25 Classic Austin Powers GIFs to Celebrate 25 Shagadelic Years

Who can forget Austin Powers? The outrageous parody of James Bond created and played by comedic actor Mike Myers gave us so many memorable lines and characters over the franchise’s three films. (A fourth installment is rumored to be in the works.) From “Shagadelic, baby!” and “Oh, behave!” to Dr. Evil and Fat Bastard, there’s a laugh a minute in the three cinematic spy spoofs.

It’s hard to believe the original film is already 25 years old, but it is, having dropped in May of 1997. America instantly fell in love with the bumbling but overconfident British secret agent who has a strange and inexplicable sexual magnetism, always bedding the most babelicious girls and somehow getting the bad guys even though he’s dumb as a rock.

The concept of Austin Powers came about during a period of mourning for Myers. His father had recently died and he was taking time off in the wake of his success with Wayne’s World when the idea of Austin Powers came to him. He wrote the script about the secret agent who had been frozen since the “Swingin’ Sixties” and later thawed in the ’90s to conquer his nemesis Dr. Evil in only two weeks.

“It was one of those things where I didn’t know if anybody would get this movie who didn’t grow up in my house,” Myers later said of the story.

But director Jay Roach got it, and went about crafting a movie that mimicked a film adaptation of an obscure British comic book. The dynamic duo managed to nab huge celebrity cameos for all the films that followed, including Will Ferrell, Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Carrie Fisher.

While some might say Austin Powers hasn’t aged well, the character was always meant to be politically incorrect in the first place. When you watch Austin Powers, you’re not doing so for insight; you’re doing it for the dumb comedy and some shits and giggles. In that sense, it hasn’t aged at all.

In honor of the film’s 25th anniversary, we rounded up the funniest GIFs of the International Man of Mystery.