Decade Retrospective: Who Had An Awful Decade?

By Will Leitch, 12:15 PM on Mon Nov 16 2009, 88,719 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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As the resident historian around these parts, I'll be doing the decade retrospectives for the next month or so. We'll go year-by-year soon, but for now, we're looking at people and concepts who had a bad decade.

By a bad decade, we're not talking about fads that inevitably evaporated. (No Elian Gonzalez, or "Livin' La Vida Loca.") We mean people and concepts that, on December 31, 1999, were respected and/or revered, reputations that were devastated by the last 10 years. If this decade would have never happened, they would have been a lot better off. The last decade exposed them as not nearly as lasting as we once thought they would be.

The rest of the month, I'll be doing year-in-reviews, twice a week, but we kick you off with this photo gallery, inspired by the fantastic Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists by The Onion A.V. Club. (Thanks to A.J. Daulerio, Joe DeLessio, Drew Magary, Ben Mathis-Lilley, Mike Ryan and Bill Scheft for their suggestions on some of these.) Click the photo gallery to enjoy, and leave us your own suggestions in the comments, if you feel so inclined.