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MTV's late-night alternative-music show, two hours of videos the daytime rotation wouldn't touch, from Hüsker Dü and Morrissey to the world premiere of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." For a generation that stayed up for it, the 1990s hosts Lewis Largent and the encyclopedic Matt Pinfield were the gatekeepers of what counted as cool.
![Video thumbnail — [Adult Swim] 2001 Pool Bumps](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hoWcIE8VRMI/hqdefault.jpg)
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
MTV's late-night animation grab bag, where a music video would melt into a stick-figure film noir, a sketch about art-school girls, and a wordless spy named Æon Flux who died at the end of nearly every short. It ran three seasons from 1991 and hatched two of the channel's defining cartoons: Beavis and Butt-Head arrived as a Mike Judge short called Frog Baseball, and Æon Flux grew from a six-part serial into her own series.
Dr. Drew's calm medical answers and Adam Carolla's running commentary, taking calls about sex, relationships and drugs from teenagers who had no one else to ask. The late-night KROQ radio show went national in 1995 and got a live MTV version the next year, and for a decade the two of them were the voice of after-midnight advice.
The Jamaican-accented tarot reader who ruled late-night cable — 'Call me now!' — as the face of the Psychic Readers Network. For a few years around the turn of the millennium, Miss Cleo's pay-per-minute readings were an inescapable TV-ad fixture, until the whole operation collapsed under federal scrutiny.
Dionne Warwick on a talk-show set, a psychic named Linda Georgian beside her, and the 1-900 number under every satisfied caller. At $3.99 a minute the Psychic Friends Network was the late-night infomercial of the early 90s, airing thousands of times a year until the company behind it went bankrupt in 1998.
A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero, recycled into a late-night talk-show host who interviews real celebrities on a monitor and rarely understands their answers. Space Ghost Coast to Coast was one of Cartoon Network's first original series, the precursor to Adult Swim, and the reason a generation of teenagers stayed up past 11 on Friday nights.
Billy Blanks in the headset mic, punching and kicking the air in front of a room of glistening people, and the infomercial promising that Tae Bo would do the rest. From late 1998 the four-tape set was in every living room: the VHS that turned taekwondo and boxing into aerobics and had your mom throwing jabs at the TV.
A "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot" in a flag-draped Eagle's Nest, four nights a week after The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert coined "truthiness" on night one, roasted the president to his face at the 2006 Correspondents' Dinner, ran for president, started a real super PAC and never once broke character — well, almost never.
A fake newscast that became a real ritual: eleven p.m. on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart at the desk, the day's news taken apart piece by piece. For a generation in dorm rooms and first apartments, this was how the 2000s got processed — and quoted at work the next morning.
Suzanne Somers in a leotard, squeezing a blue-and-white spring between her knees, and the promise that you could squeeze your way to shapely hips and thighs. The ThighMaster infomercial ran so often in the early 90s that the thing was a punchline before most people owned one, and then they bought one anyway: more than 10 million of them.