Unintentional Period Piece / Turn of the Millennium

Examples having their own pages:

• Films — Live-Action
• Video Games

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Advertising

• While the 2009 commercial for SakuraCon (an annual anime convention held in Seattle) would be ridiculous no matter what decade it was produced in, the infamous part where a goth-dressed man shouts "GIRUGAMESH!" is a combination of this and Viewers Are Geniuses. To a modern viewer, even a stereotypical anime fan which this commercial would be trying to appeal to, it would seem like he's shouting gibberish made to sound cool/Japanese, when in fact "Girugamesh" — the name derived from the Final Fantasy character "Gilgamesh" — was a Japanese metal band that lasted from 2003 to 2016, but whose overseas popularity peaked early, and by 2009 were mostly unknown to Americans outside of the kinds of hardcore Japanophiles the commercial was actually aimed at. This reference would be completely lost to viewers from The New '10s onward had they not been J-Rock enthusiasts. Not helping is that nowadays, searching "girugamesh" on Google brings up video links to the memetic commercial before it brings up even the band's Wikipedia article.
• "Piracy. It's a crime." — colloquially known as "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" — was an anti-copyright infringement PSA campaign co-created by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) that appeared on many commercial DVDs sold between 2004 and 2007. The campaign almost immediately dates itself to the early-to-mid-2000s with its Nu Metal music, "in your face" on-screen text, fast-paced music video-esque editing, and grungy aesthetic. The campaign's look was already dated by the time it was discontinued. Not to mention the Top 10 movie list seen on the computer screen, featuring several early 2000s films such as Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and The Matrix Reloaded.
• The Microsoft Office XP ad campaign suffers from this in spades. Firstly, it revolves around the Scrappy status of Clippy, whose function has been completely removed from Microsoft Office starting with Office 2007, making it unlikely that younger viewers will get all the jokes. Every computer seen is of the CRT monitor variety and the final short ends with Clippy being used to eject a floppy disk from a PC tower. There's also a Product Placement cameo from the original Xbox controller, which was just out at the time.
  • The tie-in website for the campaign is also a time capsule of 2001, as Vice describes thusly:
  An archive of the site is a perfect time capsule of this period on the internet, including a (now busted) Flash game, a reference to “all your base are belong to us,” a dig at the 2000 presidential election’s “dimpled chads,” a joke about the 1998 book Who Moved My Cheese? and the acronym ROTFL.

Anime and Manga

• Azumanga Daioh is mostly free of such moments, but there are some jokes that make little sense nowadays, especially in the early chapters of the manga, which were first published from 1999 to 2000. Examples include Chiyo, a Child Prodigy, having no knowledge of how to use a computer, which itself sports a boxy 4:3 monitor and is treated as an unusual addition to a classroom; a reference to the then-new Virtual Pet craze; and a Take That! at the Yomiuri Giants' losing streak, which was broken shortly after that specific strip's publication. Even after the first volume, there's still a few period-reliant moments like Osaka comparing Chiyo's dad — or at least, the talking cat plushie from her daydreams who claims to be him — to Yoshiro Mori, a prime minister whose controversial tenure was still in recent memory at the time (the strip was published after his resignation and refers to him as the former prime minister, but it still relies on one having a fresh recollection of his time in office). What's perhaps most noticeable is the near-total absence of cell phones throughout the series, Tomo being the only character indicated to own one — with a very blocky late 90s/early 2000s design, to boot. Even Chiyo, who comes from a rich family and is the character you'd most expect to have a cell phone, doesn't.
• Despite being set 20 Minutes into the Future, an episode in the first season of A Certain Magical Index where the whole world goes through a body swap has Shirai Kuroko switching with someone who is clearly Barack Obama (complete with her saying "YES WE CAN"), who had just become the President-Elect at the time and was just about to become the 44th POTUS. In addition, the series has everyone with flip phones.
• The second season of Darker than Black, the first episodes of which were set in Vladivostok, quite firmly pins itself in the winter of 2007-2008, because the city has since experienced a building boom that radically changed its skyline just a year later.
• While Hiromu Arakawa has sworn up and down that they're based on the Ainu people she grew up next to as a farm girl in northern Japan, the Ishvalans of Fullmetal Alchemist and their parallelism to Muslims in the early (and very xenophobic) days of The War on Terror makes some people wonder. The politicization was then fully embraced in the 2003 anime adaptation, thanks in part to its director, Seiji Mizushima, having an obsession with being "topical". The Middle East references are laid on much thicker (the opening arc has the town of Lior changed from a geographically-vague mountainous region to a Middle Eastern desert, for starters), overt references are made to the rape and torture of prisoners and civilians at the hands of the military (likely inspired by the real-life cases of military abuses making headlines at the time), and much more attention is given to Edward's and Dante's atheistic views (at a time when speakers like Richard Dawkins had gained large cultural relevance).
• While Gals! was never a 100% exact representation, it's still reflective of how Shibuya and gyaru culture were in the late 90s to early 2000s and it goes without saying that both have changed significantly since this series' heyday. ADV's English dub ^note  the company's dubs themselves are also products of their time of the anime adaptation is also this given how often the word "retard" is thrown around like it's a sports term in that dub; in the decades since, the word is now considered much more offensive towards those with mental disabilities.
• Genshiken became a snapshot of the Japanese otaku subculture as it was during the early 2000s before it was Un-Canceled with Nidaime. The references are contemporary, and it notably deals with the moe boom and (to an extent) the "mainstreaming" of otaku-dom around the start of The New '10s. The gap between the old guard and the new generation is increasingly evident in Nidaime, where the idea of "otaku" has gone from something of an internalized, somewhat shameful identity to a (relatively) unstigmatized descriptor of someone who enjoys their hobbies with a shameless, fiery passion.
• ADV Films' infamous English Gag Dub of Ghost Stories was recorded in 2005, and boy does it ever sound like it. It's filled with references to the George W. Bush administration as well as the then-current political landscape of the USA (particularly Texas, where the dub was recorded), the then-still-powerful Fundamentalist Christian groups, Hurricane Katrina, Scientology, certain now-long-dead memes, and name-dropping of several prominent media personalities of the time such as Lindsay Lohan. One particular Cold Open that, in the original Japanese, had been silent, had that silence filled with a news-radio broadcast that culminated in referring to popular CNN anchor Anderson Cooper as a closeted homosexual, at a time when admitting to be gay was still controversial, particularly in the case of public figures. This became Hilarious in Hindsight a few years later when Cooper actually did come out. The very politically incorrect humor used in the dub would have met with far more controversy just ten years later.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: While the series' bevy of pop culture references mostly focus on older media with long-lasting cultural presences, a number of other elements readily date the series to the first half of the 2000s. Among other things, the English and Japanese versions feature references to the Nintendo GameCube, Fear Factor, Everybody Loves Raymond, Tiger Woods, Hamtaro, and Harry Potter (the latter of which forms the basis of an entire episode), all of which were at the peak of their popularity at the time.
• Love Hina doesn't usually exhibit this trope aside from some Values Dissonance, but the anime's Christmas Episode is built almost entirely around the fact that it originally aired and is set on Christmas Day of 2000, with an in-universe rumor that anyone who confesses their love on Christmas of that year will have their wish granted. Quite a few problems that the episode sets up would also likely have been easily solved if the characters had cellphones, which weren't in wider use yet during the early 2000s.
• Lucky Star:
  • The anime adaptation first aired in 2007 and is quite reliant on mid-to-late 2000s anime, manga, and gaming references, most often to Haruhi Suzumiya, which was at the peak of its popularity during that year. As a result, it's become a perfect snapshot of what Otaku culture was like during that period.
  • Any jokes about phones firmly date the series to the late 2000s. While texting is in use, the characters' cellphones are all flip phones and all of their households still have landline telephones which they use more often when they're at home. At one point Kagami and Miyuki talk about the uses of caller ID, with the punchline being that the Hiiragi family's main phone doesn't have it.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Many of the conflicts in the show are heavily based around real-life ones that had been in the news at the time (the anime, unsurprisingly, was directed by Seiji Mizushima). Caricatures of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are featured as the first and second presidents of The Federation. Amusingly, the show directly featured the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers (an insurrectionist group in the Sri Lankan Civil War) despite being set 200 years in the future; by 2009, only two years after the show premiered, the Sri Lankan government had quelled the insurgency.
• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children features very obvious Product Placement flip-phones, which wouldn't stick out too much if not for the fact that it takes place in a Constructed World where Panasonic shouldn't exist. The action scenes owe quite a bit to the later films in The Matrix, with half the cast running around in black leather coats. Additionally, the way the characters are written was heavily inspired by the common fanon interpretations of them at the time, with quite a few of those interpretations having fallen by the wayside since (admittedly, in large part as a response to Advent Children).

Comic Books

• The Authority's original run is dated to the late 90s and early aughts, with the team regularly and casually engaging in regime change and one arc being based on anxieties about the then-coming new millennium.
• The Boys is about a black-ops group tasked with keeping the psychopathic, hedonist Smug Supers of the world in check. It's also an indictment against superheroes and the state of the comic book industry at the time. As such, the comic relied a significant amount on how things were back when it was published between 2006 to 2012.
  • Perhaps the most blatant example of this is Payback, the resident stand-in for The Avengers. The whole joke about them is that they are a second-rate team perpetually living in the shadow of The Seven, the Justice League expies, and are considered disposable by their bosses. A pretty spot-on assessment of the position of Marvel's superteam at that time. Nowadays, though, with the smashing success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the difficulties the DC Extended Universe has encountered trying to catch up, the Avengers are just as popular as the Justice League, if not more so, as far the public is concerned.
  • The hyper-sexualized aesthetics and gross-out humor is very much a reflection of the kinds of entertainment popular during the early to mid-2000s. Suffice it to say, the TV show adaptation which debuted in 2019 significantly toned those aspects down.
• The Cartoon History of the Universe: The final two books, titled The Cartoon History of the Modern World, were completed during the George W. Bush administration, and it shows. The Professor makes a few references to controversial political issues of the era, including criticizing Private Military Contractors and "freedom fries," while covering events from hundreds of years ago.
• Civil War (2006) was in large part an attempt to process the increased surveillance state and militarism of the post-9/11 era through the perspective of a superhero universe, and it shows in many spots.
  • The Superhero Registration Act, though an old hat in the genre, is clearly drawing from the Patriot Act. Though parts of the act remain in place, nearly any modern discussion of it describes it as an unconstitutional law that was rammed through Congress at a time when they were willing to sign off on whatever the Bush administration wanted.
  • The final battle of the comic has Captain America get tackled by a group of civilian rescue and law enforcement workers, who were heavily lionized in the aftermath of the attacks. Cap then calls it off and agrees to go into custody after noticing the (relatively minor by superhero standards) amount of property damage their brawl has been causing, reflecting the increased tentativeness towards urban destruction that came after 9/11.
  • Sally Floyd's infamous "Do you know what MySpace is?" rant was disliked even in its time, but now looks downright comical when MySpace is spoken of only as a punchline about dead social networks. Her other big cultural touchstones haven't fared much better: American Idol went into heavy decline to the point of being put on a years-long hiatus, NASCAR, though still around, is nowhere near the cultural force it was in the 2000s, and The Simpsons is the joke about shows that continue only via cultural inertia. (YouTube is bigger than ever, though.)
  • Lastly, Civil War ultimately frames pro-registration as the "correct" side—by the accounts of some of its writers, they in fact saw it as the obvious right answer, hence them tossing in a few Kick the Dog moments on the part of its supporters just to make the conflict somewhat convincing. By the time it came out, the American people were largely turning on Bush-era neoconservatism (after September 2006, Bush's approval rating never again rose above 40%), and history was not kind to it; the Republican party wouldn't start to make a serious comeback until Donald Trump, who largely disavowed Bush's legacy. This may have factored into the "pro-reg" side proving overwhelmingly unpopular with readers, leading to the general arc of the Marvel Universe post-Civil War up to Siege being one long showcase of how the act was an ill-considered idea.
• Due to the author being a New Yorker and featuring plenty of Scenery Porn, the Girl series such as Girl — The Second Coming nails it as a pre-9/11 NYC with shots of the Twin Towers still intact and the city being nicknamed "Rudy's shooting gallery," referring to the previous mayor Rudy Giuliani.
• The 2004-2005 Vertigo series The Losers is in a large part British writer Andy Diggle's scathing indictment of the state of the post-9/11 US, written at more or less the exact moment majority public opinion turned against The War on Terror. The US is portrayed as a twisted, hypocritical nation secretly ruled by a Shadow Dictatorship composed of big corporations and the CIA (themselves depicted, with the exception of Marvin Stegler, as smug, cowardly gangsters who cheerfully sign off on the deaths of innumerable innocents from behind their comfortable desks), and the Big Bad, Max, is a shadowy, amoral power broker who thinks conventional morality doesn't apply to him and that the highest good is expanding America's wealth and power, damn the consequences. His master plan is to create a pro-American nuclear rogue state in international waters to cow the developing world, especially the Middle East, into towing the American extreme right's party line under threat of genocide. Various conspiracy theories that were popular at the time but massively declined in prominence in subsequent decades also feature as major plot points.
• The Marvel Mangaverse is dated pretty heavily to that period in the early 2000s where manga was officially having its first real mainstream boom, but hadn't really trickled into Small Reference Pools yet. The how-to-draw-manga artstyle (in fact, one of the artists did do such books) is the main giveaway. There's also the rather Shallow Parody feel of a lot of the series, which seem to be more based on general Japanese culture ideas that had also been somewhat mainstreamed at the time (Kaiju, Super Robots, samurai, ninjas, geisha), rather than parodying any specific series or genre, reflecting a time when mainstream anime outside of heavily-dubbed shounens didn't really exist and finding it was somewhat tricky. One of the few exceptions to that rule is its version of Fantastic Four, which is a pretty close riff on Neon Genesis Evangelion—a show that is certainly still well-known and well-regarded, but was at the height of its prestige in Western anime fandom at the time.
• Marville hasn't aged well at all. There are numerous references to AOL Time-Warner, portraying it as a powerful MegaCorp that rules the world in 5002. There are also "jokes" about Marvel's staff and comics in the early 2000s, for example, showing Peter David, who was making a bet with Bill Jemas to see who could sell more comics, as a poor man (David won the bet). And the title and issue #1 references Smallville, which had recently come out. But it isn't even a good representation of the 2000s because of errors like Ted Turner and Jane Fonda being married (and somehow still alive) in the year 5002, when they were divorced at the time of its publication.
• Runaways Vol. 1 can be firmly placed as being set between 2003-2004, due to its clothing styles, cell phones, and references to Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War.
• Scott Pilgrim has gradually become this over time though in surprising ways. The first book came out in 2004 and finished in 2010 though the events within the story take place over a year. This makes it a bit ambiguous on when it takes place except for the early-mid 2000s, which was shown with things like the types of games and music seen (action films being big, Scott having a PSP, and so on). However, the bigger element is seen in retroactive portrayal. Scott was written to be portrayed as this sort of hapless loser for not having much of a career or life despite going to college, and his friends are presented as in a similar boat to a lesser degree. However, a decade after its final book, Scott's situation is a lot more commonplace regarding young adults being able to establish a life and the overarching reasons (such as the economy and so on) are more pronounced, especially with things like the aftermath of the Great Recession, the rise of the next wave of Internet culture, social movements and so on. This makes Scott and his friends more relatable and sympathetic than perhaps O'Malley intended at the time.
• The Vertigo series Testament is ostensibly set in a vague dystopian future, but like its near-contemporary The Losers, it is steeped in the social anxieties of the late War on Terror. Major plot points include a false-flag nuclear strike on an unspecified Persian Gulf nation kicking off World War III, the reinstatement of the draft due to this, Mega Corps usurping control of the armed forces from the government, mass surveillance through body-implanted computer chips, and military AI gone mad. Likely the most awkward bit of dissonance with subsequent decades is the presence of "the Nats," a racist, isolationist Right-Wing Militia Fanatic organization... who are actually treated as the Lesser of Two Evils next to the globalist tech-guru Big Bad.
• The entire Ultimate Marvel line has this going for it. Created in the early 2000s, a part of its appeal was that it averted several superhero tropes at the time and "modernized" several elements of Marvel lore. However, the way it went about this was to apply copious amounts of 2000s superhero tropes (Darker and Edgier interpretations of characters, Bloodier and Gorier moments galore, Beware the Superman being prominent, everyone being Unscrupulous Heroes at best, Civvie Spandex or black costumes almost exclusively and lots of Hotter and Sexier), which have retroactively dated the entire line (aside from Spider-Man). When you see the leather-clad Ultimates (the Avengers under a different name) and Ultimate X-Men murdering people while casually talking about their sex lives, it's very clear what era they're from.
  • For a more specific example, The Ultimates Volumes 1 and 2 are very much products of The War on Terror. The story begins with "What if Captain America was resurrected during the 2000s" and goes from there. Cap himself in this continuity is the living embodiment of post-9/11 "national unity" and his infamous "You think this letter [A] on my head stands for France?" was an obvious jab at France after the country opposed the invasion of Iraq. Bush himself even appears in a few scenes. Hawkeye and Black Widow's infiltration of an office building is straight out of The Matrix, Thor's Conspiracy Theorist characterization and the shape-shifting Chitauri are both inspired by David Icke, and Volume 2's plot revolves around the Ultimates being made to fight terrorism in the Middle East and winding up in the crosshairs of an anti-American supergroup known as the Liberators, whose members include two Chinese agents, an Azerbaijani and a North Korean. And Loki.
• X-Statix dates itself to the very early aughts because of its near-complete lack of any mention of social media, even as the titular team chases every other kind of media. This is lampooned in the distant Sequel Series X-Cellent, where team leader Guy Smith, having been forced to come out of retirement after almost two decades in order to deal with a new threat, is reduced to begging a young blogger to help him get the word out about his team coming back, as most of his old media contacts have either retired or aren't willing to spend their time covering a team that nobody remembers.

