Internet Nostalgia 2: Charlie And Friends

Sometimes it seems like all the retro-humor was just one troll or another

A duck walked up to a lemonade stand
He said to the man running the stand
“Hey! Got any grapes?”
The man said, “No, we just sell lemonade
But it’s cold, and it’s fresh, and it’s all home-made
Can I get you a glass?”
The duck said, “I’ll pass”

Then he waddled away (waddle, waddle)
‘Til the very next day
-The Duck Song, Bryant Oden

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here, huge success
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction
Aperture Science:
We do what we must, because we can.
For the good of all of us…
Except the ones who are dead.
- Still Alive (Theme Song from Portal), GlaDOS / Jonathan Coulton

So very much of the humor on the internet back in the day was basically about trolling people.

If I had a nickel for every time I was rickrolled I probably could have kickstarted my first hedge fund with just that.

Or people would say Trololol and occasionally link to this fellow singing exactly that.

Sometimes songs were considered trollish just for being overplayed - “What Does The Fox Say” or “Macarena” or “Sandstorm” (good lord, the parkour in this video was unimpressive). There was also songs that were trollish for being … obnoxious, like Rebecca Black’s Friday, or ones that were just blasts of childish music like themes from My Little Pony or Thomas The Tank Engine… or Everything Is Awesome from the Lego Movie. Someplace in between those is Spongebob singing about being a Goofy Goober, and for that matter the Nyan Cat audio loop. And if you don’t recognize the name Dragostea Din Tei, you might know it as The Numa Numa Song (with a much worse video - Gary Brolsma looks like he might be Trigglypuff’s little brother) - the bubblegum pop video that actually went with the song made these guys not just locally famous in Romania but an international hit.

But usually this was iconic cartoonish Flash characters doing various trolling. The Duck Song (and several sequels - whenever you’d think this saga was over, another one would come out) featured an annoying duck who would pester a lemonade stand owner, asking him: “Got any grapes?” (Spoiler: he did not.) My kids got me this t-shirt during lockdown to cheer me up, it worked - and people comment on it to this day when I wear it to the grocery store or the like.

Sequels to the Duck Song featured the eponymous duck returning to harass the owner of a local corner store, and then to annoy both the lemonade stand owner and the corner store lady (is this a love story? well, maybe one with an annoying duck…) A fourth and fifth duck song followed; confirming in the fifth that the man and woman were engaged, so apparently the duck has secretly been a matchmaker the whole time. Also, at some point there is another Duck Song featured the duck annoying Santa. In all cases, the duck is a prankster troll.

Charlie the Unicorn: Bit of a turn of events, Charlie is usually the butt of everyone’s jokes/pranks/mischief; he is a cynical, disgruntled, lethargic, pessimistic unicorn, surrounded by various manic creatures who are generally either capricious, malicious, or just sing and then explode. Basically he’s a Redditor. These short Flash animated sketches are all musicals of various annoying earworm qualities and they generally end poorly for Charlie, such as with his kidney being stolen. The Charlie the Unicorn series originated on Newgrounds back in the day (c.f. the earlier internet nostalgia piece) and then migrated to Youtube as part of Filmcow, and eventually to a monster-sized Kickstarter that took forever and a day. Charlie’s adventures start with his search for Candy Mountain, then on to becoming the Banana King, and then underwater (“I think I died long ago and you two are my eternal punishment”) to find a snowman, a overly affectionate starfish, and extremely questionably save the world, and then it’s off to the moon to meet the extremely glam millipede (who continues a long-standing tradition of exploding after singing) - however, this time Charlie’s companions blow up the moon. For quite some time that was the end of it, but then author Jason Steele put a Kickstarter together to continue the story and enough of us maniacs backed it that the whole saga basically doubled in length for the grand finale - which was also largely higher production value and even more insane.

When I first heard mention of Charlie Kirk I somehow expected not a “Prove me wrong” meme but instead

This was probably a sign that I needed to go touch grass and stop being terminally online and exposed to so damn many memes… as one might judge from the fact you are currently reading volume two of my meme retrospective and there’s at least a couple more coming. Stay tuned as my sanity evaporates.

Potter Puppet Pals were a series of sketches of Harry Potter characters done by puppets, of which The Mysterious Ticking Noise was perhaps the most iconic. Production values were low. Same guy who did this is the guy behind Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (and the band Lemon Demon) - Neil Cicierega. Give this one a listen and see if it doesn’t get stuck in your head.

Let’s be fair - “getting people” with trolling songs as a form of kids humor wasn’t exactly new. The puppet character Lambchop appeared on Captain Kangaroo in 1956, but the iconic Lambchop moment for most of us happened in the 1980s, and that is The Song That Doesn’t End - which is a little bit like singing Ninety-Nine Bottles Of Beer On The Wall, except that there are always 99 bottles. In a rather self-aware level of trolling, Annoying Orange features the eponymous orange in a band regaling the audience with this song several times; similarly in Good Girls it’s sung as “This is the song that doesn’t end” - and perhaps most aptly it’s used in a ad for headache medicine, with kids in the back seat of the car eating chocolate covered espresso beans and singing this song.

