The Pop Culture Junkie podcast is running a special series of episodes looking back at the past decade, chronicling the highs and lows, at least from a pop culture standpoint. Each episode deals with two years (2010/2011 and 2012/2013 are out as of this writing) so we had to leave some stuff out. A year is a long time! So as a companion piece, here is a more in-depth look at each year in pop culture.

2012 HAD US ASKING…

• Were you ready for the end of the world?
• What the heck was up with ‘Florida Man’?
• Will Disney own the entire entertainment universe soon?

THE FILMS

Genre films were big in 2012: The top two grossing films were the assembled The Avengers from Marvel and on the DC side, The Dark Knight Rises. The Amazing Spider-Man, which was a Marvel character by way of Sony Pictures, also charted in the top ten, as did Sony’s James Bond entry Skyfall. This year gave us the first of four Hunger Games movies, and the first of three Hobbit movies, the third Men In Black film, as well as the end of the Twilight Saga with Breaking Dawn Part 2. Top animated films included Pixar’s first movie with a female lead character, Brave, as well as Wreck-It Ralph, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and the Adam Sandler-voiced Hotel Transylvania. As far as non-franchise films, like it or not, 2012 was the year of Seth MacFarlane’s Ted, along with more high-browed films like Lincoln, Argo, Les Miserables and Django Unchained. We also got the first of the Pitch Perfect, Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street films.

THE TUNES

Gotye scored an unlikely monster hit with his ‘Somebody I Used to Know’, featuring Kimbra, which spent eight weeks on top of the Hot 100, obviously striking a chord with a lot of former lovers, despite not being a dance, rap or even a rock song. Pop and rock songs dominated the top of the charts this year: Carly Rae Jepsen scored big with her debut single ‘Call Me, Maybe’, fun featuring Janelle Monae’s debut ‘We Are Young’ was huge, as was Maroon 5 with two singles, ‘Payphone’ and ‘One More Night’. Kelly Clarkson’s anthem ‘Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)’ and new supergroup One Direction with ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ (which would one day be aptly spoofed by Amy Schumer) both hit big. The year’s bangers included ‘Lights’ by it-girl Ellie Goulding, ‘We Found Love’ by Rihanna with Calvin Harris, ‘Starships’ by Nicki Minaj and ‘Wild Ones’ by Flo Rida featuring Sia. LMFAO continued to be in our earholes with ‘Sexy and I Know It’ and Adele had an entry in the top 20 with ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, continuing her reign as a pop sensation after releasing 21 in 2011. Macklemore featuring Ryan Lewis had a sleeper hit with ‘Thrift Shop’, and Taylor Swift scored the year’s other breakup hit song with ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. Acoustic guitar heavy folk rock was big this year, as witnessed by the rise of folky, beardy bands like The Lumineers. Mumford and Sons, Of Monsters and Men, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and The Avett Brothers. They didn’t all debut in 2012, but this was the year you started hearing them everywhere.

THE TELEVISION

The CW Network, which started its life trying to appeal to young women with shows like Gossip Girl and 90210, decided in 2012 to target a different demographic by launching an entire universe of shows based on DC Comics. The first was Arrow, starring Stephen Amell, and based on the adventures of DC’s Green Arrow. 2012 was also the year of the girls, literally, as HBO premiered its sitcom Girls, starring Lena Dunham and Allison Williams. Other female-led comedies premiering this year were Emmy-bait Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, The Mindy Project with Mindy Kaling, and the culty but short-lived Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 starring Krysten Ritter. The big drama debuts this year were the modern-day take on Sherlock, Elementary, Shonda Rimes’ soapy Scandal, and the first of Dick Wolf’s Chicago-based dramas, Chicago Fire. On the animated side, Nickelodeon debuted The Legend of Korra and Disney premiered the edgy kids’ show Gravity Falls.

