Austin Powers
Mike Myers as the swinging spy, the bald nemesis, and eventually half the cast — a three-film Bond parody whose catchphrases colonized every schoolyard in 1999. The humor ran racy for its era; the craft underneath is what stuck.
#Catchphrases
7 items
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.
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.
"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.
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?"
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.
Wayne's World
Two guys broadcasting a cable-access show from a basement in Aurora, Illinois became a $183 million blockbuster — still the biggest movie ever made from an SNL sketch. "Schwing!", "…NOT!", "We're not worthy!" colonized every hallway in America, and one headbanging scene in an AMC Pacer sent Bohemian Rhapsody back up the charts seventeen years after its release.