Playboy's Pam Anderson Special (1996)

Hundreds of years from now if the inhabitants of some alien planet were crack open a time capsule of photographs, videos and the artifacts of our 20th century society, what would they learn about our bizarre world? They might conclude that we liked to watch tall men running back and forth on a hardwood floor passing each other a large ball and that one man with Day Glo hair and paintings on his body grabbed the ball from the others. They might find a white paper cup decorated with golden arches, the brown liquid inside still too hot to drink.

But the most startling discovery would be the adoration of a life-form called Pamela Anderson. From bits and pieces recorded on television, in magazines and via the then fledgling communication network World Wide Web, these 25th-century historians would piece together the reign of this global deity who ruled over a billion people, a fifth of the earth's population. Her message of saving and healing was beamed weekly into 110 countries from a pulpit of sky and water and golden sand. She was a true guardian of life in a bulging red swimsuit. Her photo was everywhere—on posters, billboards, calendars and magazines—in every corner of the earth. She stood for all that was sexy, tattooed and siliconed.

Her platinum blonde hair, bedroom eyes and bedroom mouth made her the definitive "girl next door," the ultimate female companion for the 1990s. She was born in a land known for its cold and snow but moved to L.A. which was home to other godlike creatures before the "big one" took it off the map.

In the month of February 1990 she was declared the official "Miss" and in clothing much too skimpy to cover her desirous feminine parts, she was photographed and a centerfold was sold to millions. For a while she took the name of C.J. Parker, lived on the beach, smelled of a fragrance called Coppertone and exposed her cleavage to pubescent teenagers. As Pam-demonium swept the globe she became a disciple of a man with two first names and a prodigious collection of body art. The couple's willingness to expose their sexual exploits fueled tabloid headlines in words and Polaroids. But the notoriety of the goddess reached its zenith in 1996 with the release of a 96-page Pam-zine collectable. And as one of the alien sociologists examined the images from a single copy hermetically sealed in that time capsule, he was overheard sighing: "Awesome babe!"