Internet Nostalgia 3 - More Memes, or: Ninjas Are Totally Sweet

Internet Nostalgia, Redux

Back in the days before memes meant “ways to trash talk people on Twitter” but long after Richard Dawkins coined the term in his book The Selfish Gene, they were internet shorthand for funny visual quip.

Not this Gene

At some point they generally standardized into a photograph or cartoony image with superimposed text, of the sort you’ve seen a million times. I Can Haz Cheezburger and many many other sites grew to prominence on this model.

But before that, they were a little more freeform.

Real Ultimate Power was an early meme - dating apparently back to 2002 and lampooning the perennial fascination with ninjas that had plagued American culture since at least the 1980s, and continued to recur thanks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mortal Kombat, and similar pop-culture phenomena. Rather than being a single image it was (and still is) a website with various hilariously over the top claims about ninjas. This site was popular enough to not only fly around the Internet a few times but get a book deal for its author, uh, Robert Hamburger, surely the most plausible name you’ve ever heard. It looks like you can still buy it from Amazon today - caveat emptor, I haven’t.

Naturally, this was goofy enough that it picked up parody from other sources - cut-and-paste webcomic Elf Only Inn poked fun at it for an episode with frames like

Let’s jump back a bit further, though.

The term “meme” originally comes from by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He created the word to describe a unit of cultural transmission or imitation, drawing a parallel to the biological unit of heredity, the gene. He of course meant something entirely different than we mean by it today, but that’s often the nature of language - it tends to evolve. The most cogent example that he gave at the time was the “earworm” - the song that gets stuck in your head - and then the borrowing of musical patterns across songs, compositions, and performances, including the rise of musical “sampling” and the like - one might wonder what he’d have said about Queen’s Under Pressure vs Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby.

Dawkins’s intended etymology for the word “meme” was as a shortened form of the Greek word mimeme, meaning "imitated thing", according to Wikipedia and YourDictionary. He chose the short, monosyllabic "meme" because it sounded similar to “gene”.

Examples of memes in Dawkins' original sense include melodies or jingles, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches (and, one presumes, also other architecture). He envisioned memes as spreading through imitation, leaping from one person's mind to another, similar to how genes propagate within a gene pool. Religion seemed to proceed by mimetic propagation - as did other cultural traits - but there was some rather serious credence given to the concept that any prostyletization was this way and certainly that the growth of Islam was basically mimetic - that it didn’t need to be as slow as the growth of a population, it could be as fast as conversion which could be as fast as persuasive conversation. (To a lesser extent he says this about the Protestant Reformation as well and generally should credit the growth of Christianity similarly.)

But over the course of the internet’s history, a lot of visual imagery held mimetic status for a while. I’m sure you’re surprised.

Surprised Pikachu is, of course, a classic smartass response - frequently posted to something that shouldn’t be a surprise at all.

Sean Bean has a lot of iconic appearances in memes, but this one is usually the one you see (unless it’s a joke about how he dies in every movie)…

Dark humor after the fall of the World Trade Center during 9/11 gave us the Tourist Guy meme - supposedly found in the wreckage; spoiler: it of course was photoshopped.

William Defoe has been in many movies over the years, many of which made him famous, but Spider-Man made him a meme.

The terrifically hamfisted antipiracy campaign “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” - attempting to convince people not to download movies and songs - was parodied to death in memes. But it was somewhat ironically hard to beat the fact that in the original advertising campaign… they stole the font they used for it. Err, I mean, they didn’t pay the licensing fee, but gosh, that sounds awfully darn similar to the Motion Picture Association is saying equates to stealing…

Anyway, Futurama did a remarkably entertaining job of spoofing the whole genre, with Bender declaring that why yes, he’d be happy to do all sorts of crimes.

This most recently came back around, though as the extremely topical meme:

Before Kanye West was known for singing about Hitler, the meme about him had mostly been about interrupting Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards.

