EricD
Coeur d’Acier
Well I can't speak for popular culture, but I suspect that part of the reason is quality and availability of source texts. The CImbrian War and the career of Marius falls into a bit of gap in our primary sources about the history of the Roman Republic. The period of the Punic Wars is covered in a lot of detail in the Histories of Polybius, a very high quality, detailed, and lucid account. The surviving books of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita also cover the Punic Wars and the following Macedonian wars in some detail as well, although I would rate Polybius as the preferable source of the two of them as Livy was writing long after the events of which he wrote. After Marius, we have very clear and high quality texts about events in the tumultuous period of the mid to late 1st century BC in the writings of Cicero and Caesar, two of the most remarkable authors in the Latin language.
The Cimbrian War and the career of Marius is most clearly accounted to us in Plutarch's Life of Marius, as well as some of his related biographies like those of Sulla, Crassus, and Pompey. While Plutarch is definitely a valuable source, it should be remembered that his primary intent as a biographer was to explore the souls and characters of these men as individuals, and so his accounts focus often on their moral qualities or on anecdotes which illustrate their nature as individuals, and don't focus so much on causation of events. This makes him less useful for the modern historian than, say, Polybius, who took a very structuralist approach and wanted to examine how empires rise and fall and respond to changes in fortune. The Civil Wars of Appian also discuss this time period, but Appian's sources and reliability are highly debatable.
The late 2nd century and early 1st century BC were tumultuous times for the Roman Republic, and the Cimbrian War was definitely a major threat to Rome and Italy, but unfortunately our available texts on the period are much more limited and problematic than the writings of people like Polybius.