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2014 Pop Culture History

Quick Facts from 2014

  • World Bold Event: CVS Pharmacy stopped selling tobacco products on September 3, 2014, becoming the first major U.S. pharmacy chain to do so, forgoing an estimated $2 billion in annual tobacco revenue. They also rebranded as CVS Health.
  • Top Song: Happy by Pharrell Williams, which spent ten consecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first song to generate over a billion streams
  • Must-See Movies: Interstellar, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The LEGO Movie, John Wick, and Big Hero 6
  • People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive: Chris Hemsworth
  • Notable Books: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  • Postage stamp: 49 cents; Keurig coffee maker: $149.99; Titleist golf balls: $39.99/dozen
  • Super Bowl ad (30 seconds): $4.25 million
  • The Funny Musician: Weird Al Yankovic, whose album Mandatory Fun became the first comedy album to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 in 51 years
  • Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Horse, associated with energy, independence, and forward momentum
  • The Conversation: Have you done the Ice Bucket Challenge yet?
Top Ten Baby Names of 2014

Girls: Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Isabella, Ava
Boys: Noah, Liam, Mason, Jacob, William

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols

Erin Andrews, Alessandra Ambrosio, Gillian Anderson, Hayley Atwell, Morena Baccarin, Elizabeth Banks, Kristen Bell, Ashley Benson, Julie Benz, Tia Blanco, Alison Brie, Emilia Clarke, Lauren Cohan, Jenna-Louise Coleman, Kaley Cuoco, Alexandra Daddario, Brooklyn Decker, Kat Dennings, Zooey Deschanel, Gal Gadot, Karen Gillan, Ellie Goulding, Ariana Grande, Gigi Hadid, Lena Headey, Sarah Hyland, Katie Holmes, Samantha Hoopes, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Scarlett Johansson, Victoria Justice, Jennifer Lawrence, Evangeline Lilly, Demi Lovato, Tatiana Maslany, Rose McIver, AJ Michalka, Aly Michalka, Kate Middleton, Olivia Munn, Rachel Nichols, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Olsen, Rita Ora, Katy Perry, Emily Ratajkowski, Bar Refaeli, Rihanna, Margot Robbie, Emmy Rossum, Ronda Rousey, Zoe Saldana, Nicole Scherzinger, Lea Seydoux, Shakira, Taylor Swift, Ivanka Trump, Sophie Turner, Sofia Vergara, Emma Watson, Deborah Ann Woll

The Quotes

“Adele Dazeem.” — John Travolta, introducing Idina Menzel at the 2014 Oscars, a mispronunciation so spectacular it immediately became its own cultural event

“But that’s none of my business.” — The Kermit the Frog meme, 2014’s most-deployed passive-aggressive social media format

Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year

The Ebola Fighters — the doctors, nurses, and aid workers who responded to the West Africa Ebola outbreak, which infected over 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000

Miss America and Miss USA

Miss America: Nina Davuluri — the first woman of Indian descent to win Miss America
Miss USA: Nia Sanchez, Nevada

We Lost in 2014

Robin Williams — comedian, actor, and one of the most beloved performers of his generation- died August 11, 2014, at age 63. His death prompted a worldwide outpouring of grief and a significant public conversation about depression and mental health that had rarely been attached to someone so outwardly joyful. The causes of his behavior in his final months were later attributed in part to Lewy body dementia, a diagnosis made only after his death.

Philip Seymour Hoffman — one of the finest character actors of his generation, winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for Capote, died February 2, 2014, at age 46, of acute mixed drug intoxication.

Joan Rivers — comedian, television personality, and trailblazer who opened doors for female stand-up comics that had previously been firmly shut- died September 4, 2014, at age 81, following complications from a procedure at a clinic in New York.

James Brady, the White House press secretary who was shot and partially paralyzed during the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, died August 4, 2014, at age 73. A medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, attributing it to complications from the 1981 gunshot wound, making it a homicide ruled 33 years after the original shooting.

Lauren Bacall — actress and screen legend, the defining Hollywood femme of the 1940s- died on August 12, 2014, at age 89.