An outraged Iraqi threw his shoe at George W Bush back in 2008 and it not only made the news, it was immortalized as a meme.

People were still snarking at him for posing for the Mission Accomplished photo a few years earlier.

But if you’re willing to mention famous Iraqis, it is hard to displace the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf aka “Baghdad Bob” who delivered such bombastic lines as “There are no Americans in Baghdad, I will take you there in one hour!” or “Yesterday, we slaughtered them all and we will continue to slaughter them!”

Oh yes, and while we’re in Mesopotamia… well, right across the border, how could I forget? The This Is Sparta meme absolutely saturated the internet, excerpted from a movie (300) featuring a lot of oiled-up Spartans who seem to have forgotten their hoplite armor and made a lot of historians very cranky.

I shan’t give you the full deconstruction - but Bret Devereaux does a fine job with the seven part series “This Isn’t Sparta” and I like to recommend him to people. Reserve some time if you’re going to dive into this one!

The video game Portal gave us this meme (apologies in advance, Celeste!), as the testing-complex controlling Artificial Intelligence who we know as GlaDOS kept promising that there would eventually be cake to motivate protagonist Chelle to complete her various puzzle tasks.

Eventually “the cake is a lie” became a memetic spoiler for the game in general, as well as an otherwise nonsensical phrase to say to people if they hadn’t played it.

how old is the freaking Gummy Bear meme anyway?

I’m A Gummy Bear was an annoying catchy song - which as I link it to you here from youtube today has 3.8 billion plays and is 18 years old. My kids and their friends are only responsible for half of those plays - much like Baby Shark or Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up - so this was legitimately a hit. It’s stupidly catchy. Beware the earworm.

Crazy Frog - Axel F, from the Miami Vice days, made its return in a similar synthpop fashion but much wackier. It’s also well suited to the kids, and I suspect it was primarily kids playing this or pranking others, but it’s astoundingly recognizable.

Caramelldansen - this Swedish pop song is set to an anime video (which is apocryphally features hentai characters; I’m not sure how true this is as the description of “adult visual novel” for Popotan is … questionable and apparently Sony refused to distribute it originally due to a policy against sexual content, so it got cut down into an acceptable format… so let’s say it might not be squeaky clean; also, from my understanding in Popotan one of the girls is eleven years old so there’s that). Anyway, very chirpy video; there’s a version where they sing it in English also if you are curious to know what they are saying - but more hilariously, there are some great misheard lyrics versions out there (very NSFW).

Bodies…

This song is Bodies - better known as Let The Bodies Hit The Floor - I’m not sure why Drowning Pool became a meme; the occasional D&D group metalhead liked to channel them when playing a barbarian and scream LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR when they’d rage. (I was used to the same guys that would terrorize Jacques Ze Whipper, though: the metalheads that I knew would always want to crank Slayer or Norwegian death metal like Burzum or Emperor.)

This song was rather successfully parodied with I Can Only Count To Four and Bodies (Kids Edition) both of which look quite a bit less sinister.

Speaking of Jacques…

Jacques Ze Whipper: Heck, I brought him up, why not, he might as well be a meme at this point. Renfaire dandy, performs on stage with whips; even made it on America’s Got Talent at one point (mercifully under the name Jack The Whipper and without the Outrageous French Accent). Jacques has a stage show where he not only does various whip and fire tricks, but also improvises parody songs with whipcrack beats in response to audience requests. He is somewhat legendarily trolled at renfaires by his frenemy Slayerman, who pops out of the crowd with disturbing regularity (and often hundreds or even thousands of miles from home) to demand Slayer.

Longcat - Well, the (safe for work) internet is for funny cat pictures, right? So, why not an elongated cat? For some reason, this particular one bounced around as a particularly popular image for quite a while.

