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Born in 2004? Here's the world you arrived into

In 2004, "Yeah!" topped the charts, Shrek 2 packed theaters, a stamp cost 37¢, the average home went for about $221,000.

What things cost in 2004

Gas at $1.85 in 2004 works out to about $3.20 in today's dollars, and the $6.21 movie ticket to roughly $10.75. The 37-cent stamp, which had held steady for three years, converts to about 64 cents.

The biggest moments of 2004

• A college student named Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room.
• The Summer Olympics returned to their birthplace in Athens, Greece.
• The Boston Red Sox won the World Series, breaking their famous 86-year championship drought.

• Friends aired its final episode in May, and some 52 million Americans tuned in to say goodbye to the gang at Central Perk.
• A soft-spoken software engineer named Ken Jennings won 74 straight games of Jeopardy!, keeping the whole country tuning in nightly all summer and fall.
• SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in October, becoming the first privately built craft to reach space twice in two weeks.

Toys, TV & trends of 2004

• The Nintendo DS launched with its futuristic two screens and a stylus.
• Yellow Livestrong bracelets started a rubber-wristband craze that swept schools everywhere.
• World of Warcraft debuted and quickly became the biggest online game in the world.

• Motorola's impossibly thin RAZR flip phone debuted and instantly became the coolest thing anyone could pull out of a pocket.
• Halo 2 made history with a $125 million launch day, with kids lining up at midnight outside game stores in Master Chief costumes.
• Robosapien, a gesture-controlled walking robot, stomped and karate-chopped its way to the top of holiday wish lists.

The music scene

Usher owned the year so completely that Confessions sold 1.1 million copies in its first week and spun off four number-one singles. Green Day roared back with American Idiot, a full-blown punk-rock opera that introduced the band to a whole new generation. Meanwhile the hottest music purchase for many teens wasn't a song at all but a $2.50 ringtone snippet of one, a business suddenly worth billions.

At the movies

Shrek 2 didn't just top the year's box office; it became the highest-grossing animated film the world had yet seen. The Polar Express pioneered eerie full-motion-capture animation with Tom Hanks playing five roles, while a $400,000 indie oddball called Napoleon Dynamite put "Vote for Pedro" T-shirts in every school hallway. At the Oscars, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby took Best Picture.

Cartoons kids loved

• SpongeBob SquarePants
• Danny Phantom (debuted in 2004)
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends

This was the peak of the creator-driven cartoon era: Butch Hartman launched Danny Phantom while still running The Fairly OddParents, and Craig McCracken followed the Powerpuff Girls with Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. SpongeBob even jumped to the big screen in November, proving a TV cartoon could headline a hit movie.

The world in 2004

• World population: about 6.4 billion
• U.S. President: George W. Bush
• A massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Indian Ocean region in December, prompting a worldwide relief effort.

• The European Union welcomed ten new countries at once in May, its biggest expansion ever, stretching the union from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.
• NASA's Cassini spacecraft became the first ever to orbit Saturn, beaming home jaw-dropping pictures of its rings and moons.
• Greece shocked the soccer world by winning Euro 2004 as 80-to-1 underdogs, just months before hosting the Olympics in Athens.

2004 birthday questions

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