Up next in 10
The 2000s might not seem too far away, but they started about a quarter century ago and there are LOTS of things to dissect, from Heelys to Myspace. Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 10 Wild Facts About the 2000s | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
In May 2004, Saturday Night Live cast member Rachel Dratch debuted her Debbie Downer character
0:05
during an episode hosted by Lindsay Lohan. The sketch involves a happy family whose Disney World
0:09
vacation is ruined by the outrageously morbid Debbie, constantly killing the vibe by bringing
0:15
up things like mad cow disease and train explosions. You might have assumed the Debbie
0:19
Downer was a pre-existing expression, like nervous Nelly or plain Jane, but it wasn't
0:24
Dratch coined it for the character, and it eventually caught on in wider usage
0:29
That's right, one of SNL's silliest sketches, which led to most actors breaking character
0:33
from laughing, led to a common colloquialism. For what it's worth, there are newspaper references to real people named Debbie Downer
0:40
from long before 2004. And to those people, I am so sorry
0:44
Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss. At this point, we're far enough removed from the 2000s to look at its fads and trends and
0:51
say, what were we thinking? But we're also far enough removed to forget some of its strangest and most surprising
0:57
pop culture moments. So this episode of The List Show is all about our favorite WTF facts from the aughts, from
1:03
Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year to the NSYNC Star Wars crossover that sort of happened
1:09
Let's get started. These days, Merriam-Webster determines the Word of the Year internally, by crunching data
1:19
on trending terms and filtering out ones that always rank high in search
1:23
But back in 2007, the dictionary let people choose the word by voting in an online poll
1:28
The winner was Woot, spelled as gamers were known for spelling it, with two zeros instead
1:32
of the letter O. Merriam-Webster defined the word as an interjection expressing joy
1:37
It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all. Similar in use to the word yay. At
1:42
that point, Woot didn't even have an official entry in Merriam-Webster's dictionary, but
1:46
it does now, as a variant of Woot spelled with O's. Other boards in Merriam-Webster's top 10 for that year were Facebook and Quixotic
1:53
which MySpace users will remember as one of the moods you could set as your status
1:57
I honestly still don't even know what it means. Or if I even pronounced it right
2:02
Just kidding. I looked it up. Don't come for me. MySpace users will also remember the joy of tweaking HTML to customize your page with
2:10
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 Anguin 2009 book Stealing Myspace the battle to control the most popular
2:25
website in America, Myspace programmers simply forgot to block users from inserting HTML into
2:30
their own profiles. When co-founder and product manager Kyle Brinkman noticed that some Myspace
2:34
pages were customized, he initially thought the site had been hacked. But even though the capability
2:39
made pages load much slower and posed security risks, the team decided not to get rid of it
2:44
As staffer Jason Pfeffer put it, users come first, and this is what they want
2:49
Computers are probably the last thing you associate with CBS's long-running reality
2:53
series Survivor. But one did appear late in season two, which took place in the Australian
2:57
Outback and aired in 2001. The five remaining contestants were brought to an outdoor internet
3:02
cafe, complete with coffee, Danish, and one translucent blue iMac computer. There, they
3:07
got to chat with their families via instant messenger. Oh, and make them answer trivia
3:12
questions. The contestant whose loved ones got the most right won a 30-minute private chat and a $500
3:17
Visa gift card to go online shopping. The weirdest thing about watching this segment in the year 2024
3:22
isn't seeing basic computer capabilities positioned as near miracles. It's that one of the contestants
3:27
actually proposed to his girlfriend over instant message during it. She said yes
3:32
DM marriage proposals just don't hit like they used to. Let's linger in the world of reality
3:38
competition shows to revisit the American Idol phone scam of the early aughts
3:43
During seasons two and three, which aired in 2002 and 2003, a handful of Utah-based scammers
3:48
bought phone numbers that were a couple of digits off the numbers you'd called vote for an American Idol contestant
3:53
Anyone who accidentally dialed these wrong numbers were told to call a different 900 number
3:58
During that call, which cost them about two or three dollars, the caller then just heard
4:01
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
4:09
The scammers pocketed all the money they made from the confused callers. And they would have gotten away with it too if not for those meddling kids
4:16
Or actually the Federal Trade Commission, which forced them to pay $40,000 in civil penalties
4:22
Kids these days don't remember a world in which they couldn't search for something on Google Images
4:26
And they have Jennifer Lopez to thank for that. In February 2000, the pop star arrived on the Grammy's red carpet clad in a green jungle
4:32
