 2004 as the world's thinnest clamshell phone at a shocking $500. Its anodized-aluminum body, laser-etched keypad, and impossible thinness made it a fashion statement. When the price dropped in 2005–2006, everyone had one—and snapping it shut after a call was the whole point.

Mountain Dew Code Red

The cherry-red Mountain Dew that felt genuinely edgy in 2001 — a new flavor, a darker can, and a tongue-staining color that made regular Dew look tame. It was the drink of LAN parties and late-night gaming.

Mountain Dew LiveWire

The orange Dew that only existed between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Two summers of "get it before it's gone" panic-buying later, PepsiCo surrendered and made LiveWire permanent in 2005.

"Mr. Brightside" by The Killers

The Killers' debut single — written after Brandon Flowers found his girlfriend in a Las Vegas bar with another man. Released in 2003, it peaked at No. 10 on both the US and UK charts, and then simply never left: by 2026 it had logged more than 500 weeks on the UK singles chart, a communal scream at weddings and stadiums that outlived its own decade.

Mr. Six

A bald old man in a tuxedo and giant glasses shuffles off a vintage bus, the Vengaboys kick in, and suddenly he's dancing like his knees are twenty-five. Six Flags' Mr. Six made an entire country want to follow that bus to the park.

MTV Cribs

The MTV show that walked you through celebrities' mansions, one "welcome to my crib" at a time. Premiering on September 12, 2000, it turned the house tour into appointment television: the car collections, the home theaters, the walk-in closets, and the wall-to-wall excess. It also became infamous for stars who padded their episodes with rented mansions and borrowed cars, which only made it more fun to watch.

Muscle Milk

The chalky-sweet protein shake that lived in every 2000s gym bag, GNC aisle, and locker room — with the all-time-great fine print: Muscle Milk contains no milk. The name said milk, the label said otherwise, and eventually the FDA had thoughts.

My Chemical Romance

The eyeliner-and-marching-band emo icons behind The Black Parade. Formed in New Jersey after 9/11, MCR gave every mid-2000s teenager an anthem — "Welcome to the Black Parade," "Helena," "I'm Not Okay" — and a look.

My Life as a Teenage Robot

Nickelodeon's art-deco superhero cartoon about XJ-9 — 'Jenny,' please — a world-saving robot who would rather be at the mall. Rocket fists, gorgeous retro-futurist design, and the eternal struggle of being both Earth's protector and the weird new kid.

MySpace

MySpace launched in August 2003 and became the social network that swallowed the mid-2000s internet — where everyone's first friend was Tom. Top 8 rankings sparked drama, profile songs played on auto-load, and DIY HTML customization meant glitter graphics and autoplay music ruled. Bands broke careers there; it was the most-visited website in the US by 2006.

MythBusters

Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, two special-effects veterans and a crash-test dummy named Buster, testing urban legends with real experiments and — whenever remotely possible — explosions. MythBusters was every 2000s science class's reward day, and it convinced a generation that engineering was cooler than anything in the textbook.

Nacho Libre

Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.

Napoleon Dynamite

A deadpan indie comedy about an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho navigating high school, family chaos, and his own social ineptitude. Released in 2004, the low-budget film became a quotable phenomenon with unforgettable moments — "Gosh!", "Vote for Pedro", tetherball showdowns — and spawned endless merchandise and T-shirt catchphrases.

Naruto

A young ninja in an orange jumpsuit, ostracized by his village, dreams of becoming Hokage. Naruto Uzumaki's long-running shonen saga about friendship and determination became the hook that pulled American kids into anime culture.

Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest

Every July 4th at the corner of Surf and Stillwell: 50,000 people, a wall of hot dogs, and the Kobayashi-vs-Chestnut arms race that turned competitive eating into holiday television.

National Treasure

Nicolas Cage as a history-nerd treasure hunter who decides to steal the Declaration of Independence — because the treasure map is on the back. Bruckheimer gloss, a premise played completely straight, and one of the 2000s' great cable-rerun perennials.

Ne-Yo

The guy who wrote some of the biggest R&B songs of the mid-2000s before his own voice became equally unavoidable. Ne-Yo went from invisible hitmaker to chart-dominating artist in one album cycle — and never stopped being both at once.

Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide

Ned Bigby had a tip for everything — lockers, crushes, bullies, picture day — and he and his best friends Moze and Cookie put the guide to the test daily at James K. Polk Middle School. For three seasons of hallway chaos, Nickelodeon turned surviving seventh grade into a how-to manual.

Need for Speed: Underground

The reboot that ditched exotic supercars for neon-lit tuner street racing — body kits, underglow, and a spoiler you could see from space. Every 2003 sleepover had a souped-up Civic saved on the memory card.

Nelly

For the first half of the 2000s, Nelly was pop-rap's biggest crossover star — the Band-Aid-cheeked St. Louis rapper behind "Hot in Herre" and "Dilemma," a run of singalong hits that owned radio, MTV, and the charts.

"Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado

Nelly Furtado flirting with Timbaland over crisp club production was the sound of a total reinvention: out with the earnest folk-pop, in with sleek and urgent. Released in April 2006, it spent six weeks at #1, became her first American chart-topper, and owned that summer outright.

Neopets

The website where you could adopt a digital pet, battle it in the Battledome, and waste hours playing Flash mini-games to earn Neopoints. Launched by UK students Adam Powell and Donna Williams in 1999, Neopets became a certified after-school phenomenon, drawing tens of millions of users at its mid-2000s peak.

Nerds Rope

A rope of soft gummy armored head-to-toe in crunchy Nerds. The texture contrast was the entire point — gummy squish, candy crunch, one bite after another. Lunchroom currency: you traded them, dangled them, bit straight across.

Nero Burning ROM

The software that turned a blank disc into a mix CD, a backup, or a copy of something you probably shouldn't have had. Nero came bundled with drive after drive, so for a lot of people it wasn't the disc burner they chose — it was simply the one that was there. Its icon is a burning Colosseum, which is both a pun and a historical error.

Netbooks

For a few years, the future of computing was a laptop the size of a hardcover book with a screen you squinted at and a keyboard you learned to type on with your fingertips together. Netbooks were cheap, tiny, everywhere — the first computer a lot of kids ever owned — and then the iPad arrived, and within three years the entire category was gone.

Netflix DVD Mailers

The anti-late-fee revolution in a red envelope. Netflix mailed you DVDs one at a time, and you could keep them as long as you wanted — the ritual was hypnotic, and your queue said who you were.

Newgrounds

The birthplace of internet culture's raw, unfiltered edge — where amateurs published bold Flash creations with no gatekeeper between them and millions of eyes. A tank logo, the dreaded "blam" vote, and the night-before anxiety: did your submission survive judgment?

Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica

MTV's cameras moved in with pop's most photogenic married couple and struck gold in the very first episode, when Jessica Simpson stared at a can of tuna and asked, "Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish?" Newlyweds turned domestic squabbles about laundry and Chicken of the Sea into appointment television — and made Nick and Jessica bigger than either of their music careers ever had.

Nextel Push-to-Talk Chirp

The two-tone chirp that echoed across every construction site, warehouse, and parking lot of the 2000s. Nextel's Direct Connect made a cellphone work like a walkie-talkie — press the side button, talk instantly — and everyone within fifty feet heard both sides of the conversation.

NFL Street

Seven-on-seven football with no penalties, no injuries, and no uniforms — just NFL players in street clothes talking trash on a concrete lot. Taunt the defense while you run and you fill the Gamebreaker meter. EA Sports BIG's 2004 answer to the question of what football looks like with all the rules taken out.

Night at the Museum

Ben Stiller takes the night-guard job at the American Museum of Natural History and discovers the exhibits come alive after dark — Robin Williams as a chatty Teddy Roosevelt, a tiny cowboy named Jedediah, and a premise so charming the real museum's holiday attendance jumped by about 50,000 visitors.

Nike Air Force 1s

White-on-white, box-fresh, and heaven help whoever stepped on them. A 1982 basketball shoe became THE sneaker of 2000s hip-hop — bought two pairs at a time, wiped down mid-day, and immortalized when Nelly wrote a whole song about needing them.

Nike Shox

The sneakers with the fat shock-absorber columns under the heel—sixteen years of Nike R&D that landed in 2000 and instantly became hallway status. Vince Carter wore them to jump clean over a 7'2" Frenchman at the Sydney Olympics. Boing.

Nintendo DS

The clamshell handheld that split gaming in two — literally. Nintendo's dual-screen DS added a touch-sensitive bottom screen and stylus, backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance cartridges, and era-defining hits like Nintendogs, Brain Age, and Mario Kart DS that proved touch controls weren't a gimmick.

Nintendo GameCube

The small cube-shaped Nintendo console with a built-in carry handle, released November 2001. Indigo or purple exterior, proprietary MINI-DVD discs, and an oversized green A button that defined its controller. Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Metroid Prime, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker were system-defining hits.

Nintendo Wii

The white remote-waving console that turned living rooms into bowling alleys and convinced your grandmother that she wanted to play tennis. Nintendo's motion-controlled revolution sold 101 million units by letting non-gamers actually *feel* like they were swinging a bat or rolling a bowling ball, while leaving a trail of cracked TV screens in its wake.

Nintendogs

You pet the puppy with the stylus, you called its name into the microphone, and it learned to sit — Nintendogs made grown adults coo at a plastic clamshell on the bus. The virtual puppy that sold the Nintendo DS to everyone's mom ended up one of the best-selling games ever made.

Wayne Wonder — "No Letting Go"

Jamaican lovers-rock over the handclap-driven Diwali Riddim—the sound of spring 2003 radio. Wayne Wonder's sweet R&B float became the riddim's most perfect vessel.

Nokia 3310

The brick phone that became a meme—Nokia's 3310 was the phone that survived drops that would kill any modern device. Released in 2000 and sold over 126 million times, it was famous for its indestructibility, the built-in Snake II game, interchangeable colored covers, and the iconic Nokia tune ringtone. It was the anti-smartphone years before the smartphone era, representing the peak of durable simplicity.

Nokia N-Gage

You pressed the edge of your N-Gage to your ear to make calls — the infamous "sidetalking" — while everyone nearby asked why you were talking into a taco. Swapping games meant removing the back cover and battery. The Game Boy Advance outsold it 100 to 1 within weeks. The joke aged beautifully, though: phones really did become game machines.

