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.
#British
9 items
MediEvil
Sir Daniel Fortesque, a one-eyed, jawless skeleton hailed as the Hero of Gallowmere after dying to the first arrow of the battle, gets a second chance when the sorcerer he supposedly killed returns a hundred years later. Sony's 1998 PlayStation hack-and-slash looked like a Tim Burton Halloween special and let Dan rip off his own arm to club things with.
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.
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.
Salad Fingers
A thin green man with lettuce for fingers who loves the feel of rusty spoons, speaks in a whisper, and lives alone in a dead, bleached world. David Firth posted the first Salad Fingers episode to Newgrounds in July 2004, and a generation of kids who watched it in a computer lab has never quite recovered.
Spice Girls
"Wannabe," Girl Power, and five color-coded personas — Baby, Scary, Sporty, Ginger, and Posh — that turned a British pop group into a global phenomenon. Their faces sold everything from lunchboxes to soft drinks, and their debut became the best-selling album ever by a female group.
The Tomorrow People (90s revival)
Teenagers "break out" with telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, and find themselves drawn to a sentient psychic spaceship on a South Pacific island. The British revival of a 70s cult classic aired on Nickelodeon from 1992 to 1995 — and lives on for US viewers as a fever-dream memory many later doubted was real. It was real, and it was genuinely on Nick.
Chumbawamba — Tubthumping
"I get knocked down, but I get up again — you're never gonna keep me down." The 1997 pub-and-stadium singalong that became an inescapable global anthem — sung by a band most fans never realized was a veteran British anarchist collective.
Spice Girls — Wannabe
"If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends" — the debut single that launched the Spice Girls, "Girl Power," and the immortal nonsense of "zig-a-zig-ah." Filmed in one continuous take storming a posh London hotel, it became the best-selling single by a girl group in history.