Everyone knows that Chocolate Rain, Hide Yo Wife Hide Yo Kids, and Grumpy Cat are top
tier memes- but have you ever considered what happened to the subjects of this accidental
internet fame?
Stay tuned as we go turning over rocks to look under them for the whereabouts of some
of the greatest meme stars of all time, and by all time we mean like the last fifteen
years or so of human history.
8.
Success Kid In the year 2007, an 11-month old kid by the
name of Sammy Griner was on a beach with his parents.
At some point he picked up a fistful of sand and shoved some of it in his mouth.
He then clenched his fist and looked determinedly into the camera.
The camera went “click”, and the kid became immortal.
His parents, well, they didn’t know it then, but that shot would make them a lot of money.
His mother, Laney Griner, later uploaded the photo to Flickr, and there it stayed mostly
unnoticed for a while.
But Sammy’s image didn’t stay hidden away for too long.
How could it, it was one of the most eye-catching infant photographs ever taken.
As time passed, the mother sold the image to multiple advertisers, and in 2013 Barack
Obama even used it in one of his campaigns.
Sammy had become one of the most noticeable faces on planet Earth, with meme after meme
of Sammy in various languages being spread around the web.
Fast-forward to the year 2015, and Sammy’s father, Justin, would become very glad that
Sammy had made that unique facial expression.
That’s because Justin fell ill and that year he required a kidney transplant.
A GoFundMe campaign was started to raise money for Justin’s transplant, and in part because
of Sammy’s meme fame, the cash was raised and Justin had his operation.
So, what happened to Sammy?
Well, we know as he got older he got into skateboarding.
We also know that he enjoyed sketching, and from what we can see, he is pretty good at
it.
He wasn’t so popular with his teachers, though, due to his behavior.
When he was ten years old his parents pulled him out of school and educated him at home.
The thing is, the fame got to him as he grew older.
In an interview he once said, “They only want to talk to me about Success Kid, but
I’m not just that!”
He said that being the Success Kid became something of an embarrassment to him, and
he wanted to be known as an artist and not just the kid that defiantly ate sand when
he was an infant.
What really bugs him is when people ask him to look like Success Kid so they can take
a photo of him.
He said in an interview, “They ask me for the freaking pose and stuff…I’m tired
of it.”
He is serious, too, about this bugging him.
He could have got more famous by appearing on a TV game show in which contestants have
to guess what you’re famous for, and Sammy said no, no way, he wasn’t going to be the
Success Kid any longer.
He does accept, though, that he’s made some money from the meme, well, the family has.
They’ve even hired a meme manager, the same guy who manages the Grumpy Cat and Scumbag
Steve memes.
We’ll get around to those soon.
Some folks have criticized Sammy’s mom for exploiting her child, but she doesn’t think
anything like exploitation went on.
She once said, “It’s just a picture, we get paid for it.
I just took a picture and now I get paid for it, I don’t think many people wouldn’t
do the same.
It’s his future and his present that it pays for.”
As for Sammy, he’s just happy that he was able to help his father in his time of need.
In his own words he said, “I’m really happy that I’m famous because I’m glad
that people like it, I’m glad it makes people happy when they’re sad.
I’m also really happy that I still have a dad.”
The last big news around Success Kid came in 2020 when Laney sent a cease-and-desist
order to the Republican Steve King after he’d used the meme.
She called him “vile” and said he didn’t have permission to use the Success Kid meme
in his campaigns.
So, one thing we can tell you is that memes have legs.
A photograph of a kid of a beach in 2007 is still a hot meme today.
7.
Grumpy Cat Who was the grumpy cat?
Was she really all that grumpy in real life?
Ok, so first of all, grumpy cat, real name Tardar Sauce, looked like that not because
she was sick of life’s travails or hadn’t gotten enough fish that day, but because the
animal suffered from a type of dwarfism.
Grumpy cat wasn’t emotional, she just had a medical condition.
That condition, though, turned Arizona waitress Tabatha Bundesen into a millionaire.
That’s because in 2012 her brother took a photo of her rather fed-up-looking feline
and posted it to Reddit.
The image almost instantly became a big hit and had over one million views within 48 hours.