print dress designed by Versace. According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt keywords related to Lopez wearing that dress became Google most popular search query to date But because Google didn have an image search engine users couldn immediately
4:46
see photos of J.Lo in the dress. They could only click on article links related to the topic
4:51
So as the story goes, Google invented Google Images. It's not completely apocryphal, but there is a little more to it than that
4:58
At the time, Google was a two-year-old company with a lot of big ideas and not enough workers
5:02
to realize them all immediately. As Kathy Edwards, Google Images director of engineering and product, told GQ in 2019
5:09
everyone there at the time was like, of course we need to build an image search engine, but
5:13
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
5:19
be prioritized. Still, though, Google didn't hire someone to head the project for a few months, and Google
5:24
Images didn't launch until July 2001. Some people buy a motorcycle or get bangs during a midlife crisis
5:32
Roger Adams invented Heelys. It was 1998, and Adams was miserable at work and going through a divorce
5:38
He took a vacation to Huntington Beach, California, and would recall in 2004 that seeing young
5:42
skaters reminded me of a happier time in my life. The idea for Healy's came to him in a flash
5:48
He built the first pair by carving the heels from some Nike running shoes with a hot butter
5:52
knife and inserting skateboard wheels. One way the company tried to promote safe healing was to include examples of what not
5:58
to do on the Healy's website. There was video footage of Healers tripping, falling, jumping off railings, flying into
6:05
pools with no protective padding and no helmets, as CBS's The Early Show described it
6:10
When a CBS News correspondent showed the footage to a group of kids, though, several didn't
6:15
seem to get the message, instead saying they wanted to do what they saw the Healers doing
6:19
on the video. Ah, to be young. Healy's heyday has thankfully passed, but they'll always be a part of musical theater
6:26
history at least. wore them to simulate swimming in The Little Mermaid on Broadway
6:31
Speaking of Disney fish, Finding Nemo was great for clownfish visibility, but not so
6:35
great for actual clownfish. In 2008, The Telegraph reported that clownfish populations in certain
6:40
places had plummeted by 75% in the five years since the film's release. Some marine biologists
6:46
attributed the crash to an increased demand for pet clownfish. As one clownfish researcher
6:50
told the paper my message to kids who love 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 release Don free your pet fish by flushing it down the toilet
7:05
When the movie says that all drains lead to the ocean, it implies that all fish will survive
7:09
the journey, conveniently skipping the part where sewage gets shredded up in the process
7:14
As sewage equipment manufacturer JWC Environmental put it, in truth, nobody would ever find Nemo
7:19
and the movie would be called Grinding Nemo. Yikes. With Neopets, though, you never had to worry about them dying
7:26
And kids at the aughts were exposed to a lot in Neopia. Basic economics, a little gambling, a lot of immersive advertising
7:34
What they weren't exposed to was Scientology, despite the efforts of certain board members
7:38
Some of Neopets' early investors belonged to the Church of Scientology, and as Neopets
7:43
co-founder Donna Williams revealed in a 2014 AMA, at one time there was some talk of putting
7:48
Scientology education on the site, but we killed that idea pretty sharpish
7:52
The Scientologists borrowed some organizational elements from the church in structuring the
7:56
company, but Williams didn't notice any changes, apart from some odd test that interviewees
8:01
had to take consisting of questions like, which straight lines seemed friendlier and
8:06
stuff like that. We also had a lot of obscure celebrities coming around the office for tours
8:11
If you want to take an even deeper dive into the weird history of Neopets, check out our
8:14
full episode of Throwback, All About It. A few not-so-obscure celebrities, at the time anyway, almost made it into Star Wars Episode
8:22
2 Attack of the Clones. Three members of NSYNC – JC Chazé, Joey Fatone, and Chris Kirkpatrick
8:28
– suited up as Jedis and even learned lightsaber choreography to be extras in the 2002 film
8:33
Militant Star Wars fans were not happy at the prospect of a boy band infiltrating their
8:37
precious space opera, which, according to Kirkpatrick, was why the footage didn't
8:42
make the final cut. But the trio did at least get to take something home from the set – their
8:46
fake Padawan braids. And to bring this video full circle, that pop culture moment was parodied on Saturday
8:52
Night Live in January 2002. Host Josh Hartnett and four cast members portrayed NSYNC in full
8:57
Jedi garb, even performing a song that featured the line, Without you, I feel so alone, like I was attacked, attacked by clones
9:04
That's exactly what the movie was missing. Thanks for joining me on this journey back
9:08
to the weird world of the aughts, which began over 20 years ago. Oh god, I don't want to think
9:14
about that. What was your favorite fad from the 2000s? Leave yours in the comments and I will see
9:19
you next time
#education