Comic Strips

• While The Boondocks was launched in 1999, its turn for the political after 9/11 firmly welded it to the zeitgeist of The War on Terror, particularly the opposition to it. Its presentation of African-American culture is likewise very much of its time, especially with its hatred of BET, which became a major focus of criticism by black leaders in the 2000s. Riley's personality was already dated by the mid-2000s, hence why the animated adaptation changed his character and look so much.
• Most of Get Fuzzy is clearly rooted in the 2000s. One storyline had Bucky suing Fungo for assault, which became a court case on Judge Judy, which would end in 2021. Another storyline referenced the 2007-08 writers strike, with Bucky hiring an editor to review his reality show script, also dating it to a time when reality shows were all the rage. In another strip, Bucky doctored one of Satchel's Where's Waldo books into Where's Osama, and the book ends with a platoon of marines finding him; this became Hilarious in Hindsight when Osama was captured in 2011.

Fan Works

• Diamonds in the Desert goes to show it was made and takes place in 2007. Todd uses a PDA (these had only just begun to be displaced by smartphones) for various purposes such as electronic music and going online with a hacked external wireless modem. Nowadays, hardly anyone remembers PDAs anymore, and everything his fancy customized device can do would be possible out of the box with a smartphone.
• The very first episode of Dragon Ball Z Abridged has a gag where Piccolo checks his MySpace page. The series began in 2008, when MySpace was still all the rage and Facebook was only beginning to take off. However, the joke still somewhat works if you interpret it as Piccolo being so lonely and isolated that he still uses MySpace. Lampshaded in a later episode when he says he upgraded to "Spacebook".
• Eddie Rath's Naruto Filk Song rap "Gaara The Sand Assassin" gets dated to the 2000s with the line "Caramelldansen is the same as Cascada—they're both fucking annoying". The song was written when Caramelldansen Vids were most popular and Cascada fanvids were epidemic in the Naruto fandom.
• Even ignoring the fact that Cori Falls wrote fanfiction of the Orange Islands and Johto seasons of Pokémon: The Series, it's abundantly obvious that her story "Heroic Hearts" was written shortly after the contested 2000 U.S. presidential election: the villain is a very obvious stand-in for George W. Bush, who goes by "W. Shrubb", referencing two of his nicknames that were only really common in the very early 2000s, and who Cori's heroes argue only won the mayoral election through corruption — an accusation that was certainly most prevalent immediately after Bush v. Gore. In addition, Shrubb's speech contains word-for-word copies of the original Bushisms, and mention is made of a website that is a parody of the long-defunct "Bush or Chimp".
• The Ketsueki Quadrilogy serves to be a big example for fighting game fanfiction. It already has the technological/social/cultural aspects that many other works have in this list, but what sells this series as such is the datedness of its lore. The four franchises featured in the fic have all underwent very significant plot developments (Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur rebooted their universes, Street Fighter started progressing post-SFIII with new elements added to the lore, and Tekken introduced so many additions to the lore that straight up creates plotholes in the original). Needless to say, the fanfic series is trying its best to stand amidst the new additions. However, Street Fighter V's Laura Matsuda winds up making a cameo in Majin Seiryu Ki, meaning the author is aware of the more recent developments, though time will tell how much might be factored in.
• The Merry Go Round Broke Down is a Who Framed Roger Rabbit fan-sequel themed around the contemporary popularity of CGI cartoons and the decline of traditionally animated cartoons. It is from 2008 and it shows. For example, Bugs Bunny is a Racist Grandpa because he hasn't had a show in years. Three years later, The Looney Tunes Show came out. Another example is Arthur and Buster worrying about Arthur being canceled, which wouldn't happen until almost fifteen years later in 2022.
• In addition to being a pre-Book 7 Harry Potter fic, the infamous My Immortal has a Present-Day Past dated to the 2006-2007 years in which it was written:
  • Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff have yet to be displaced by Miley Cyrus, and The Twilight Saga (especially its Fandom Rivalry with Harry Potter) is conspicuous by its absence, as is Fall Out Boy, one of the biggest "goff" (then emo) bands of the 2000s. There's even a mention of Hilary Duff dating Joel Madden, dating the story to the two years (2004–2006) in which they were together.
  • Another giveaway comes in if you're a My Chemical Romance fan (since they tend to be the band mentioned most in the fic), as most of the songs by the band mentioned in the story are singles off of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, MCR's second album and their first big mainstream release. Amusingly, the story never mentions any songs off of MCR's more obscure first album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, which came out in 2002, showing that even Tara sticks dominantly to mainstream "punk" and "goff" bands. The story makes no references to any songs off of their even more successful third album from late 2006, The Black Parade, either, meaning most of the story was likely written prior to its release.
• A Pikachu in Love takes place during the Johto arc of Pokémon: The Original Series and has several elements pointing to it having been written while it was still airing in the first couple years of the 2000s. The narrative lacks any subtle nods to later events in the anime and unironically has Pikachu worrying about Ash growing up one day and leaving him behind; the two went on to have adventures together in half a dozen regions after Johto, and Ash eventually became one of the most infamous cases of Not Allowed to Grow Up in anime history. The fic is also styled archaically, being presented as a blank white page with text written in an unconventional font that's hosted on a Pokemon-specific fansite^note that in itself is a time capsule to 90s / early 2000s web design instead of a general fanfiction archive.
• The Rainbow Brite Dark Fic The Rainbow Connection is from 2005. You can tell it's prior to cellphones becoming commonplace by Rainbow, now going under the name Alice, asking to use the payphone at a restaurant. In a more subtle case, Stormy mentions that she's been looking for Rainbow/Alice for 20 years. Rainbow Brite came out 20 years prior.
• When Rocket Member began, Ash's Pikachu from the Pokémon anime had an Ambiguous Gender. A popular theory was that it was female. Pikachu in the comic is a girl, but since then the anime has confirmed Pikachu as a male.
• Despite the Star Wars setting, you can easily tell that the Sith Academy series was written between 1999 and 2001. People rent movies from Blockbuster and have CDs, VCRs and dial-up Internet. There are also numerous pop culture references to things like boy bands, the Spice Girls, Teletubbies, Furbies, The Blair Witch Project, and Ally McBeal, along with stories about Y2K and the contested 2000 US Presidential election.
• This trope was part of the motivation for the Sonic X: Dark Chaos rewrite. The original, which was started in 2007, included several references to Internet memes and games from that era (most notably Team Fortress 2). It also had numerous Take That! jokes aimed at 4Kids Entertainment, which ended up going bankrupt soon after the story was finished.
• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space was written sometime in the 2000s, and it shows. There are numerous references to B Movies often mocked within the Caustic Critic culture of the time (especially Ed Wood and Irwin Allen productions), along with Take Thats to the then-dominant Reality TV genre.
• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series was written between 2005 and 2013, and a lot of the references date it to the former decade. For example, "The Night of the Living Television" has Hobbes mentioning that Susie's family are (presumably) watching "that horse movie called Dreamer". Most of the earlier chapters have references to Garfield and Friends (which reran on Boomerang between 2005 and 2008) and That '70s Show (which aired its final two seasons as season one was written), long-out-of-business department stores such as Radio Shack and Crazy Mike's Video are mentioned, and the plot of "Help Wanted" involves Calvin attempting to get money to buy a VideoNow Color.

Films — Animation

• The 2008 film Bolt has Penny and Bolt taking a selfie with a Polaroid camera. It also counts in a meta fashion as Miley Cyrus voices Penny, right at the height of Hannah Montana's popularity. Originally, Chloë Grace Moretz voiced Penny, and she had recorded all her lines, but Disney decided to re-record the lines using Miley.
  • Another, more subtle example is in scenes that briefly feature period-correct welcome signs for Ohio and Missouri. These signs have since been replaced with updated designs.
• Up. First is Russell's standalone GPS; a boy of Russell's age today would have a smartphone with the same capability. Secondly is the age of Carl and Charles; if they were around 10 and 25 years old respectively in the mid-1930s (and the beginning of the film is specifically tied to that period), they would be c.85 and 100 in the late 2000s, and given that only a few thousand people have become centenarians since the beginning of the 20th century, the odds of them living even another 15 or 20 years are quite low.
• Just look at the soundtrack for Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Aaron Carter, etc. Libby's cellphone is pretty bulky, and there's a poster for a girl group in Cindy's room.
• Shark Tale is very much a product of 2004. It has an especially large focus on "urban gangsta flavor" and features celebrities who were at their peak among its cast: while Will Smith and Angelina Jolie are still well-known, Katie Couric (at the time a host on Today before anchoring CBS' evening newscast) and Renee Zellweger faded from the spotlight years later (although the latter would make a comeback of sorts in the late 2010s), and Peter Falk (whose final Columbo TV movie was made in 2003) would develop Alzheimer's before dying in 2011. The soundtrack also involves numerous artists who were really big at the time, but have since declined like Pussycat Dolls and Jo Jo.
• The Shrek films. In addition to their 2000s pop music soundtracks (such as the Baha Men and Smash Mouth) and their All Star Casts, the series' sense of humor was based around two things: parodies of the 1990s Disney animated films, and snarky pop-culture gags. The former marks them as products of a time when Disney defined American animation (when the first film came out, Pixar was still only known for the first two Toy Story films and A Bug's Life, with Monsters, Inc. a few months away). The pop culture references especially, as they help pinpoint the era this movie's set in.
• 2008's Horton Hears a Who! has a Who reference "WhoSpace", which blatantly dates itself to before the emergence of Facebook and other social media sites.
• An Extremely Goofy Movie has a massive focus on extreme sports, a thing that became mainstream in the 2000s before its inevitable fade. The big 70s trip Goofy had also connects to the massive nostalgia the decade had. ESPN2 being a thing in the movie also references the then newly-acquired network by Disney through ABC.

Jokes

• How do you annoy Lady Gaga? Puh-puh-puh-poke-her-face, puh-puh poke-her-face...
• How do you scare Iraqi children? You say Bush!
• Why did Osama bin Laden shoot his wife? He looked under her dress and saw Bush.

Literature

• Cell is really blatantly a product of this era, especially in its portrayal of the cell phones central to the plot. All of them are shown as 2000s-era flip phones. Smartphones never get so much as a mention, and neither does any kind of social media, which would doubtlessly have shown up in a story like this if it were written today.
• The Clique novels became dated very quickly after they were first published. The main characters constantly obsess over brands and celebrities that were in vogue at the time, but have since fallen out of favor; they all communicate using an instant messenger app on their desktop computers, and social media is largely nonexistent; and their wardrobes are unlimited but firmly rooted in turn-of-the-millenium styles. In general, the whole concept of the series—a clique of Spoiled Brat mean girls engaging in shallow, excessive materialism, bullying other students, bragging about their glamorous lifestyles, and getting very little character development or comeuppance in return—only makes sense before the 2008 Recession, when that level of supericiality wasn't as heavily condemned as it is today.
• While Cloud Atlas is meant to transcend all of time as a parable of the human condition through the ages, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish became dated quickly. Supposedly set in 2004 at the book's publication, no references are made to cell phones or social media, not even in a "kids these days" style rant. Timothy's business as a vanity publisher was later replaced by self-publishing, which the book does not acknowledge at all.
• While not affecting the plot much, there are a few references that date The Diamond Girls to the early 2000s (it was published in 2004), some more obvious than others.
  • Rochelle mentions being a fan of the band Busted, who were popular at the time only to disband in 2005.
  • Jude mocking Ryan as looking like an extra for Pirates of the Caribbean references the first movie, which came out in 2003 (though it's not too dated given Pirates of the Caribbean is still well-known in pop culture and has been virtually the only successful pirate swashbuckler movie for decades).
  • Jude is mentioned as watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on video; Buffy is still well-known despite ending in 2003, but the part about it being on video dates it.
  • Pluto is mentioned as being one of the nine planets; it was declassified as a planet in 2006.
  • The most dated reference is probably the girls pretending to be on Top of the Pops, which ended in 2006; it's also seen as 'tainted' now due to the heavy involvement of Jimmy Savile, who was revealed to be a child predator following his death in 2011.
• Several reviews have noted that How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (published in 2006) is clearly rooted in the early-to-mid 2000s, due to the frequent mentioning of shows like The O.C. (ran from 2003 - 2007) and Total Request Live (ran from 1998 - 2008 until the 2017 revival), characters listening to then-popular musicians like 50 Cent, the emphasis on parties, fashion and dating as the epitome of teen life, and more. On a less pleasant note, it's been pointed out that some of the casual remarks and attitudes of the teen cast come off as sexist, racist and/or classist these days (e.g. Opal looks down on immigrants working blue collar jobs and some of her remarks about women come off as misogynistic and Slut-Shaming) but were considered more 'acceptable' or a source of 'edgy' humor in the early 2000s. In a more meta sense, most of the books that Opal Mehta 'borrowed' from were also published in the early-to-mid 2000s, so it contains a lot of tropes, archetypes, humor and so on that were popular in YA literature at that time.
• The Millennium Trilogy manages to date itself thanks to Stieg Larsson's insistence on giving detailed specs on Lisbeth Salander's computer. He had intended to make her sound like a cutting-edge hacker with top-of-the-line equipment. Nowadays, she would come off as a Luddite with an Apple fetish.
• Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon is a 2004 book about the popularity of Pokémon. As the name implies, it also documents the supposed "fall" of the franchise. The book was created shortly after the release of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire in 2002. Pokémon was seen as "dying" during the late Gen 2 period and throughout Gen 3, though what was really occurring was that the fad was dying. The merchandise and games were still top sellers, but Pokémon wasn't quite as rabidly popular as before, so the book cited it as a "dead series" due to its marketing not being as visible to the general public outside of the fanbase (and thus no longer constantly reminding people of its existence). Popularity Polynomial came into effect just a few years later during Generation 4 just another two years after the book came out, and the series was boosted back into the gamer spotlight, where it's remained since.
• A minor bit near the end of The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch has Ponder Stibbons shocked that the London Natural History Museum keeps its statue of Charles Darwin in the North Hall cafeteria. (Ridcully takes the view that this ensures everyone's going to see it.) This dates that scene (other Roundworld scenes are set at various points during Darwin's life) prior to May 2008, when the statue was returned to the top of the staircase of the main entrance hall to celebrate his upcoming bicentenary. (Darwin himself identifying one of the displays as "Robert Owen's diplodocus carnegii" also dates it to before 2017, when Dippy was replaced by Hope the blue whale.)
• Jay Asher tried to defy this trope when he wrote 13 Reasons Why. He deliberately chose to have Hannah record her suicide note on cassette tapes, as these were already an obsolete technology by 2007 (which gets lampshaded by Clay)^note Ironically, audio cassettes later made a minor comeback in some niche music communities since then, albeit not as large as the similar comeback made by vinyl records. and would prevent the story from aging out as quickly as if she'd recorded it on a more high-tech medium. This was also the reason why he had Tony drive a classic Ford Mustang, instead of a more modern sports car that would date the book to the mid-2000s. That said, it doesn't fully escape this. The mere concept of cyberbullying is never mentioned in a Teens Are Monsters story, chiefly because people were only just starting to face its implications, something that Asher noted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The TV adaptation, made a decade later in 2017, had to alter the story to include cyberbullying as part of its Adaptation Expansion.
• The first Twilight book came out in 2005 and it shows with the technology. The internet was becoming popular but it wasn't the cornerstone that it was to become in a few years. Bella doesn't use computers much and her dad still has dial-up (although that could be somewhat justified by the fact that they live in a small and somewhat secluded town). The characters also use CDs and CD players to listen to all their music. Bella doesn't even own a cell phone until Edward forces her to carry one for her safety and the Cullens pull out large satellite phones when they need to communicate reliably over interstate distances. Meyer also attempted to defy this trope in an ironically unnecessary fashion: the music Bella and Edward bond over is Linkin Park, but Meyer left it unstated due to fears that it would date the series. In reality, the band maintained its popularity for well over a decade and the tragic suicide of frontman Chester Bennington renewed nostalgic interest in his work.
• World War Z. The Zombie Apocalypse is supposed to begin at an unspecified point in the early 2010s, and while the book makes some decent guesses as to what the world would look like by then, other guesses stamp it with the mid-2000s time in which it was written.
  • References to The War on Terror abound. A huge part of the reason why the Zombie Apocalypse gets so out of control is that the American intelligence apparatus was virtually discredited in the wake of the "Iraqi WMDs" debacle.
  • The pop culture references don't help either. Jamie Lynn Spears is referred to as a big enough celebrity to have a line of sneakers, marking the book as having been written before her Teen Pregnancy scandal destroyed her career. Several minor characters are also thinly veiled expies of personalities such as Howard Dean^note As "The Whacko", a former rising star politician from Vermont who was disgraced by an outburst of emotion on the campaign trail, only to later be selected as Vice President for the wartime national unity government, Karl Rove^note The character is named "Grover Carlson", in case it wasn't obvious who the former White House chief of staff is based on, Colin Powell^note A black war hero from the opposite party as "The Whacko" whose family came from Jamaica, and who gets named President to lead the wartime government, Ruben Studdard^note An overweight talent show winner who gets blown up with a grenade, Bill Maher^note A political talk show host and comedian who claims that the Zombie Apocalypse is the revolution that will bring down the lies that the "old way of life" was founded upon, in between ranting about high-fructose corn syrup and the "feminization" of America, Ann Coulter^note An older blonde woman and ideological foe to the aforementioned talk show host; as the celebrity fortress they're in is overrun, they start having sex like there's no tomorrow. In real life, Bill Maher and Ann Coulter are known to be close friends despite their huge ideological differences., and Paris Hilton^note A Spoiled Brat heiress who, while watching news footage of the zombies overrunning New York, mocks one guy she sees who was Too Dumb to Live, all of whom enjoyed their greatest cultural prominence in the early-mid 2000s, while there's also a reference to Larry the Cable Guy and his "Git-r-done!" Catchphrase (rendered as "Get it done!").
  • Max Brooks correctly predicted that touch-screen and voice-assisted computers would exist by 2013, but he completely missed the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, which are conspicuous in their absence; instead, we see desktop PCs using those technologies (and that's to say nothing of the reference to the Nintendo GameCube, when by the real 2013 it had been succeeded twice over). More importantly, he greatly underestimated just how big the online media, and social media especially, would become, something that actually plays a role in the story on more than one occasion. The only online news sources mentioned are 2ch in Japan and the AOL homepage in the US, and one interviewee states that, in the run-up to the Zombie Apocalypse, alternative media outlets were scorned as untrustworthy and appealing either to an elitist, "latte liberal" PBS/NPR audience (referring to the left-leaning, anti-Bush blogosphere of that era), or to unwashed computer nerds who would never be taken seriously by the mainstream (referring to sites like the aforementioned 2ch). A version of the story written today would likely portray the opposite scenario, with misinformation about the zombie plague running rampant online and making the Great Panic worse.
  • In the book, the core of much of the national survival/continuity of government plans involve a retreat to an easily defensible safe zone where the government and military can get enough breathing room to reorganize. The US' safe zone is the West Coast and the Rockies, Britain's safe zones include northern Scotland and the Isle of Man, and Ukraine's safe zone is centered on... the Crimean peninsula. Following Crimea's hostile takeover and annexation by Russia in 2014, the chapter on Ukraine easily falls into this trope.
  • Brooks predicted that Iran would have nuclear weapons by the early '10s, as evidenced when the refugee crisis caused by the zombie outbreak leads to a nuclear war between Iran and Pakistan. Iran's nuclear ambitions were a subject of much debate and punditry in the 2000s, as many people feared that their acquisition of The Bomb would destabilize the balance of power in the Middle East... and they remain a subject of much debate and punditry into the present day, with many future predictions of Iran being "months away" from becoming a nuclear-armed state still having never panned out as of 2020.
• In Skeleton Key (2002), the third Alex Rider novel, the Big Bad is an embittered former Soviet colonel who wants to return The New Russia to its former glory by orchestrating a coup d'état against the Russian government. In hindsight, the book was pretty clearly written early in Vladimir Putin's reign, before his reputation as a global powerhouse really became established. The President of Russia is a blatant No Celebrities Were Harmed parody of Boris Yeltsin, and Russia itself is portrayed as a chaotic post-Soviet Republic that just wants to embrace democracy and move past its old rivalries with the West. That portrayal became pretty outdated by the end of the decade, after Putin's aggressive policies actually did return Russia to superpower status, his increasingly authoritarian leadership caused the most Western pop culture to once again portray Russia as an enemy, and the country's antagonism with the West went back to square one after Putin was accused of (among other things) conspiring to influence the 2016 United States Presidential Election.
  • In a more minor example, in the fourth book, Eagle Strike (2003), the only thing that gives Alex reason to suspect that the Big Bad is international celebrity Damian Cray is that he finds Cray's personal phone number on a hired assassin's unsecured mobile phone. Indeed, due to the Comic-Book Time nature of the series' timeline, in Scorpia Rising (published 8 years later in 2011, but set less than a year after Eagle Strike), a smartphone that can't be unlocked because it needs a passcode is a minor plot point.
• Captain Freedom dates itself to the mid-aughts with jokes about Kazaa, the War on Terror, and the "dinosaur flatulence" theory of climate change. There's also references to "Mad Moses", a Bible-obsessed former judge turned supervillain, who was obviously inspired by Roy Moore, who was still a judge back then.
• Television Without Pity: 752 Things We Love to Hate (and Hate to Love) about TV dates itself to not only the Caustic Critic boom of the 2000s and early-2010s (which Television Without Pity was a huge part of), but also to the early-to-mid-2000s by referencing what TV shows were still on the air at the time. Many of the TV shows discussed and/or mocked in the book have been cancelled or have long faded into obscurity.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Death by Pantyhose, Jaine tries to get an Egg McMuffin from McDonald's, only to find she missed the time to get breakfast by an hour. McDonald's would start serving breakfast all day in 2015, whereas the book was released in 2007.
• A major part of the first Haruhi Suzumiya novel is the unethical means by which Haruhi acquires a computer for the SOS Brigade, namely by fabricating evidence of the president of the Computer Research Society sexually assaulting Mikuru, then blackmailing them to get them to fork it over. The novel came out in 2003, at a time when it was unheard of for a school to have many computers outside a dedicated computer lab and maybe a few classrooms, so naturally Haruhi’s club didn’t come with one. Nowadays when everyone and their brother has a smartphone and students bring their laptops to school, this would have been unnecessary. It would also mean Kyon would most likely upload the Mikuru cosplay photographs to his own computer rather than hiding them unsuccessfully on the club’s desktop computer, meaning Mikuru wouldn’t notice what he’s doing and inadvertently make Haruhi think there is something between them, getting her jealous enough to almost recreate the world with Closed Space, so the climax would have to be quite different also.
• What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History was published in 2004, and it shows. The snarky way the book covers its subjects is a reflection of that era's Caustic Critic culture and obsession with Bile Fascination. During the section covering AMC's early attempts at making original series, the book insists that the channel shouldn't make more original series and stick to its roots as a classic movie channel, which ended up being hugely ironic when taking the huge successes of multiple AMC originals years later (especially Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead) into account. The book's front cover also is a prime example of the era's fascination with retraux aesthetics.