After a year or so, Grumpy Cat became arguably the most famous cat in the world, propelling
her to stardom and banking a lot of cash for Tabatha.
When talking about this meteoric rise to internet fame, the brother said in an interview, “We
knew she was extremely unique, but we didn't know she would be this magnitude of special.”
The cat became so well known that its second birthday party was something of a big deal
and the cat food brand, Friskies, paid for it.
Grumpy cat got into modelling, advertising; had book deals, and did paid appearances on
TV.
Tabatha said her phone never stopped ringing.
All this amounted to her making a lot of money, perhaps as much as $100 million.
We don’t know exactly how much since Grumpy Cat’s earnings haven’t been made public.
As for where Grumpy Cat is now, she’s in cat heaven.
She died from a urinary tract infection at only seven years old.
And that’s why it’s important to clean your urinary tract regularly.
6.
El Risitas You’d most likely never seen or heard about
a man named Juan Joya Borja before, but after he did an interview in 2007 he became a household
face.
In his native Spain, he’s also sometimes referred to as El Risitas, which translates
to English as “The Giggle.”
What’s so funny about the video-meme is the fact that Juan has a really infectious
laugh.
He’s actually telling a story about when he worked as a dishwasher and how he lost
a bunch of pans, but if you didn’t speak Spanish, well, you could believe whatever
the subtitles tell you.
This playing around with a video and adding English subtitles has been done a few times,
notably with Adolf Hitler in the 2004 movie called, “Downfall.”
But we believe that Juan deserves a place on this list just because he’s so funny,
never mind if you speak Spanish or not.
It was in 2015 when he really shot to fame, gaining millions of views on YouTube for being
subtitled as a designer for Apple.
He wasn’t of course.
You might still see his face these days, especially if you use Twitch where he appears as an emote.
From what we can see, Juan is alive and well and still working as a comedian.
5.
Distracted Boyfriend
This image is sometimes called Distracted Boyfriend, but you might also see it being
called, “Man Looking at Another Woman.”
The question is, who took the shot and who are the people in it?
The shot was taken in 2015 by a photographer named Antonio Guillem.
He then uploaded it to a photo stock site and it wasn’t until a couple of years later
that it became a meme.
The focus of the meme is always the same.
The man has one thing, but favors another thing.
For example, in one case the girlfriend is capitalism, and the girl he’s looking at
is socialism.
Ok, so, Antonio Guillem is a 48-year old Spanish photographer.
When he was interviewed in 2017 and asked what he thought about his image turning into
a meme he said when he took the shot he didn’t even know what a meme was.
He was as surprised as anyone that he’d taken a photo that went viral.
He said that he’d been working with those same models on many shots, but it was the
distracted man photo that broke the internet, so to speak.
He also said that he was a bit bugged about people taking the image and not paying for
the use of it, something he said was illegal.
He said that he and the three models were all a bit annoyed about the photograph being
used in a way that it insulted the models.
He said he never made much money from the image, simply because people didn’t pay
for it.
Just to let you know, the male model, who is named “Mario” in the media – we don’t
think that’s his real name – has said he’d never look at a woman that way, and
especially if he was with his girlfriend.
Two of the models in that famous shot are still working for Guillem, but he didn’t
say which ones.
Even though he hasn’t been paid much for the image, he still admires some of the memes
that appear online.
He said in one interview, “Regarding what I think about the photo has gone viral, I
think the image was a good foundation to whoever had the great idea to turn it into a metaphor
that works for almost everything.”
Ok, now for something a little stranger.
4.
Ermahgerd
This photo of a girl named Maggie Goldenberger is perhaps one of the most arresting images
in the meme-world.
Maggie, we’re sorry, but you do look awfully weird in this shot.
When Maggie was 23 and travelling around India in 2012, that’s when she found out that
her 11-year old self had become an Internet meme.
There she was heading to Rajasthan when her friend told her that she might want to check
out a photo that had become viral.
After she had checked into an internet cafe, Maggie was seriously shocked to see the world
was laughing at her, sharing a photo of her with a wide-open, retainer-filled fish-mouth,
wearing ridiculous pigtails, and dressed in ugly clothes.