Now That's What I Call Music!

The compilation-album franchise that dominated music retail in the 2000s, where rapid-fire TV commercials scrolled the entire current-radio tracklist, and every kid rushed to own the one disc that had everything on it. One CD, every hit on the radio — no allowance wasted on a single.

NSYNC

'Bye Bye Bye' and its jerky-dancing video were inescapable on TRL, announcing that five boys from Orlando could rival the Backstreet Boys. NSYNC was teen pop's other empire during the late 90s, built by the same producer and fueled by a rivalry that defined a generation.

Numa Numa

One of the internet's first viral megahits: a webcam clip of a New Jersey teenager lip-syncing and flailing joyfully to a Moldovan pop song. Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa Dance" spread to hundreds of millions of views — and it happened before YouTube even existed.

O

Tim Blake Nelson's modern Othello, relocated to an elite Southern prep school where basketball replaces Venice's wars. Mekhi Phifer as the only Black student and star athlete, Josh Hartnett as the jealous rival, Julia Stiles as Desdemona. It was made to be released in 1999—but held from the world for two years after Columbine.

O.A.R.

The jam band MTV never gave a platform but college kids couldn't live without. O.A.R. — "Of A Revolution" — spread dorm to dorm on burned CDs of live shows, a band you heard about from a friend long before you ever heard them on the radio. By the time they sold out Madison Square Garden in 2006, the underground had simply become too big to ignore.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Step out of the sewers and the whole world renders in front of you — go anywhere, be anyone, ignore the main quest for two hundred hours. Bethesda's 2006 fantasy epic was the game that made the Xbox 360 generation feel next-gen, gave us the Adoring Fan, and handed the industry its permanent shorthand for microtransactions: a paid suit of horse armor.

Ocean Avenue

Pop-punk with a violin section of one. Yellowcard's signature song only reached #37 on the Hot 100, but it went double Platinum and became the era's defining leave-this-town anthem — named for a street that doesn't quite exist.

Ocean's Eleven

Eleven thieves, three casinos, $160 million in one underground vault. Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of the Rat Pack classic put George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Julia Roberts in the coolest movie of the decade — a heist so smooth it made crime look like a hangout.

Old School

Three depressed guys in their thirties start a fraternity, and Will Ferrell's Frank the Tank goes streaking through the quad. Todd Phillips' 2003 comedy turned a midlife crisis into a toga party and helped define the decade of R-rated comedy that followed.

One Tree Hill

Half-brothers, one basketball court, one small North Carolina town. One Tree Hill turned its episode titles into a running playlist and taught a generation that brooding on a riverside court wasn't just a mood — it was an identity.

Oprah's "You Get a Car!"

"Everybody gets a car!" On one September afternoon in 2004, Oprah handed 276 audience members a new Pontiac each — and handed the internet a meme it would still be pointing with twenty years later.

Oreo Cakesters

The soft, squishy lunchbox Oreo — two chocolate snack cakes around the familiar white creme — that lasted five years, vanished in 2012, and got mourned so hard Nabisco finally brought it back a decade later.

Oreo O's

Cookies for breakfast, officially sanctioned. Post's Oreo O's were little chocolate cereal loops flecked with cream that turned the milk a chocolatey brown — and then, one day, they vanished, becoming one of the most mourned discontinued cereals of the era.

Original Xbox

Microsoft's first console was a giant black box that held a Pentium III and changed online gaming forever. Launched November 15, 2001, the Xbox arrived with the Duke controller (instantly mocked for its size), a built-in hard drive, and Ethernet port. Halo: Combat Evolved was the system seller, but Xbox Live (November 2002) was the revolution: console gaming went online with a headset in the box and broadband required.

Orkut

Google's first social network — named after the engineer who built it — where you left "scraps" on friends' pages, rated them Trustworthy, Cool, or Sexy, and joined communities for everything. A modest curiosity in America, it became a full-blown national obsession in Brazil and India.

Orlando Bloom

A British actor fresh out of drama school who got cast as an elf archer in a trilogy about rings, then played a swashbuckling blacksmith in a trilogy about pirates. For a window in time, he was on every Tiger Beat cover and the poster behind every teenage fan's bedroom door.

OutKast

André 3000 and Big Boi met as teenagers at Lenox Square mall in Atlanta and launched one of hip-hop's most fearless acts. The South got something to say—literally—and hip-hop would never ignore it again.

OutKast — Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

OutKast's 2003 double album—one solo disc each for André 3000 and Big Boi—became an unstoppable cultural force. Anchored by the inescapable #1 hit "Hey Ya!" ("shake it like a Polaroid picture") and the smooth groover "The Way You Move," the album won a Grammy for Album of the Year and achieved diamond certification. Radio and MTV were inundated.

The Fray — "Over My Head (Cable Car)"

The piano-rock breakout that introduced The Fray to the world — a mid-2000s radio staple about a falling-out with a brother, its title borrowed from his childhood nickname.

"Fireflies" by Owl City

One guy, one laptop, one unfinished basement in Owatonna, Minnesota — and somehow the #1 song in America. "You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies..." You know the rest. You will always know the rest.

P90X

Twelve DVDs, ninety days, a pull-up bar wedged in the doorframe, and a magic phrase — "muscle confusion." Tony Horton's basement bootcamp was the infomercial phenomenon of the late 2000s, and for a while it seemed like every dad, coworker, and college roommate in America was "doing P90X."

Get Paid to Surf

The dot-com fantasy made real: companies would literally pay you to browse the web. Millions signed up for the Viewbar, watched ads while surfing, and actually got checks—until the ad market crashed and the dream evaporated in 2001.

Paranormal Activity

A camera on a tripod, a bedroom door, and whatever it is that moves while they sleep. The $15,000 haunted-house movie that terrified test audiences into walking out — and rode a 'Demand It' campaign to nearly $200 million in the fall of 2009.

Paris Hilton

The original "famous for being famous" heiress. "That's hot," a tiny dog in her handbag, a pink Sidekick, and a permanent spot on the tabloid covers — Paris Hilton was the face of 2000s celebrity culture.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

A pixelated banana, dancing. A frantic novelty song, repeating. Together they conquered the early-2000s internet through sheer absurdity, until someone in every room could yell "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!" and everyone else would groan on cue.

Pepsi Blue

The electric-blue, berry-flavored soda PepsiCo pushed with a huge early-2000s marketing blitz — Britney-era ads, Papa Roach tie-ins, and a taste somewhere between cotton candy and berry. Gone by 2004.

Pepsi Twist

Pepsi with a shot of lemon and a yellow spiral on the label — the cola aisle's big swing of the early 2000s. Britney Spears sold it, the Osbournes sold it at the Super Bowl, and by 2006 it was gone from American shelves.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians

A dyslexic twelve-year-old finds out his dad is Poseidon, his best friend is a satyr, and summer camp trains demigods. Rick Riordan's five-book series — The Lightning Thief through The Last Olympian — put the Greek gods in modern America and became the book fair's hottest ticket of the late 2000s.

Pets.com Sock Puppet

The floppy-eared sock puppet with the wristwatch collar became more famous than the store he was selling — a Macy's parade balloon and a Super Bowl ad for a company that lasted nine months past its IPO. He remains the face of the entire dot-com bust.

Photobucket

The image host that decorated the entire early internet — MySpace profiles, forum signatures, eBay listings. Photobucket's ten billion images were invisible infrastructure, right up until June 2017, when a paywall turned millions of embedded pictures into upgrade-nag placeholders all at once.

Pimp My Ride

Xzibit takes your hopeless beater to the shop and it comes back with a fish tank, seven screens, and flames. MTV's most gloriously absurd makeover show — and the birthplace of "yo dawg, I heard you like…"

P!nk

The raspy-voiced anti-pop-star of the TRL era — the one who mocked the pop machinery while beating it at its own game. Missundaztood sold 13 million copies on pure attitude, and "Get the Party Started" is still doing exactly what it promised.

Pirates of the Caribbean

Disney's wild ride-to-film franchise that nobody saw coming. The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) launched a trilogy that turned a theme-park attraction into one of the 2000s' biggest blockbusters, powered by Johnny Depp's Oscar-nominated performance as the eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow.

Pixel Chix

A little plastic house with an LCD screen and a digital girl living inside it—part Tamagotchi, part dollhouse. You fed her, played games, dressed her, and sent her to bed, and if you neglected her long enough she'd pack up and leave.

Pizza Hut P'Zone

A calzone the size of your face, engineered to pack 1,220 to 1,560 calories and up to twice your daily sodium—the 2000s fast-food arms race distilled into one folded, sealed, gloriously indefensible package. Pizza Hut's P'Zone was the broke teen's manifesto: why choose between pizza and a calzone when you can have both and explode.

Planet Earth

Eleven episodes, five years of filming, and one planet showing off. The BBC's 2006 landmark was the first nature documentary series the corporation shot in high definition, and it turned nature TV into event television — the show everyone bought an HDTV to justify, narrated by David Attenborough (or, if you watched it on Discovery, Sigourney Weaver).

PlanetSide

Sony Online Entertainment's wildly ambitious 2003 MMOFPS — a persistent online war where three factions fought over huge, seamless continents with hundreds of players in a single battle. Too big and demanding to be a mainstream hit, but unforgettable for the players who lived in it.

PlayStation 2

The black rectangle that invaded living rooms worldwide as an affordable DVD player and happened to pack the best game library ever assembled. With over 155 million sold—the best-selling console of all time—the PlayStation 2 didn't just dominate gaming; it became the era's default home entertainment hub.

Pluto's Demotion

On August 24, 2006, astronomers voted and every solar-system poster in every classroom on Earth became wrong. Pluto was out, 'dwarf planet' was in, and a generation raised on nine planets took it personally.

Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire

The third-generation Pokémon games arrived on Game Boy Advance with a whole new region, double battles, and 135 new creatures to catch. Ruby and Sapphire expanded what Pokémon could be — and nobody questioned whether they still needed to own a Game Boy.

Texas Hold'em Poker Boom

Chris Moneymaker's real name was actually Chris Moneymaker, and when the amateur accountant won $2.5 million at the 2003 World Series of Poker, every dorm and living room in America suddenly had a card table, a clay chip set, and a dream.