Live-Action TV

• 24, being a Post-9/11 Terrorism Show that ran until 2010, was a product of its time while it was still on the air. By the time its original run ended, America was well into its withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and was just a year away from finally catching Osama bin Laden.
• In Arrested Development
  • In the third season, the references to the Iraq War are so specific that they tie the show to that exact time period. For example, GOB's wife is shown posing a la Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy, and one episode has Michael meeting a group of Saddam Hussein lookalikes that wound up jobless after Hussein's then-recent capture. There are also several references to the Enron accounting scandal, and William Hung from American Idol makes a cameo.
  • In the fourth season airing in 2013 (a full decade after the first season aired), the writers took advantage of the Time Skip to lampoon the zeitgeist of The New '10s. To whit, the Housing Crisis turns out to be a big plot point in Lindsay and Tobias' story, drone warfare turns out to play a major role in Buster's story, Michael gets a job driving the Google Street View camera car at one point, and a No Celebrities Were Harmed stand-in for Herman Cain is a major supporting character.
• Band of Brothers is a strange example. While it is an actual period piece — about the real-life exploits of the 101st Airborne in World War II — certain things in the present-day portions of the episodes date it to the early 2000s. For example one of the interviews in the first episode says "our country was attacked" to rationalize why so many people volunteered. The episode in question aired two days before 9/11. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue talks about the people who are still alive — or were back in 2001. Dated History also comes into play, as the show depicts two things that were widely thought as true (and had been reported in the book on which the show was based) — namely that Joe Liebgott was Jewish and that Albert Blithe died of his wounds in 1948. Those two facts were debunked by the real-life family members of the men after the show aired — Joe Liebgott was actually Catholic and only assumed to be Jewish by his comrades, and Albert Blithe lived for another twenty years but just never showed up to reunions (making everyone assume he had died). Such facts would be considerably easier to find out with most veterans having Wikipedia pages and multiple books are written since showing the miniseries was made in a mostly pre-internet age.
• The Bernie Mac Show is clearly rooted to its original run between Vanessa's fashion choices, Jordan owning an original Xbox (with one episode showing him playing Dead or Alive Ultimate) as well as a name drop of Sonic X. The guests where Bernie talks to America also feature references to their (then-popular) series, with one episode having Bernie talk to Ashton Kutcher and it ending with a reference to Punk'd.
• Birds of Prey (2002) featured many recent inventions (PDAs, portable CD players, wireless earpieces) that look considerably low-tech ten years on. In particular, the supposedly high-tech enormous computers that Oracle uses look laughably old-fashioned, although this could be put down to budget constraints. The soundtrack also counts, especially the final episode which contains a t.A.T.u. song.
• Chappelle's Show can be very topical for its time frame of between 2003 to 2006, with jokes about Howard Dean's outburst, the Tom DeLay anthrax attack, Diddy's Making the Band, and R. Kelly's scandal.
  • Spoofed in this sketch where Dave is In Da Club listening to a newly-released "lost" Tupac Shakur song from 1994 that nonetheless name-drops Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, President George W. Bush, Eminem, and the war in Afghanistan while making Suspiciously Specific Denials throughout. By the end, the song is mentioning specific people in the club right there, including Dave himself, making it obvious that it's just the DJ himself on the mic pretending to be Tupac.
• Cold Case:
  • In case doing the math with the interviewees' ages isn't enough, there are episodes with references to the Iraq War, the Catholic Church's then-recent pederasty scandals, or the one with a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of young Barack Obama.
  • Due to the show's flip-flop back and forth on LGBTQ rights, encapsulating the non-linear public opinion of the time, Lily comes out vocally in support of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies for the police force, which solidly places the show prior to 2010.
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
  • A number of early episodes featured killers who were Armored Closet Gays, willing to commit murder to safeguard their secret. Now that the LGBT community encourages coming out to a much greater degree, this being a motive for murder seems almost narmy.
  • "Deep Fried and Minty Fresh" (2009) has a moment when Hodges says that he believes that a certain anti-copy measure in dollar notes is actually used by the government to track people from satellites in outer space. Langston sarcastically replies: "Yet we can't find Bin Laden."
• Dark Oracle: an example of teen life during the early-mid 2000s: Geeks who played World of Warcraft on computers running Windows XP, having 'dumb' cellphones with monochrome screens, reading comic books, and in general having a life outside the internet as well.
• Dead Like Me ran between 2003 and 2004, and it encapsulates the 2000s. Beyond the usual fashion, Betty is shown with a Polaroid camera, a Gorillaz poster can be seen in George's apartment, the computers at Happy Time are clearly early-2000s-era monitors, "Reapercussions" features apperances from Gary Collins and Mary Ann Mobley (dating the episode to before their deaths), and one episode has a scene where George tells Delores that her brother Luke "bombed the crap out of Baghdad," clearly dating it to The War on Terror.
• The TV version of Dead Ringers ran from 2002-2007, and it shows, especially with frequent jokes about then-relevant British and international politicians (especially Tony Blair and George W. Bush) and then-relevant television programmes. A number of episodes made jokes about things that were being talked about in the British or international media at the time of transmission. The politically incorrect style of humour used in the show would also not be seen as acceptable in modern times.
• Gilmore Girls is a zig-zagged example, and also one of how comedy ages poorly. Beyond the usual fashion and technology, the comedy relies heavily on pop culture references. About half of these are fine, as they're esoteric and not related to the year the episode aired, but the other half are definitely of their era. For example, Lorelai asks Rory in one episode to guess who just broke up and Rory responds with "Brad and Jen?" to Lorelai's horror. In addition, a lot of laughs were mined from subjects such as body weight and sexuality, like the episode "Die, Jerk," which has Rory write a scathing editorial about a ballerina centered mostly on her weight — the joke is that she can't fit into her leotard and her partner can't pick her up. The Aesop of the episode is Rory needing to develop a thicker skin in response to her articles when confronted by the ballerina in question. Some fans criticized the 2016 reboot for not changing with the times and using the same kind of humor despite it not playing out as well as it did in the 2000s.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • An early episode has Ted and Robin accidentally taking each others' cell phones as a plot point. The phones were silver Motorola Razr flip phones — extremely popular when the episode aired but hilariously outdated now. And the idea of accidentally picking up and unknowingly using someone else's phone is laughable. The high degree of personalization and customization that smartphones allow — from screen backgrounds to app layouts — as well as their increased security (passcodes and later biometrics), would make it instantly obvious that one has picked up someone else's device.
  • Early in the first season, Ted uses a dating agency, which hookup apps and dating websites all but killed off in the 2010s.
• A number of FX Network shows had this problem.
  • Nip/Tuck — Hearts 'N Scalpels was a Grey's Anatomy rip-off, and the final season began with an episode that outright references the 2008 recession.
  • Rescue Me was firmly based around the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The men of 62 Truck had lost four of their brothers on 9/11, and the finale aired just four days before the tenth anniversary of the attacks, which came up throughout the final season.
  • While The Shield was usually good about avoiding this, only making a few references to current events, it still slipped and let its 2000s-ness show on occasion. One of the characters nearly loses her job after she makes racist remarks to an Arab woman whose husband was killed by a racist after 9/11, references are made regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California, and there's a reference to the housing crisis in the last couple of episodes of the series.
• The George Lopez Show has a problem with this, especially with plots regarding the children:
  • Several episodes have revolved around Carmen's (and less often, Max) instant messaging causing problems for her. At the time, social networks had not quite caught on and there still were fears that online chatrooms were full of child predators. While internet safety is still an issue with especially for teens, regulations have changed due to the increasing prevalence of social media.
  • Another sign of the show being a product of the 2000s was its episodes about George's father-in-law Vic, and the latter's background as an immigrant from Castro-era pre-Thaw Cuba. Many episodes have Vic and Angie speak of Castro in the present tense, especially when discussing his rule over Cuba. One episode, in particular, has George, Ernie, and Vic attempting to rescue Vic's brother Octavio after Castro refused to allow him (Octavio) to leave the island. Another episode has George buy Angie tickets to Cuba to see her grandmother's village. Angie tells George that she promised her father that she would not visit Cuba unless Castro was out of power. Both of these episodes were released in 2003, which clearly date the show to before Castro's stepping down in 2008 and death in 2016.
  • In "Dubya, Dad and Dating", Carmen protests George W. Bush and the Iraq War when the president makes a speech at the factory, which is treated as irresponsible teenage behavior and only serves to embarrass George at work. This episode came out in 2003, right before public opinions on Bush's presidency and the Iraq War had nosedived and most shows and sitcoms became highly critical of him.
• Gossip Girl: The show's first couple of seasons uses the fact that the principal characters use cell phones that can send pictures as a way of showing how rich and privileged they are. It's very telling that the eponymous columnist operates from a website rather than a social media account. Social media would probably make it hard for Gossip Girl to even exist, as the teens could probably just tweet the gossip themselves. With social media, it would make Serena's sudden disappearance to boarding school at the start of the series a little harder to take — it's easy to not return Blair's calls but ignoring her on social media would be tricky (MySpace is mentioned, but it wasn't as widely used as Twitter or Facebook would be), and Serena would not have been able to completely avoid her friends that way. Additionally Jenny is a budding fashion designer and has to pay her dues sorting thumbtacks at an internship — whereas in the age of social media she could easily promote her dresses through Facebook, Instagram, and/or Pinterest. She does have a brief storyline in Season 2 where she and a model called Agnes try to market her dresses online, but they need Agnes's photographer friend to take high-quality pictures. Overall the flamboyant lifestyle reeks of a pre-2008 recession age. More superficially, the soundtrack is comprised of the most notable pop hits of the day.
• Video game documentary series Icons obviously contains multiple dated references. However, some episodes really stand out. For example, the one where Everquest is hailed as the biggest MMORPG, when by the mid-2000s it had been overthrown by World of Warcraft, or how their Insomniac Games episode focuses heavily on pre-third party Spyro the Dragon and ends on the new Ratchet & Clank (2002).
• VH1:
  • The I Love the... series sparked a wave of "celebrity-bashing" shows often featuring lesser-known comedians and the odd forgotten celebrity, an influence that extended to not only VH1, but also many other cable channels by the second half of the decade. In a few years however, insulting celebs in general with no apparent motive became unfashionable (unless one did or said anything controversial) and much of the very politically-incorrect humor would be considered "unfit" for mainstream media. This even extends to the series' New Millennium installment, which was made in 2008, before the decade it was supposed to be nostalgically looking back on was even over, which presented some problems in hindsight. That specific special is fascinating now as a time capsule for what people thought would be memorable and lasting about, say, 2007; some things apply, but some look laughably dated, even just a year or two down the road. And yet, it's almost more apt for the sort of nostalgia the show was made for. VH1 made up for that special's short-comings in 2014 with I Love the 2000s.
  • Many of the "countdown" specials the network made in the 2000s, like The Greatest... and [random number, usually 40 or 50] Most Awesomely Bad... (the latter of which was another "celebrity-bashing" platform for the network) fell victim to his trope. Some of the Greatest... countdowns would become dated based on changing opinions — 100 Greatest Songs Of The 90s (aired in 2007) was topped by Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", while a few years later the choice would have been a (pop) song from the late-90s (e.g. the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way"), while the Most Awesomely Bad... specials would eventually become dated with several of the artists and/or songs featured becoming Vindicated by History, and because of the fact that, within a few years, insulting celebs in general with no apparent motive, unless they did or said anything controversial, would be considered "unfit" for mainstream media.
• Sometime in the early 2000s, TV Guide made a list of the "worst TV shows of all time." It would have been a timeless piece had it not been for the fact that the list was topped by The Jerry Springer Show, a show that was still relevant at the time, but slowly began to fade out of relevance as the novelty of tabloid talk shows began to become a normality with the rise of more "trashy" reality TV shows.
• Malcolm in the Middle has landlines being used to make calls (the family on the show probably wouldn't have been able to afford cell phones anyway), the boys playing with Game Boy Color systems, a soundtrack of Pop Punk songs, very early-noughties hairstyles such as Reese's spiky frosted tips and Malcolm's faux-hawk, a subplot involving a Dance Dance Revolution-type game in one episode, and many other details that date it to the early 2000s.
• Pick out any episode of any MTV reality show from the 2000s, and you will find an encapsulation of the decade's flashy pop culture.
  • Becoming featured fans remaking the music videos of their favourite artists. While some of the artists imitated have endured over the years (Britney Spears, Eminem), a lot of them quickly faded away like O-Town, B2K, Dream — and it was a time when Justin Timberlake was more famous for being part of N*Sync. The show is a time capsule of what music was popular in the early 2000s, as well as a time when MTV was still, at the very least, known for being a music channel first.
  • MTV Cribs was a show built entirely around exploring the lifestyles of the rich and famous by exploring their homes. Not only did its existence speak to the worship of luxury and celebrity that helped define pop culture in that decade, but the style and technology in the homes were often so 2000s it hurt.
  • My Super Sweet Sixteen also hearkens back to an era, pre-Great Recession and Occupy movement, when flaunting immense wealth was in style and something it was thought there was even a point-and-laugh audience for.
  • Pimp My Ride's main aesthetic was a mix of The Fast and the Furious and mid-decade Glam Rap. The titular Pimped Out Cars all resemble something out of one of its host Xzibit's music videos, with giant rims, bright paint jobs, massive sound systems, and video game consoles (all from the Sixth or Seventh Generation) installed.
  • Teen Mom would become a relic of the teen pregnancy "epidemic" of the 2000s, a time when underage sex was constantly in the news.
• MythBusters has good rewatch value due to the 'Busters' scientific rigorousness, but several of their experiments are inspired by then-popular viral videos (i.e: the 200,000-piece Lego ball, the model car outrunning the real car), and movie & TV-based myths (none of which are any more recent than the mid-'00s).
• Nathan Barley is overwhelmingly an example of Values Resonance, since Nathan's obnoxiously over-featured mobile phone and vocation as a minor internet prank video celeb turned out to be well ahead of his time, rather than the passing fad the show's creators were expecting his lifestyle to be. However, it's weird watching bell-bottom low-slung jeans coupled with boxer shorts an inch below the armpits, transparent technology, and the extreme sports and anime aesthetics coexisting with characters that appear like modern hipsters, the overall feel coming off like a Retro Universe version of The New '10s as imagined by people in the 2000s who have had that decade's culture described to them but not shown. The most obvious anachronism is Dan's horrid style magazine, Sugar Ape, which represented an industry and young contemporary art scene that (thanks to the Recession and the internet) stopped existing only a few years after the show aired. Nathan's conspicuous consumption and limitless (implicitly parental) money supply is also something you would not see in a modern hipster portrayal, who, even if they were moneyed, would be trying to appear guilty about it. (A second series with a more 'Millennial' tone, showing Nathan being cut off from his money and trying to get a house, was floated but never made.) What really jumps out is that the Hosegate idiots are shown to be doing what they do as self-expression rather than an exercise in branding or getting clicks — even the sleazy magazine boss seems to feel part of a legitimate art scene.
• NCIS, being a Long Runner, is certain to have a few of these, such as when a beleaguered Abby is requested to examine a 1 terabyte hard drive, and snaps at Palmer, “Do you know how big that is?” A 2020s viewer is certainly thinking, “The bare minimum baseline for a non-SSD desktop?”
• Never Did Me Any Harm — a short-lived British documentary series where a father forces his four boys to conform to 1950s style discipline — is instantly recognizable as a 2000s show. The oldest boy Theo is instantly recognizable as a 2000s death metal lover, social media is never mentioned, the family's TV is analog and the games consoles they have all look outdated. One hilarious sequence has The Dandy of the family Joe enduring a Traumatic Haircut to get a short Edwardian-style cut worn by "Teddy Boys". He whines about it looking "so old-fashioned", when those haircuts briefly came back into fashion a few years later.
• A lot of 2000s shows on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel are becoming this, especially ones from the early 2000s. Technology in the 2000s changed rapidly, so you can tell when a show was made by what they're showing.
  • Lizzie McGuire features fashion and hairstyles that are very clear products of their time, as well as Lizzie, Miranda, and Gordo using landlines to make three-way phone calls to each other, Lizzie's excitement at meeting Aaron Carter and Frankie Muniz, both of whom were the biggest male teen stars at the time,Lizzie wanting to emulate Britney Spears in the "Oops I Did it Again" video, the use of AIM as a method of communication, and a soundtrack with songs by artists such as Michelle Branch and Destiny's Child all make it a very clear time capsule of 2000-2002.
  • Drake & Josh, particularly in the case of Drake, whose devil-may-care personality might be perceived as borderline lecherous and narcissistic in the more straitlaced 2010s (the fact he fronts a garage rock band has become quite dated as well); this would not be helped by Drake Bell's accusations and subsequent conviction of sexual relations with underage girls in 2021. Meanwhile, the timid Josh was often the fall guy for his half-brother's schemes, much in line with stereotypes about these kinds of characters during the 2000s.
  • Hannah Montana, being a show about a white teenage female Idol Singer in a blonde wig, not only dates itself via Hannah's (and nearly any teenage character present) mid-to-late 2000s fashions and the notion of "pop princess" as being like Hilary Duff, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in image, but through including then-current pop culture references to the likes of Orlando Bloom, Lady Gaga, guest star Jesse Mc Cartney, American Idol, Katy Perry, Coldplay vs. Radiohead (while both bands were formed in The '90s, they wouldn't become well-known in the US until the late 2000s), Dr. Phil, the gossip culture of the day (such as Perez Hilton and TMZ), Barack Obama and Kelly Clarkson, among others, and well as then-fellow Disney Channel stars.