America in 2014 — The Context

Barack Obama was in the sixth year of his presidency. The economy was recovering steadily from the 2008 financial crisis. The Affordable Care Act had survived its rocky rollout and was enrolling millions of previously uninsured Americans, while remaining the most politically contentious legislation of the decade. ISIS had declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, drawing U.S. military attention back to the region. And the internet, particularly social media, had become the dominant medium for political discourse, cultural conversation, celebrity, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of challenges involving buckets of ice water.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

In the summer of 2014, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge swept social media. The format was simple: dump a bucket of ice water on your head, post the video, challenge three friends to do the same within 24 hours or donate to the ALS Association. The challenge spread faster and further than any previous charity campaign in history, generating over 17 million videos on Facebook alone and reaching virtually every celebrity with a social media account. The ALS Association received $100.9 million in donations between July and September 2014, compared to $2.8 million in the same period the prior year — a 3,500% increase. The money funded research that contributed to the 2016 discovery of the NEK1 gene, one of the most common genetic contributors to ALS.

The Oscars Selfie

At the 86th Academy Awards on March 2, 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres gathered a group of A-list celebrities — including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o, and Channing Tatum- and had Bradley Cooper take a photo with her phone. She tweeted it. It became the most retweeted image in Twitter history within hours, breaking the previous record held by Barack Obama’s reelection tweet. The photo accumulated over 3.3 million retweets. Samsung, whose phone was used, received an extraordinary amount of free product placement. Whether that was accidental was widely debated.

Also at the same ceremony, John Travolta introduced singer Idina Menzel as “Adele Dazeem.” The mispronunciation was so thorough and delivered with such confidence that the internet generated a “Travoltify Your Name” generator within hours. Menzel handled it with grace. Travolta apologized. The internet did not forget.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Taylor Swift released 1989 on October 27, 2014, marking her full transition from country to pop. It became the best-selling album of the year, moved over a million copies in its first week alone, and spawned four top-five singles. Swift also pulled her entire catalog from Spotify, arguing that music streaming services undervalued artists’ work. She was, at that point, the biggest pop star in the world and getting bigger.

Guardians of the Galaxy opened August 1, 2014, and proved that Marvel could make a major theatrical hit out of characters almost nobody had heard of. The film grossed over $770 million worldwide. The soundtrack — a mix of 1970s pop hits framed as a fictional mixtape — became the first soundtrack composed entirely of previously released songs to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200.

The LEGO Movie opened February 7, 2014, and was significantly better than a movie based on plastic toy bricks had any right to be. Its theme song Everything Is Awesome was nominated for an Academy Award, which was either a triumph for the film or a comment on the state of movie songs, depending on your perspective.

John Wick opened October 24, 2014, and quietly became one of the most influential action films of the decade, establishing a new visual grammar for choreographed fight sequences that every subsequent action franchise attempted to copy.

Betty White was awarded the Guinness World Record for “Longest TV Career for an Entertainer (Female)” in 2014, with her debut traced to 1939. She was 92 years old and still working.

Gangnam Style by PSY exceeded the maximum view count of YouTube’s 32-bit integer counter in December 2014, having surpassed 2,147,483,647 views — the largest number a 32-bit system can store. YouTube had to upgrade its view counter to a 64-bit integer. No video had previously broken the internet’s arithmetic.

Bots outnumbered humans on the internet for the first time in 2014, accounting for approximately 60% of all web traffic. The majority were engaged in activities including web scraping, spam distribution, and ad fraud. The humans remaining were largely unaware of this development.

The beard on Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask fell off during cleaning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2014. Workers reattached it with epoxy glue — a material that is both inappropriate for ancient artifacts and extremely difficult to remove without causing further damage. The museum staff responsible were later prosecuted. The mask required professional restoration to undo the repair.

The number 2,147,483,647 is the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer — the largest number most standard computing systems could store. It is also the number of YouTube views that broke the counter when Gangnam Style exceeded it.

