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
6 items
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.
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.
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.