  • iCarly looks dated to around 2005/2006 due to the long time between the first season was produced and its 2007 premiere. This happened because of the in-universe response of it being "crazy" and unexpected that the characters could create, film, and have their videos go "viral" and that tens of thousands of people will watch them. By 2007, YouTube had already established the YouTube Partnership program which enabled popular web stars to make a lot of money via YouTube advertising and by the turn of the 2010s there were new viral videos and memes being hatched weekly.
    • The revival manages to keep feeling dated at least for the web show portion. Carly would be far more likely to have returned to content creation as a twitch live streamer, and it would be all but impossible to return to using the original iCarly website for anything but a redirect to twitch or youtube. The rest of the show is very much updated to go along with the millenial audience which might be approaching their 40s, with better racial diversity, adding LGBT characters and keying into many millenial character tropes.
  • While avoiding (or at least, parodying) many of the traditional tropes of Nickelodeon's tween-coms of the era, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide is still an obscenely mid-2000s time capsule thanks to the lack of social media or the scarcity of cellphones in the middle school environment (Ned himself only gets a phone during the final season and rarely uses it), along with lacking modern technology schools use (Cookie's tech-savvy credentials are confirmed by his having a laptop with 1 terabyte hard drive, at a time most computers had 40 to 60 GB disk space... at best). The "garage rock" (read: The Hives, The Strokes and Green Day)-inspired soundtrack and the school kids' fashion sense (low-rise jeans and fuchsia for the girls, high-waisted trousers and hockey shirts for the boys) just confirm it is a product of the times in case there was any doubt.
  • The Brothers García, to the point that it almost feels like a That Nostalgia Show in the style of The Wonder Years for the early 2000s. The TV set is analog, VHS and CDs are used, the kids use the house landline rather than cellphones, Carlos' Spiky Hair was all the rage with teens at the time, and Lorena freely references the hottest pop stars of the time (some, such as Britney Spears and Janet Jackson, would continue being popular in later years, but others, such as Macy Gray and Mandy Moore, would fade into obscurity). Likewise, the video game technology contains Bland Name Products versions of the PlayStation 2 and the Game Boy Color, and an episode has George fantasizing about a Lara Croft Expy at the height of her presence in pop culture.
• Mind of Mencia comes across as this for the mid to late 2000s. Mencia frequently parodies celebrities and public figures such as Paris Hilton and George W. Bush.
• The Office (US) is one for the mid-late 2000s/very early 2010s, especially with regards to the technology and pop culture references. In Season 2, the most coveted gift at the office secret Santa exchange is an iPod 5G (and understandably so: Ryan remarks that it costs $400). Jim and Pam's wedding in season six is an extended Shout-Out to a then-popular YouTube video. Characters are frequently shown using BlackBerries and flip phones, and several storylines center on Dunder Mifflin's declining sales in a world full of big-box retailers, and later on, the rise of online shopping and the increasing move towards being more "paperless".
• Parking Wars ran from 2008 to 2011. On top of the 2000s-era parking meters and phones, Blockbuster is also featured in several episodes.
• S Club 7 and their TV show has several plots that date it to the 2000s.
  • The main premise — a struggling pop band trying to make it in America — and the group don't market themselves online, through YouTube or Facebook. In the first season, they're easily conned and tricked into working for what they think is a luxury hotel in Miami, when a quick Google search could have told them it was a dump. There's a lack of cellphones among the group, which causes entire episodes involving them getting stranded somewhere or separated from everyone else.
  • An episode of LA 7 has Paul getting them to make a movie, and the joke is that he shoots it all on a cheap video camera. Fast forward a few years when home technology has advanced, and that would actually be a rather sensible idea. And in LA 7 and Hollywood 7 the group try to find a manager and then shoot their first video — whereas with today's technology they'd try to shoot their own videos first in the hopes of attracting a manager.
  • The movie Seeing Double also has as its plot a mad scientist trying to clone the pop stars of the world. S Club, in particular, have their clones trotted out on stage while the real ones are stranded in Barcelona. Such a thing would be harder to pull off in the days of smartphones and social media, and the group could have exposed the ruse much sooner. Among the pop stars cloned include Gareth Gates, (runner-up to the first season of Pop Idol), Michael Jackson (who passed in 2009) and Posh Spice (who was still sort of releasing music at the time before she ultimately focused on her businesses instead). The film also has a Take That! to Tom Green who was still mainstream at the time. The movie also references "President Bush".
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers Wild Force: The Rangers' Transformation Trinkets being flip phones is enough to tell you that this show came out in 2002. However, what really dates it is the handling of environmentalism during the arc that focuses on Kite/Animus, whose views on humanity's relationship with nature where considered outdated even back then.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Storm: The season features slang, technology, music and a focus on extreme sports that were much more common in the early 2000s.
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder: Kira's look is very much inspired by the punk rock aesthetic that was very popular during the time period, especially among singers like Avril Lavigne. Modern viewers will also notice the use of flip phones and may even be surprised at the regular hang out spot being a cyber café of all things.
• Certain episodes of Reba make it pretty clear it was made during the Turn of the Millennium. Not only do the characters occasionally refer to what year it is, one of the major characters during the first couple of seasons gets a lot of praise from Laugh Track audience because she was on American Idol, and game systems such as the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Xbox get mentioned semi-frequently. Though, oddly, there's no mention of the PlayStation 2. Apparently, Reba's not a Sony fan...
• Screenwipe is a "programme all about [British] television", but as it was in the late 2000s. As well as reviews of specific shows that were airing at the time, most of which have been forgotten by history, it's a good time capsule of telelvision as it was after the boom of reality TV and the launch of multichannels but before streaming services gained popularity.
• Scrubs:
  • While the show's portrayal of doctors and medical interns is applicable to any time period, the show has otherwise become a 2000s time capsule thanks to the lack of social media and references to 2000s pop culture cornerstones like House, along with Sacred Heart Hospital lacking more modern technology hospitals today use. The "adult-alternative" (read: Joseph Arthur, post-Men at Work Colin Hay, Shawn Mullins, the Eels) soundtrack and the presence of flip phones just confirm it is a product of the 2000s in case there was any doubt.
  • One episode centered around The War on Terror when a soldier previously wounded in Iraq was admitted to the hospital and his presence caused a rift between pro-war and anti-war hospital residences, and Dr. Kelso's attempts to control the situation. At one point, Kelso also attempts to control the situation by bringing up the then-recent news that Pluto had been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet. Oh, and at the end of the episode, The Janitor says that he believes the US should look for Osama bin Laden (then at large) in Pakistan.
• Skins will always be rooted in that time in the mid-late 2000s when teenage sexual mores in Britain were almost at a national crisis point and chlamydia was a standing joke; the expression "Skins party" left the lexicon almost as soon as it arrived. Interestingly, they actively tried to avert this by refreshing the core cast every two seasons; instead, this resulted in each generation feeling even more specific to its own period. (Cook's episode in season 4 frequently features Rock Band 2, something Tony would never conceive of and Nick would consider passé.)
• The Smoking Room: The series can be dated to the early-to-mid 2000s by the appearances of both the characters and the titular room, by the relatively nonchalant attitude the other characters have to Robin's sexuality, and by the fact that the smoking room exists (an indoor smoking ban took effect in England in 2007, and indoor office smoking rooms were thereafter prohibited).
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "11:59", Janeway mentions how the Y2K problem was nothing to worry about, and neglects to mention anything else notable around the beginning of the 21st century, such as the World Trade Center attacks, or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, although this might be as much a product of information loss following a nuclear World War 3 in 2053, or because there is an alternative timeline where those events didn't take place, but where fictional events like a successful terrorist campaign to reunify Ireland in 2024 did.
• Star Trek: Enterprise is clearly a product of the early Aughts. Two of the main characters are strongly reminiscent of George W. Bush, Trip physically and Captain Archer in mannerism. The main villains of the first two seasons are the subtly named "Suliban". The third season opens with what could accurately be described as 9/11 in space, and contains a subplot where alien terrorists attempt to deploy a biological WMD in the United States (reminiscent of the 2001 Anthrax attacks). Another subplot involved Vulcans contracting the psychic equivalent of AIDS and included an overt PSA during the final commercial break.
• The $treet (which aired on Fox in 2000) firmly dates itself to the pre-decentralization of Wall Street by having the characters reference it as something that's new and alien to them. One episode has a Writing Around Trademarks-knockoff of Viagra (only this time, it's a gender-flipped equivalent) that's played up as the hottest thing to hit pharmaceuticals in decades. Additionally, it has several moments of Technology Marches On (characters talking up Palm Pilots) and references to works like Gattaca and Xena: Warrior Princess.
• Armando Iannucci has repeatedly said that he will never make any more of The Thick of It despite requests because it belongs to a 2000s age of political discourse, when there was still a curtain to hide things behind, and still a general feeling that the political system worked despite its many flaws. Even the fourth series, which features the Coalition^note An unusual joint government between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats (a result of the growing resentment towards the political class brought upon by the fallout of the Iraq War, the financial crisis and the MP expenses scandal) and an increased role of social media, comes off as charmingly dated in the 'dumpster fire' political discourse of the mid-2010s.
• That'll Teach Em — a British reality show about modern teens enduring 1950s schooling — dates itself immediately as a 2000s show. For one, it was made during the height of Point And Laugh Shows that involved bratty teenagers being punished on a routine basis. The trend died out as soon as the decade ended and there was a collective backlash against what amounted to child abuse for entertainment. More superficially the teens wore then-current fashions which look slightly dated now. Hilariously the boys all have to get "Teddy Boy" short-back-and-sides haircuts, most of whom complain about them looking so old fashioned. Said haircuts would briefly come back into fashion during The New '10s.
• 30 Rock:
  • If you ever need a refresher on what was happening in 2006-2007, watch the first season. A particularly good example is in the episode "The Fighting Irish", when Pete tells Liz that "you look like that lady astronaut who tried to kidnap that other woman." This refers to a then-headline news story involving Lisa Nowak, which you either forgot about or never heard of.
  • The first two seasons make several jokes about the Bush administration and the upcoming 2008 election. They even managed an accidental It Will Never Catch On joke when Jenna hears that Barack Obama is black and sarcastically dismisses the idea that he has a chance of becoming president.
• Trailer Park Boys firmly became this in Canada after the legalization of marijuana in October of 2018, firmly setting the series for good as a depiction of 2000s-era weed culture.
• Train Man (2004) screams early-to-mid 2000s Otaku culture in Japan. Various stores that appear in the background at scenes that take place in Akiba, most notably electronic stores, have since been replaced by game centers/arcades and anime-related stores that became prevalent after Otaku culture was de-stigmatized. The lack of smartphones and social media is also telling. In fact, part of why Otaku culture was de-stigmatized has to do with the success of the franchise.
• Ugly Betty is rooted to the mid-to-late-2000s by nature of its premise revolving around the titular character working for a fashion magazine, with fashion that screams that era. Some of the songs featured also date the series to the 2000s, ranging from "Good Girls Go Bad" to "Boom Boom Pow", and the episode "The Bahamas Triangle" is partially revolved around a guest appearance from Shakira.
• Although Veronica Mars aged remarkably well in many other respects, the use of technology such as flip phones grounds the show firmly in the mid-2000s. There are also plot points that wouldn't work in the era of smartphones, such as when Veronica's father asks her to send him a photo of the art gallery where she claimed she was, and she has time to rearrange all the pictures on the walls of the motel room she's actually in before taking a picture with her camera, uploading it to her computer, and emailing it to him. In modern times he would get suspicious if he didn't receive a smartphone selfie from her within a minute. There's also an episode when Veronica uses a webcam, and in her voiceover explains what a webcam is with the assumption that most of the audience would be unfamiliar with this technology.
• The bullet time scenes in Walking with Beasts (2001) immediately peg the series as having been produced soon after The Matrix (1999) hit theatres. The fact that this gimmick was copied in a Nature Documentary on prehistoric life produced by The BBC is the perfect example of how much impact this movie had at the time.
• Although The West Wing doesn't technically take place in our timeline, being a political show, its episodes often focus on politically relevant topics of its time (the late 1990s and early 2000s). At the same time, a lot of the topics are still relevant today. For example:
  • The subplot about the space shuttle Columbia in the 1st season finale (in 2000) is definitely Harsher in Hindsight considering that in 2003 it disintegrated while coming back to Earth, killing everyone on board.
  • One early episode focuses on the US military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gay people serving in the military. This can easily be dated to when it was made, since the policy was overturned in 2010.
  • The attacks on 9/11 came just before the third season began. The first episode was a Very Special Episode hastily written to address the anti-Muslim sentiments in the aftermath of the attacks, and the third and fourth seasons in particular are heavily influenced by 9/11. Watching these episodes nowadays, you almost have to remind yourself that this was how people felt at the time.
  • Many of the characters are expies of real-life politicians of the era: Governor Ritchie is George W. Bush, Dr. Jenna Jacobs is Doctor Laura, Matt Santos is Barack Obama (two years before he ran for President, mind you).
  • As Vox TV critic/reviewer Emily St. James pointed out on the series' 20th anniversary, the politics of the show was a pretty good encapsulation of the center-left/bipartisan way of thinking where the "best idea wins", where globalisation is good for the country and feeling like politics had reached the democratic, neoliberal "end of history" in the western world. While that centrist ideal did manage to look good for some of the Obama era, there was a brutal snap-back as right wing populism, funded by billionaires & massive corporations seeking to reduce taxes & regulations, saw the rise of Donald Trump, the UK voting yes to Brexit and a surge in votes for far-right nationalist parties in much of Europe.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?, by nature of being an improv show, dates strongly to the era it was filmed in—especially the American show. The ABC version with Drew Carey was filmed between 1998 and 2001 (the last filming date being a few days before 9/11). And as expected, it's full of Clinton jokes (especially references to the Monica Lewinsky scandal). There are references to the Firestone tires debacle, South Park, The Blair Witch Project, Britney Spears, boy bands, Survivor's explosive popularity, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (there was even a game based on it), and jokes about George W. Bush's pop cultural perception as a dunce. And the choice of artists used in Greatest Hits often dates to the time as well. And the endless jokes about Friends, which aired opposite from it on NBC. The CW revival will soon be dated as well, in the same ways.
• The Wire:
  • The technology used dates it pretty firmly to its 2002-08 run. In Season 1, the detail's investigation into the Barksdale Organization is driven by cracking their network of pager signals to justify wiretaps on pay phones the gang uses to communicate. By Season 2, the street has transitioned to burner cell phones ("the latest in yo-tech" in Kima's words) — to the surprise of many cops (who don't realize how cheap phones have gotten), and the Greek is using text messages on a BlackBerry. As the series goes on, the crooks get more sophisticated in using mobile technology — and the cops get ever more sophisticated in using the technology to track them down. It's also dated to the 2000s by the absence of two key technologies: true smartphones and social media.
  • In season 3, Major Colvin sets up several illegal free drug zones in the Western district of Baltimore, which he manages to keep a secret from his superiors for several weeks. In the 2020s, this would be impossible due to increases in inner city surveillance and smart phone cameras and recording devices. Colvin's project would be public knowledge within a day or so.
  • Starting in Season 3, there's increased reference to the Police Department's "ComStat" system for tracking police performance (a fictionalized version of the CitiStat system actually implemented in the early 2000s, based on New York's CompStat). While data-driven policing is still a thing (and CitiStat still exists in Baltimore), the arrests-driven approach is definitely an artifact of the 2000s, before more recent policy trends towards criminal justice reform.
  • Season 4 makes heavy reference to the "No Child Left Behind Act" and its effects upon the education system.
  • Throughout the series, street-level dealers gave their product topical brand names like "Troop Surge", "WMDs", and "Pandemic" (i.e. bird flu).
  • Several figures are slightly time-shifted No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of late 1990s-early 2000s Baltimore pols:
    • The most prominent is Tommy Carcetti, a white councilman who becomes Mayor of Baltimore and then Governor of Maryland, who is a pretty obvious stand-in for Martin O'Malley. O'Malley did the same thing 1999-2007, although, to his credit, O'Malley served two full terms as Mayor before seeking the governorship rather than skipping out after two years like Carcetti.
    • Council President (and Carcetti's eventual successor) Nerese Campbell appears modeled on Sheila Dixon, who was Council President during O'Malley's term as Mayor and eventually succeeded him.
    • The unnamed antagonistic Republican governor is a pretty transparent parody of Bob Ehrlich, who was governor during O'Malley's second term as mayor.
• Occasionally, Yes, Dear is a time capsule of late 90s and early 2000s child culture, featuring references to such shows as The Wiggles and Blue's Clues, with the former episode having the then-current Greg/Jeff/Anthony/Murray lineup guest-starring and with the latter episode even having Sammy watching said show using a VHS tape. In addition, one episode's plot was centered around Emily Warner's birth being covered by A Baby Story, a popular reality show during that era.