It’s Over 9000 - This was absolutely the archetypical anime meme for quite a while; Vegeta from Dragonball Z absolutely lost his mind realizing the power level of protagonist Goku. The thoroughly preposterous arms race of DBZ was eventually eclipsed by other anime (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann apparently eventually features mecha the size of the galaxy … I’m not sure how, really, or what they do / how they move / etc, but I’m sure it’s all Rule of Cool anyway.) I’m not particularly conversant with anime, so I’ll defer that answer to someone who is. But Dragonball Z is famous for tremendously slow fights (that take the whole episode) with earth-shattering (or at least moon-shattering) consequences and a tremendous escalation in power levels to the point that someone’s power level being Over 9000 goes from a startling implausibility to an irrelevant speedbump in just a few episodes.

Will It Blend? What sort of silly mayhem can we cause with a blender? Really, that’s the whole concept.

Mythbusters. Good lord, this television series ran for fourteen years and was utterly iconic to a generation. Initially Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage (and eventually quite a number of other people), this show set out to entertainingly replicate, prove or debunk, but mostly have fun with various urban legends or Hollywood myths. This may deserve its own article - or its own book - and I doubt I’m obsessive enough to write it properly. But it was one of the shows I did actually watch somewhat regularly even when I didn’t otherwise watch TV. They were quirky and could usually be relied on to come up with something zany.

I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane - This one’s getting its own article; Samuel L Jackson’s too iconic. But briefly: 2006 schlock action movie Snakes on a Plane features the exceedingly dubious plot of an assassination plot on a plane using a cargo of venomous snakes released in-flight in an attempt to kill a high-value passenger (a trial witness in a key case). Samuel Jackson absolutely chews the scenery, as you’d expect. The sanitized-for-television edit is almost more hilarious (much like trying to sanitize Scarface for prime time television, it requires a great deal of redubbing). But as I say, expect a followup article.

Green Jello and the Three Little Pigs - This song was extraordinarily popular on MTV for a brief period, got their band name cease-and-desisted, and came back as Green Jelly - so I present Green Jelly with the stupid puppet show video we might remember about the Three Little Pigs and Rambo. This was back in the days when MTV didn’t panic about drug references, especially not from cartoon wolves smoking out.

Citation needed: XKCD took the Wikipedia “Citation Needed” link and made it into a protest sign that people used as an icon for a while. This was sort of hilarious. But it generally devolved into just generally cranky SOBs just snarling “SOURCE?” at people.

And unfortunately, the state of the cranky internet today.

Trigglypuff: the iconic triggered radical feminist college student protestor mad at the patriarchy. YouTube has the whole scene, it’s … something else.

The Memestock blowup happened when attention was drawn to overshorted stocks (WallStreetBets gets credit for this, fairly or not) and a lot of Reddit users decided to make a run on various thinly traded stocks that they had some sort of emotional attachment to, like GameStop, AMC, or Tesla (or more recently, Beyond Meat). This was usually a means of “sticking it to” hedge funds who were excessively shorting these stocks, causing a “short squeeze” and driving the stock up dramatically.

I will be back with an article about the memestock crash here somewhat shortly (this is actually what my students most wanted to hear about from the hedge fund world, go figure) - but I haven’t seen anyone write about it from the perspective of the hedge fund side of the world. (No, I wasn’t involved.) Though I did see Michael Burry weigh in recently from Cassandra Unchained, so perhaps it’ll be an entertaining alternate view.

Video games brought us a whole lot of memes.

Video game legends bring us both iconic dumbass hero Leeroy Jenkins from World of Warcraft - famous for jumping the gun and getting in over his head, and thereby becoming so legendary that Blizzard memorialized him into the backstory of the game … and yes, there’s even a TVTropes about it - and Slenderman-esque glitch horror villain Herobrine from Minecraft, whose backstory evolved into being Notch’s dead brother somehow incarnated into the game in some vaguely Tron sort of plot - don’t worry about it, it got retconned all the time. Herobrine looked a bit like Minecraft main character Steve except with creepy all-white eyes.

And besides, Steve eventually got retconned into freaking Jack Black, or as the meme went: “overweight middle aged man action figure”.

