In 1993, Conan O’Brien’s good-natured late-night show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien debuted. Conan, a veteran of The Simpsons, and Saturday Night Live  was tapped for the show after David Letterman, angry over losing The Tonight Show to Jay Leno, defected to CBS. The show struggled in its early years, but there were a few hits straight out of the gate. One was a silly segment riffing on millennial hype (already starting to build) and the futurism of the fifties and sixties: “In the Year 2000.”

Conan and Andy posed with flashlights under their faces and predicted the future, as Richie “LaBamba” Rosenberg crooned “In the year 2000…”

Predictions ranged from the absurd and somewhat timely (“A brave Britney Spears will travel to Chechnya in an attempt to convince warring Chechens and Russians that her breasts are real”) to the absurd and timeless (“Rock music will all be done by computers, and as a result, computers will get a lot more oral sex”). The skit was so popular it spawned its own book.

As the millennium proper approached, the writers made the call to keep “In the Year 2000” as it was, and the skit stayed more or less intact until Andy Richter left the show in May 2000. Even then, the only change was replacing Richter with the night’s celebrity guest (Richter himself often returned during his guest appearances on the show).

The homegrown charm of “In the Year 2000” held until Conan moved up to the Tonight Show spot himself. When the skit came back as “In the Year 3000,” it was introduced by Richter, back on the couch where he belonged, teasing Conan about holding onto “The Year 2000” for nine years after January 1, 2001. The flashlights had been upgraded to flashing collars, but Rosenberg’s falsetto still anchored the skit.

“In the Year 3000” was the first skit to be carried over from Late Night to The Tonight Show, and went out in 2010 as it went in, not long before Conan’s final episode on NBC: silly, good-natured, and oddly timeless. Don’t believe me? The first joke is about an updated Sherlock Holmes adaptation. It doesn’t get more timeless than that.

Seventeen years is a long time for what was essentially a one-note joke, but I’m still a bit sad that we lost “In the Year 2000” and its futuristic successor. Like Conan himself, it was always a little too weird for what we think of as “network television,” but worked quite well there, despite that.

As far as I know, NBC still has the rights to the “In the Year…” concept and has no interest in letting them go, but everyone’s moved on since then anyway, and this month Team Coco will be getting all the old “Late Night” material to share on its website (aside from some music rights issues). I’ll probably take some time when the skits go live to revisit the Year 2000.