(It’s somewhat traditional for other children’s songs sung as a round to carry on nigh-endlessly as well, like John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt or Michael Finnegan, but this one takes it to extreme.)

Classic trollface: this is the other one I had as a t-shirt; Hot Topic used to sell them. I’ve had more than a couple people ask me where I bought it. Eventually my son wanted one; I’m happy to report that Amazon now sells them (and I got him his own, to amuse his classmates).

Pepe The Frog … and seemingly everything else on 4Chan or YTMND. I think we may all be aware of just how much the alt-right memed this one into the mainstream back in 2015 or so, enough that Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, eventually killed off his own creation (naturally, art never dies) - but as the saying might go: feels bad, man. Or alternately, you might say kek, which is its own meme, see below. Still, this frog is remembered these days not for being the original somewhat dopey chill green guy from the original comic but for either the alt-right, the Trump 2016 election, the Kekistanis or the 2016-era Groypers, the 2019-era Free Hong Kong protests… or of course the inevitable PEPE cryptocoin.

While we’re on the topic, Kek came from Korean online chatroom speech: kekekeke indicating laughter the same way lolololol or hahahahaha might. World of Warcraft devs modded this in as an easter egg of sorts: Alliance players and Horde players couldn’t understand what the other side was saying, but when someone from the Horde said “LOL” in chat it was mapped to “KEK” by whatever translator-garbler was in use, so millions of WOW players learned that KEK meant LOL. Naturally, the 4channers picked this up and ran with it, inventing Kekistan as the nation of trolls (dedicated of course to the downfall of their neighbors “Normistan” and “Cuckistan” - it’s not real subtle). They even have a theme song from the band PEPE and a green flag that looks one swastika away from the old Nazi era battle flag.

Kids TV show Lazytown spawned a couple different memes: “You Are A Pirate” was excerpted all the time and often tongue-in-cheek-linked to Limewire for downloading media for free. But We Are Number One was so catchy and Robbie Rotten was so over the top goofy that putting several of him on screen for a song-and-dance number was bound to be zany. People actually did covers of this song, which sort of boggled my mind. Actually, Alestorm covered You Are A Pirate too, but the incredibly niche “pirate metal” is their self-proclaimed genre.

His name is John Cena: I debated putting no picture of John Cena here, if you know, you know. But this meme basically consists of whatever’s going on being interrupted by the musical sting, the voiceover announcing “AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA” and then Cena flexing dramatically. It’s one of those things that seemingly becomes more amusing with repetition, which seems unlikely but does seem to actually work out that way.

Maybe less trolly was songster Parry Gripp, who mostly seemed to be … hungry. It’s Raining Tacos got namechecked by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight (as I recall, he thought it was cruel to play this to dissuade the homeless from camping out in your doorway - buddy, you could do a whole lot worse); there was a whole series of Taco songs about the Taco-Bot 3000 or Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito (inevitably, my younger daughter adopted this as her theme song for a local restaurant breakfast - the waitress was pleasantly bemused). But Parry Gripp also did a variety of other musical improvisations; a popular one in the early cycle of the Mandalorian was Baby Yoda. Whatever else you can say about this guy, he had a talent for writing stupidly catchy earworms and cutesy flash animations that your kids would demand over and over again - and while it was all very twee, it least it wasn’t Dora the Explorer or various Minecraft parody songs.

Oh yes, Minecraft parody songs. Those were all over the place on various gamer Twitch streams and racking up millions of Youtube views. Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night got turned into Don’t Mine At Night. As far as novelty songs go, it was a reasonably good followup; certainly it felt like “in the style of Weird Al Yankovic” sort of music. There were certainly others. Moves Like Jagger was morphed into Screw The Nether. Coldplay’s Viva La Vida got parodied (as Fallen Kingdom); Usher’s DJ Got Us Falling In Love became Revenge, the song Dynamite was parodied as TNT (this is perhaps a little more on the nose than most of these jokes get) and Owl City’s When Can I See You Again turned into How Do I Craft This Again. More nonsequitur was Dan Bull’s Boom Boom Boom, an ode to Minecraft’s living-explosive the Creeper, a walking green bomb that wanders around the game and causes havoc, done as a fast-paced and readily quotable rap. There are, unsuprisingly, a lot more of these… Minecraft is such a juggernaut. Here’s a Youtube link recapping the Minecraft parody music scene from 2012-2022. I think my kids may have serenaded me with basically all of them during lockdown. No wonder my sanity eroded.