Google’s market capitalization exceeded the total value of Russia’s entire stock market in December 2014. Russia’s stock market had a capitalization of approximately 1.2 trillion at the time. Google was valued at roughly 1.4 trillion. The comparison was made frequently in financial media and seemed to bother Russia considerably.

As of 2014, only two artists in Billboard history had placed their first two singles at #1 and #2 on the Hot 100 simultaneously: The Beatles and Iggy Azalea.

Superman would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2014, had Congress not extended copyright terms in the late 1990s. The next significant date for possible Superman copyright expiration is 2033, when the earliest Action Comics material becomes eligible again under current law.

Weird Al Yankovic’s album Mandatory Fun became the first comedy album to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 in 51 years, since Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut in 1963. It was also Yankovic’s first #1 album in a career spanning 32 years. The album was accompanied by eight music videos released on eight consecutive days, a promotional approach that was itself parodied as a parody strategy.

Pablo Escobar’s former personal hitman, John Jairo Velasquez, known as “Popeye” and attributed with involvement in approximately 3,000 deaths, was released from prison in Colombia in 2014 after serving 23 years. He became a YouTube personality with over 250,000 subscribers, posting videos about crime, prison life, and his past. He died of cancer in 2020.

The MV Sewol, a South Korean passenger ferry, capsized on April 16, 2014. The captain instructed passengers — the majority of whom were high school students on a field trip — to remain in their cabins and not move. The captain and several crew members then abandoned ship. Of the 476 people aboard, 304 died, most of them students. The captain was sentenced to life in prison.

Pia Farrenkopf was found mummified in her car in her garage in Pontiac, Michigan, in March 2014. She had died in 2009. Her bills had been set up on auto-pay, and with no family members checking on her, the automatic payments continued for nearly five years until her bank account was exhausted and her home went into foreclosure. It was the foreclosure proceedings that led investigators to the property.

Greenpeace activists installed a large banner near the Nazca Lines in Peru on December 8, 2014, walking across the protected geoglyph site — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — to place the message adjacent to one of the hummingbird figures. The footprints left in the fragile ancient desert soil were immediately visible and potentially irreversible. Peru’s government demanded an apology and sought criminal charges. Greenpeace apologized.

Michelle Carter, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts, was charged with manslaughter in 2014 for allegedly sending text messages encouraging her 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to follow through with his suicide in July 2014. The case raised questions about the extent to which words — specifically digital messages — could constitute criminal conduct. She was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins appeared on the cover of Paws Chicago magazine, a cat publication, posing with his cats. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper openly mocked the cover on his program. Corgan responded at length and with considerable intensity. The feud between a rock musician and a television anchor over a cat magazine cover was the kind of conflict that 2014 seemed specifically designed to produce.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA and Nobel laureate, auctioned his Nobel Prize medal in December 2014 due to financial difficulties, becoming the first living Nobel laureate to sell his. It sold for $4.1 million. The buyer, Russian tech billionaire Alisher Usmanov, returned it to Watson, saying that a scientist of his stature should keep his medal. Watson has subsequently been stripped of honorary titles by several institutions over statements he made about race and intelligence.

Cheetos introduced a fragrance called Cheetos Flamin’ Hot in 2014. Described by the company as carrying the aroma of its signature snack, it was not widely adopted as a personal fragrance.

A Starbucks pay-it-forward chain began at a drive-through in St. Petersburg, Florida, early on one morning in 2014, when the first customer paid for the next person’s order. The chain ran from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. — 379 consecutive customers — before customer 380 declined to participate. The chain was widely covered as a feel-good story. It was also noted that, in most cases, customers paid slightly more than the person ahead of them, meaning the chain had a modest upward financial pressure built in.

Molecular biologist James Watson sold his Nobel Prize medal, as noted above. Separately, record-setting swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan — a 17-time world champion finswimmer who had previously rescued 20 people from a submerged bus in 1976 — carried the Olympic torch at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. He had also rescued people from a burning building in 1985. His extraordinary rescue record has never received the level of public attention it deserves.

In 2014, approximately 7 humans were killed by sharks worldwide. Humans killed an estimated 63 million sharks. The math does not favor the sharks.

