10 Wild Facts About the 2000s You Might Have Forgotten

At this point, we’re far enough removed from the 2000s to look at its fads and trends and say, “What were we thinking?” But we’re also far enough removed to forget some of its strangest and most surprising pop culture moments.

From Merriam-Webster’s 2007 word of the year to the NSYNC–Star Wars crossover that sort of happened, here are some facts from the aughts.

1. Debbie Downer was born.
2. An online poll determined Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.
3. Users could do their own HTML coding on Myspace.
4. An iMac showed up on Survivor.
5. There was an American Idol phone scam.
6. J. Lo helped lead to Google Images.
7. Heelys were a thing.
8. Finding Nemo wasn’t great for real clownfish.
9. Neopets were all the rage.
10. There was almost a Star Wars–NSYNC crossover. 

Debbie Downer was born.

In May 2004, Saturday Night Live cast member Rachel Dratch debuted her “Debbie Downer” character during an episode hosted by Lindsay Lohan. The sketch involves a happy family whose Disney World vacation is ruined by the outrageously morbid Debbie, constantly killing the vibe by bringing up things like mad cow disease and train explosions.

You might have assumed that Debbie Downer was a preexisting expression, like Nervous Nellie or Plain Jane. But it wasn’t: Dratch coined it for the character, and it eventually caught on in wider usage. That’s right—one of SNL’s silliest sketches, which led to most actors breaking character from laughing, led to a common colloquialism.  For what it’s worth, there are newspaper references to real people named Debbie Downer from long before 2004. 

An online poll determined Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

These days, Merriam-Webster determines the word of the year internally, by crunching data on trending terms and filtering out ones that always rank high in search. But back in 2007, the dictionary let people choose the word by voting in an online poll. The winner was w00t, spelled as gamers were known for spelling it: with two zeros instead of the letter o.

Merriam-Webster defined the word as an interjection “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay.’ ” At that point, w00t didn’t even have an official entry in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, but it does now—as a variant of woot spelled with o’s.

Other words in Merriam-Webster’s top 10 for that year were facebook and quixotic—which Myspace users will remember as one of the moods you could set as your status. 

Users could do their own HTML coding on Myspace.

Myspace users will also remember the joy of tweaking HTML to customize your page with fonts, colors, and backgrounds that reflected the real you. The feature introduced countless teens to coding and set Myspace apart from its competitors. It was also an accident.

According to Julia Angwin’s 2009 book Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, Myspace programmers simply forgot to block users from inserting HTML into their own profiles. When co-founder and product manager Kyle Brinkman noticed that some Myspace pages were customized, he initially thought the site had been hacked. But even though the capability made pages load much slower and posed security risks, the team decided not to get rid of it. As staffer Jason Feffer put it, “users come first, and this is what they want.”

An iMac showed up on Survivor.

Computers are probably the last thing you associate with CBS’s long-running reality series Survivor. But one did appear late in Season 2, which took place in the Australian Outback and aired in 2001. The five remaining contestants were brought to an outdoor “internet café,” complete with coffee, danish, and one translucent blue iMac computer.

There, they got to chat with their families via instant messenger, and also made them answer trivia questions. The contestant whose loved ones got the most right won a 30-minute private chat and a $500 Visa gift card to go online shopping.

The weirdest thing about watching this segment in the year 2024 isn’t seeing basic computer capabilities positioned as near-miracles. It’s that one of the contestants actually proposed to his girlfriend over instant message during it. She said yes. DM marriage proposals just don’t hit like they used to.

There was an American Idol phone scam.

Let’s linger in the world of reality competition shows to revisit the American Idol phone scam of the early aughts.

During Seasons 2 and 3, which aired in 2002 and 2003, a handful of Utah-based scammers bought phone numbers that were a couple digits off the numbers you’d call to vote for an American Idol contestant. Anyone who accidentally dialed these wrong numbers were told to call a different 900 number. During that call, which cost them about $2 or $3, the caller then just heard a recording of the correct American Idol numbers to call.

In other words, there was no voting, simply rerouting and coughing up a few bucks. The scammers pocketed all the money they made from the confused callers. And they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids! Or actually the Federal Trade Commission, which forced them to pay $40,000 in civil penalties.

J. Lo helped lead to Google Images.

Kids these days don’t remember a world in which they couldn’t search for something on Google Images—and they have Jennifer Lopez to thank for that. 