Her first thought was, how the hell did someone get that photo and why on Earth is it being
shared from Miami to Manchester to Mumbai.
She later said in an interview, “I just can't believe this is my 15 minutes of fame—I
was hoping it would come in another form.
But I guess you have to take what you can get.”
We now know that the image was submitted to Reddit in 2012 and since that time it's been
viewed at least 5.6 million times.
Maggie later admitted that she and her friends used to dress up, and in this particular shot
she was trying to look as “dorky” as possible.
The image was uploaded to Maggie’s friend’s MySpace page, but then somehow later made
its way to Reddit.
Maggie has no hard feelings about the photo, and actually thinks the fact it’s a meme
is quite funny.
From what we can see, she’s a nurse in Phoenix, Arizona.
We checked her out on Facebook, but she hasn’t left much information public.
3.
Roll Safe
This is one of the most shared memes in the history of memes, but the British actor and
writer who stars in it, one Kayode Ewumi, has said he’d rather be famous for his talents,
not the meme.
In fact, he one said in an interview, “I didn't go to uni or study my craft to become
a meme.”
The image is taken from a satirical documentary called the “Hood Documentary”, which was
about young Londoners living in their so-called Hood.
Kayode didn’t make any money from the meme, but after filming the Hood documentary he
went on to write and star in more TV shows.
In 2020, he was asked about the meme and the fact it has such staying power, to which he
replied, “I don't really think about it, because I wasn't on socials to look at it
and see it and I never really retweeted that meme and I didn't pay any attention to it.”
2.
Scumbag Steve
The image of Scumbag Steve was first published on MySpace and was an album cover for a Boston
rap group called Beantown Mafia.
That image later went on Reddit, and from there it went viral.
The guy in the image is named Blake Boston, and he said that the photographer who took
the shot was his own mother.
At the time of the photo he was just 16-years old.
But how does Blake feel about being portrayed as a loser?
Well, in an interview in 2012, he said this: “Everyone has their scumbag moments.
Even before Scumbag Steve happened, I maybe had a couple too many drinks.
But right now, it's more about Scumbag Steve as a character.
With the whole persona of the CD, yeah, I'm going to sing about scumbag stuff to do.”
His mother wasn’t too happy about the meme, since many of them mocked her son for his
apparent bad life choices and sketchy ethics.
She didn’t want Blake becoming the poster boy of bad behavior.
Well, Blake has now grown into a man, and from what we can see he’s very busy on social
media, posting on the matter of politics a lot.
He seems pretty settled down right now, and has a partner and a couple of kids.
As for cashing in on Scumbag Steve, it seems he’s earned in the region of $1 million.
Call him names if you like...he probably doesn’t care.
1.
Skeptical Child As facial expressions go, we don’t think
anything beats how this kid is looking at the lady who’s talking to him.
So, who is this kid and who is the woman?
Well, we know that the image was posted to Reddit in 2012 and we know that it was a man
from Texas that did it.
We also know that he claims he just saw the image on Facebook, but we don’t know who
actually took the photo.
The woman in the image is named Heena Pranav, and back in 2012 when she was a 25-year old
medical student working in Uganda, someone took the shot.
She’s now back in the USA, and a few years ago she was approached and asked about the
kid.
Her reply was, “I was with a group of other medical students at the time, we were walking
around and I saw this little boy, he seemed really sweet.”
She said he was great to be around and he was really animated, which we can see in this
photo.
She also said that he didn’t speak English, so she didn’t really communicate with him.
At the time she had no idea anyone would ever look at the image, never mind it being shared
countless times over the Internet.
For some people, the fact the image went viral has annoyed them, seeing as some of the memes
seem to make fun of the kid.
Some critics have said the memes exploit the child, and people should be more focused on
the hardships of people living in poverty.
Others have said that the photo perpetuates a stereotypical image of poor Africans being
saved by westerners, but to many folks, he’s just a very cute kid pulling a very funny
face.
As for the here and now, we know that Heena works as a doctor, likely in Chicago, although
the boy’s name and what he’s doing is not known.
Now you need to watch, “How A Meme (Slenderman) Became Real.”
Or, go watch, “Russian Sleep Experiment - EXPLAINED.”