The Pop Culture Junkie podcast is re-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, 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.

2016 HAD US ASKING…

• Are you Team Batman or Team Superman (or neither)?
• Who was right, Captain America or Iron Man?
• Who was Becky with the good hair?
• Hey…is that a clown behind you?

THE FILMS

2016 was all about the animals, with Pixar’s Finding Dory leading the box office that year. The Secret Life of Pets, Jungle Book, Zootopia, Sing, Kung Fu Panda 3 and even Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them all placed in or near the top twenty that year. But we also saw a LOT of superhero (and galactic hero) movies this year. Captain America: Civil War focused on a battle between warring factions of the MCU, while Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice showed us that the key to diffusing a fight was having a mom with the same name as your frenemy. Deadpool, still years away from being part of the MCU, delighted audiences with his swearing (and that pegging scene.) Doctor Strange got to headline a movie for the first time, and X-Men: Apocalypse saw the mutants trying to stop the end of the world. Over on the DC side, the first iteration of the Suicide Squad hit the screen. Off-world, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was an entirely original tale that showed the beginnings of the rebellion against the Empire, and Star Trek: Beyond continued the rebooted story of the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, and proved that we’ll still be listening to the Beastie Boys centuries hence. Oh, and there were female Ghostbusters, and lots of fragile dudes freaked out about it, and the end of the year brought us something different: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone singing and dancing their way through La La Land.

THE TUNES

Justin Bieber owned the top two slots of the Billboard Hot 100 year-end list, with “Love Yourself” and “Sorry.” The Chainsmokers also got two slots in the top ten, with “Don’t Let Me Down” (featuring Daya) and “Closer” (featuring Halsey) charting big. Rounding out the top ten were Drake Featuring WizKid & Kyla asking for “One Dance,” Rihanna (with Drake) doing the “Work,” twentyonepilots speaking for all of us with “Stressed Out,” Desiigner singing about a “Panda,” Adele returning to say “Hello,” and Justin Timberlake confessing he “Can’t Stop the Feeling.” In album news, though, the year belonged to Beyoncé, who blew us all away with the surprise album Lemonade, released as an hourlong collection of videos on HBO. The concept album gave us huge hits like “Hold Up”, “Formation” and “Sorry,” but all 12 songs charted on the hot 100, even her foray into country music, “Daddy Lessons.” Amateur detectives got busy decoding one lyric in the breakup song “Sorry” that referred to a cheating spouse who “better call Becky with the good hair.” Whoever could Bey be singing about here? Could it be Rachael Ray? We may never know. Beyoncé killed it at the Super Bowl and on her world tour, and took home the Video of the Year award for “Formation” and would later notch nine Grammy nominations. Not only that, but she won four Emmys for her Lemonade special.

THE TELEVISION

Netflix’s Stranger Things combined 1980s nostalgia with horror to create one of the most popular shows of the year. In a small town in Indiana, a group of young friends witness supernatural forces and secret government exploits. Created by the Duffer Brothers and starring Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Joe Keery, Gaten Matarazzo (and the rest), the show just enjoyed a successful fifth season, with one more yet to premiere. Genre shows were big this year, with Lucifer, Westworld, Marvel’s Luke Cage, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The OA and Preacher all bowing this year. True stories were big too, with The Crown premiering to tell the story of Queen Elizabeth II (RIP) and her brood, and American Crime Story spending a season on the impeachment of former president Bill Clinton. The popularity of This is Us on NBC proved that there was still an audience for a classic family drama series, and the revival of Full House, called Fuller House, showed that nostalgia for our past need not involve little girls with psychic powers (and nosebleeds) fighting monsters.

