Animorphs
The Scholastic sci-fi series that hooked '90s kids on something surprisingly dark: five teens who can 'morph' into any animal to fight a secret alien invasion. The covers where a kid transformed mid-photo were the whole hook.
#Aliens
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Independence Day
The White House explodes. Will Smith punches an alien and delivers the one-liner. Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a PowerBook. The movie that made July 4th weekend a permanent blockbuster holiday — and the biggest film of 1996 by a mile.
Mars Attacks!
Tim Burton's $80 million love letter to a gory 1962 trading-card set: cackling bug-eyed Martians vaporizing Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, and half of Hollywood — until Slim Whitman's yodeling makes their heads explode. Five months after Independence Day played it straight, this played it very, very weird.
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.
The X-Files
Fox's paranoia engine: FBI agents Mulder and Scully investigating UFOs, monsters, and government cover-ups one case file at a time. Created by Chris Carter, The X-Files turned "I Want to Believe" into a mantra and proved that prime-time TV could do serialized mythology decades before the streaming age demanded it.