Music

• Several songs which came out shortly after the 9/11 attacks, including a great deal in the often-patriotic Country Music genre.
  • "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" by Toby Keith. This one has a fair bit of Narm Charm, and someday Americans will look back on it and swear that it must have been a parody. (Some have thought that from the beginning.)
  • "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?" by Alan Jackson is a subversion, in that it's framed as a look back to that important day.
  • "This Ain't No Rag, It's a Flag" by Charlie Daniels.
  • Taking a detour into Hip-Hop Protest Song territory, "Makeshift Patriot" by Sage Francis, a critique of the media and government response to 9/11.
  • And bridging the gap between it and the Iraq War was Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" It can be jarring to hear him singing "And you say we shouldn't worry 'bout Bin Laden" in modern times, which few people really said at the time. The most cringe-worthy line is about vowing to "get what's behind bin Laden"- meaning Saddam Hussein. In a few years, we would discover that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and his involvement with al-Qaeda was mainly turning a blind eye while they operated training camps in Iraq. And that's all that will be said about that. But there's a reason why you don't hear this song anymore; the US pulled out of Iraq in 2011, and it's hard to "worry 'bout bin Laden" anymore now that he's dead.
• A less polemic example from Worley is the late 2004-early 2005 "Awful, Beautiful Life", which despite otherwise being a fairly Slice of Life song, contains the line "We said a prayer for cousin Michael in Iraq / We're all aware that he may never make it back..."
• Phil Vassar's 2002 hit "American Child" has the line "My grandfather would've been 80 today / But in '45 he fell down beside an American child..."
• "1985", originally recorded by SR-71 and later Covered Up by Bowling for Soup in 2004, is a song about a middle-aged soccer mom who was raised in The '80s and is still stuck in that era, nostalgic for how much better things seemed back then compared to her boring life in the present. Her tastes in music and fashion are contrasted with modern trends like Nirvana, Limp Bizkit, Reality TV, and Ozzy Osbourne becoming better known as an actor and TV personality than a musician, references that were already becoming quite dated by 2004. In 2024, Billy Cobb would record a cover called "2005" that updated the pop culture references and pointed out that the song was now older than the year 1985 was when the Bowling for Soup version came out.
• The Beastie Boys' album To the 5 Boroughs, with its numerous criticisms of George W. Bush's first term, falls squarely into this territory.
• Lemon Demon's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" is very much a product of the mid-2000s internet and Generation X's nostalgia, particularly with the reverence given to Memetic Badass Chuck Norris ("Chuck Norris Facts" having spread across the internet around 2005), and the winner of the Ultimate Showdown being Mister Rogers. The Flash-animated official music video on Newgrounds also features a number of dated visual references, including Samuel L. Jackson being attacked by snakes, Tobias Fünke covered in blue paint, and Eric Bauman being punched in the face by Lowtax.
• Big Time Rush's "Boyfriend" contains references to both late-2000s hit films Slumdog Millionaire and The Twilight Saga.
• The Black Eyed Peas:
  • The music video for "Where Is The Love?" features posters for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City being covered up and a group of children playing Postal 2. Given the song's anti-violence message, the inclusion of the games was likely a reference to the then-popular belief that video games are to blame for turning people violent.
  • "Boom Boom Pow" features the line "I'm so three-thousand-and-eight, you so two-thousand-and-late!"
• Paula DeAnda's "Walk Away (Remember Me)" contains the lyrics "Does she know that you like to play PS2 'til 6 in the morning like I do?".
• Eminem:
  • The album The Marshall Mathers LP is such a hyperspecific portrait of the free speech debate of the year 2000, and of a moral panic about Eminem's music which has long since died down and seems quaint in retrospect, that it's borderline incomprehensible to people born after that year without having a Genius page open and a willingness to Google why Eminem was mad at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. One of the deepest cuts is Eminem's verse on "Bitch Please II", in which Eminem namedrops Billboard journalist Timothy White, who wrote an article about him saying he was 'profiting off the world's misery'.
  • "The Real Slim Shady" is quite obviously a product of its time, with references to Pamela Anderson, Tom Green, Fred Durst, and Will Smith's musical career.
  • "Marshall Mathers" is about Eminem complaining about the state of music in the year 2000. He starts by accusing mainstream rappers of being knockoffs of Biggie and Pac, continues by complaining about *NSYNC and Britney Spears (both of whom became Vindicated by History years later), and disses Insane Clown Posse... but the real moment of datedness is when he sings an offensive Song Parody of "Summer Girls" by LFO, a song and group that is nowadays forgotten (and if it is remembered, it's for its peculiar lyrics).
  • "White America" references Total Request Live in its chorus, firmly planting it in the early 2000s when MTV was at the peak of its cultural prominence, which would gradually die out by the end of the decade due to its already-unfolding Network Decay, and later on, competition from YouTube, which would render TRL obsolete.
  • "Without Me" references then-vice president Dick Cheney, how the FCC tried to take him off MTV, and then makes a series of Take Thats to artists who haven't been relevant in years, specifically Chris Kirkpatrick and Limp Bizkit, while Moby is dissed as an aging "has-been" (even stating the latter as being 36 years old). All of this screams 2002, the year "Without Me" was released. The video also sees him dressing like Osama Bin Laden.
    • Moreover, one of the pot-shots issued at Moby was the lyric "Nobody listens to techno". It was pretty accurate in 2002, when Electronic Music was a very niche thing in America (to the point that American DJs and electronic musicians had to go abroad to find success). Come to The New '10s, where EDM became a major genre and has permeated several different genres, EDM DJs are in high demand, and EDM festivals can pull in crowds numbering at over 100,000. Moby himself later noted in a 2016 interview how that particular lyric would be Hilarious in Hindsight later on: in 2013, even Eminem (whose dislike of techno was, apparently, sincere) would capitulate, releasing the techno-infused EDM rap "Rap God", which would become one of his Signature Songs.
  • "Mosh" is a protest song that was released as a single prior to the 2004 US Presidential election, and its lyrics heavily reflect that. Mention is made of Bin Laden still being considered a terrorist threat, Em voices frustrations about the Bush administration by saying that then-president George W. Bush should go fight in the Iraq War as a way to "impress daddy", and the final lyrics are of Em saying "Mr. President! Mr. Senator!", referencing the candidates of the 2004 US election (the aforementioned Bush, and Senator John Kerry). The music video even had two versions made (mainly just with different endings) and both are also equally as dated. The first one, released before the election, shows people reluctantly showing up to vote between Bush and Kerry. The second version, released after the election, shows protesters breaking into the US Capitol Building while Congress is in session with signs saying stuff like "Down with Bush!", something that might be seen as extremely tasteless, especially among the left-leaning audiences the song was aimed at, if replicated nowadays in the wake of the 2021 Capitol siege.
  • "Ass Like That" mentions Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who were at their peak in 2004 but became soon subject to Hype Backlash and eventually became forgotten, not to mention they're mentioned to be young adults. Even more noticeably, it mentions that Hilary Duff is underage, which would stop being the case just shy of one year later (which was lampshaded in the song's lyrics).
  • The 2004 song "Rain Man" has a verse in which Eminem mourns the then-recent death of Christopher Reeve (who frequently appeared in Eminem's sick punchlines). Eminem claims responsibility for the death by placing a Superman sticker inappropriately on the fridge and hexing him, and admits he only kept dissing him because his name rhymes with so many things.
  • The unreleased King Mathers album contains lots of material about Eminem despairing about the state of hip-hop in 2007, complaining that nobody buys albums any more ("look at Soundscan"), mocking the pop radio dominance of the now-Condemned by History "snap" and Glam Rap genres (by rapping in a fake southern accent about his candy-paint drenched car), and calling out the cultural insensitivity of The White Rapper Show, an unsuccessful reality TV show that aired during that same year.
  • A few songs released for Relapse: Refill can be identified as material intended for King Mathers from the references in them. In particular, "Careful What You Wish For" has an opening skit referencing the chaotic events of Eminem's personal life, mentioning the death of Proof, Obie Trice getting shot, and Eminem's own potential retirement from rapping. Notably, it doesn't mention Eminem nearly dying of an overdose, the event the rest of the Concept Album is about.
  • Relapse, released in 2009, contains multiple references to Kim Kardashian back when she was known for her sex tape while Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse are all brought up as drug-addicted trainwrecks rather than the Vindicated by History icons they became once people started seriously reckoning with the judgmental attitudes of the 2000s.
    • The video for "We Made You" shows Slim Shady making out with Amy and licking her rotten teeth, and another song says that Em's critics can "suck my dick with Amy Winehouse's teeth", referencing then-contemporary horror about Amy losing teeth due to her drug abuse. Once Amy died, the press that had torn her apart elevated her to a paragon and icon and this was all forgotten.
    • The video for "We Made You" is also a parody of the 2007-2009 MTV reality show Rock of Love, and contains references to Transformers (2007) and Guitar Hero. Eminem himself claimed it was an intentional period piece, and that his novelty hits are supposed to be 'snapshots' of everything going on in pop culture at that moment, so people in the future can look back at them and remember what was going on. He used this as justification for how the video features Slim Shady dressed as NFL player Tony Romo and humping "Fat Jessica Simpson" (played by Trisha Paytas), a reference to the then-"power couple", and the media trashing Simpson for being "fat" at that time.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • His 2003 song "Couch Potato" (a parody of "Lose Yourself" by Eminem) references many shows like Fear Factor, The Sopranos, and 24 that were popular at the time of its release, but the vast majority have since then either ended or greatly declined in popularity. It also boasts about his TV "being HD-ready", a feat that was much more impressive at that time, as HDTV became publicly available the previous year.
  • His 2006 song "White & Nerdy" sees the protagonist of the story saying that he has people begging to be in the Top Eight friend spaces on his MySpace page. It his also stated that he enjoys collecting comic books and action figures, as well as other classic nerd things like Star Wars, none of which — along with editing Wikipedia — would be bad marks against him in The New '10s. Another classic nerd thing mentioned is being in a glee club, which would become mainstream during the late-2000s/early-2010s due to the popularity of both High School Musical and Glee. The final thing listed that shows its a product of his age is that computer programming is seen as being nerdy — it would later become both a useful skill being taught in schools and a lucrative career field.
• Alan Jackson's 2000 single "www.memory", in addition to its title referencing the explosion of the Internet at the turn of the millennium, also features very 2000-looking graphics advertising an "alanjacksonmemory.com" site created as a tie-in to the single, plus a female protagonist driving around the video in a Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car model that was very popular at the time the song was released, but had mostly faded from the public consciousness by the time it ended production in 2010.
• Joy Electric's Favorites at Play, released in 2009. It's a Cover Album, except instead of covering the songs he considered influential (which would have resulted in yet another '80s nostalgia album), Ronnie Martin covered then-recent songs he liked. So the album is a weird little time capsule of songs that got played on the radio between 2003 and 2008.
• Ministry's trilogy of albums protesting the George W. Bush administration.
• Nine Inch Nails' 2007 Concept Album Year Zero, and its accompanying Alternate Reality Game, was firmly a satire of contemporary American politics, positing a dystopian 2022 where an America controlled by the Christian Right and the military has destroyed civil liberties and turned The War on Terror into a Forever War.
• Brad Paisley:
  • His 1999 debut "Who Needs Pictures" is an example of this. The song is about a man who discovers an undeveloped roll of film and declines developing it in favor of cherishing the memories of the pictures taken. Only a couple years later, those photos would probably be on a digital camera's memory card instead (still justifiable if he has no means of reading the card), and only a few years after that, they'd be trivially easy to access on a smartphone.
  • Defied by his 2007 single "Online", which originally contained the line "Go check out MySpace". In concert, he now changes this line to the more timely "Go check my Facebook page".
• Train's "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" mentions Tae Bo, a "cardio-boxing" program popular in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
• Gothic industrial band Lucid Dementia's 2008 album Trickery has a lot of Protest Songs, most of which relate to the Bush Administration and thinly veiled references to the Iraq War. It's especially noticeable when listening to their next album, released in 2013, which is mostly horror-themed and very light on politics.
• Weezer's "Pork and Beans" has a music video that references a bevy of internet memes, none more recent than 2008. The various references just scream, "Hey, remember when YouTube was still new?"
• Good Charlotte's hit "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" immediately dates itself with the lyrics "There's no such thing as 25 to life as long as you got the cash to pay for Cochran."
• Gym Class Heroes' "New Friend Request" is filled with MySpace references, including Tom and the Top 8.
• Blackhawk's 2000 single "I Need You All the Time" has the line "A call takes a quarter and dime". Payphones were raised from 25 to 35 cents in 1997, and they were already on their way out by the time the price jumped further to 50 cents in 2001.
• A Southern Rap group by the name of UTP Playas had a hit song from their debut album The Beginning of the End. The song, "Nolia Clap", had a simplistic dance and was named after the Magnolia Projects in New Orleans, which was also the location where the song's music video was shot. While its demolition had commenced as early as 1998, it wasn't until 2008 that the place was completely razed. Harmony Oaks would also later be built in 2011 where Nolia used to be.
• System of a Down's album Toxicity happened to be the number one album the week of 9/11, and its political views date it to its pre-War on Terror release. The most notable tracks are "Deer Dance", which references the anti-WTO protests in 1999, and "The Prison Song", which is dated by (a) the fact that prison reform and ending the War on Drugs have become a lot more mainstream since 2001, (b) the statistics are woefully out of date ("Nearly two million Americans are incarcerated in the prison system of the US." OK, sure...) and (c) the line "Utilizing drugs to pay for secret wars around the world", which is almost quaint, since the US has been fighting very expensive and very public wars since the album was released.
• In the patriotic fervor of the year following 9/11, New York City-based Hardcore Techno artist Omar Santana released the Sept. 11, 2001 EP under the alias American Hardcore Alliance featuring mixes by himself and fellow Americans Dre Hectik and DJ Sabotage of a gabber track that notably samples George W. Bush's address to the nation on the night of the attacks. Santana would later use his American Hardcore Alliance alias again in 2004 for the Nowhere To Hide EP celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein by coalition forces 4 months prior.
• "The Last Ten Years (Superman)" by Kenny Rogers, released in 2006, relates a lot of pop culture related to the decade prior to its release, including Y2K, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Oklahoma City bombings (1995), Bill Clinton's run-in with Monica Lewinsky (1995-96), the rise of cell phones, the dot-com boom and bust, reality television, rising gas prices, satellite radio, hybrid cars, and so forth. It also references the deaths of Charles M. Schulz (2000), Ray Charles (2004), Johnny Cash (2003), Minnie Pearl (1996), Ronald Reagan (2004), Dr. Seuss (1991), George Harrison (2001), Pope John Paul II (2005), June Carter Cash (2003), and Christopher Reeve (2004). It also contains the line "The best golfer's black, the best rapper's white, and it's about damn time", a line that may sit uncomfortably with some after Tiger Woods' infidelity fiasco in 2009.
• The Wilkinsons recorded the song "1999" in 2000, based around a "get with the program" hook of "This ain't 1999". It still could probably work if the target of the song is depicted as being very behind the times.
• The Herd's most political songs, "77%" and "The King Is Dead", are both diatribes against former Australian PM John Howard, and you can place both of them to the year they were released without any trouble; "77%" is about the Tampa affair of 2001, and "The King Is Dead" celebrates Howard's election loss in 2007.
• Ludacris' first single in 2000 "What's Your Fantasy" mentions the Georgia Dome, the then-home stadium of the Atlanta Falcons. With the Dome's demolition and replacement by Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2017, this song became a period piece.
• The video for the Matthew Good Band's song "Hello Time Bomb" features the lyric "My devil's on sugared smacks, down at the radio shack". This references the (then) well-known electronics chain Radio Shack, which is even shown off in the video (complete with a sign that says it's "Canada's Electronic Store"). At the time this video was released, the chain was already falling on hard times, closing off most of its concept stores and new locations in the late 90s and early 2000s. Fast-forward a few years, and the chain finally went bankrupt in 2015 in the face of stiff competition and mounting. While there are still a handful of locations around (known as "The Source"), Radio Shack is functionally gone from the public consciousness. Younger viewers of the video may not even know what the chain in question actually was.
• L33tStr33t Boys' song "Yuri The Only One" is an almost perfect time capsule of the anime and gaming fandoms circa 2008. It consists of copious references to Chobits, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Playstation 3, Wii, Ranma ½, Final Fantasy, and other things that were most relevant during the late-2000s.
• FM Static's "Definitely Maybe" is a Break-Up Song about a guy trying to date a girl with a cheating boyfriend. It has the line "I saw what happened all those times he went for water when we were at the movie theater watching Harry Potter", which dates it to when the films were still coming out.
• Morrissey's "America Is Not the World" suggests that the singer won't respect America until they've had a black President. In 2004, that probably seemed far-fetched, but just one election cycle later Barack Obama made it a reality. Even better, the singer also suggests a female President as an alternative for gaining his respect, years before Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the closest runner-up to becoming the 2008 Democratic candidate and then the Democratic candidate for 2016.
• MC Lars' song "iGeneration" refers specifically to the earlier half of millennials, the ones that were in their late teens and early twenties in the 2000s (although the iGen moniker would be later used to refer to the centennial generation). It's also a pre-MySpace song with references to DVDs and the internet, but no social media or YouTube.
• Minor example from "I Wanna Do It All" by Terri Clark. An early line in the song mentions "jotting things down on a Krispy Kreme sack", which seems like a generational-specific reference, given that Krispy Kreme had its explosive international growth around this time before overexpansion and Executive Meddling caused the chain to withdraw severely.
• The Arctic Monkeys' debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not contains several lines and references that date it easily to the mid-2000s:
  • The opening track "The View From The Afternoon" has the line, When she's pressed the star after she's pressed unlock, which is a reference to the key sequence for unlocking several models of then-hugely-popular Nokia mobile phones. Only a few years later, Nokia's dominance would start to fade with the rise of the iPhone and (outside of North America) Samsung smartphones, and using a PIN, pattern or even biometrics to unlock a phone began to take over.
  • "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured" name-drops Smirnoff Ice and Tropical Reef as drinks. Again, very popular for a few years, before disappearing almost entirely.
    • In general, many of the songs reference things common to the binge drinking culture that reached its height in the mid-2000s.
  • Not even the sleeves would be immune to this: “I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor”’s cover features a sign clearly saying that the selling of tobacco products is illegal to under-16s. The age limit would be bumped up to 18 in 2007.
  • "A Certain Romance" describes the targets of the song's ire as wearing Classic Reeboks, or knackered Converse, or tracky bottoms tucked in socks, which was briefly fashionable among some groups of people when the album was released. The song also derisively claims that "There's only music so that there are new ringtones" when ringtones of or sounding like popular songs was a trend that faded out towards the end of the decade.
• The music video for Limp Bizkit's "Rollin'" features the band playing atop the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The band actually received a letter from the owners of the World Trade Center congratulating them after they won "Best Rock Video" at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards... a letter that they received on September 10, 2001.
• Feeder's "Buck Rogers" mentions a Cool Car having a CD player at a time when most car stereos had tape players. Car stereos with CD players became more ubiquitous as the decade went, but were quickly eclipsed by smart devices during the 2010s.
• A rankings version - the Blender 50 Worst Songs Ever list (along with a similar list done in cooperation with VH1 around the same time), released in 2003, is mostly comprised of a bunch of 80s and 90s songs — a good chunk of which have since been Vindicated by History (such as Europe's "The Final Countdown", Spin Doctors' "Two Princes" and 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up?"), practically acting as an unintentional time capsule of the constant ragging on cheesy 80s songs and (non-Grunge) 90s songs in the early-to-mid 2000s. Some of the choices particularly reflect which artists were deemed okay to be pop culture punching bags at the time (such as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, choices that nowadays wouldn't be seen as politically correct).
• Saliva's "Click Click Boom" has Josey Scott rapping that you won't "hear no crying-ass bitching" from them, unlike "what seems to be on everybody's CD". Music streaming services and the vinyl revival would later displace CDs as the dominant form of music releases.
• It can even happen in other languages. Mexican emo-rock group Allison's song "Memorama" features the lyric "Triste es / de pronto ver tu MySpace / y ver que ya no estoy / en tu top", which translates to "It's so sad / to suddenly open your MySpace / and see that I'm not on your top friends anymore". Only a very specific age group would even know what MySpace was or how the ranking system worked.
• The Tom Smith song "Tech Support For Dad" includes the line "Turns out he got his Compaq before Clinton was impeached". Compaq ceased to exist as an independent brand in 2002, and Clinton was impeached in 1998. Given how Technology Marches On, a computer from 1997 at the latest (July 1995 being more likely as the oldest possible timestamp given that another line mentions that it still has Windows 3.1 installed rather than Windows 95 or one of its successor operating systems) would be aging but servicable in 2000, and a certified relic by the end of the decade. Since the point of that line is to show how hopelessly obsolete the tech-illiterate dad's computer is, the increasingly dated period reference actually makes the song funnier as the years go by.
• A small boy band named LMNT released a song called "Juliet" in 2002. That song references a pager in the line "I tried to page you twice". Not too long after the song was released, cell phones would end up completely replacing pagers as the go-to wireless telecommunications device.
• The music video for the Crookers Remix of Kid Cudi's "Day 'n' Nite", released in 2008, features an Emo Teen group and Zoo Magazine (a "lad's mag" that stopped publishing in 2014).
• Basshunter's "Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA", or "We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA". Released in 2006, Ventrilo has since been superseced by TeamSpeak and much later, Discord, while DotA has received a standalone-software sequel, DOTA 2, as well as a far more commercially successful competitor, League of Legends. The music video itself, which depicts Basshunter and some friends performing the titular activity, is basically a time capsule of mid-2000s PC gaming culture.

