- So most of you already know what a meme is,
but in case you're living under a rock,
a meme is a humorous image, video, piece of text, et cetera,
that is copied, often with slight variations,
and spread rapidly by internet users.
But while you might be familiar with the biggest ones,
have you ever wondered where they came from?
These are 10 origins of the most famous internet memes.
Number one is the rick-roll.
"Never Gonna Give You Up" hit number one
on the music charts one year after its release
in 25 countries, including the United States.
Then, 20 years later, the image board web site 4chan,
experienced a phase where its users would entice readers
with intriguing headlines to a news story or image,
but when the link was clicked,
a badly edited image of a duck on wheels would appear.
Now, this was called duck-rolling.
You see where it's going?
In May of 2007, that underwent a transformation
when a user on the video game board known as /v/
linked to a Rick Astley music video under the guise
of a new trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto 4.
After just a few weeks, the bait and switch prank took off
with 13 million people reportedly being rick-rolled.
And what's really interesting is that Astley himself
embraced the meme, as it gave his career a second wind
and even earned him a 2008 MTV Video Music Award
for best act ever.
Number two is do a barrel roll.
The phrase, "Do a barrel roll,"
comes from the popular Nintendo 64 game, Star Fox 64,
which is one of my personal favorites,
released on June 30th, 1997,
in which your character pilots a futuristic R-wing aircraft.
In the opening level of the game,
a squad mate named Peppy appears over your radio
and advises you to, "Do a barrel roll!"
to spin your aircraft to avoid an incoming attack.
Peppy's radio message was given an Urban Dictionary entry
on January 30th, 2004 and was used repeatedly by callers
on Tom Green's live internet TV show
in the summer of 2006 during his call in segment.
Users on 4chan, once again,
where the phrase was commonly quoted,
planned to raid the show by phoning in
and using internet memes, including telling Tom to,
"Do a barrel roll!"
Google actually ended up immortalizing the meme
with a hidden Easter egg on November 3rd, 2011.
If you want to see what happens for yourself,
type in, "Do a barrel roll" in Google search
and watch your entire browser flip upside down.
Number three is U Mad?
The question, "You mad?" aka, "You mad, bro?"
has been used countless times on images that are intended
to troll others or to imply that there might be
some hard feelings surfacing in a discussion.
The phrase hit the road to meme status
when it began in November of 2003 when rapper Cam'ron
was a guest on The O'Reilly Factor with Bill O'Reilly.
Cam'ron and his producer, Damon Dash, debated O'Reilly
if rap music had a negative effect on young children,
but whenever Dash would attempt to explain his view,
he would be interrupted, much like O'Reilly always does,
which prompted Cam'ron to taunt Bill by saying,
"You mad, you mad."
On August 13th, 2004, an Urban Dictionary user
with the handle Johnny Twoguns submitted an entry for U Mad
and credited Cam'ron's O'Reilly Factor appearance.
From there, it spread to multiple websites
like Facebook, YTMND.com, and many others
with the superimposed caption on different reaction images.
Oh, Matt's got too much enthusiasm in this video!
It's too much!
U mad, bro?
Number four is Success Kid.
Everybody loves this kid.
The success kid is a photo of a baby boy
making a raised fist pose to indicate the feeling
of celebration over a situation that worked out.
The photo was taken on August 26th, 2007
at a beach in Jacksonville, Florida
by American photographer Laney Griner.
Griner took the photo of her 11-month-old son Sammy
and posted it on her Flickr page and Getty Images,
but then in January of 2008, the photo started to appear
in profile pictures and page backgrounds on MySpace,
if you remember what that is,
and began spreading around the internet with the caption,
"I hate sandcastles."
That's when it was altered into a meme called Success Kid
in early of 2011 and was posted to Reddit,
where it gained massive traction.
The photo was even used in Billboard ads
by Virgin Media in February of 2012
and was also used in a post by the White House.
But the most amazing thing is that in April of 2015,
Sammy's meme fame even helped his dad Justin
crowdfund $88,000 for a kidney transplant operation.
Now, that is success.
Number five is Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
It's peanut butter jelly time, peanut butter jelly--
I'm sorry, I'll just stop.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time is a flash animation
of a dancing banana set to a song
by the same title by the Buckwheat Boys.
The looping flash animation was created
by Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn in 2002,
who uploaded it to the forums of OffTopic.com.
It was then taken from those forums
and uploaded to the popular flash animation and game site,
NewGrounds.com on March 1st, 2002,
where it began its rapid rise to fame.
On November 13th, 2002, the animation appeared
in an episode of NBC's Ed and in 2003,
it went viral across many well-known internet humor sites
like Ebaumsworld and Something Awful.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time continued to spawn
different parodies over the next couple years
until it finally appeared in an episode of Family Guy.
On November 20th, 2005, the family dog Brian performed
his own version of Peanut Butter Jelly Time
in a banana costume while holding maracas,
igniting the meme once again.