Poo-Chi

The chunky gray robot dog that kicked off the early-2000s robo-pet craze. Poo-Chi barked, sang, and showed its mood through pixelated red LED "eyes," responded when you petted its head or spoke into its nose, and — best of all — sang synchronized songs with any other Poo-Chi nearby.

Popped Collars

Collar up. Sometimes two collars up, on two polos at once. The mid-2000s ritual that turned a tennis sun-shield into the international symbol of mall prep — and then, almost as fast, into a punchline.

Poptropica

The browser game that ate every school computer lab: you made a round-headed avatar and traveled island to island, solving story quests and puzzles. It was created by Jeff Kinney, who was just becoming famous as the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Portable DVD Players

The backseat road-trip luxury before tablets existed. A portable DVD player strapped to the back of a headrest — or a dual-screen set for two kids — meant the family minivan finally had in-flight entertainment, as long as the disc didn't skip over every pothole.

Portal

A portal gun, a passive-aggressive AI, and a promise of cake. Portal shipped in 2007 as the little extra in Valve's Orange Box — built by fewer than ten people — and walked away with the whole bundle's spotlight, a Game of the Year trophy, and half the internet's vocabulary.

Potter Puppet Pals

Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. If your brain just added the next line, you were on YouTube in 2007. Neil Cicierega's felt-puppet Hogwarts reduced the wizarding world to bickering hand puppets — and produced one of early YouTube's most-watched videos ever.

PSP

Sony's widescreen handheld that made your backpack feel like contraband. The PSP played UMD games and movies, had actual graphics, and let you game or watch on the go—turning every school lunch period into a gaming session. It felt like the future until the future moved on.

Puka Shell Necklaces

The little white shell choker every guy wore over a popped-collar polo circa 2001 — beachy, breezy, and slightly cheesy. Puka shells turned a Hawaiian souvenir into a mall-store staple of the early-2000s.

Punk'd

Ashton Kutcher's hidden-camera prank show, and one of MTV's signature 2000s hits. Premiering on March 17, 2003, it ambushed celebrities with elaborate staged disasters — fake arrests, fake tax seizures, fake catastrophes — and filmed them melting down before the big reveal. The Justin Timberlake episode, in which he was led to believe the government was seizing his home over unpaid taxes, became one of the most famous pranks in reality-TV history.

The Pussycat Dolls

"Don't Cha" wish your girlfriend was hot like them — the question every radio in 2005 asked roughly once an hour. The Pussycat Dolls arrived fully formed in matching choreography and smoky eyeliner, a burlesque act reverse-engineered into a chart juggernaut, with Nicole Scherzinger doing most of the singing and all six doing the strut.

Quiznos

The toasted-sub chain that ran your sandwich through an oven — and ran the most bewildering ad campaign of 2004, a pair of shrieking rodent-things called the Spongmonkeys singing "We love the subs." Quiznos was Subway's hot-pressed rival before it collapsed.

Ratatouille

Pixar's rat-in-a-toque masterpiece: Remy, a rodent with a chef's palate, secretly cooking in a Paris kitchen by puppeteering a hapless garbage boy by the hair. It ends with a single bite of vegetables sending a feared critic hurtling back to his childhood — the most devastating flashback in animation.

Ratchet & Clank

The buddy-platformer that paired Ratchet, a wrench-swinging lombax mechanic, with Clank, a small defective robot — and armed them with the most gleefully over-the-top arsenal on the PlayStation 2. Blowing up enemies with a Suck Cannon or a flamethrower was the whole point.

Razor Scooters

The folding aluminum kick scooter that showed up in 2000 and sold millions before parents and shin guards became mandatory equipment. Named Spring/Summer Toy of the Year in 2000, Razor Scooters were on every driveway and schoolyard by 2001 — until suddenly they weren't, and the brand settled into a comfortable half-life of summer rentals and nostalgia.

Real World/Road Rules Challenge

The competition show that threw The Real World and Road Rules casts into the same arena and let them fight it out for cash. Premiering on MTV on April 20, 1998, it evolved through several names — from Road Rules: All Stars to Real World/Road Rules Challenge to, eventually, just The Challenge — and became a physical, strategic, elimination-driven staple of MTV's 2000s lineup. Improbably, the spin-off outlived both of the shows that created it.

Reese Witherspoon

The teenager with a critic's favorite first kiss who grew into the 2000s' defining star. Southern charm and comic precision built through the '90s—Fear, Freeway, Election—but then Legally Blonde detonated, and she owned the decade. Walk the Line proved she could do Oscar-worthy dramatic work. Married and divorced Ryan Phillippe in a trajectory as public as her career was inescapable.

Reno 911!

A handheld COPS parody that never broke character. The hapless deputies of a fictional Reno Sheriff's Department stumbled through investigations with the deadpan energy of a mockumentary, mixing inspired improvisation with the comfort of a familiar ensemble—short-shorts, bad judgment, and the weird alchemy of characters who felt like actual people. Six seasons of controlled chaos.

Resident Evil 4

Leon Kennedy, a rural Spanish village that wants him dead, and a camera perched over his shoulder — the 2005 GameCube masterpiece that rewired the action game. Resident Evil 4 scored a 96 on Metacritic, swept Game of the Year awards, and handed its camera angle to nearly every shooter that followed.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

The prequel trilogy's dark landing, May 19, 2005: Order 66, the Mustafar duel, and the Vader suit sealed shut — the first Star Wars film ever rated PG-13. It was the year's #1 movie in North America, and it has aged into the one the prequel generation defends.

Rickrolling

The internet's favorite bait-and-switch: click a promising link, get Rick Astley's 1987 "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead. Born on 4chan in 2007 and peaking in 2008, it's the prank that never really gave up.

Nelly — "Ride wit Me"

"If you wanna go and take a ride wit me..." — HEY, MUST BE THE MONEY! Nelly's acoustic-guitar bounce was the sound of every radio, mall, and school bus in 2001, the laid-back victory lap off Country Grammar.

Ridin'

A Houston rapper's song about profiling that climbed to No. 1, spent 31 weeks on the chart, and became the best-selling ringtone of 2006. "They see me rollin', they hatin'" echoed from every flip phone in America.

Rihanna

A teenager from Barbados who walked into a New York audition and walked out with a six-album deal, then spent the back half of the 2000s taking over pop radio. From the steel-drum bounce of 'Pon de Replay' to the umbrella-ella-ella hook that owned the summer of 2007, Robyn Rihanna Fenty went from island newcomer to global star before she turned 21.

Ringtones & Crazy Frog

Before smartphones, your ringtone was your personality — monophonic beeps, then polyphonic MIDI, then "real tones," each tier a status upgrade bought from services like Jamster. And looming over the whole era: a CGI frog doing a moped impression, outselling Coldplay.

RipStik

A skateboard with no push-off: two pivoting platforms, one caster wheel under each, propelled entirely by wiggling your hips. The RipStik was the cul-de-sac holy grail of the late 2000s — impossible-feeling at first, and the kids who mastered it became local legends. Skateboard purists called it cheating; everyone else called it the future.

Road Trip

A college kid's one-night mistake gets caught on tape—and the tape gets mailed to his long-distance girlfriend. Cue an 1,800-mile scramble to intercept it, with Tom Green's unhinged campus tour guide narrating the whole saga as local legend. Depraved and stupid exactly as intended, it rode the post-American Pie wave into dorm-room immortality.

Robbie Williams

Around the year 2000 he was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet — record-breaking EMI deal, 375,000 people at Knebworth — and Americans only half-knew who he was. The Take That bad boy turned solo megastar is the great transatlantic asterisk of the era: everywhere, except here.

Robosapien

The 14-inch robot that kicked, punched, belched, and did karate chops — all on command. Designed by a Los Alamos robotics physicist and demoed endlessly at mall kiosks, Robosapien was the "future is here" toy of the mid-2000s.

Rock Band

You got a plastic guitar, a plastic bass, a plastic drum kit, and a plastic microphone. Four friends could play one song together at once. This seemed revolutionary for about three years.

Rocket Power

Four friends in a Southern California beach town who lived for surfing, skateboarding, and street hockey. Rocket Power bottled the turn-of-the-millennium extreme-sports craze — all attitude, boardshorts, and "friends before competition."

RollerCoaster Tycoon

You designed roller coasters and managed an amusement park in this beloved strategy sim. Created almost single-handedly by Chris Sawyer and released in 1999, RollerCoaster Tycoon became a sandbox classic — famous for coaster design and infamous for the player habit of trapping guests. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 followed in 2002.

Roomba

The disc-shaped robot that vacuumed your floor by itself — bumping off the furniture, humming along, and, most memorably, serving as a chariot for the family cat. The first robot vacuum most people ever actually owned.

Roswell

Alien teens hiding in plain sight in a New Mexico high school — sci-fi wrapped in teen romance, set around a kitschy diner where everything came doused in Tabasco. It only ran three seasons, but its fans mounted one of TV's most famous save-our-show campaigns, mailing bottles of hot sauce to the network.

RuneScape

A browser-based MMO that ran on any school computer—no download, pure Java, accessible everywhere. RuneScape let you trade with strangers in Varrock, cut yews, dodge scams, and explore the Wilderness, all while technically just looking at homework on another tab.

Samurai Jack

A feudal swordmaster flung into a dystopian future wages a quest to return home — wielding a magical katana against a shapeshifting demon in near-silent, gorgeously cinematic episodes that borrowed from '70s film and manga masters. Tartakovsky's samurai epic ran four seasons without ending its story — a cliffhanger that wouldn't resolve until 2017.

Darude — "Sandstorm"

The relentless Finnish trance instrumental that owned the year 2000 — jocked by every arena PA, burned onto every mix CD — then got a second, stranger life as the internet's favorite troll answer to "what song is this?"

Saw

Two strangers wake up chained in a grimy bathroom, caught in a game set by a killer called Jigsaw. The micro-budget 2004 shocker with one of horror's most famous twist endings turned October into Saw season for the rest of the decade — and put Billy the puppet's spiral cheeks on Halloween costumes everywhere.

Destiny's Child — Say My Name

The call-and-response hook that defined an era of R&B, and the most dramatic lineup announcement in pop memory — disguised as a music video premiere. 'Say My Name' introduced the world to Destiny's Child in their most iconic form — and to the concept that your favorite song's original singers might not be the ones who got famous for it.