Pinball

• The 2006 Stern World Poker Tour is a reminder of just how popular Poker (especially Texas Hold 'Em) was in this decade.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Robin Williams' 2002 comedy special Live on Broadway encapsulates the zeitgeist of the post-September 11th/pre-Iraq War period, with Robin discussing different topics such as the security measures enacted after the September 11th attacks and the war with Afghanistan, as well as gags about Lance Armstrong, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, and the Enron scandal.
  • His final special, Weapons of Self-Destruction in 2009, focuses on the first year of Barack Obama's administration, which includes humorously recapping the events that took place between Live on Broadway up to and including the beginning of the Great Recession, and ends with a joke delivered by Robin playing Walter Cronkite, who'd recently died.

Tabletop Games

• Age of Aquarius Second Edition is easily identifiable as "so 2000s". Or, as Russians are more likely to identify periods, as "so Putin's first presidency". Certain events in the NPCs' backstories reference dates such as 2003, and the police still spells its name with a "mi" (which means it's not the Medvedev presidency which started in 2008). The first edition is so 1990s.

Toys

• Bratz (both the dolls and the wider franchise as a whole) are deeply rooted in the early-to-mid 2000s:
  • This is likely the reason (along with the Mattel lawsuit) that the Bratz fell out of favor while Barbie continued to sell. Bratz was very much based on the then-current "hip" 2000s trends of flaunting wealth, nightclubs, partying, and shopping, all of which gradually grew outdated and became outright tacky after the recession, while Barbie's premise of being The Everyman for girls to project onto meant she could easily adapt to new trends every decade. Bratz didn't have the same benefit, and as a result, its attempts to rebrand by emphasizing friendship and having more modest outfits only caused fans to complain about the changes.
  • Jade's favorite music was still listed as Gwen Stefani even in 2012. It's been listed as that since as far back as 2005. Stefani was pretty big as a solo artist in the mid-2000s and was also still known for her No Doubt hits in the 90s, but by the 2010s she hadn't released any new music for years (she released a moderately successful third album in 2015).
  • Many of the clothes worn by the Bratz are clearly influenced by 2000s fashion trends, such as low-slung pants, wide-legged jeans, ruffled skirts, crop-tops, skirts or short dresses paired with jeans and so forth.
• The short lived Teen Trends dolls, intended to focus on fashions of teens of the era, are very much dated to the mid-2000s they were released in. Outfits include fashion trends like velour tracksuits, low rise pants, scarf belts, "bling," and small dogs in purses akin to Paris Hilton. The "punk" character, Kianna, resembles fashions worn by Avril Lavigne in a pop punk style, complete with straight hair with chunky highlights. The fashions are on trend for the era, but not past it at all.

Visual Novels

• Fate/stay night seems to be set around its release year of 2004, and much is made of Association Magi and their abhorrence of modern technology, with any magus who uses anything more sophisticated than a rotary phone being declared a renegade. Tohsaka Rin, in particular, had no concept of what a VCR is. At the time, this could be passed off as her just being from an overly traditional family. Within a decade, it's hard to imagine how she keeps up her perfect academic record while never seeing a PC until high school and being utterly Hopeless with Tech when she tries to learn. Later media in the franchise shed this to stay relevant, with the EXTRA/Extella timeline taking place in a digital space within a lunar supercomputer, and Fate/Grand Order including all sorts of esoteric Magitech.

Web Animation

• The Bill Cosby Fun Game from 2005 hearkens to Cosby's then-recent sex assault lawsuit with the premise focusing around Cosby needing to scrounge for extra money. Not even ten years later, Cosby was hit with a wave of rape allegations that led to his actual conviction. That's not going into the victory tune being "Always and Forever" from Napoleon Dynamite.
• Bonus Stage is filled with pop culture references that date it to the early 2000s.
  Joel: Boy, this Nintendo Revolution sure saved gaming!
• Broken Saints features as one of its protagonists a programmer who boasts of recently helping to save the world from the disastrous effects of the Y2K Bug, irrevocably dating the work to the early 2000s at best.
• Made during the Golden Age of machinima, The Strangerhood, made with The Sims 2, may or may not be an Intentional Period Piece. Its first few episodes could have taken place anywhere at any time, but from the sixth episode onward, it quickly degenerated into "let's spoof this or that show from the 2000s for five minutes and see what happens." That Lost was spoofed but Heroes was ignored dates the miniseries even more to early 2006. The American Idol, Desperate Housewives, CSI: Miami, and Alias jokes seal the deal that this show could only have been made from 2004-2006, three years shy of the release date for The Sims 3.
• Strangerhood creators Rooster Teeth have minor cases of this on flagship series Red vs. Blue, most notably references to Lost and MySpace (says something about the show's longevity that later seasons have references to Game of Thrones and Facebook). Subverted with "Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Stupid 4G network," which doesn't date the quote with the days 3G was the norm — and in fact, the joke still works, with 5G only beginning to take off in 2019, more than a decade after the episode the joke came from.
• Strong Bad Email
  • There's a DVD exclusive email where Strong Bad discusses what would happen if his supervillain self Strong Badman got a movie, satirizing superhero movies in the process. Most of the satire in question is pretty clearly rooted in mid-2000s superhero film culture. The references to "head-to-toe black leather" is pretty clearly playing on the original X-Men Film Series trilogy, as is the mention of how such movies tend to redesign the costume to show the face (and to a lesser extent, it suggests a common joke about the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man Trilogy films showing Tobey out of the mask a lot). It caps off with a Take That! to the Halle Berry Catwoman (2004), at the time the most recent example of how superhero movies could go terribly wrong. All this pretty clearly dates this to the pre-Iron Man and MCU era, where comic-accurate costumes came more into vogue, and the current punchline for "failed superhero film" started switching around as the genre became more crowded.
  • The series as a whole mostly plays with this by way of being deliberately dated—the majority of its content ran during the 2000s, yet parodies and pop culture references tended to originate from the entire latter half of the 20th century (and many avert Small Reference Pools—who here's heard of Mr. B Natural?). Even when the show did make a dated joke, it generally blended in with the jokes about decades-old films or videogames. Its style was also significantly different when compared to Flash cartoons of its era, meaning that it stayed fairly good-looking when compared to, say, early-days Pico. That said, one could also cite Two Decades Behind, as part of the reason the show favored outdated references was to create a sense that this was a world the creators saw as iconic—and that means a lot of references from the 80s and 90s.
• Quake the Movie: Escape from the Bastille, first shown at QuakeCon 2001 and later published online, was a Quake III: Arena Fan Film created when machinima existed but had yet to be recognized as a genre, and made for a multiplayer game without scripts or customizable demos (features that the previous games allowed), predating the in-game recording techniques later employed by Red vs. Blue. Thus, it was a rendered 3D animation using in-game models — including the Strogg from Quake II — dating it right away. However, it also shows itself as a product of its time when Ranger fights the Strogg hand-to-hand, as it was produced when The Matrix was popular (it had only been out for two years) and thus no one in its intended audience would question why the hero of Quake would suddenly bust out kung-fu moves against the bad guys instead of just dumping rockets into them.

