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A 1996 scene from The X-Files
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Mulder and Scully are back, but the world has changed. When the first episode of the upcoming revival of The X-Files premieres on Tuesday at an entertainment-industry conference in France (it will air on TV in January), the FBI agents who helped kick start the 1990s paranormal craze will solve crimes in a newly wired world (the trailer does show smartphones, after all).

But no matter how the show is updated for 2016, it will bring a little bit of the 1990s with it. After all, The X-Files helped define the decade. When the show premiered in 1993, it helped precipitate a programming trend that would last for years.

As TIME wrote in 1995, The X-Files and its imitators spoke to a distinctly pre-Y2K interest:

Read more from 1995, here in the TIME Vault: Out of This World

More Must-Reads From TIME

Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com.

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