There were some more mainstream bands that specialized in trolling, too. Shock-rock band Gwar or maybe more properly GWAR was all about who they could offend, usually with grotesque cartoonish stage shows full of prop blood and… other fluids… various decapitations and dismemberments and similar transgressions, set to their own thrash-metal soundtracks. They weren’t especially great musicians, though they were weren’t terrible - to be fair, some of their competition was significantly worse and still popular - but given that they dressed like Warhammer 40k Chaos Warriors and sprayed the audience with hundreds of gallons of stage blood every show, their appeal was mostly performance art… and the extremely thin sci-fi/Mad-Max-ish plots that hung their albums together. At one point, the lead singer Oderus Urungus had the enormous prosthetic groin portion of his costume confiscated and deemed obscene - the judge presiding over this case was, no kidding, named Dick Boner… reality is stranger than fiction. The band made their whole next album and tour about the band’s highly fictionalized quest to recover it (the accompanying movie was called Phallus In Wonderland, the matching album America Must Be Destroyed featured such foes as the Morality Squad). Gwar kept themselves somehow relevant for a lot longer than most bands - gaining notoriety early with Scumdogs of the Universe in 1990 (their first album was actually Hell-O in 1988), being mainstreamed by Beavis and Butthead on MTV, appearing on Jerry Springer and the Joan Rivers Show, battling The Aquabats during the Ska Parade, and then returning to pop culture as part of the Gathering of the Juggalos. Gwar is literally still on tour as I write this, although to be entirely fair, quite a number of the original band members haven’t survived.

Perhaps better known - or at least, more airplay and more memes, if less longevity - was the Bloodhound Gang. Most famous for their song The Bad Touch, and also somewhat infamous for The Ballad of Chasey Lain, they hit mainstream radio with the annoyingly catchy Fire Water Burn before the internet was really a thing. But after that, the rest of their songs tended to propagate alongside their videos - or to be fair, they tended to propagate along Napster or Limewire or Kazaa or Bittorrent, as MP3s - and they were catchy drivel white boy rap songs, more humorous and less edgy than Eminem who was starting to chart around the same time frame.

Bo Burnham probably takes the cake.

I’m afraid we probably all know how this one goes.

But even before Bo Burnham was there to welcome us, Avenue Q had already told us about it.

The internet is really really great…

The otherwise somewhat anodyne musical Avenue Q, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek featuring Gary Coleman, had one rather breakout hit: a duet between two puppets: Kate Monster and Trekkie Monster sing The Internet is For Porn.

At one point quite a few years back, I had to help a friend purge his son’s laptop of malware acquired from visiting inappropriate sites. I rolled my eyes and we got his system cleaned up, but we set his web browser home page to default to loading up to play that particular Avenue Q song when he opened Internet Explorer.

There were inevitably also other extremely catchy Flash animations. Probably the greatest viral success of this was Jibjab, who combined parody songs with well-done topical Flash animations around the 2004 elections with “This Land” (a parody of Woody Guthrie’s song This Land Is Your Land, rethemed to be about the election clash between George W Bush and John Kerry), following on with “Good to Be in DC” (again, focusing on political figures, and to the tune of I Wish I Were In Dixie), and then “Second Term” (released immediately after Bush was re-elected, to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes). Jibjab came back in 2008 with another political Flash cartoon “Time for Some Campaigning” about McCain vs Obama - to the tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changing.

Post-Flash, memes coalesced into mostly single-frame pictures with superimposed images (frequently enough, cat pictures) epitomized by ICanHazCheezburger and similar sites. Easily copied-and-pasted, easily taken in at a glance, also well suited to a mobile phone - as that was the new viewing platform, and Flash hadn’t made the leap (mostly because Steve Jobs never let it onto the iPhone… wanting to keep control of the development environment.)

And memes increasingly politicized in the social media era, with the Zuckerberg Equation of social media engagement quantifying the unpleasant reality that engagement farming was best done by ragebait. So things that would inspire people to annoyance, anger, or hostility would drive engagement and increased “dwell time” - never mind that this was bad for the customer, for society, for the social fabric, it was good for selling more ads. Facebook made buckets of money with this (and let’s be fair: with Zynga’s Farmville, but no one wants to remember those days, right?) And all the other social media (and mainstream media) players followed - providing tailored outrage editorial content content to certain echo chambers (Facebook, X/Twitter, Bluesky, etc) has driven stovepiped views of the world similarly to how people point at specific news sources for political slant (MSNBC or NPR vs Fox or Newsmax).

But don’t worry! Surely the advent of rapidly-improving image-generation technology (AI and deepfake and otherwise) and video synthesis will have no unforeseen consequences other than some really great memes, right?

But that’s probably a conversation for a different article. For the moment, we’ll leave this with silly memes. Enjoy your end-of-year celebrations and we’ll pick up again soon!