Web Comics

• Early seasons of Ansem Retort avoided this by mostly just making jokes about the Kingdom Hearts series itself, but by early season 3 they were referencing 8-Bit Theater (which ended in 2010) and by the final season they were parodying Jersey Shore, which aired from 2009-2012. Topping it off, in the arc where time got completely fucked up, Jack Bauer ended up on the 20-dollar bill and Riku being able to remember that it was supposed to be Andrew Jackson was a major plot point. Not only does the Jack Bauer reference date it to the first decade of the new millennium, as of 2016 there's talk of moving Jackson to the back of the 20.
• Apart from the topical references in the Arthur, King of Time and Space contemporary arc, one early strip has Morgana refer to cosplay, with Merlin "translating" this for the principal as "hall costumes". A decade later, nobody familiar enough with fandom to understand a reference to hall costumes could possibly fail to know that this is also called cosplay.
• Brigadier Swirl, drawn in 2001, is about a girl in high school who is obsessed with pregnancy. She is depicted watching A Baby Story whose popularity was at its peak at the time. These days, she might be addicted to Teen Mom. Also, none of the students in her school carry cell phones with them.
• Doubling with Anachronism Stew, the Ciem Webcomic Series was written from 2007-2010. It is supposed to be set in 2020, but depicts technology that dates it to happen between 2004 and 2009, largely due to being made with The Sims 2.
• Venus Envy is about a transgender high school girl. It began in the early 2000s, where trans people and especially openly trans teenagers weren't discussed often, and it shows in the way characters interact with Zoe.

Web Original

• The Onion:
  • Back in 2000, they ran an article titled "Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible". The idea was to satirize people who were obsessed with the Internet and made a point of using it for routine tasks. Some of the things Area Man uses the Internet for in the article are checking on movie times, getting directions, getting recipes, looking up colleges, and looking up word definitions — in other words, things that everybody would be using the Internet for just a few years later.
  • Their 1999 article "I Don't Even Remember Writing 'The Tommyknockers'" pokes fun at Stephen King's famously huge body of work, suggesting that he sometimes gets his own books mixed up, and doesn't even remember writing some of them. While most of the article still rings true today, there's one line where King claims that he sometimes gets The Dark Half, The Dark Zone and The Dark Tower mixed up, and has trouble remembering which is which. In 1999, the books in the Dark Tower series were among King's least-known works, so it was somewhat believable that he would have easily forgotten about writing them. But since King finally finished the series in 2004, they've become among his best-known, with an accompanying line of tie-in comic books from Marvel Comics and a big-budget film adaptation starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey—and King has stated several times that he considers the series his most personal project.
• Pure Pwnage wears the fashion and culture of the mid-2000s online gaming scene on its sleeve, with parodies of Red vs. Blue and Homestar Runner along with references to MySpace and later Zero Punctuation. The games shown include Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft early on, before giving way to Team Fortress 2 (pre-hats) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Even the name is dated — "pwned" as slang for getting one's ass kicked hasn't been widely used since 2010 at the latest.
• Rob Dobi's Your Scene Sucks and How To Dress Emo are encapsulations of the underground fashion trends of the mid-late 2000s. Many of the entries are very dated, often mentioning MySpace and Livejournal as still being popular, as well as the whole idea around the "#1 Pete Wentz Fan", "Crunkcore Kid", "MySpace Whore" (who uses a T-Mobile Sidekick 3, a cell phone that was once hip and cutting-edge but which has been virtually forgotten since the rise of smartphones), and "Hot Topiccore" scenesters lampooned on the site. Since the site last updated in 2011, it's becoming more and more dated as time goes on; for instance, dubstep is mentioned in passing in the latest update dated June 8th, 2011, when it was just starting to break into the mainstream, but that entry has yet to make its presence, even though the dubstep craze has peaked and declined since then.
  • The entries for "Primitive Emo"^note about fans of 90s Emo groups such as Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Pinkerton-era Weezer and the "Skramz Revivalist" ^note  about fans of the harder-edged Screamo sound of the 90s dates itself in an entirely different fashion, however. When the entry was first written, most of the 90s era emo and screamo bands had broken up, and the two genres went into a Lighter and Softer direction as newer bands with poppier sounds got signed to major labels. The site portrays the Primitive Emo as a sad Disco Dan who spends his days organizing his vinyl record collection and the Skramz Revivalist as a Johnny-Come-Lately who was too young to be part of the scene at its peak whose favorite bands "have either broken up or are French". Since then, The New '10s has seen a revival of 90s emo and screamo among newer bands, and many of the bands listed in these entries have gotten back together.
• The peak of YTMND's popularity was in the mid-2000s, so most of the pages made for it would have been made around then. Any that are still online today can come across as time capsules containing 2000s memes and pop-culture references. Even the website's founder, Max Goldberg, acknowledged this in 2016, saying that he didn't have much interest in it beyond "good memories".
• When it comes to longtime YouTubers who commonly do so nowadays, most YouTube videos that don't run at 60 FPS when in 720p or above. This is because YouTube videos running any higher than 30 FPS is a relatively recent thing in the grand scheme of the site's life (support for it first rolling out in late 2014, just shy of ten years after the site started). For that matter, videos can also be dated just by the resolutions available — most users back around 2005 to 2006 didn't know or care how to get higher resolutions, and a video available above 240p was usually an accident. Similarly, a lot of earlier Youtube videos will reference or joke about features that were eventually removed, like "rating 5 stars" and Video Responses.
• The Million Dollar Homepage was created in 2005 and very much shows it, with ads for online casinos, Sudoku puzzles, a forum for the then-recently decided 2012 London Olympics, and very blatantly an ad that says "Free for 2006".
• One episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series includes a laundry list of memes from the announcement and launch of the PlayStation 3, including "599 US DOLLARS", "Giant Enemy Crab" and "Attack Its Weak Point for Massive Damage", dating it to the mid-to-late 2000s when such memes were still commonly circulating.
• By the 2010s, the Rickroll has become infamous for being a key way to tell something on the internet was made in the mid- to late-2000s, much the same way that Zero Wing memes were an easy way to date something from the very early 2000s. Other memes obviously fall out of favor and become dated in the same way, but those two were the biggest ones of their respective eras. Despite attempts by nostalgic netizens in the mid-to-late-2010s to push it as a "timeless meme", the Rickroll is still regarded as a "dead meme" by many people.
• Some pages on This Very Wiki date themselves to the 2000s and early 2010s with the pop culture references in the headers. Fridge Logic still features a reference to Alias in its header, and the reference remains there despite Alias being doomed to obscurity (much like other "big" drama shows of its time like Lost and Desperate Housewives) because it sets up the "weird wig" joke in the same header.
• Nametags ends up as this due to its setting and aiming for authenticity. It's set in a video game store and the characters are all avid gamers, so there are lots of references to then-current or upcoming games, like Drawn to Life or Hellgate: London. There's an entire episode revolving around the launch of Halo 3. Not just that, but something like the running gag of customers asking if the store has any Wii consoles in stock only to be told no - referencing how the Wii was notoriously high in demand back then - loses the relatability it had with contemporary audiences
• Spoofed in this video by Chris Thorburn, in which a man sits down with his girlfriend to watch a teen Sex Comedy from 2004 that he loved when he was younger, but hadn't seen since. Between all the casual homophobia, misogyny, blackface jokes, rape jokes, and Kevin Spacey playing a perverted principal forcing him to explain that 2004 was a different time, there's also a conspicuous scene where the main character declares that "this spring break is dedicated to all the troops fighting for our freedom in Iraq!".
• Spec World, despite being set in an alternate timeline where the Cretaceous mass extinction never happened, was clearly made in the early 2000s. Many of the creatures and concepts from it are informed by theories that were in vogue with paleontologists of the time, but have since fallen out of favor, such as pterosaurs declining at the end of the Mesozoic, mosasaurs having eel-like tails, and Megaraptor being a giant dromaeosaur. There's also a disproportionate amount of gross-out humour indicative of the early noughties' era.
• The Best Page in the Universe peaked in popularity in the mid-2000s, so most of its most popular entries date to that time period. Any of the blog's most well-known or memorable entries can come across as time capsules containing mid-2000s memes and pop-culture references. The blog itself is a time capsule for the "fratire" humor that was popular among young men at the time.
• Dropout: "We Didn't Start the Flame War" is a snapshot of the Internet as of 2009, featuring many trends that have since fallen out of favor or been entirely forgotten. This includes rickrolling, Digg, the ROFLCopter, ASCII art in general, outdated slang like "pwnage", sites like BustedTees, and even Dropout's predecessor CollegeHumor. Unfortunately, Flame Wars turned out to be a timeless concept.