THE TRENDS, TOYS AND TECH

The year 2012 is notorious for something that didn’t happen: the end of the world. Despite the predictions of a few doomsday prophets, the Mayan calendar tablet that purportedly ended on December 21st, 2012 did not lead to an outbreak of solar flares or any other end-of-the-world scenarios, as you have undoubtedly worked out for yourself. What did happen? The NHL’s cyclical calendar of contract negotiations came to a stalemate, causing a league-wide lockout that went from September to January of 2013. The KONY 2012 documentary prompted widespread outrage against Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army, which recruited child soldiers amongst its other horrors. The Disney megacorp swallowed up LucasFilms, bringing Star Wars into the House of Mouse. 2012 was when the dangerous, even fatal Cinnamon Challenge (video yourself eating a spoonful of ground cinnamon) peaked, fortunately, as at one point 70,000 people were tweeting their participation every day. Gag. Australian daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped to Earth from a helium balloon moored in the stratosphere, thrilling us all for a few minutes on October 14th.

Over in tech, in September, an iOS upgrade from Apple brought iPhone users a new app called Apple Maps that showed users a world not unlike the one predicted by Mayan doomsday preppers: 3D views of the Brooklyn Bridge, melting into the East River, a black hole opening up in Tennessee, and cars sinking into the Las Vegas asphalt, among other digital disasters. The new app moved landmarks away from their actual locations and misdirected lost travelers as a result of a massively buggy code that had Apple head honcho Tim Cook issuing a public apology and instructing users to try the Bing maps app. (Apple’s relationship with Google was extremely sour at this point.) Apple’s new devices like the iPad minis required a new charging cable, and users discovered the new lightning cables were very prone to fraying at the tips. This year Windows 8 debuted to mostly negative reactions, but Microsoft did score big with their take on the tablet, the Surface, so they had a marginally better year than Apple. 2012 was also the year we started sexting on Snapchat and Niantic introduced Ingress, the precursor to Pokémon Go, this year.

THE MEMES AND CATCHPHRASES

Memes make the world go around, and nothing brings back the feeling of a year like a meme, viral video or the phrase that everyone, even your mom, was saying. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when one of these begins, it can be noted when something viral reaches critical mass, before becoming overused. Here’s a quick list of everything that had us talking in 2012.

• Korean songster Psy rode a pretend horse into our hearts as his Gangnam Style video became the most-viewed (and liked) video on YouTube.
• The frowny-faced cat named Tardar Sauce, aka Grumpy Cat became the face of a million memes describing how much we all hated everything. Grumpy Cat passed away in 2019. RIP.
• Olympian gymnast McKayla Maroney smirked her way into nearly as many memes that year; clearly we were not into being happy about stuff this year. (Given that we figured it was going to end soon, this totally makes sense.)
• The 2012 election, while not being the live grenade that subsequent elections would one day feel like, gave us watercooler fodder like Mitt Romney’s inaptly phrased “binders full of women.” Most of the bound women have escaped as of this writing.
• The MTV series Catfish (based on the 2010 film of the same name) gave us a new word for people using fake dating profile pictures to lure in unsuspecting potential dates.
• In 2012 we finally noticed that there was something very off about adult human males from the Sunshine State, when the headline “Florida Man Chews Off Face of Homeless Man While High” became but the first in a never-ending series of strange tales, most involving drugs and/or alligators, from the state. Enough so that you can do a search with the words “Florida Man” and any date and come up with a hit.

SAYING GOODBYE

In 2012 we said goodbye to the one and only Whitney Houston and Etta James, two of the most amazing voices in pop culture. Hosts Richard Dawson (Family Feud), Don Cornelius (Soul Train), and Dick Clark (American Bandstand) passed away, as did Monkee Davy Jones, as did Adam Yauch, better known as MCA from the Beastie Boys. Disco sensations Donna Summer and Robin Gibb both lost their lives, as did authors Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury and Nora Ephron. Classic TV and movie actors Andy Griffith, Ernest Borgnine, Sherman Hemsley, Phyllis Diller, Jack Klugman and Larry Hagman died, as did astronaut Neil Armstrong and Rodney King, whose video recorded beating by LA police sparked days of riots. Cancelled shows in 2012 include Chuck, The Closer, CSI Miami, Gossip Girl, Eureka, House, One Tree Hill, and Weeds.

And that’s a bigger, better look at the year in pop culture, circa 2012.