Scary Movie

A shameless parody of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Matrix, and half of Hollywood, powered by Wayans-family comedy and the breakout of Anna Faris. It opened to $42.3 million — the biggest R-rated opening weekend ever at the time — and taught the 2000s that no movie was safe from a spoof.

Scene It?

The board game that made you turn on the TV: pop in the DVD, watch a movie clip, and be the first to yell the answer. For a few years in the mid-2000s, every family game night and every dorm shelf had a Scene It? box — and probably three editions of it.

School of Rock

Jack Black fakes his way into a prep-school substitute-teaching job and turns a class of fifth-graders into a rock band. The trick that makes School of Rock immortal: the kids were real musicians playing live, so every scene of them discovering rock and roll is actually happening.

School Assignment Planners

The agenda book your school handed out on the first day — printed with your school's name, a homework grid for every class, and pages of rules and study tips. The Y2K editions came wrapped in a holographic cover that made an irresistible record-scratch sound when you dragged a fingernail across it.

Scooby-Doo (2002)

Mystery Inc. went live-action with a CGI Great Dane, a tropical haunted resort, and one performance nobody has ever stopped praising: Matthew Lillard simply became Shaggy. Critics shrugged, kids showed up in droves, and "like, zoinks" had its biggest summer ever.

Scooby-Doo Fruit Snacks

Betty Crocker's Scooby-shaped fruit snacks in the purple box — the character fruit snack of the 2000s lunchbox. The opaque sky-blue Scooby was the piece everyone wanted, and yes, the old ones really did taste different: the recipe changed in 2015, and fans have never forgiven it.

Scrubs

The hospital show that could cut from a surreal daydream about a floating head to genuine grief—all in one episode. Scrubs proved that comedies could be funny and devastating, that a laugh track wasn't required when your writing was this sharp, and that TV bromance could hit as hard as any drama.

Sean Paul

The Jamaican dancehall artist who put Kingston rhythms and patois on top of American pop radio. Sean Paul turned reggae into a staple of every club and school dance for five years straight: three number-one hits (one of them a Beyoncé collab), a Grammy, the sound of the mid-2000s.

Second Life

A world with no levels, no quests, and no way to win — just land you could buy and a currency you could cash out for real money. For about two years in the mid-2000s, Second Life was going to be the future, and every news network, embassy and corporation piled in to say so. It is still running, which surprises people.

"Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes

A seven-note riff that sounds exactly like a bass — played by a band with no bassist. "Seven Nation Army" peaked at #76 on the Hot 100, then quietly conquered every stadium on earth. Millions chant it at games today without knowing they're singing The White Stripes.

Sex and the City

Four single women navigate New York nightlife, relationships, and Manolo Blahnik shoes. HBO's June 1998 breakout became the defining show of female friendship and the cosmopolitan—literally.

Shaggy — It Wasn't Me

The get-caught-and-just-deny-everything anthem of 2000 — Shaggy and RikRok trading a call-and-response about brazenly denying an affair. An accidental single that became a number-one smash on both sides of the Atlantic and a karaoke staple forever after.

Shakira

The Colombian rock poet who learned English, kept the belly dance, and conquered the 2000s — from "Whenever, Wherever" echoing out of every mall to "Hips Don't Lie" taking over the planet in 2006. Those hips, famously, do not lie.

Shallow Hal

Jack Black gets hypnotized by Tony Robbins (yes, really, playing himself) to see only inner beauty, and falls for the woman of his dreams—who happens to be wearing a 25-pound fat suit. It's a broad comedy that made a lot of money and aged like milk left in the sun. Modern rewatching is complicated by the fact that the actors who wore that suit lived through genuine hurt.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

A lonely kid's imaginary superheroes turn out to be real, and off he goes to Planet Drool in smeary red-and-blue 3-D. Nobody who was a child in 2005 forgot the dream song, the Land of Milk and Cookies, or a pre-Twilight Taylor Lautner scowling in a shark suit.

Sharper Image

The mall store where you'd test-nap in a $400 massage chair while pretending to shop. Sharper Image was a playground of high-end gadgets, gizmos, and dubious contraptions—air purifiers, personal robots, noise machines, and the infamous Ionic Breeze, which looked futuristic but barely worked.

Shaun of the Dead

A London sales advisor stuck in a rut and his slacker best mate face the zombie apocalypse armed with household objects, a vinyl collection, and a plan that begins and ends at the pub. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "rom-zom-com" is the parody so precise and so affectionate it stands as a great zombie film in its own right — Romero himself phoned to say so.

Shrek

The grumpy ogre who just wanted to be left alone, dragged into a quest to rescue a princess and discover his own capacity for love. Shrek arrived in May 2001 as a subversive fairy-tale comedy from DreamWorks, won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and spawned a franchise that defined early-2000s family cinema.

Shutter Shades

Sunglasses with no lenses — just plastic slats, like Venetian blinds for your face. After Kanye West wore a white pair in the "Stronger" video, shutter shades conquered every mall kiosk, party photo, and MySpace profile picture of 2007–2008, despite being objectively worse than sunglasses at everything sunglasses do.

Silly Bandz

Colorful silicone rubber bands that snapped back into animal and letter shapes when stretched and released, worn stacked on the wrist as a trading currency. Silly Bandz sparked a playground economy so intense, schools across North America banned them to restore order.

The Simpsons: Hit & Run

A drivable, explorable Springfield with missions, kickable cars, and the show's actual writers and voice cast — "GTA for kids" was the fan shorthand, and it was said with love. Over 3 million copies sold, no sequel, no remaster, and a cult that has only grown since 2003.

"Since U Been Gone" — Kelly Clarkson

The breakup-scream anthem of the 2000s. Kelly Clarkson needed an identity beyond American Idol; Max Martin and Dr. Luke handed her a pop-rock chorus that demanded everything a voice could give, and every car ride since has been a rehearsal.

Sky High

Disney's superhero high school movie, where freshmen get sorted into Heroes and 'Hero Support.' Will Stronghold — powerless son of the world's two greatest supers — starts ninth grade at a school that floats above the clouds, and Kurt Russell plays super-dad with total sincerity.

Skype

The free app that made video-calling normal, with its blue logo and unmistakable ringtone bloop. Launched in 2003, Skype connected long-distance friends and family over early broadband — and became a verb before Microsoft bought it.

SlamBall

Basketball played on trampolines, with body checks. For two glorious seasons on TNN-turned-Spike-TV, guys in helmets launched off spring beds and dunked on each other from ten feet in the air — and every kid who saw it wanted a backyard version immediately.

Smallville

Ten seasons of Clark Kent before the cape — a teenager learning to hide superpowers in small-town Kansas, one kryptonite freak-of-the-week at a time. It was The WB's biggest series debut ever, and its real long game was watching Clark and Lex Luthor's friendship curdle into destiny.

SmarterChild

A chatbot on your buddy list that never slept, always answered, and never quite cursed no matter how hard you tried. SmarterChild answered trivia, cracked jokes back, and proved millions of kids were ready to talk to an AI — they just didn't know that's what it was.

"All Star" by Smash Mouth

Somebody once told me — you know the rest. Smash Mouth's 1999 radio staple peaked at #4 on the Hot 100, but immortality arrived in 2001, when it played over Shrek's opening credits and fused itself permanently to a green ogre. The internet did the rest.

Smencils

Scented pencils rolled from recycled newspaper, sold one at a time out of plastic 'freshness tubes' at every school fundraiser table. A fresh Smencil under your nose was the best thing that happened during a spelling test — and choosing between Bubble Gum and Black Cherry was a genuinely hard decision.

Santana ft. Rob Thomas — "Smooth"

Man, it's a hot one. The Santana–Rob Thomas collaboration that refused to leave the radio, straddled the millennium at #1, and swept its Grammy categories. Decades later it's still the eternal-summer song the internet won't let die.

Smosh

Two teenagers lip-syncing the Pokémon theme in their living room, mouths flapping with total commitment. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making dumb videos with their friends before "YouTuber" was a word — and for long stretches of YouTube's first decade, nobody on the platform was bigger.

Snapple Elements

Snapple's short-lived line of exotic-flavored drinks in tall, tinted-glass bottles with element-themed names. The original four flavors—Fire, Sun, Rain, and Earth—made them feel like a more sophisticated, grown-up version of regular Snapple, and the distinctive glass bottles made them a status symbol at school.

SNL Digital Shorts

"An SNL Digital Short" was the title card that meant Monday's homeroom had material. When "Lazy Sunday" leaked onto a fledgling startup called YouTube in bootleg uploads, it did as much for YouTube as it did for Andy Samberg — and "Dick in a Box" won an actual Emmy.

Snood

Launch goofy grimacing faces up the board, match three, and watch the ceiling ratchet down — while your AIM away message covered for you. Snood was the shareware puzzler installed on every dorm and computer-lab machine at the turn of the millennium, and it was written by a geology professor as a gift for his wife.

Snuggie

The blanket with sleeves. Regular blankets "slip and slide" and trap your hands, so America was sold a backwards fleece robe for $14.95 — buy one get one, free book lights. Everyone mocked the commercial. Everyone bought one anyway. It was, infuriatingly, cozy.

OutKast — "So Fresh, So Clean"

OutKast's getting-dressed anthem and cultural forever-favorite. A Sleepy Brown hook over a Joe Simon soul sample that became the decade's smoothest flex. The video was a visual extravaganza—CGI backdrops, a beauty parlor, church scenes, and cameos from Ludacris, Chilli, and Goodie Mob.

Ne-Yo — "So Sick"

The heartbreak ballad that made Ne-Yo a star, 'So Sick' hit number one the very week his debut album did. The premise is pure heartbreak: a guy can't escape love songs on the radio because every one reminds him of his ex.

Soap Shoes

Sneakers with a slick plastic plate in the arch so you could grind rails like an inline skater — no skates, no board, just shoes and misplaced confidence. Every schoolyard had one kid with Soaps, and that kid had bruises.

SoBe

Glass bottles with an embossed lizard, promising mystery potions brewed from ginseng, guarana, and ginkgo — words that meant nothing and sounded exactly like what the future was supposed to taste like. SoBe owned the gas-station cooler at the turn of the millennium, proof you were clued into something cooler than Gatorade.