Western Animation

• 6teen is clearly a product of the mid-2000s. The central location of the series is a mall, back when indoor shopping centers were largely still in fashion. All the characters have cellphones, but they're flip phones. Video stores still exist, with two characters working at them for a long part of the show. Texting is big, but social media is rarely referenced. Illegal copies of movies are shared by selling discs, not online at the time (although it's still common in certain countries such as the Philippines and China). The characters only ever have a little trouble finding new jobs with almost no references and are never particularly bothered if and when they lose those jobs, clearly dating the show to before the 2008 Great Recession, when competition for jobs made it harder for high school kids to be hired over unemployed adults for after-school work.
• All Grown Up!: This retelling of the Rugrats cast as preteens has stuff like Angelica only using a flip phone and bulky laptop, the Java Lava being an Internet Cafe, references to boy bands, and an episode devoted to "Yu-Gotta-Go".
• American Dad! before the show shifted from politics to outlandish plots were very clearly set during the second half of the Bush administration, especially with the constant bashing of Bush and his administration's policies and references to events during the era like the War on Terror. Also expect the early episodes to have then-contemporary pop-cultural references as well, such as Scrubs and Kobe Bryant's rape trial, both of which were also mocked on sister show Family Guy during this time.
• As Told by Ginger is obviously set post-1990s but before the late-2000s. There are references to VCRs and pagers instead of DVDs and cellphones (though the richer teens have cells to show how affluent and spoiled they are). The hairstyles and clothing worn by many of the characters are distinctly late 1990s-early 2000s, especially Courtney's hair, and wardrobe along with Ginger wearing bohemian-chic clothing that includes cargo pants and baggy jeans. The episode "The Right Stuff" featured a banner for a science fair proclaiming its then-current year: 2000. There is also the Gripling's ostentatious lifestyle (pre-Great Recession) and Mipsy's 13th birthday bash (again pre-recession and more or less similar to My Super Sweet Sixteen). There is absolutely no sign of any social media which certainly would have been a major part of the series if it came out a few years later.
• The Boondocks, though not quite as overtly dated as the comic strip (Production Lead Time makes that impossible), still wears its late-2000s timeframe with pride. The first season alone features Oprah as "the queen of daytime talk," BET being given no quarter, closeted gay rappers, R. Kelly's first trial, Pimp My Ride and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition back to back, a thinly veiled parody of The War on Terror, and that's just the stuff episodes center on. There's also things like Thugnificent's musical style, which is rooted pretty hard in the then-popular crunk (and he even had his career take a dive at around the same time the genre's mainstream popularity did). Funnily, Tom DuBois feels like a satire of Barack Obama, but he predates Obama's rise by some years, something the show itself joked on.
• Braceface is obviously set sometime before the late-2000s. The hairstyles and clothing worn by many of the characters are distinctly late 1990s-early 2000s, especially Maria's hair and midriff-showing dress shirt, along with Adam Spitz's "frat boy" clothing. There is also things such as Nina's Rich Bitch lifestyle (the show having been made pre-Great Recession), Alden fronting a Garage Band, and the Pop Punk and Garage Rock-flavored soundtrack. Most strikingly is the depiction of main character Sharon Spitz as an animal rights activist, with the show having been on the air at a time when animal rights activism was a major sociopolitical force with many celebrity supporters (such as executive producer Alicia Silverstone) — thus Sharon and the other animal rights activists that show up are often painted in a positive light. By the later half of the decade, animal rights activism got such a bad rep (mainly due to PETA's increasingly questionable publicity stunts) that much of the once-powerful and influential movement began being seen as misguided at best and a complete joke at worst rather than a serious cause worthy of attention.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, despite being set in a futuristic space society, has many jokes and references that mark it as being a turn-of-the-millennium cartoon:
  • The robot vampire NOS-4-A2 is always called an "energy vampire", a term that (in the late 90s and early 2000s) was used to describe an appliance that continues to use electricity when left plugged in, even when deactivated, a media buzzword for the energy crisis.
  • In one episode, XR mentions having lobbied against airbags, after just having taken out a weapons smuggler with one.
  • In another, he is seen selling Ramway products to his fellow rangers, a reference to Amway.
  • In yet another, he mentions having a 2000 gigabyte (2 terabyte) memory. Today, you can affordably get a portable hard drive with that much memory.
• Cartoon Network Groovies only use Cartoon Cartoons from up to the early 2000s. The music styles are sometimes dated as well, along with the artists who sung them. For an individual case, the Josie and the Pussycats Groovie shows off musical styles throughout the decades but ends at the late 90s, early 2000s.
• Clerks: The Animated Series was made in the 1999-2000 period, and it shows. The show references numerous pieces of media from around the time, such as The Matrix, The Real World and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, and its pop culture references don't go as far back as the 1980s, with one of its oldest references being to Stand by Me. The "Korean animators" ending to the Courtroom Episode comes off as more of a reference to the then-growing anime bubble than to Korean animation. In addition, the show's very politically-incorrect style of humor wouldn't fly today.
• Clone High has references to celebrities who were most popular in 2002, such as Tom Green, Mandy Moore, and Ashley Angel from O-Town (this is Played for Laughs as he was never truly famous, but to a modern viewer he is completely unknown). The music played is a specific variety of pop-punk from that period. Nobody uses a cell phone, which became ubiquitous among teens half a decade later.
• Code Lyoko: Characters use old cellphones (no smartphones yet), blocky computers, and CD players (CD ROM are notably used to support programs, where you'd expect USB keys or clouds by now). On a more meta level, the Shifted to CGI between the real world and Lyoko was justified by the fact that CGI was still expensive, and not very realistic in the early 2000s, and there were a few All-CGI Cartoon yet. Plus, as it appeared less than ten years ago, CGI was not considered as "real" animation, and studios were hesitating between the two methods. As CGI looked very artificial, it could only belongs to the inside of a computer, before All-CGI Cartoon became common.
• Cyberchase is from the early 2000s, and boy does it feel like it.
  • The premise of the show, where three kids are warped into cyberspace to solve problems in that universe, can only work in late 90s and early 2000s, when the Internet was a relatively new thing. Speaking of which, the computers that they have are very blocky, as was commonplace during the late 90s and early 2000s.
  • One Planet of Hats is named Radopolis.
  • If you read the kids' profiles, Matt's favorite music is "anything by Will Smith".
  • "Cool It" has Matt lamenting that there's "no CD player," dating it to its airdate in 2002.
  • "Trading Places", originally aired in 2002, has Matt disappointed to trade away one of his most prized posessions: a Mark McGwire baseball card. McGwire had actually retired the previous year, but not out of the question that he'd be still be revered until 2005, when he was implicated by former teammate Jose Canseco as having routinely taken Performance Enhancing Drugs during his baseball career.
  • There are a few pop culture references that are outdated as well.
    • The first episode has several; Inez namedrops Xena: Warrior Princess, and says that they can vote her off the island.
    • Shari Spotter is a parody of Harry Potter, when it was at the height of its popularity.
    • Coop is voiced by Tony Hawk, when skateboarding was popular at the time.
• Danny Phantom is dated to the mid-2000s by the technology and fashion. Notably, Tucker uses a PDA, which smartphones have long since replaced.
• Daria was set around the "Dawn of the Millennium". It shows in many ways:
  • The music clips were very much Turn of the Millennium hits.
  • Helen's blocky cell phone, the use of landline phones, mentions of phone cards, mentions of pagers, Internet cafes, Cathode ray television sets and computer monitors, Daria getting a CD-ROM game, Jane having an iMac in one episode.
  • The sheer opulence of the characters' homes in Lawndale (pre-Great recession).
  • The presence of malls in Suburban America.
  • The depiction of "Gen X Cynicism" after The New '10s and The New '20s does not seem standard, but is born out of willful and privileged ignorance.
  • The fact that in the second season, they go on a field trip to paintball. While not unheard of at the time even slightly Post Columbine, Lawndale wouldn't even dream of taking such a field trip within even a few years of the show's end in 2002.
  • Daria being given "Tough Love" and flat out blamed for having low self-esteem. In The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, a common action. Nowadays? It's downright throwing salt in the wounds.
• The premise of Drawn Together, based around a parody of "trashy" reality shows, clearly dates it to the era when such shows were dominating the television landscape, and the characters themselves are parodies of common stereotypes exhibited by reality shows of the era (i.e., "the jock", "the bitch", etc.) Some of the characters' animation styles are also dated to that era, with Ling-Ling and Spanky being standout examples, as they are parodies of anime and early 2000s internet flash animation, the former being dated to the the 2000s anime bubble and the latter being dated when Adobe discontinued Flash Player in 2020.
  • After the series phased out the "reality show" aspect, it essentially became a mountain of parodies and/or references to a great deal of popular 2000s culture, ranging from Extreme Makeover ("Alzheimer's That Ends Well")^noteThe DVD version has an extra scene where Clara ends up on Wisteria Lane and parodies Mary Alice's narrations, the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series (Strawberry Sweetcake from "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist"), Supernanny ("Super Nanny"), VeggieTales (the Veggie Fables from "Clum Babies"), a Take That! towards King of the Hill ("Lost in Parking Space"), rampant potshots to Tori Spelling in one episode, and the last episode was a parody of American Idol.
  • "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education" deals with Spanky and Xandir pretending to be married so Spanky can qualify for health insurance. The episode is clearly dated to before gay marriage was legalized in the United States in 2015.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • The first Chip Skylark episode had Vicky watching the concert on Pay-Per-View, which was already in the wane, being replaced by "Video On Demand" services.
  • The TV movie Channel Chasers falls into this quite a bit because it parodies a lot of television from the era it was written (around 2000-2004). While some parodies are timeless and still fresh, mostly because the shows they parodied had been off the air for some time, some are just really dated by today's standards. The manga/anime parodies also betray the time it was written, since the shows they parody have dwindled in popularity with its target audience over the years (even though teenage and adult fans still like them, as the Otaku community grew older and wiser). Then there's the parody of the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake cartoon, a Take That! at the cheap Flash cartoons for girls that flooded the market; shows of that nature have increased in quality since then, so it either leaves you scratching your head or smirking slightly, and even then the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series was later Vindicated by History. The parody of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids especially hasn't aged well due to Bill Cosby's sexual assault allegations and effective erasure from pop culture.
    • The Distant Finale features futuristic-looking buildings and flying cars in the background. Given that it takes place 20 years later, the movie was produced in 2003, and now we are in The New '20s, it's safe to say that we aren't even close from having flying cars anytime soon.
  • The early seasons are obviously products of the early 2000s. Chip Skylark is based on male teen idol and boy band ideals from the period and is voiced by *NSYNC member Chris Kirkpatrick. That style fell by the wayside in the mid-2000s, and newer boy bands and teen idols have a different aesthetic. The show also features a Britney Spears parody character named Britney Britney, who is based on Britney during her teen idol days. Early episodes have a lot of Internet jokes that are based around how relatively-new and obscure the internet was before it became a cornerstone several years later. And the episode "The Boy Who Would be Queen" makes a big deal out of Trixie being a Closet Geek; however, girls enjoying video games and comics has become more accepted since its release.
  • "Odd Ball" revolves around Timmy raising money to repair his V-Cube, a Bland-Name Product cross between a Nintendo GameCube and an Xbox.
  • The Rich Bitch lifestyles of Trixie, Veronica, Remy Buxaplenty and Tad & Chad clearly date the show as having begun before the Great Recession, which made such opulent displays of wealth unfashionable. Tad & Chad's encouragement of scorn towards unpopular kids wouldn't fly in later years, when more strict policies towards bullying would be enacted by schools.
  • The whole Fairy Idol special revolves around a parody of American Idol, which was at the height of its popularity when it first aired in 2006. Particular mention goes to the contestant based on William Hung and his infamously poor-quality Cover Version of "She Bangs" by Ricky Martin, which, despite being two years old at that point, was still a popular subject of parody.
  • With an increased focus against bullying in The New '10s, Francis would never fly today.
• Family Guy
  • In the 2006 episode "Saving Private Brian", Brian and Stewie attempt to get kicked out of the military by pretending to be gay. "Don't Ask Don't Tell", the law that required the military to discharge openly gay service members, was repealed in December 2010, and the military's ban on gay soldiers was officially scrapped a few months later in 2011.
  • The third act of "Thanksgiving" is about the family and their guests arguing about America's stance in the Iraq War, which ended a month after the episode's premiere.
  • "The Juice is Loose" is about Peter becoming friends with OJ Simpson. Only problem is, it aired in March 2009, shortly after OJ was imprisoned in Las Vegas for armed robbery. Acknowledged with a title card saying this was a 'lost' episode from 2007.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Nintendo GameCube systems (and a Nintendo Wii in a 2007 episode), Game Boy Advance systems (which would become a Nintendo DS later; Hilarious in Hindsight when we got games based on the show for both the GBA and DS), a pager/beeper in one episode (at a point when they'd already started to be displaced by cellphones) and a lot of other technology references make it an obvious product of the mid-2000s. An episode of the first season (2004) featured Mr. Herriman trying to capitalize on his unexpected viral fame, however this was prior to the inception of YouTube in 2005 (which would be parodied in an episode of the final season in 2008).
• Futurama is set in the year 3000 but produced at the turn of the Millennium and, as other works by Matt Groening, uses its setting to satirize contemporary issues and celebrities. For example, the episode centered around the "Kidnappster" site is a parody of the contemporary discourse on Napster (the now defunct peer-to-peer service) and digital audio piracy. The same episode also shows that Lucy Liu is still seen as a sexy goddess on the internet a thousand years later.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy references a great many things from the early-to-mid-2000s, including references to the then-burgeoning anime and otaku culture, Eris (briefly) being portrayed as a Valley Girl, Hoss Delgado being a clear parody of the '90s Anti-Hero, an episode revolving around a computer with dial-up Internet, and direct homages to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Sam Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy.
• Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi is a show that could only have only been made during the 2000s anime bubble, when Western cartoons and media in general were trying to cash in on the sudden global popularity of Japanese pop culture. Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi leaned heavily on anime tropes that were popular at the time, and was even based on a Japanese Pop Music band. However, not only would many of the anime tropes and ideas that populated the show fall out of use within Japanese works years later, but pop music from South Korea would come to absolutely eclipse J-pop in global popularity the next decade, while the Japanese band that HHPAY was based upon would fall back into obscurity even before that point.
• Invader Zim: Even being a show set 20 Minutes into the Future, it couldn't prevent this. The plot of "Nano Zim" is centered around Dib sending a physical disk with incriminating photos of Zim to a TV show to expose him. A decade later, he could have emailed them directly to the TV producers the second they were taken. Meanwhile, citizens are shown looking on at scenes of destruction with a notable lack of cell phones being held up to record them.
• Johnny Test is clearly rooted to the mid-to-late-2000s, thanks to its Totally Radical nature, its rock-flavored theme song, and the characters' sense of fashion; with the theme song describing Johnny himself as a kid with "a head of fiery hair and a turbo-charged backpack". The show also featured a number of parodies of popular 2000s kids' media, most notably BIONICLE (with the Mega Roboticles), Crash Bandicoot (with Smash Badger), and Pokémon (with Tinymon)— whileCrash would see a resurgence after Johnny Test ended its run and Pokémon has kept its popularity consistent, the Bionicle toyline would be discontinued in 2010 (though it would see a brief relaunch in 2015, a year after Johnny ended).
  • Some of the technology also dates the series; notably, Lila is the only member of the Test family to have a cell phone— a 2000s era flip phone at that. "iJohnny" is with this in particular— Hugh forbids Johnny for getting his own cell phone due to him being too young and the general fear that he'll lose it, which, to a modern viewer, would be downright laughable.
  • "Johnny Tube" features Johnny attempting to be a viral hit on SnoobTube (a clear parody of YouTube), and the site layout is clearly based on an older YouTube layout. Furthermore, Bling-Bling Boy becomes famous by suggesting Johnny to add a bunch of video effects through SnoobTube's built-in video editor (a feature which YouTube would discontinue in the late 2010s), and the episode has a parody of Fred with Hi-Pitch Hal, at a time when Fred was still one of the most popular YouTubers.
  • "Coming to a Johnny Near You" revolves around Johnny using the Voice-Over 9000 to make his life like a movie trailer. It features several jokes about movie trailers having narration, which have largely been phased out with the death of Don LaFontaine in 2008.
  • A case could be made for "Johnny Hollywood", where Johnny and Dukey go into several of his dad's movies through his sister's virtual reality video helmet. The episode is centered around the fact that Hugh owns movies on DVD, which, while still being produced, have largely fallen out of favor of being able to watch movies on streaming services, sometimes day-and-date with a theatrical release.
• Kappa Mikey was made during the 2000s anime bubble, and it shows. One of the show's central jokes is about how American dubs of children's anime are edited to ridiculous levels. This practice would largely fade out by the time the anime bubble burst and 4Kids Entertainment went belly-up, with the majority of recent examples of "Americanized" dubs being from grandfathered franchises such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
• Kevin Spencer:
  • The technology used shows its age: The Spencers are so poor that they own a CRT TV with an antenna connection, most computers are the "boxy" type, and most of the phones featured in the series are the rotary-dial type. The crew seemed to catch on with this, as in the later episodes, the Spencers own a cordless wall phone.
  • "The Stripper Strikes Back" features Percy attempting to put a stop to a liquor strike by calling every single person involved and explicitly saying his name to them, causing him to be attacked by every last one of his victims at the end of the episode. Such a plot would be laughable today, as Percy (and by extension, his victims) are shown with rotary-dial phones; with modern smartphones having caller ID and location tracking, Percy would be caught and tracked down far more easily nowadays.
  • "Jacked In" depicts Kevin being addicted to an arcade game (therefore meeting Shauna in the process), and the opening sequence depicts Percy playing various machines, dating an episode to a time when arcade machines began to decline in popularity outside of Japan. Furthermore, Kevin and Shauna's virtual reality fight is clearly a reference to The Matrix.
  • The "Bruno Gerussi Must Die" duology feature a multitude of dated pop-culture references, with parodies such as "Degrassi Jr. Power Rangers", "Degrassi Creek", "Survivor XII: Northern Manitoba", and "Bruno Gerussi Must Die Again" opens with Kevin getting Percy on "Who Wants to Marry a Prostitute?".
  • The guest stars also date the series. "Buzz" features Daryn Jones and Morgan Smith, the hosts of Buzz, a sketch series which aired on The Comedy Network, and the episodes "Spankdriven" and "Treble Charger" have appearances by the namesake bands voicing themselves, with Sum 41 also appearing as themselves in the Treble Charger episode. Buzz would end in 2005, and the bands (with the exception of Sum 41) would fall to obscurity afterwards, with Treble Charger disbanding in 2006, a year after Kevin ended, and wouldn't reform until 2012, well after Kevin ended.
  • "The Buck Stops Here" could have only been written in 2004, as it features a scene in which Percy goes into a rant against then American president George W. Bush.
• Kim Possible: The early episodes are very early 2000s:
  • Kim's fashion, including her iconic midriff-baring attire, are staples of contemporary fashion. It also had a boy band heavily influenced by the Backstreet Boys and N Sync, and Smash Mouth themselves had a cameo appearance. The theme also contains the dated line "Call me, beep me if you wanna reach me. If you wanna page me, it's okay", when pagers were largely displaced by cellphones by the mid-2000s. Foreign language versions of the song (such as the Polish dub's use of SMS (text message for people unfamiliar with the term)) change the technology to update it.
  • Zita Flores is shown in "Virtu-Ron" to be a fan of the MMORPG Everlot, a parody of EverQuest. While it still exists today, it has since been overthrown in popularity as an MMORPG by World of Warcraft.
  • Some episodes feature Cuddle Buddies, a spoof of the Beanie Babies craze. While Beanie Babies are still made today, they aren't as big as they were in the late 90s and early 2000s.
• King of the Hill: "Lost In MySpace". The entire plot revolves around Hank's workplace getting a MySpace page (which, at the time, had already been overthrown by Facebook) and then having it hijacked by a co-worker who was fired after a flash mob gone wrong.
• Cartoon Network ran a promotion in 2001 where viewers could vote on pilots to be made into shows, and one pilot was for a cartoon called A Kitty Bobo Show. The plot of the pilot is that the eponymous Kitty has a new cell phone, he's the only one of his friends to have one, and it's enough to be a status symbol. Most of the jokes are based around cell phones being new things for more people to own. Kitty also calls his friends "homie" a lot.
• Martha Speaks: When Martha became an adviser to the President, both the First Family and the cabinet were clearly based on the early Obama administration.
• The Nutshack was made in the mid-to-late-2000s, and it shows, especially since the show's pop culture references usually rely on mid-2000s youth culture (such as the Pimp My Ride references in "Jeepney" and 2Quack and Snoop Duck are two examples, even though the former was long dead by the time the episode aired).
• While it is set in a period eerily similar to the 1970s, Phineas and Ferb is probably a part of this, ranging from technologies, clothing, having mostly pop rock, skate punk and Pop Punk songs as the influences for the music (the theme song is sung by Bowling for Soup) to other things. Candace is frequently seen with a flip phone, though a 2011 episode gave her a smartphone, and smartphones were slightly more common in the show in its last season. Lampshaded in one episode, with Candace freaking out due to the lack of features, with her mom saying that she's broken too many phone.
• The PJs, running between 1999 and 2001, is clearly rooted to the early 2000s. The show featured a number of pop culture references that clearly set the show in that era, including a parody of Survivor, an episode where Calvin and Juicy become rappers (featuring a guest appearance from Snoop Dogg, to boot) and ends with Thurgood unintentionally starting the riot of 2000, another episode based around a parody of the Y2K bug, and mentions of then-existing television networks, including a crack at "the frog network" in "Hangin' with Mr. Super" or the BTV joke in "A Race to His Credit", with Thurgood praying that the network is not showing a marathon of Amen (which would leave the BET network in 2001).
  • "How the Super Stoled Christmas" is dated by its premise of Thurgood stealing the tenants' money to get Muriel a new computer for Christmas. The computer in question is clearly modeled after Hewlett-Packard Pentium machines, which not only are no longer being produced, but the Pentium brand would be discontinued by Intel in 2023. Furthermore, when Nula catches Thurgood stealing her fish tank for money, he lies to her by saying that "Phantom Menace is the best Star Wars yet!" and the parody of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" has the lyric "Between you and Jar Jar Binks/Meesa say I like him more".
  • "Clip Show" is dated by it being a parody of Inside the Actors Studio, with host James T. Bagger being an expy of James Lipton (who died in 2020). Furthermore, Bagger tells Thurgood that their show is "on the Bravo network", dating it to before Bravo would become the reality TV network it is today (Inside the Actors Studio would remain on the network before it moved to Ovation in 2018).
• The Powerpuff Girls episode "Moral Decay" (aired in 2001) prominently features the gold Sacajawea dollar coin in a plot about Buttercup knocking out bad guys' teeth in a money-making scheme. The Sacajawea coin was only in general circulation in the United States from 2000 to 2001, with a brief revival from 2009 to 2011; otherwise, it has only ever been available to collectors. It doesn't help that Blossom outright calls it "the new Sacajawea dollar" when she first sees it, or that one of the coins clearly has the year "2000" stamped on it.
• The Proud Family is a victim of this, from references of technology like Napster to its early 2000s fashion.
• The first three seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants tend to get hit with this harder than the rest of the series, thanks to its greater grounding in the atmosphere of western society in 1999-2004. Most of this is visible in the technology present throughout the show, which includes pre-smartphone "shell phones" and landline phones being ubiquitous, computer monitors and television sets being boxy units with 4:3 displays, and the internet never showing up as a function of daily life (in fact, it's never even alluded to). Even the first movie shows its age with Karen's portable interface being a box monitor (though this design was later incorporated in post-movie appearances, with the aged design becoming a plot point in the episode "Karen 2.0").
  • The episode "Idiot Box" is kicked off when SpongeBob buys a brand-new television set so that he and Patrick can play in the box it came in. Before the late 1990s, the average TV screen would not exceed 24 inches in diameter (with the exception of extremely expensive rear-projection sets), while flat LCD and LED sets would take over in the late Turn of the Millennium and early part of The New '10s. Thus, it was only in early The Aughts when it was common to see TVs that were both large and bulky enough for someone (children at least) to fit inside their packaging.
  • A couple cases also occur for "The Sponge Who Could Fly", where a joke was made about SpongeBob gearing up to get some complimentary peanuts; due to greater attention towards peanut allergies in recent years, most airlines now give pretzels to customers instead. The live-action framing scenes also date themselves by videotapes still being commonplace, with the joke at the end about Patchy's tape of the episode getting chewed up being something that could've only worked without an explanation as late as its 2003 airdate, by which point DVD players were already rapidly supplanting VCRs — the last official SpongeBob VHS release was the "Lost in Time" package just three years later.
• Static Shock gets hit rather hard with this, with references to then-popular real-world sports figures who mostly faded out of the spotlight with a couple of years, all the televisions being bulky CRTs (even ones owned by characters who were extremely rich), the teenage cast spending most of their free time hanging out in malls and playing video games in the local arcade at a point when both had started to go into decline in the US, Static carrying a pager instead of a cell phone, home phones being commonplace, and even Shaquille O'Neal being shown using a bulky flip phone.
• While Transformers: Animated is set in the 22nd century and thus mostly has examples of modern/future technology, Sari is shown to own a flip phone in a few episodes. Played for Laughs with Captain Fanzone, a man who hates technology, who is shown having trouble using a rotary dial phone.
• VH1 ILL-ustrated, a short-lived adult animation anthology series, aired from 2003-2004, and it shows, with shorts including a Yogi Bear parody featuring then-president George W. Bush and then-vice president Dick Cheney as parodies of Yogi and Boo Boo; a short spoofing Popeye in the style of anime (this show having aired long before the anime bubble burst); and a marijuana-themed parody of SpongeBob SquarePants titled SpongeBong HempPants that satirized the weed culture of the time period. The show also features parodies of then-relevant celebrities, many of whom mostly faded out of the spotlight by the end of the 2000s. The shorts' politically incorrect style of humor would also not be seen as acceptable in modern times.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo? serves as a fairly accurate and realistic look at The Noughties for pre-teens, teenagers and young adults. It also has guest appearances here and there from then-current celebrities, some of whom have since fallen into complete obscurity, and the show's theme song got a Pop Punk rendition performed by Simple Plan. It's an unintentional period piece to the early 2000s, for the same reasons that the original Scooby-Doo was one to the 1970s.
• Winx Club is a time capsule of the early 2000s with the colourful Y2K themed outfits the characters wear - especially Stella, who's The Fashionista of the team. The main characters are also modeled off notable female celebrities of the day; Bloom off Britney Spears (although the comparison there might not be as apparent since she's red haired), Stella off Cameron Diaz, Flora off Jennifer Lopez, Musa off Lucy Liu, Tecna off P!nk and Aisha off Beyoncé. Any cell phones that show up are flip phones, and Bloom's parents have an analogue TV, landline phone and blocky computer.

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