Famously they let Jack Black sing in the Minecraft movie. This wasn’t actually what he sang, but this is what people thought he was going to sing, which is even funnier, because in an interview he leaned into it.

And when someone perished in a video game, it became customary to memorialize their passing.

Skyrim players would absolutely not stop it with the Arrow To The Knee meme about the cranky guardsman. (You’d discover that this did not in fact impair the guard from chasing you down at all should you engage in any larceny, of course…)

Fabulous Secret Powers - at some point the gay subtext in He-Man was too much for people and they decided that the line “Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said By The Power of Grayskull” was the perfect excuse for an over-the-top rainbow rave for Prince Adam; it was a bizarre mash-up with “What’s Going On” and it was a common parody meme on YTMND and similar sites.

It’s over, Anakin! I have the high ground! - There were a lot of fairly derpy things that came out of the Star Wars prequel trilogy but this one in particular got quoted a lot.

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny - I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but it was one of the defining flash animations of the era (and survived the transition to video when most of the other flash-based memes died.)

They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard - this may be the One Meme to Rule Them All (as much as any Lord of the Rings meme can lay claim to fame - the only other real contender is of course Sean Bean reminding us that One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor, but we’ve already seen that one. And this one comes with an outstandingly catchy song.

Chuck Norris Facts - oh dear lord. These rattled around the internet forever. They even reprised in The Expendables 2 when Chuck Norris showed up as one of the characters. This list is endlessly long and increasingly preposterous.

Banana For Scale: This is the image that started it all, as if you’d even buy this television anymore. (It’s apparently from a Craigslist ad, showing you how big the TV offered for sale is.)

But the concept of using a banana to show relative proportion was instantly mocked and has been for the next couple decades.

Derpy Hooves: My Little Pony gave us many meme references but to the best of my understanding a fanfic character memed its way into pop culture: the crosseyed pony Derpy Hooves. The fandom fell so in love with the online fanfic depiction of this character (originally named Muffins) that she was renamed on the show originally to Ditzy Doo and then to Derpy Hooves. I guess giving the Bronies what they want is … well, actually, probably something the editors usually justifiably thought twice about, but they did it this time. I don’t recall my girls obsessing about this, but they sort of had their My Little Pony phase and moved on to other things, for which I am quite grateful.

Hampster Dance: To the tune of Whistle Stop from the 1973 Disney animated Robin Hood movie (the one where Robin and Marian are foxes), albeit sped up faster, the Hampsterdance hit the internet as a Geocities page in 1997 as an animated GIF with a repeating soundtrack. YTMND preserved this for posterity. You’re welcome?

Schmoyoho hit one of their two big autotune hits with the Bed Intruder song: hide your kids, hide your wife.

They somehow capitalized on this and came back with a song about detox train wreck Charlie Sheen, fresh (thrown) off his show Two and a Half Men and doing a press tour to show how he was sane and detoxed: spoiler, he was most assuredly and hilariously not. What he was, however, was Winning. Bi-winning. This interview (songified below) was epically insane.

It’s Not Lupus: Everyone who actually has this disease, of course, was annoyed as heck by Dr. House when this meme catapulted across the net:

Spider-Man Pointing - it’s generally used as a way of indicating “the pot calling the kettle black” in meme form, but it’s absurd even at first glance without knowing a thing about it.

There were an absurd number of cat memes - not just Longcat, mentioned above.

Grumpy Cat. Look at this guy. Kinda speaks for himself.

LOLcats - there were many of these, but they became the recurring image reel for meme aggregation site ICanHazCheezburger and were correspondingly popularized as cute derpy cats.

Nyan Cat - While the image is distinctive on its own, it really doesn’t hold a candle to the full effect that you get from the animation-and-sound of the flying, rainbow-shooting, music-playing Nyan Cat.

The “You Don’t Say” meme has been popular for some time as a response to various obvious assertions or to people Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud. For instance, a recent Huffington Post article was very indignant that facial recognition software that identifies people with criminal records is a threat to darker skinned people and illegal immigrants? Err, ok… you don’t say? But that might not be the bitter denunciation of technology you think it is.

