Reply 1997 is a 2012 South Korean television series that centers on the lives of six friends in Busan, as the timeline moves back and forth between their past as 18-year-old high schoolers in 1997 and their present as 33-year-olds at their high school reunion dinner in 2012, where one couple will announce that they're getting married. As the first installment of the Reply series, it also portrays the extreme fan culture that emerged in the 1990s when first generation idol groups such as H.O.T. and Sechs Kies took center stage and K-pop was just beginning to blossom.

Busan, officially Busan Metropolitan City, is South Korea's second most populous city after Seoul, with a population of over 3.4 million inhabitants as of 2017. Formerly romanized as Pusan, it is the economic, cultural and educational center of southeastern South Korea, with its port being South Korea's busiest and the sixth-busiest in the world. The surrounding "Southeastern Maritime Industrial Region" is South Korea's largest industrial area. The large volumes of port traffic and urban population in excess of 1 million make Busan a Large-Port metropolis using the Southampton System of Port-City classification. As of 2019, Busan Port is primary port in Korea and the world's sixth-largest container port.