Sony AIBO

A $2,500 robot dog that learned, played, and had moods — and people loved theirs like family. Sony's AIBO was the actual future, briefly for sale — Japan's entire first batch sold out over the internet in twenty minutes.

Soulja Boy — Crank That

A 16-year-old self-produced a ringtone rap that conquered MySpace, YouTube, and every school talent show. The Superman dance was inescapable, the song spent weeks at #1, and nobody asked permission from traditional radio.

Sour Skittles

Regular Skittles under a grainy sour-sugar coating that genuinely shredded your tongue if you finished the bag — and everyone finished the bag. The green-and-yellow pouch turned the candy aisle's safest brand into a dare.

South Park

The construction-paper kids from Colorado who never stopped talking. South Park arrived in 1997 as basic cable's biggest shock — then spent the 2000s proving it was television's fastest satire machine, with episodes built in days so it could mock the news while it was still news.

SparkNotes

The night-before-the-essay lifeline. SparkNotes put free study guides for every book you didn't read online in 1999 — teachers dreaded it, everyone bookmarked it, and even Barnes & Noble dumped CliffsNotes from its shelves.

Spider-Man

Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man was the superhero film that launched a thousand blockbusters — a scarlet-and-blue origin story with real stunts, genuine emotion, and Tobey Maguire's earnest Peter Parker. The upside-down rain kiss, Willem Dafoe's scenery-chewing Green Goblin, and 'with great power comes great responsibility' became templates for how to do superhero cinema.

Spirit Halloween

Every August, a dead storefront blooms orange and black. Spirit Halloween turned vacant retail space into a two-month empire of costumes and animatronics — the annual resurrection that tells you a Sears used to be here, and that Halloween is coming.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

Sam Fisher creeping through the shadows in his three-eyed night-vision goggles, snuffing out lights and slipping past guards. The Xbox stealth game that made hiding in the dark thrilling.

SpongeBob SquarePants

The absurdist sponge working the fry cook line at Bikini Bottom, living under the sea with his starfish best friend, and radiating genuine optimism. SpongeBob SquarePants premiered on Nickelodeon in May 1999 and became the network's biggest hit — a cultural juggernaut that turned early episodes into an endless meme quarry.

Spore

Will Wright's evolution sim promised everything from primordial cell to galactic empire — and its Creature Creator was an all-timer. Then the game itself arrived: shallow where the hype was deep, and wrapped in DRM so hated it drew class-action lawsuits and an Amazon review-bombing for the ages.

Sprite Remix

Remember when Sprite messed with its own formula and made something genuinely weird — colorless fruit sodas that looked exactly like the original but tasted like a flavor explosion? Sprite Remix was the early-2000s novelty soda that escaped being a joke and became the one kids actually mourned when it disappeared.

Spy Kids

The movie where your boring parents turned out to be retired spies — and when they got kidnapped, you and your sibling became the heroes. Robert Rodriguez wrote, directed, and edited his 2001 gadget caper himself, packing it with jetpacks, a surreal TV-host villain, and henchmen made entirely of thumbs.

SSX Tricky

IT'S TRICKY! The snowboarding game that traded realism for backflipping off a glacier while Run-DMC loops in your skull. Uber Tricks, a celebrity voice cast, and the loudest announcer in video games — winter sports as a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Fountains of Wayne — "Stacy's Mom"

A cheeky power-pop confection about a kid crushing on his friend's mother, built as a loving homage to the Cars — so faithful that Ric Ocasek assumed the opening riff was a sample. It wasn't. Add the Rachel Hunter video and you have the summer of 2003 in three minutes.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005)

You and your sibling dividing a CRT in half, capturing command posts on Hoth all afternoon — split-screen, two controllers, no internet required. Pandemic's 2005 sequel added playable Jedi, space dogfights, and the 501st Legion's story, and when EA's 2017 reboot stumbled, a generation stampeded back to "the REAL Battlefront II."

Star Wars Galaxies

This MMORPG wasn't about saving the galaxy—it was about living in it. Crafters built everything from blasters to starships, player cities elected mayors, and Jedi were so rare and risky (permanent death, at first) that seeing one felt like a legend sighting. Then the NGE overhaul flattened it all, and players never quite forgave it.

Paul Oakenfold — "Starry Eyed Surprise"

The superstar-DJ-goes-pop moment of 2002: British trance producer Paul Oakenfold handed the mic to Shifty Shellshock and turned a Harry Nilsson sample into an inescapable summer sing-along. It felt bigger than its chart position ever suggested.

Static Shock

Virgil Hawkins was a Black high-school kid from Dakota City who caught electromagnetic superpowers and became Saturday morning's most grounded hero. Static Shock spent four seasons on Kids' WB taking on gun violence, racism, and bullying — subjects superhero cartoons usually sidestepped — without ever losing its sense of fun.

Step Brothers

Two middle-aged men still living with their parents accidentally become stepbrothers when their single parents get married. The bunk-bed disaster, the friendship declaration, the Catalina Wine Mixer — a movie so quotable it became a cult classic through cable reruns and endless friend-group recitations.

Step Up

Street dancer meets ballet school, sparks and choreography ensue. The 2006 Baltimore dance romance that launched Channing Tatum, a five-film franchise — and, off-screen, the era's most beloved dance-movie couple.

Steve Irwin

The khaki-shirt guy with the boundless enthusiasm and the "Crikey!" catchphrase, wrestling crocodiles and charming snakes on television. Steve Irwin's show reached over 130 countries and roughly 500 million viewers, making him a global wildlife icon with an unmistakable hands-on approach.

Absolutely (Story of a Girl) — Nine Days

"This is the story of a girl, who cried a river and drowned the whole world" — the hook that owned the radio in summer 2000, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. Singer John Hampson wrote it about his then-girlfriend (later his wife) after an argument before a concert. The follow-ups never matched it, but the hook never left.

Studded Belts

A black leather-ish belt carrying rows of chrome pyramid studs — one, two, or three if you meant it — worn loose and rattling whether it threaded the belt loops at all. It was the cheapest possible ticket into the 2000s emo and pop-punk uniform, sold from the Hot Topic checkout rack to every kid assembling a personality in an afternoon.

StumbleUpon

Press the green Stumble button and the toolbar threw you onto a semi-random webpage matched to your interests. Thumbs up or thumbs down, and it learned. StumbleUpon was the platonic ideal of productive procrastination: the perfect tool for losing an entire afternoon, one weird website at a time.

Stump the Schwab

Three contestants, one Howie Schwab, and no realistic chance. ESPN's sports-trivia gauntlet dared fans to out-know the network's famously encyclopedic first statistician — a guy in an untucked jersey who knew every stat that ever mattered. Losing to the Schwab was the expected outcome, and that was exactly the fun.

The Sudoku Craze

Remember when sudoku grids were suddenly everywhere — newspapers, airport bookstores, that one waiting room where time moved differently? The mid-2000s delivered the last great pencil-and-paper puzzle obsession, and it trained a generation of commuters to genuinely fear the word "fiendish."

The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

Disney Channel's sitcom about identical twins living in a Boston hotel lobby. Zack and Cody Martin were troublemakers in suits and ties, navigating the Tipton Hotel with their mom the lounge singer and a cast of misfits—the rich girl London, candy-counter staffer Maddie, and a hotel full of chaos waiting to happen.

"Fat Lip" by Sum 41

Three voices trading off one bratty anthem — "storming through the party like my name was El Niño." It ruled MTV and every skate video in 2001, went 2× Platinum, and the band never even meant for it to be a single.

Super Mario Sunshine

A tropical vacation goes hilariously wrong when Mario arrives on Isle Delfino and is immediately framed for vandalism. Armed with a talking water-cannon backpack and a court order to clean the island, you chased 120 Shine Sprites across a bizarre, sun-soaked adventure. Divisive at launch — no castles, just a goofy water gun and a wrongfully convicted plumber — it's aged into a GameCube classic.

Super Smash Bros. Melee

Nintendo's 2001 GameCube fighting game where Mario, Link, Pikachu, Kirby, and dozens of other Nintendo characters beat each other senseless on themed stages and knocked foes off the screen. A launch-window blockbuster and the best-selling GameCube title, it became the foundation of a massive competitive and esports community that kept the game alive for decades.

Super Troopers

A low-budget indie that became a word-of-mouth empire. Five Vermont state troopers prank their way through a dead stretch of highway—the all-'meow' traffic stop, the maple-syrup chug, Farva's immortal 'liter of cola'—while feuding with the local cops. Theaters shrugged; the DVD made it a generation's comedy bible.

Superbad

A last-week-of-high-school panic attack disguised as a party movie. Two best friends on a doomed one-night quest to buy alcohol, and a fake ID bearing a single name — McLovin — that instantly became the decade's most famous prop. This was the R-rated teen comedy that felt like watching your own friends instead of a movie.

Supernanny

Jo Frost stepping out of a black London cab in a tailored suit, ready to fix your family. Supernanny made the "naughty step" a household phrase, turned toddler meltdowns into primetime television, and gave every 2000s kid the ambient fear that one bad tantrum could summon her.

Survivor

The CBS reality-competition show that premiered in 2000 and kicked off the modern reality-TV boom. Contestants are stranded in remote locations, split into rival tribes, and compete in challenges while voting each other out at Tribal Council. Host Jeff Probst's iconic catchphrase "The tribe has spoken" and the show's tagline "outwit, outplay, outlast" became part of the cultural lexicon.

T-Mobile Sidekick

The swivel QWERTY phone that made AIM mobile before smartphones existed. The Sidekick was the texting status symbol — if you had one, you were cool.

T9 Texting & Ringtones

Typing "home" and getting "good," texting blind from inside your pocket, and a computerized frog selling ringtone subscriptions between every cartoon. The whole keypad-phone universe, in one glorious, beeping memory.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver raised on one piece of fatherly wisdom: "If you ain't first, you're last." The summer 2006 comedy opened at #1 with $47 million and gave the world "shake and bake" — a catchphrase real drivers still quote.

Taylor Swift

The curly-haired country teenager with a guitar who ended the 2000s as the name on everyone's radio. "Love Story" and Fearless made her a household name; the Kanye moment made her a headline. Everything after is a much bigger story—this entry is about when she was new.

Tech Deck Fingerboards

Miniature fingerboards the size of trading cards that let you do tricks on your desk. Tech Deck's genius move was licensing graphics from real skate brands like Birdhouse and World Industries, turning a novelty into a collecting frenzy — and a classroom contraband item teachers confiscated by the drawerful.