THE TRENDS, TOYS AND TECH

The great clown panic of 2016 started in South Carolina in the summer of 2016 when one woman reported seeing clowns whispering in the woods near her home, which sparked a rash of over 100 clown sightings all over the country, some of them perhaps copycat incidents: a woman in Alabama called 911 after seeing a clown in the parking lot of Walmart, and a school in Cincinnati closed after five students “incited panic” with threats of a “clown clan” descending on their school. The panic even got a mention in a White House press briefing before fading away like a red wig in the sun. Worse than clowns, there was the invasive kids bop “Baby Shark” driving us all nuts this year. Politics were unavoidable, with you-know-who running for (and winning) the presidency, and his running mate Mike Pence got a shoutout (not in a good way) from the casts during a performance of Hamilton. Across the pond, the Brits were just beginning the process known as Brexit, which is still controversial. We did something called the “mannequin challenge” and Olympic bad boy Ryan Lochte was everywhere, but surely that’s just a coincidence.

In tech, gamers got up and out of the house to play Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game that made the real world a virtual playground for Pikachu, Charmander and all their friends. Some people took it a little too far, though, and were arrested breaking into private property after hours to play the game. Closer to home, our refrigerators, microwaves and even toasters were suddenly online. Our appliances were now smarter, but we remained as dumb as ever, as hackers used these new networks to break into our accounts. This is the year that both hoverboards and Samsung Notes were lit – literally on fire – and people became more obsolete than ever: Amazon started using drones for deliveries and for the first time, we could let our cars do the driving. 2016 had us lurching even faster towards the robot revolution.

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 2016.

• Political figures (and those that love them) introduced a lot of catchphrases into the lexicon this year, and we – well, some of us – are still saying things like MAGA, fake news, and talking about the deplorables.
• Decrying “cancel culture,” aka ‘consequences’, and being “woke,” aka ‘compassionate’, were all the rage in some circles.
• The death of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who was killed after he grabbed a child who climbed/fell into his enclosure, happened six years ago as of this writing, but we are still in mourning. RIP, Harambe.
• Frogs were endlessly meme-able, from Dat Boi unicycling his way into our heart, to evil Kermit convincing himself to do the bad thing, to Pepe the frog, who went so far towards the Dark Side that he’s now a symbol of hate.
• U mad bro? The clenched fist of cartoon character Arthur became a shorthand for unexpressed rage, something we all knew a little bit about this year.
• The one politician nobody likes, Ted Cruz, got the meme treatment when the factually impossible but still fun idea of him being the mysterious Zodiac Killer gained a lot of traction.
• Goals: for 2016 to be lit AF. You know what I mean.
• Still confused? So was the math lady, who pondered equations with a look of extreme puzzlement on her face. The image was from Brazilian telenovela Senhora Do Destino, but she really spoke for all of us then, and now.

SAYING GOODBYE

Brangelina called it quits in 2016, and The Muppets revival on ABC ended far, far too soon. Other shows cancelled this year include Two Broke Girls, C.S.I., The Good Wife, Castle, Rizzoli and Isles, Royal Pains, Penny Dreadful, Mistresses, Mike and Molly, and Person of Interest. It turned out that Limitless was limited to a single season, Unforgettable got forgotten by most everyone, and audiences stopped looking for Marco Polo. Elder hunks Rob Lowe and John Stamos were out of a job after Grandfathered and The Grinder both were axed at Fox, E! said “no (The) Soup for you” to all of us, cancelling the veteran clip show that gave us Joel McHale, Hal Sparks and Aisha Hinds after 22 years.

There were a staggering amount of celebrity deaths in 2016, including such notables as David Bowie, Prince, Muhammed Ali, George Michael, Alan Richman, Gene Wilder, Anton Yelchin, along with Carrie Fisher – and her mom, actress Debbie Reynolds, who passed away within a day of each other as the year drew to a close. We also lost TV moms Florence Henderson and Doris Roberts, and TV dads Alan Thicke and Garry Marshall, who was the father of classic sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Happy Days. And there’s more: Garry Shandling, George Martin, Ron Glass, Vanity, Harper Lee, Nancy Reagan, Patty Duke, Chyna, William Christopher, Leonard Cohen and Zsa Zsa Gabor, etc. Whew.

And that’s a bigger, better look at the year in pop culture, circa 2016.