The oldest living man in 2014 was Alexander Imich, age 111, a Polish-born American chemist who had survived both the Holocaust and the Soviet labor camps. He died in June 2014 at age 111, having held the record for six weeks.

United Passions, a film about the history of FIFA produced with FIFA funding, opened in 10 U.S. theaters on June 5, 2014, and grossed $607 on its opening weekend — approximately $60 per theater. The film has since been noted as one of the lowest-grossing theatrical releases in American box office history. The timing, given that FIFA’s corruption scandal broke the following year, made it additionally unfortunate.

A 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sold at auction in August 2014 for $38,115,000, including buyer’s premium, breaking the record for the most expensive car ever sold at auction. The record has been broken several times since, often by other Ferraris.

Romania has been attempting since 1916 to recover 93.4 tons of gold sent to Russia for safekeeping during World War I. As of 2014, Russia had returned approximately 33 kilograms of it. This is not a rounding error.

The Feud

Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins posed with his cats on the cover of Paws Chicago magazine. Anderson Cooper devoted a segment on his CNN program to openly mocking the cover. Corgan responded publicly and at significant length, expressing genuine grievance. The resulting back-and-forth between a multiplatinum rock musician and one of America’s most respected broadcast journalists, conducted entirely over a cat magazine, is a reasonable summary of 2014 media culture.

Nobel Prize Winners

Physics — Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which enabled bright, energy-saving white light sources; LED lighting now accounts for the majority of new light fixture installations worldwide
Chemistry — Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, allowing scientists to see individual molecules inside living cells
Medicine — John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser for the discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain,  the brain’s internal GPS
Literature — Patrick Modiano, French novelist, for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation
Peace — Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai  for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education; Malala, at 17, became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history
Economics — Jean Tirole — for his analysis of market power and regulation, particularly in industries dominated by a small number of powerful firms

2014 Christmas Gifts and First Appearances

New Nintendo 3DS XL; Little Green Army Men, Bubbles, and Rubik’s Cube inducted to the National Toy Hall of Fame; Amazon Echo (first generation Alexa device)

Broadway in 2014

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opened January 12, 2014, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, celebrating the life and songs of Carole King. It ran for over 1,500 performances.

Aladdin opened March 20, 2014, at the New Amsterdam Theatre, adding to the Disney Broadway catalog that had already included The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.

Les Miserables returned in a Broadway revival on March 23, 2014, running until September 4, 2016.

Best Film Oscar Winner

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o, won Best Picture at the 86th Academy Awards in March 2014, presented for the 2013 film year. Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress. The film is based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

2014 Entries to the National Film Registry

13 Lakes (released in 2004)
Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day (released in 1913)
The Big Lebowski (released in 1998)
Down Argentine Way (released in 1940)
The Dragon Painter (released in 1919)
Felicia (released in 1965)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (released in 1986)
The Gang’s All Here (released in 1943)
House of Wax (released in 1953)
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (released in 2000)
Little Big Man (released in 1970)
Luxo Jr. (released in 1986)
Moon Breath Beat (released in 1980)
Please Don’t Bury Me Alive! (released in 1976)
The Power and the Glory (released in 1933)
Rio Bravo (released in 1959)
Rosemary’s Baby (released in 1968)
Ruggles of Red Gap (released in 1935)
Saving Private Ryan (released in 1998)
Shoes (released in 1916)
State Fair (released in 1933)
Unmasked (released in 1917)
V-E Day +1 (May 9, 1945) (released in 1945)
The Way of Peace (released in 1947)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (released in 1971)

Top Movies of 2014
  1. American Sniper
  2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1
  3. Guardians of the Galaxy
  4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
  5. The LEGO Movie
  6. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
  7. Transformers: Age of Extinction
  8. Maleficent
  9. X-Men: Days of Future Past
  10. Big Hero 6

Godzilla was on screen for approximately 8 minutes of the 2014 film that bears his name. The rest of the running time was devoted to other things. Audiences had opinions about this arrangement.