Teen Titans

The anime-influenced DC superhero show that nailed the mid-2000s tonal whiplash — dark arcs one episode, gag-faced slapstick the next. Puffy AmiYumi's theme is still stuck in your head. Cartoon Network cancelled it after five seasons in 2006, and the 2013 spinoff only made fans madder.

Wheatus — "Teenage Dirtbag"

An outcast anthem in a nasal falsetto: the kid with the AC/DC tapes everyone treated like a devil worshipper, pining for a girl out of his league. The twist — "two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby" — is one of pop's great reveals. America shrugged; the rest of the world made it enormous.

Terry Tate: Office Linebacker

"You kill the joe, you make some mo'!" Reebok's Super Bowl surprise dropped a full-speed NFL linebacker into a beige office to flatten anyone with bad workplace etiquette, and cubicle America never laughed harder. It aired on national TV exactly once — then became one of the first true viral video franchises.

TFLN (Texts From Last Night)

Anonymous, out-of-context text messages — labeled only by area code — capturing the previous night's worst decisions. It was the drunk-text hall of fame, and half the fun was reconstructing the disaster around each single message.

That '70s Show

The basement circle — six teenagers lounging while the camera spun lazily around them, over and over. That '70s Show made the '70s look retroactively cool and turned Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis into household names. Nostalgia about nostalgia: a show made at the turn of the millennium about 1976, set in a fictional Wisconsin basement everyone wished was theirs.

That's So Raven

A Disney Channel hit (2003–2007) starring Raven-Symoné as Raven Baxter, a San Francisco teen who experiences brief psychic visions of the future. The show's running gag: Raven's attempts to change what she's foreseen inevitably cause the very chaos she was trying to prevent. One of the network's biggest comedies of the era, it was among the first Disney Channel sitcoms led by a Black female lead.

The All-American Rejects

Stillwater, Oklahoma's hook machine. Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler wrote the songs wedged in every 2000s head — 'Swing, Swing,' 'Dirty Little Secret,' 'Move Along,' 'It Ends Tonight' — and then closed the decade with the most cheerful-sounding kiss-off ever recorded, 'Gives You Hell.'

The Amanda Show

Amanda Bynes was thirteen when she became Nickelodeon's entire comedy machine — a rotating cast of characters who never ran out of sketches or failed to land the joke. The Amanda Show ran from 1999 to 2002, and if you were there, you still remember exactly how kids danced in Judge Trudy's courtroom.

The Apprentice

The boardroom reality-competition that made "You're fired!" a national catchphrase. Premiering on NBC on January 8, 2004, and produced by Survivor mastermind Mark Burnett, it pitted contestants against one another in business tasks — running lemonade stands, marketing products, managing teams — with the loser of each week sent home from a tense boardroom showdown. The winner walked away with a one-year, $250,000 contract to promote one of Trump's properties, and the boardroom showdown became a fixture of mid-2000s television.

The Backyardigans

Five animal buddies, one magical backyard, and a different musical genre every episode. Created by Janice Burgess for Nickelodeon in 2004, it should have been forgotten years ago — except the soundtrack went so unreasonably hard that TikTok rediscovered it in 2021 and refused to let go.

Bloodhound Gang — "The Bad Touch"

"You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals..." Bloodhound Gang's gleefully crude smash turned a biology-class euphemism into an inescapable party anthem — and the monkey-suit video sealed the deal.

The Beach

Leonardo DiCaprio's post-Titanic swing: Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's backpacker novel, shot at a real Thai bay that Fox literally bulldozed to make prettier. It opens dazzling and gradually loses the plot — which is exactly how the critics called it in 2000, and exactly how everyone who saw it at fifteen still remembers it. The soundtrack ("Pure Shores," "Porcelain") outlived the movie; Maya Bay paid the price for the fame.

The Bourne Identity

A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back and no memory — but his hands remember everything. Matt Damon's amnesiac assassin made spy movies fast, grounded, and paranoid — and the decade's action cinema followed his lead.

Mumford & Sons — "The Cave"

The slow-burn follow-up that out-charted its more famous sibling in America: 'The Cave' is the sound of fingerpicked quiet building into a full kick-drum-and-banjo gallop — and it became the song of 2010-2011 coffee shops everywhere.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Alexandre Dumas' revenge classic played gloriously straight: betrayal, a hidden fortune, sword fights, and vengeance served exquisitely cold. A January sleeper in 2002 that grew into dad-canon — the cable movie you'd catch on a Sunday afternoon and watch to the end, every single time.

The Daily Show

A fake newscast that became a real ritual: eleven p.m. on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart at the desk, the day's news taken apart piece by piece. For a generation in dorm rooms and first apartments, this was how the 2000s got processed — and quoted at work the next morning.

The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger's Joker turned Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel into the event film of 2008 — a then-record $158.4 million opening weekend on the way to a billion dollars worldwide and a posthumous Oscar. "Why so serious?" was everywhere that summer.

The Day After Tomorrow

Roland Emmerich's 2004 blockbuster trades aliens for air currents — a cascade of extreme weather that flash-freezes New York in a matter of days. Dennis Quaid's climate scientist goes unheeded, Jake Gyllenhaal ends up burning library books to survive, and that frozen Statue of Liberty became the poster image for every "what if the climate does THIS" conversation you had in school.

The Fantanas

Coca-Cola invented four fictional spokes-girls to lip-sync about wanting Fanta, and for most of the 2000s the jingle lived in everyone's head rent-free. Each Fantana repped a flavor; together they were the bubbliest, most aggressively catchy thing on television. "Wanta Fanta — don't you wanta?"

The Fast and the Furious

Paul Walker's undercover cop, Vin Diesel's Toretto, NOS buttons, neon underglow, and "I live my life a quarter mile at a time." The $38 million sleeper that made import-tuner street racing the defining car culture of the decade.

The Fray

The Denver piano-rock band whose earnest, mid-tempo anthems were the sound of mid-2000s radio and every emotional TV montage of the era. "Over My Head" broke them; "How to Save a Life," supercharged by Grey's Anatomy, made them huge.

The Girl Next Door

A straight-arrow high-school senior, a gorgeous new neighbor with a secret past, and the eternal question: "is the juice worth the squeeze?" It underperformed in theaters — then found its real audience on DVD and late-night cable, where it quietly became one of the 2000s' most rewatched teen comedies.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Jim Carrey endured 92 days in Rick Baker's green-fur prosthetics — painful yellow contact lenses, panic attacks, and an offer to hand back his $20 million payday and quit. Ron Howard's Whoville fever dream became 2000's biggest movie at the US box office anyway, and it has owned basic-cable Decembers ever since.

The Hangover

Three groomsmen wake up in a trashed Caesars Palace suite with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a missing groom — and no memory of how. The 2009 comedy that ate the summer and made Zach Galifianakis a star.

The Hills

Lauren Conrad left Laguna Beach for Los Angeles, a Teen Vogue internship, and four years of impeccably lit drama about whether any of it was real. The Hills perfected the scripted-or-not reality soap — then ended the whole argument with television's greatest mic drop, pulling the camera back to reveal a studio backlot.

The Impossible Quiz

One hundred ten questions, zero logic, and a computer lab full of kids shouting contradictory advice at the screen. The Impossible Quiz debuted on February 20, 2007, as a Flash game that turned a single-player experience into a collective fever dream.

The Incredibles

Pixar's 2004 superhero film about a family forced to hide their powers in suburban normalcy — Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, and their kids Violet, Dash, and baby Jack-Jack. They're drawn out of retirement to battle the villain Syndrome, and the film balances family comedy with genuine action and heart. The Academy Award–winning film proved animation could deliver both laughs and thrills.

The Middle

An affirmation dressed as a rock anthem — "don't write yourself off yet" — from a band that had just been dropped by its label and instead stumbled into its biggest moment. It climbed all the way to #5 on the Hot 100 and soundtracked every awkward kid's 2002.

The Notebook

Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, and the rain-soaked kiss that calcified into a generation's romantic ideal. Critics split; audiences swooned; the 2000s got its definitive sleepover weeper.

The O.C.

The show that made indie rock cool, gave us Chrismukkah, and turned Newport Beach into the center of the universe. Josh Schwartz's The O.C. launched a thousand emo haircuts and a meme that won't die.

The Office (US)

NBC's mockumentary sitcom that redefined the office comedy for a generation. Premiering March 24, 2005, The Office followed the bumbling, endearing Michael Scott (Steve Carell) and the Dunder Mifflin paper company through deadpan interviews and cringey humor that somehow made you love him anyway.

The Osbournes

The reality show that turned a heavy-metal legend into a beloved, bumbling TV dad. Premiering on MTV on March 5, 2002, it followed Ozzy Osbourne and his family — wife Sharon, son Jack, and daughter Kelly — through the chaos of daily life in their Beverly Hills mansion. Ozzy shuffling around cursing at the remote control became one of the decade's defining TV images, and the show's runaway success helped invent the celebrity-family reality genre.

The Pacifier

The guy from The Fast and the Furious in a minivan, doing a bedtime routine called the Peter Panda dance with complete tactical seriousness. The Pacifier put Vin Diesel's biceps in charge of five kids and a duck, and every rental shelf and cable afternoon of 2005 made sure you saw it.

The Polar Express

Robert Zemeckis' 2004 motion-capture Christmas film became the instant classic everyone either loved or found genuinely unsettling — sometimes both. Tom Hanks played six roles in a $165 million fever dream about a boy who boards a magical train on Christmas Eve, backed by an Oscar-nominated Josh Groban ballad. It's now a December rite: the movie every elementary school saves for pajama day.

The Princess Diaries

A shy San Francisco teenager discovers she's a princess and gets the makeover of her life—with life lessons in a tiara. Anne Hathaway's breakout film became the ultimate makeover fantasy, complete with Julie Andrews as her regal grandmother.

The Proud Family

Penny Proud, her embarrassing dad Oscar, and the one and only Suga Mama — the first animated series made exclusively for Disney Channel, and a landmark Black family cartoon. The theme song alone, sung by Solange with Destiny's Child, is an instant time machine.

The Reason

"I'm not a perfect person…" — and suddenly it's 2004 in every car, mall, and graduation slideshow in America. Hoobastank's colossal apology ballad spent the year parked near the top of the charts and never really left rock radio's rotation.

