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MTV's gleefully violent claymation series, in which caricatures of real celebrities beat each other to a pulp in a wrestling ring. Premiering on May 14, 1998, it staged absurd stop-motion grudge matches — pop stars, actors, and politicians torn limb from clay limb — narrated by ringside commentators Nick Diamond and Johnny Gomez. Gory, silly, and weirdly beloved, it signed off each fight with the same line: "Good fight, good night."
Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.
The United Paramount Network launched in January 1995 on the back of a Star Trek premiere that drew 21 million viewers — a number it spent the next eleven years chasing. UPN was scrappy, ambitious, and chronically broke, but it gave us Voyager, Moesha, SmackDown, and Buffy's final seasons — and in your town it wasn't "UPN," it was UPN 9, or UPN 50, or whatever your channel was.
Hulk Hogan in black and white, dropping the leg on Macho Man and declaring war on the company from inside its own ring. The New World Order turned WCW's Monday Nitro into appointment television and made a black-and-white t-shirt the coolest thing in wrestling.
When the World Wrestling Federation traded superhero theatrics for raunchy, anything-goes storylines and boundary-pushing characters, it conquered Monday night television. Stone Cold Steve Austin's catchphrase "Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!" and The Rock's trash-talk became playground gospel, and a glass-shatter entrance sound defined a generation's ritual.
Vanilla ice cream backed with chocolate and fronted with a cookie embossed with a wrestler's face, on a stick, with a trading card in the wrapper. Biting Hulk Hogan's cookie face off was a formative summer experience.
Zebra-striped, radically baggy, elastic everywhere — the workout pants pro wrestling's Road Warriors helped dream up for guys too big for regular jeans, which somehow ended up on NFL sidelines, in JCPenney, and on your uncle at every 1991 barbecue.