TTLT: Meme Precursors

This blog loves meme.  But let me put on my hipster glasses and say I was following memes way before any one else here was following memes.  In fact, I was following memes before the term 'Internet meme' was even coined.  There were a number of what we will call meme precursors, basically websites, videos, and images that went viral, not to the entire world (like that goddamn annoying dancing baby gif that everyone's mom put up on their aol homepage) but within a very small isolated communities, also known as "computer nerds" and "slackers in college."  In fact, many of these were enjoyed by Mr. Horse and me back when we were in college together.  Sharing the funny things on the Internet was great because it helped compensate for the fact that I hated that goddamn hoofer.But anyway, here are the top 10 meme precursors.

10. Every Time You Masturbate God Kills a Kitten

Know Your Memes claims this image first appeared on FARK in 2002 but I know for a fact I saw this image in early 2001.  It was my goddamn wallpaper freshman year of college.  Or maybe my memory is bad.  You'd like that wouldn't you Gap.  Anyway, like its meme predecessors, the picture spread and then there were plenty of spin offs and parodies.  Oh and it involves kittehs.

9. Rejected

Rejected is an animated short comedy film produced in 2000.  Released prior to YouTube or other video-sharing websites, I actually saw this for the first time on a DVD.  The thing had a huge cult following across colleges and even today you see references to it on 4chan and Reddit.  I remember back in college we thought Rejected was absolutely brilliant and hilarious.  In reality, it was just really fucking weird and we were high.  I remember telling my parents they had to see this and they thought it was completely stupid.  Old people are the worst.  Oh, this was also actually nominated for an Academy Award.

8.  Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Apparently this flash animation came out in 2000 but I wasn't aware of it until 2002.  God I was so mainstream back then.  Everyone forwarded it to each other in college.  It was pretty dumb but we were drunk.  A couple years later Family Guy parodied it.  And at the time I smugly claimed I knew about it way before it was mainstream,.  But apparently not.  I am such a fucking sheep.

7.  Leeroy Jenkins

A viral vid popular amongst the World of Warcraft crowd.  The video depicts a WoW "guild" (nerd for "team") communicating strategy on how to defeat a particularly difficult enemy in the game.  The nerds are crunching numbers and plotting their tactics and apparently one of their members, who was really high at the time, was away from his computer reheating some fried chicken.  He returned and, not having participated in any of the strategy discussions, screamed his character's name (Leeeeeeeroy Jenkkins!) over his headset and just rushed in and attacked the enemies, completely screwing up the well-thought out plans of his teammates.  The entire team gets killed and the other team members berate Leeroy.  My WoW friends tell me that it is even funnier because they were apparently trying to defeat these enemies to acquire some helpful item for Leeroy which he apparently couldn't even used because of his character type.  Fucking nerds.  Anyway, the video went viral and Leeroy is now an Internet celebrity.

6.  Winnebago Man

This is one of my all time favorites.  A VHS of outtakes from a 1980s RV commercial shoot, it features an angry, easily flustered pitchman who is constantly cursing and yelling and berating the crew (and himself) in each outtake.  The video was actually distributed for years on VHS before it finally made its way to YouTube, almost 20 years after it was created, and then went viral.   If you had the misfortune of being around me in law school I was constantly quoting this.  God I was the worst back then.

5. Badger Badger Badger

Another flash animation, this one circa 2003 and from the website Weebl's Stuff, which put out a lot of great stuff along with its sister site Rather Good (I think they were related but we have already established my memory is piss poor).  The shit on these websites was great.  I was always forwarding that shit to HWSNBN.  Like this.  Some of it even went mainstream and was used to sell Subway.  It was a dark day when Rather Good sold out and went corporate.  Badger Badger Badger was the most viral of Weebl's stuff, and Mr. Horse and I have probably spent a combined  month viewing this animation.  Over and over.  Or its high budget special edition sequel. I really don't recall doing lots of drugs in college but that is really the only explanation.

4. Fensler GI Joe PSAs

In 2003, these were my favorite thing in the world.  Some dude took a bunch of GI Joe PSAs and re-dubbed them.  This was pre-YouTube so every time a new one was released you'd have to spend like an hour downloading the Quicktime files off of the shitty low bandwidth website.  At least until Ebaums World picked them up but by that time they were obviously way too mainstream.  Another thing we ran into the ground by incessantly quoting them in college.  Mr. Horse can chime in but I think "Pork Chop Sandwiches" and "Mr. Body Massage Machine" will go down as some of the greatest comedies of the 21st century.

3. Goatse/Lemon Party

I won't put these up here.  If you really want to see them, Google them.  Don't do it from work.  Both were either sent as innocent-looking URLs or innocent sounding files names.  "Oh, what is a goatse?  Let me open this file... OH GOD!" (vomits and then forwards email to all his friends.)  "Lemon party?  Sounds fun, let me click on that link."  (vomits and makes url his away message on AIM).  Late 1990s/ early 2000s trolling at its finest.

2.   All Your Base Are Belong to Us

This really is one of the first true memes.  The phrase comes from a 1989 video game  Zero Wing which included a piss-poor Japanese to English translation.  The phrase "all your base are belong to us" was popularized in the late 1990s on various message boards, and in 2000, photoshopped images featuring the phrase appeared on websites like Something Awful.  It culminated with the above flash animation in early 2001.

1. YTMND

YTMND was originally just this webpage back in 2001.  Then someone made this one.  From there it took off  At first just images with zoomed text and a .wav file, soon they became more creative.  Like memes, YTMNDS frequently sparked fads and numerous spinoffs.  Like 4chan, the website soon became a haven for trolls who waged wars against their perceived enemies like Scientology and eBaum's World.  YTMND was huge between 2004 and 2009 but has since really been on decline.  But you could spend months looking through its best-rated sights from the website's inception and it would pretty much give you a complete picture of  how fads or memes are created.  I'll link some of the best ones but like some of the best memes, you won't understand them without the context.  Sorry you are just too mainstream.

/adjusts hipster glasses and puts on scarf to go outside even though it's summer, goes to fashion store in East Village and pays $150 for T-shirt that was intentionally made to look like it was old shirt from Goodwill


Honorable Mention: Real Ultimate Power.  Probably my all time favorite single webpage, created in 2002.  It would have made the list but, even though the website is still up, the awesome midi file of "Big Pimpin'" was removed or no longer works. That really made the website. It also makes the list because the New York Times once described it as "a satirical ode to the masculine prowess of ninjas."  Man I love when websites do things ironically.