The Ring

Watch a cursed VHS tape, get a phone call, die in seven days. The Ring turned Japanese horror into Hollywood's next obsession, made TV static terrifying, and gave every sleepover a new dare.

The Rules of Attraction

Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.

The Sims

Will Wright's dollhouse simulator where you controlled virtual lives, sent them to work, made them fall in love, and then deleted the pool ladder and watched them drown. Launched in February 2000 by Maxis and EA, The Sims became the best-selling PC game of its era—a mania that never ended, spawning sequels that kept the franchise dominant for decades.

The Sopranos

Tony Soprano walks into a psychiatrist's office with panic attacks—and changed television forever. HBO's landmark 1999 drama paired mob violence with suburban therapy, making prestige TV a thing.

Thong Song (Sisqó)

The platinum-blond Dru Hill frontman's solo signature — a 2000 smash so ubiquitous you couldn't escape it. 'She had dumps like a truck, truck, truck...' Sisqó turned a string section, a booming beat, and one very specific ode into the sound of that summer.

TI-83 Calculator Games

The graphing calculator was required school equipment — until students realized it was also a handheld game console. Snake clones, Block Dude, and Drug Wars spread from calculator to calculator over the link cable, and "put your calculators away" took on a whole new meaning.

TiVo

The machine that finally bent television around your schedule instead of the other way around. Pause live TV, rewind the play you just missed, record a whole season by name — no tapes, no timers. "TiVo it" became a living-room verb.

Toaster Strudel

Pillsbury's frozen answer to Pop-Tarts arrived in 1985 with a flaky pastry and one stroke of genius: the icing packet you squeeze yourself. Initials, zigzags, your name in frosting — breakfast as art project. Then Mean Girls made Gretchen Wieners' father its inventor, and the pastry became permanent pop-culture canon.

Tom Green

A Canadian comedian and prankster whose MTV show turned everyday chaos into absurdist performance art. Tom Green built a cult following by harassing his own parents on camera, hitting No. 1 on TRL with a song about putting his bum on things, and turning a testicular cancer diagnosis into a shockingly honest TV special. He was unhinged before unhinged was a brand.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Activision and Neversoft's skateboarding game, first released in 1999, about chaining tricks into massive combos and collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E across increasingly iconic venues. The punk, ska, and hip-hop soundtrack defined the era. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (2000) is widely considered the series' peak and one of the best games ever made.

Toonami

Cartoon Network's action block where a generation of American kids met anime. Hosted first by Moltar, then by TOM — the robot captain of the Absolution — it made Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon after-school rituals and treated its young audience like the stories mattered.

Tooth Tunes

The toothbrush that played Hannah Montana inside your skull. Press the bristles to your teeth and a two-minute song hummed up through your jawbone — exactly as long as the dentist said to brush, and only you could hear it.

Total Drama Island

Survivor for cartoons: 22 teenagers, one crummy summer camp, a sadistic host named Chris McLean, and a hundred grand on the line. The animated reality-show parody that late-2000s kids treated as completely, unironically real drama.

Totally Spies!

Three Beverly Hills teenagers in color-coded suits—red, green, yellow—moonlighting as secret agents for WOOHP between mall trips. A generation's first anime-adjacent obsession snuck in without anyone realizing.

Totino's Pizza Rolls

A sheet pan of molten pizza rolls after school: the first one always burned the roof of your mouth, and a "serving" was never fewer than fifteen. Born on egg-roll machinery in the mid-1960s, renamed Totino's in 1993, and permanently welded to the after-school hours of two decades of kids.

Trading Spaces

Two sets of neighbors, two days, a $1,000 budget, and one question: what did they do to my living room? TLC's room-swap hit made home renovation a national spectator sport — and taught America to fear the phrase "I had an idea."

Transformers (2007)

Giant photoreal robots that turn into cars, Michael Bay explosions, Steven Spielberg's name over the title, and Shia LaBeouf motor-mouthing his way through the end of the world. Bumblebee became a Camaro, Optimus Prime kept his original voice, and summer 2007 belonged to the Autobots.

Tri-Fold Presentation Board

The white cardboard monolith that folded open into three panels and stood up on the table by itself. Every science fair, history day, and book report eventually came down to one: glue-sticked construction paper, printed clip art, and a rainbow WordArt title. You balanced it across the back seat on the drive to school, praying nothing peeled off before the bell.

Trillian

AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo in one window — and AOL hated it. Trillian was the power user's messenger, locked in a patch-versus-block war with the biggest network of the IM era.

Troy

Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget take on Homer's Iliad, with Brad Pitt as the near-invincible warrior Achilles and Eric Bana as the doomed Trojan prince Hector. Gods and all, the myth was stripped down to human politics and combat — a sword-and-sandal epic that was a modest performer at home but a giant hit overseas.

Twilight

The vampire-romance phenomenon that began with Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel and exploded with the 2008 film starring Kristen Stewart as Bella, Robert Pattinson as vampire Edward, and Taylor Lautner as werewolf Jacob. The love triangle split fans into 'Team Edward' and 'Team Jacob'—complete with merchandise and fierce debate. The five-film saga ran through 2012, defining a generation's romance fantasy.

Uggs

Sheepskin boots that conquered the world: the UGG brand exploded into a mid-2000s craze, worn year-round by celebrities and mall crowds alike. Paired with miniskirts in winter, sweatpants in summer, or tucked under jeans any season — comfort trumped couture, and comfort won.

Uncrustables

The round, crimped, crustless PB&J that conquered the 2000s lunchbox. Invented by two Minnesota dads in 1995, bought by Smucker's, and defended with an actual patent on the sealed crustless sandwich — still in freezers, bigger than ever.

"Unwritten" (Natasha Bedingfield)

Feel the rain on your skin. The pep-talk anthem that opened every episode of The Hills, played from every radio in 2006, and still makes millennials narrate their own lives like a season premiere.

Urban Outfitters

The store where art-school aspiration got merchandised: ironic graphic tees, distressed denim, a wall of novelty books, and housewares nobody needed but everybody wanted. Every location was built inside a renovated building, so no two ever looked quite alike. It started in 1970 as a tiny secondhand shop near a college campus, and by the 2000s it was where you went to buy a personality.

USB Flash Drives

A stick the size of your thumb that held everything. By the mid-2000s, USB flash drives had killed the floppy disk, and everything moved on a lanyard: your homework, your music, your games. Losing one was a 2000s tragedy — the only copy of your essay, gone with the keychain.

Usher — Confessions

Usher's 2004 album that opened with 1.1 million copies sold its first week and owned every school dance for the next year. "Yeah!" with Lil Jon and Ludacris became the crunk-and-B blueprint, and Confessions proved Usher was untouchable at the peak of 2000s R&B.

V.Smile

VTech's chunky red-and-yellow "learning system" — the video game console parents actually said yes to. You jammed in a fat Smartridge, grabbed the joystick, and got Scooby-Doo or Dora teaching you letters while your older sibling smirked from behind a real controller.

Vanilla Coke

Billed as Coca-Cola's biggest launch since Diet Coke, it arrived in 2002 in a tan-and-gold can that tasted like cream soda had merged with cola. Roughly 29 percent of US households bought it that year. By 2005, it was gone. Then it came back.

Vault

Coca-Cola's bright-green hybrid arrived in 2006 with a promise: "Drinks like a soda, kicks like an energy drink." For fans of the dearly departed Surge, Vault was the second coming — until Coke pulled the plug in 2011 and brought back Mello Yello instead.

Ventrilo

The voice server of 2000s PC gaming — "Vent" to everyone who ever memorized an IP, a port, and a password to get on it. The crackle of raid nights, the guildmate who paid for the server, the push-to-talk key you forgot to release. Then Discord arrived, and the servers emptied out.

Verizon Test Man ("Can You Hear Me Now?")

A man in a gray jacket and horn-rimmed glasses wanders the far corners of America, pressing a phone to his ear and asking the void: 'Can you hear me now?' 'Good.' For nine years, that was Verizon — four words that turned a network-coverage claim into a national catchphrase.

Veronica Mars

Kristen Bell as a teenage private eye working her dad's cases in the corrupt seaside town of Neptune. Critically adored, barely watched, canceled in 2007 — and then its fans paid $5.7 million to bring it back.

Vertical Limit

A K2 rescue thriller where the only way up is with nitroglycerin. Chris O'Donnell carries explosives up a frozen mountain while Bill Paxton schemes below, and it's all kicked off by an opening scene in Monument Valley that burns itself into your brain: a father orders his son to cut the rope. It's December 2000 popcorn cinema in its most visceral form.

VideoNow

The pre-YouTube dream of TV in your pocket — one purchased episode at a time. VideoNow played 30 minutes of Nickelodeon cartoons on a chunky handheld screen, and the black-and-white original felt both cutting-edge and primitive.

Virtua Tennis

Two buttons: one to hit, one to lob. Sega's tennis game asked almost nothing of you and gave back the best rallies on the console — an arcade cabinet's worth of instant playability on a Dreamcast disc. It remains one of the machine's most fondly remembered games a quarter-century later.

Vitaminwater

The pastel wall of the 2000s deli case: candy-bright bottles, lowercase labels full of jokes, and flavors named for what they promised to do for you. Vitaminwater made hydration a personality choice — and made 50 Cent a legend of business-deal folklore.

Von Dutch Trucker Hats

The mesh-backed, foam-front trucker cap that became a mid-2000s celebrity status symbol under the Von Dutch brand. Worn and photographed constantly by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears, the Von Dutch trucker hat turned a humble working-man's accessory into a pricey fashion flex. It defined—and quickly dated—the Y2K era.

Warcraft III

Blizzard's fantasy strategy epic gave the world Arthas, hero units, and four armies worth arguing about — then its map editor quietly gave the world an entire new genre: DotA, the custom map that paved the way for the MOBA era, was built inside it.

Warped Tour

The traveling punk-rock summer camp of the parking lot: one cheap ticket for a full day of bands, a sunburn, and a merch tent where your favorite unsigned act was selling their own shirts. For a generation of pop-punk and emo kids, Warped Tour was the pilgrimage that made the scene feel like a nation.