Seriously, it's a classic episode.
I highly recommend you look it up.
Number six is Trollface.
Used as a universal symbol for instigating
frustration or conflict online,
the trollface was drawn in Microsoft Paint
by Carlos Ramirez of Oakland, California
for a humorous and crudely drawn comic
called a Rage Comic that he was making
about the anonymous users that troll on 4chan.
The comic was first posted on Ramirez's DeviantArt account
on September 19th, 2008, and over the next few months,
the trollface image began circulating around 4chan.
The face was adopted on the image board
as sort of an emoticon for internet trolls
and spread across even larger sites.
Ramirez has since obtained a copyright on the image
and in July of 2011,
he used it to send a cease and desist letter to Reddit,
which hosted images of the trollface
uploaded by different users.
But it got even weirder because on March 3rd, 2015,
a game called Meme Run was removed
from Nintendo's online Wii U store
after Ramirez had threatened a lawsuit for use of the face.
Well, it's in this video, but it's protected by fair use.
Number seven is Leeroy Jenkins.
Leeroy Jenkins is the name of a player's character
from the wildly popular game, World of Warcraft,
that was featured in a comedic gameplay video
where he inadvertently causes the death
of his entire raiding squad.
The video, uploaded to Warcraft Movies on May 11th, 2005,
shows a meeting between 13 clan members
at the entrance to an extremely difficult dungeon.
The leader explains the complicated battle plan
only to have Leeroy return from being away from his computer
and charge in early yelling his own name
and causing the catastrophic failure.
Leeroy was played by Ben Schultz of Denver, Colorado,
who acted in the video with his college buddies,
including Ben Vincent, who filmed the gameplay.
The video became an online sensation
once it was uploaded to YouTube in August of 2006
and as of March 2017 has nearly 46 million views.
Believe it or not, it went so far
that the World of Warcraft developer, Blizzard Entertainment
even created multiple game assets
to celebrate the character.
Number eight is doge.
Doge, a purposeful misspelling
and mispronunciation of the word dog,
is a funny image usually of a Shiba Inu breed of dog
that contains words in broken English
in a colorful comic sans font.
The word doge was taken from a June 24th, 2005
Homestar Runner puppet show skit
in which a character spells dog as doge.
The popular image of this dog that started this meme
was taken actually by a Kindergarten teacher in Japan.
Her name was Atsuko Sato,
who uploaded shots of her dog Kabosu
to her blog on February 23rd, 2010.
And shortly after on October 28th, 2010,
one of the photos of the dog was uploaded to Reddit
with the word doge included in the title,
giving the meme its first exposure.
From there, it reached 4chan in December of 2012
and ya'll already know what happens then.
Doge became so popular, it even got its own
Bitcoin-like currently called Dogecoin.
Here's another hidden YouTube Easter egg.
Type doge meme into the YouTube search bar
and see what happens.
Number nine is Pepe the Frog.
The weird human-like frog named Pepe was introduced in 2005
as a character in an American comic series called Boys Club.
Created by Matt Furie, Boys Club was originally hosted
on Furie's MySpace page, where Pepe and his antics
were used as an inside joke between many readers.
The image of Pepe's face along with the speech bubble
containing the phrase was scanned and uploaded to 4chan
in early 2008 and quickly gained popularity on the web site.
Originally a line drawing in the comic,
Pepe's image was colorized and different variations
of his face were created to help customize its use
for different emotions like sadness and anger.
From there, the different Pepe images were spread
across many high traffic web sites like Tumblr,
Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram.
And in October of 2014, 4chan users
actually began creating a meme economy of rare Pepe images
that they would try to actually trade and sell.
Always on the search for that rare Pepe.
And number 10 are LOL Cats.
LOL Cats, images of cats with large,
humorous captions included, were first created on 4chan
before inspiring an entire web site dedicated to them
called I Can Has Cheeseburger.
The LOL Cats fad started on 4chan in 2005
when an image of a cat waiting for Caturday
was posted in response to some of the other
less desirable weekday-themed image threads
that were occurring, like Furry Friday.
Caturday became a tradition on the site
with LOL Cat images being uploaded every Saturday
until I Can Has Cheeseburger was created in 2007
and helped them bring the meme to the mainstream audience.
Even Time Magazine covered the explosive popularity
of the meme on June 12th, 2007,
which had over three million unique results on Google
at any one time.
By that time, Cheeseburger was receiving
hundreds of uploaded photos every day.
Never underestimate the power of cats on the internet, man.
They just, they rule everything.
Thank you so much for watching this,
and if you enjoyed it, remember to hit that like button
and subscribe if you haven't yet.
I'm going to have a brand new video for you tomorrow
at 12 PM west coast time, 3 PM Eastern Standard Time,
so make sure you come by then.
Have a great day.