In February 2000, the pop star arrived on the Grammys red carpet clad in a green jungle-print dress designed by Versace. According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, keywords related to Lopez wearing that dress became Google’s “most popular search query” to date. But because Google didn’t have an image search engine, users couldn’t immediately see photos of J.Lo in the dress—they could only click on article links related to the topic.

So, as the story goes, Google invented Google Images. It’s not completely apocryphal, but there is a little more to it than that. At the time, Google was a 2-year-old company with a lot of big ideas and not enough workers to realize them all immediately. As Cathy Edwards, Google Images’ director of engineering and product, told GQ in 2019, “everyone there at the time was like, Of course we need to build an image search engine, but they weren’t sure how much priority to give it.” The spike in searches for Lopez’s Grammys look was evidence that Google Images should be prioritized. Still, though, Google didn’t hire someone to head the project for a few months, and Google Images didn’t launch until July 2001.

Heelys were a thing.

Some people buy a motorcycle or get bangs during a midlife crisis. Roger Adams invented Heelys. It was 1998, and Adams was miserable at work and going through a divorce. He took a vacation to Huntington Beach, California, and would recall in 2004 that seeing young skaters “reminded me of a happier time in my life.” The idea for Heelys came to him in a “flash.” He built the first pair by carving the heels from some Nike running shoes with a hot butter knife and inserting skateboard wheels.

Heelys took the world by storm, though the product’s success was always plagued by reports of injury. One way the company tried to promote safe “heeling” was to include examples of what not to do on the Heelys website: There was video footage of heelers “tripping, falling, jumping off railings, flying into pools, with no protective padding, and no helmets,” as CBS’s The Early Show described it.

When a CBS news correspondent showed the footage to a group of kids, though, “ … several didn’t seem to get the message, instead saying they wanted to do what they saw the heelers doing on the video.” Oh, to be young.

Heelys’ heyday has thankfully passed, but they’ll always be a part of musical theater history, at least: Performers wore them to simulate swimming in The Little Mermaid on Broadway.

Finding Nemo wasn’t great for real clownfish.

Speaking of Disney fish, Finding Nemo was great for clownfish visibility—but not so great for actual clownfish. In 2008, The Telegraph reported that clownfish populations in certain places had plummeted by 75 percent in the five years since the film’s release. Some marine biologists attributed the crash to an increased demand for pet clownfish.

As one clownfish researcher told the paper, “My message to kids who loved the film is simple—tell your parents to leave Nemo in the sea where he belongs.”

Some organizations had a different message for kids in the wake of Finding Nemo’s release: Don’t free your pet fish by flushing it down the toilet. When the movie says that all drains lead to the ocean, it implies that all fish will survive the journey—conveniently skipping the part where sewage gets shredded up in the process. As sewage equipment manufacturer JWC Environmental put it, “In truth, nobody would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called ‘Grinding Nemo.’” 

Neopets were all the rage.

Neopets, though—you never had to worry about them dying. And kids of the aughts were exposed to a lot in Neopia: basic economics, a little gambling, a lot of immersive advertising. What they weren’t exposed to was Scientology—despite the efforts of certain board members. Some of Neopets’ early investors belonged to the Church of Scientology and, as Neopets co-founder Donna Williams revealed in a 2014 Reddit AMA, “At one time there was some talk about putting Scientology education on the site, but we killed that idea pretty sharpish.”

The Scientologists borrowed some organizational elements from their church in structuring the company, but Williams didn’t notice any changes “apart from some odd test that interviewees had to take consisting of questions like which straight line seemed friendlier and stuff like that. We also had a lot of obscure celebrities coming round the office for tours.”

There was almost a Star Wars–NSYNC crossover. 

A few not-so-obscure celebrities (well, at the time) almost made it into Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Three members of NSYNC—JC Chasez, Joey Fatone, and Chris Kirkpatrick—suited up as Jedis and even learned lightsaber choreography to be extras in the 2002 film. 

Militant Star Wars fans were not happy at the prospect of a boy band infiltrating their precious space opera. Which, according to Kirkpatrick, was why the footage didn’t make the final cut. But the trio did at least get to take something home from the set: their fake Padawan braids. 

And to bring this list full circle, that pop culture moment was parodied on Saturday Night Live in January 2002. Host Josh Hartnett and four cast members portrayed NSYNC in full Jedi garb, even performing a song that featured this line: “Without you, I feel so alone / Like I was attacked / Attacked by clones.” That’s exactly what the movie was missing.

This story was adapted from an episode of the List Show on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe for new episodes every week.

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