Webkinz

Adorable plush animals from Canadian maker Ganz that came with a Secret Code—enter it online, and a virtual version appeared in Webkinz World, your own customizable digital space. Feed it, play mini-games, decorate its room, and if you neglected it too long, it'd get cranky. The plush-plus-online hook made Webkinz a mid-to-late 2000s obsession, especially among kids who'd aged out of Tamagotchis but weren't ready to leave their digital pets behind.

Wedding Crashers

Two divorce mediators crash every wedding they can find — until one crash strands them at a Treasury Secretary's family weekend. Wedding Crashers proved R-rated comedies could still pull blockbuster numbers, and the 'rules' of crashing became actual cultural shorthand.

Wet Seal

The juniors racks where a going-out top cost almost nothing and lasted one dance. Wet Seal was fast fashion for teenage girls — trend pieces bought cheap, worn once, and replaced next weekend. The 2000s mall uniform came off these racks.

Baha Men — "Who Let the Dogs Out"

The paradoxical summer of 2000 phenomenon: it peaked at #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 yet became completely inescapable at every stadium, school bus, and kids' movie imaginable.

Wife Swap

Two families — usually polar opposites — traded moms for two weeks, with a rules-change ceremony in the middle and an excruciating reunion table at the end. The appeal was simple and irresistible: watch how other people live, then decide whether your own house was really so bad.

Wii Fit

Nintendo released a scale that played minigames, and somehow convinced the whole family to step on it every morning as entertainment. Yoga in the living room, soccer-ball heading by leaning, and a daily Body Test with opinions about your BMI — the fitness moment of 2008, long before the home-workout industrial complex.

Wii Sports

The pack-in game that turned the Nintendo Wii into a living-room phenomenon — tennis, bowling, boxing, baseball, and golf played by swinging the remote. Grandparents, house parties, and flying Wii-motes; it got everyone off the couch.

The 'You Can't Cite Wikipedia' Speech

Every 2000s student heard the teacher's solemn warning: Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Every 2000s student had already used it, and would use it again that night. The workaround became a generational skill.

Will Ferrell

For most of a decade, the comedy playing at the multiplex WAS Will Ferrell. From SNL's George W. Bush and More Cowbell to Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers — his movies got recited line-for-line before the credits rolled.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The cartoon Zelda the internet swore it hated — derisively nicknamed "Celda" before it even shipped — that time revealed as one of the greatest games ever made. Link sails a drowned Hyrule with a talking boat and a conductor's baton, and every cel-shaded frame still looks brand new.

Windows Media Player Visualizations

Rip the CD, hit play, go fullscreen, lights off: the swirling neon ribbons of Windows Media Player turned every family PC into a bedroom planetarium. Nobody chose to watch Alchemy exactly — it just happened to you, for hours.

Windows Movie Maker

That star-wipe transition. Title cards in Comic Sans. Every school project, every vacation montage, and countless early YouTube videos were cut in the editor that came free with your computer. Windows Movie Maker didn't invent video editing — it just made it something any kid could actually do.

Windows Vista

The operating system that looked like the future and ran like a permission slip. Vista arrived in 2007 with translucent Aero glass — and an endless stream of "allow or deny?" prompts every time you tried to do anything. XP users refused to leave; Windows 7 users pretend it never happened.

Windows XP

The operating system with the rolling green hill wallpaper—Windows XP arrived in October 2001 with Luna's glossy blue taskbar, the green Start button, and the cheerful startup chime that defined a generation's relationship with computers. It was stable, beloved, and so enduring that users clung to it long after Microsoft stopped supporting it, making it the most iconic OS of the 2000s.

Winx Club

The anime-styled fairy-school cartoon that owned a girl generation: glittery transformation sequences, fashion-forward heroines, and serialized magic battles that took themselves seriously. Imported from Italy for Saturday mornings, it grew into one of Italian animation's biggest exports.

Wizards of Waverly Place

Disney Channel's late-2000s flagship spent four seasons turning Selena Gomez into a household name and making millions of kids believe they could be teenage wizards living above a Greenwich Village sandwich shop. The premise was simple and tight: three wizard siblings, one family competition, and only one of them gets to keep the magic.

Nestlé Wonder Ball

The hollow milk-chocolate sphere with a surprise sealed inside. 'What's in the Wonder Ball?' You cracked it open to find little candies — a treasure-hunt snack that had a much stranger backstory than most kids ever knew.

WordArt

Thirty preset styles, one rainbow gradient, and a generation of book reports that opened with their titles bent into impossible arches. WordArt was Microsoft's gift to the school computer lab — where personality went to become garish, and unstoppable.

World of Warcraft

Blizzard's legendary MMO that defined an entire genre. Released November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft dropped players into the world of Azeroth to quest, guild up, and raid alongside millions of others—at its peak reaching 12 million subscribers and spawning a cultural phenomenon that transcended gaming.

X Gon' Give It to Ya

A modest 2002 soundtrack cut that became a cultural explosion thirteen years later when Deadpool hijacked it for its entire identity. For one generation it's a 2003 film track; for another, it's the Deadpool song—DMX's snarl reborn for audiences who weren't born for the original run.

X-Men

The summer 2000 movie that made superheroes respectable — black leather instead of spandex, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen lending Shakespearean gravity, and an unknown Australian named Hugh Jackman popping the claws. The modern comic-book boom starts here.

Xanga & LiveJournal

The blogging platforms where a generation over-shared for the first time. LiveJournal and Xanga were where teenagers documented crushes, drama, and bad poetry in semi-public diaries before social networks centralized and monetized the same behavior.

Xbox 360

Microsoft's console that beat the PS3 to market by a year and defined HD-era online gaming. Unified Achievements, party chat, a matured Xbox Live — and the Red Ring of Death, the three flashing lights that taught a generation the meaning of hardware failure.

Xbox Live (Original Xbox Era)

Microsoft's revolutionary bet on broadband gaming — the service that brought voice chat and Gamertags into living rooms and normalized trash-talking strangers over the internet. The $49.95 Starter Kit arrived in November 2002 with a wired headset, a year of subscription, and a radical demand: high-speed internet or stay offline. It worked — 150,000 kits sold in the first week.

XFL

Vince McMahon's smash-mouth football league lasted exactly one season in 2001 — and burned itself into memory anyway. No coin toss, no fair catches, nicknames on jerseys, and a Las Vegas running back named Rod Smart wearing the greatest jersey in sports history: HE HATE ME.

Xiaolin Showdown

Four monks-in-training race a showboating boy genius and an ancient witch for magical artifacts, and every dispute is settled the same way: "I challenge you to a Xiaolin Showdown!" Kids' WB's kung-fu treasure hunt turned Saturday morning into a collect-them-all cosmic game show.

Y2K Panic

Computers stored the year as two digits, so 2000 looked identical to 1900. By the late '90s, the fear that systems worldwide would catastrophically fail on January 1st had built to a fever pitch — and the world spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent a disaster that, when midnight arrived, barely happened at all.

Yahoo! Answers

The internet's town square of homework panic and genuine confusion. Anyone could ask, anyone brazen enough could answer, and askers crowned a "Best Answer" from strangers of wildly varying wisdom. At its 2009 peak, Yahoo claimed 200 million users were on the site asking the things they were too shy to Google.

You Got Served

The dance-battle movie so quotable its title became a nationwide diss. B2K, Marques Houston, a warehouse full of head-spins — critics hated it, audiences made it #1 in America, and every school hallway in 2004 turned into a battle circle.

You're Beautiful

James Blunt's fragile falsetto confession — a stranger's glance on the London Underground stretched into three minutes of 'it's true.' It conquered the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 2005–06, then got played until nobody could stand it. Including Blunt.

YTMND

"You're the Man Now, Dog." A whole website built on one dumb, perfect formula: a single looping image, a blaring sound clip, and a line of zooming text — repeated forever until it was either hypnotic or unbearable.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards

Konami's trading card game swept US schoolyards in the early 2000s, rivaling Pokémon for card-game dominance. Players dueled with powerful monsters — Blue-Eyes White Dragon, Dark Magician, and the feared five-piece Exodia combo — and the phrase "It's time to duel!" echoed through lunch periods. Teachers confiscated decks, and schools debated bans.

Zach Braff

The 2000s' designated sensitive everyman: J.D. on Scrubs for nine years, writer-director-star of Garden State, and the guy whose iPod playlist a million college kids quietly adopted as a personality. For one decade, Zach Braff's daydreaming, monologuing, indie-scored inner life was the inner life of the culture.

Zathura: A Space Adventure

Two brothers find a mysterious board game in the basement, and it launches their whole house into outer space. From the same picture-book universe as Jumanji, Zathura came out in 2005 with real robots and real miniatures — and a generation of rental-shelf loyalists still swears it's underrated.

Zhu Zhu Pets

Robotic plush hamsters that scurried, squeaked, and detonated the 2009 holiday season. Mr. Squiggles and friends retailed for nine bucks and resold for forty when the shelves went bare.

ZipZaps

RadioShack's palm-sized RC cars turned a strip-mall electronics store into toy-craze headquarters. You didn't just drive a ZipZap — you tuned it, with swappable motors, gears, and body shells, like a pocket garage for the Fast and Furious generation.

Zoboomafoo

The Kratt brothers and a leaping, talking lemur who demanded snacks before he'd say a word. Zoboomafoo made every PBS Kids morning feel like a trip to Animal Junction — and yes, Zoboo was a real lemur, at least until he hopped onto the table and the puppet took over.

Zoey 101

A boarding-school show where the main draw was the tech. Zoey 101 ran four seasons on Nickelodeon and delivered the fantasy we all wanted: a beach-adjacent boarding school with PDA devices and its own sushi joint.

Zombieland

Rule #1: Cardio. Rule #2: Double tap. The 2009 road-trip comedy that made the zombie apocalypse fun — four survivors named for their hometowns, a nationwide Twinkie hunt, and one legendary celebrity cameo.

Zombo.com

Welcome to Zombo.com. You can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. And then... nothing — the internet's greatest anti-website: pulsing dots, a silky voice making infinite promises, and a quarter-century of delivering absolutely none of them.

Zoo Tycoon

Build the exhibits, hire the keepers, keep the guests happy — and then, inevitably, delete the lion fence just to see what happens. Zoo Tycoon was the zoo-management sim on every family PC and school computer lab in the early 2000s, and everyone who played it broke it on purpose at least once.

Zoolander