The somewhat unimaginatively named meme White Guy Blinking is generally used a double-take or a slightly shocked or an “excuse me, what?” in one image.

Baby Yoda - The Star Wars series The Mandalorian gave us a character named Grogu - who appeared to be a young member of the same species as Yoda, and who was immediately nicknamed Baby Yoda. (Parry Gripp wrote a song, because of course.) Cynics declared this character to be nothing but a merchandising opportunity. To be fair, bigger cynics declared all of Star Wars to be nothing but a merchandising opportunity. Be that as it may, Grogu and Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal’s eponymous Mandalorian) actually come across reasonably well on screen, unlike most Star Wars characters this century - and I will say the Andor series is also enjoyable even if it doesn’t feel quite like the usual Star Wars sort of thing.

Philosoraptor - deep thoughts from a ancient lizard. It’s mostly just a way to put an odd backdrop on a wry question.

Ron Burgundy gave us a meme image about things getting out of control, which appeared entirely too many times.

One might often see Tuxedo Winnie the Pooh as a sign that something was being done very right (sometimes followed by a horribly mutated Winnie the Pooh as a depiction of how it was about to subsequently go very wrong)

There are many many variants on Exit 12 as well

I am certain you have seen variants on this Boyfriend Looking Back meme.

And if you haven’t, Picard would chastise you for not knowing your memes.

Headache Picard is perhaps the classic Picard meme, however.

It’s often been popular to acknowledge and dismiss people when they’re beneath your notice. “Oh no! Anyway…” and “Bye, Felicia” are both popular examples of this.

And while Star Trek’s Picard has his share of memes (and Kirk has a few), Star Wars did get their fair share as well. For some reason, a smug lecture about Darth Plagueis from Chancellor Palpatine seemed to be one of them.

And the inevitable mashup with Pulp Fiction:

From time to time an image of George W Bush would crop up, emblazoned with “Miss Me Yet?” At the time it was an anti-Obama slogan. These days… yeah, GWOT notwithstanding, Bush seems like a memory of relative stability.

The Insane Clown Posse (ICP - who you may know as the Juggalos) had a surprisingly mainstream hit with their song Miracles and their distinctive face makeup somewhat reminiscent of 70s rock band KISS. But juggalos are famously lowbrow and the lyrical caliber is not high; you may know this song not as Miracles but instead as Fucking Magnets for their most famous lyric.

Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

This band is … known for Faygo and facepaint, not for cerebral or even midwit presentation. But they do seem to have fun with it, so I suppose I shouldn’t gainsay that. Their direct-to-video movies Big Money Hustlers and the Wild West prequel Big Money Rustlas are definitely ones to be treated as a drinking game (though, possibly, bring your stomach pump).

The tv show American Chopper featured two guys who - if the meme was accurate - were always arguing, and looked like they were about to break out into a a brawl. I’m not sure I ever actually saw this show. (Somehow I don’t feel like I missed much.)

Condescending Wonka was (and is still) used for snarky commentary.

The absurd badassery of the Honey Badger was popular for a bit. Largely, the video was the source of most of the absurdity, but then backreferences to it became somewhat iconic in other memes.

Breaking Bad generated a couple of memes, mostly based on Walter White.

(wait, that’s a different meme)

And the Heisenberg reveal gets turned on its head with the usual Twitch callout behavior:

It was popular to point out that things that were supposedly different were in fact not different at all with They’re The Same Picture meme; it then evolved into “things that were in fact different but were for some reason seen as being comparable or valued the same.”

I will leave you with perhaps the most earworm-y of the various memes over the decades, Albinoblacksheep’s Llama Song. It’s only 40 seconds long, but that should suffice to get it stuck in your brain. Hope you have all enjoyed this retrospective of internet nostalgia and memes, and I’ll return to something more serious for a bit.