9 items
You smelled it before you saw it. The mall pretzel counter where the dough got rolled and twisted right in front of you, then came over the counter hot, salted, and slightly too big to finish. Butter or cinnamon sugar, a paper sleeve, and a cup of Dutch Ice — the food court's most reliable pleasure.
A cinnamon roll the size of a dinner plate, buried under cream cheese frosting that pooled in the box. You could smell the counter from the other end of the mall, which was not an accident. Nobody ever finished one alone and everybody ordered one anyway.
![Video thumbnail — Die Hard - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2TQ-pOvI6Xo/maxresdefault.jpg)
The film that made 'yippee-ki-yay' a holiday tradition and launched an endless argument: is it a Christmas movie? Spoiler: yes, and also no—but watching it in December became genuinely ingrained.
A teenager's premonition gets a handful of classmates off Flight 180 before it explodes, and then Death comes back for them, one elaborate accident at a time. Final Destination (March 2000) turned an unused X-Files spec script into a $113 million hit and a franchise whose Rube Goldberg death scenes made a generation nervous about every loose screw and dangling wire.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 hit: a metal ring dug up at Giza in 1928 turns out to be a wormhole, and Kurt Russell's grieving colonel and James Spader's dismissed Egyptologist walk through it to a desert planet where a body-snatching alien is worshipped as Ra. Critics shrugged, it opened to an October record, and it spawned three live-action television series.
"The Country's Best Yogurt," the strip-mall frozen-yogurt counter that sold the '90s on "all of the pleasure, none of the guilt" and grew from one Little Rock shop in 1981 to nearly 3,000 stores. The initials originally stood for something else.
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.
The 1992 kids' martial-arts movie where three brothers — Rocky, Colt, and Tum-Tum — spend the summer training with their ninja grandpa and then use their skills to foil bumbling crooks. Home Alone meets karate camp, and catnip to every kid who wanted to be a ninja.
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.