Most Popular TV Shows of 2014

The Big Bang Theory, The Walking Dead, NCIS, The Good Wife, Person of Interest, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother (final season), True Detective (first season), Game of Thrones (Season 4), and Orange Is the New Black dominated viewing in 2014. Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno on February 17, 2014, drawing 11.3 million viewers on his debut — the largest Tonight Show audience in years.

Sports Champions of 2014

World Series: San Francisco Giants — defeated the Kansas City Royals 4-3; Madison Bumgarner pitched five shutout innings in relief in Game 7, one of the great individual World Series performances in the sport’s history
Super Bowl XLVIII: Seattle Seahawks — defeated the Denver Broncos 43-8; it was the most lopsided Super Bowl in history up to that point
NBA Champions: San Antonio Spurs — defeated the Miami Heat 4-1; widely praised as the most beautiful team basketball played in the modern era
Stanley Cup: Los Angeles Kings — defeated the New York Rangers 4-1
U.S. Open Golf: Martin Kaymer
U.S. Open Tennis:  Men/Women: Marin Cilic / Serena Williams
Wimbledon: Men/Women: Novak Djokovic / Petra Kvitova
NCAA Football Champions: Ohio State — the first College Football Playoff champion
NCAA Basketball Champions: Connecticut Huskies
Kentucky Derby: California Chrome
FIFA World Cup: Germany defeated Argentina 1-0 in extra time; Mario Gotze scored the winner in the 113th minute

Sports Highlight: Madison Bumgarner’s World Series Game 7 performance — entering in the fifth inning on two days’ rest and throwing five shutout innings to preserve the Giants’ one-run lead — is widely considered one of the greatest clutch performances in baseball history. Germany’s World Cup run included a 7-1 semifinal destruction of host nation Brazil, the worst defeat in Brazilian football history, which the Brazilian press called “the Mineirazo” — a reference to the stadium and to the country’s 1950 World Cup final loss on home soil.

FAQ — 2014 History, Facts and Trivia

Q: What was the Ice Bucket Challenge, and how much did it raise?
A: A viral social media campaign in which participants dumped ice water on their heads and challenged friends to do the same or donate to ALS research. The ALS Association received $100.9 million in donations during the campaign period — compared to $2.8 million in the same period the previous year. The funds contributed to the 2016 discovery of the NEK1 gene, a significant genetic contributor to ALS.

Q: What was the most famous moment at the 2014 Oscars?
A: Two, arguably. Host Ellen DeGeneres organized a celebrity selfie taken by Bradley Cooper that became the most retweeted image in Twitter history. And John Travolta introduced Idina Menzel as “Adele Dazeem,” a mispronunciation so complete and confident that it immediately entered cultural memory.

Q: What happened when Gangnam Style exceeded YouTube’s view counter?
A: The video surpassed 2,147,483,647 views — the maximum value a 32-bit integer can hold — in December 2014. YouTube had never anticipated any video reaching this number and had to upgrade its view counter to a 64-bit integer to accommodate further counts. The new maximum is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

Q: Why did CVS stop selling tobacco in 2014?
A: CVS Pharmacy announced in February 2014 that it would stop selling all tobacco products by October 1 of that year, forgoing approximately $2 billion in annual revenue. The company simultaneously rebranded as CVS Health, signaling a shift toward positioning itself as a health company rather than a general retail pharmacy.

Q: What was notable about Malala Yousafzai’s 2014 Nobel Peace Prize?
A: At 17, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history, sharing the prize with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi. She had been shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in Pakistan in 2012 for advocating girls’ education and had continued her activism throughout her recovery.

Q: What was the James Brady homicide ruling?
A: James Brady, who was partially paralyzed during the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, died on August 4, 2014, at age 73. A medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, attributing it to complications from the gunshot wound he sustained 33 years earlier. His shooter, John Hinckley Jr., was not additionally charged.

Q: What made the 2014 Super Bowl notable?
A: The Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43-8, the most lopsided outcome in Super Bowl history at the time. The Denver offense, which had set the NFL single-season scoring record that year, was held scoreless on offense throughout most of the game.