List of Internet phenomena

An Internet phenomenon (sometimes called an Internet meme) occurs when something relatively unknown becomes hugely popular, often quite suddenly, through the mass propagation of media content made feasible by the Internet. Sometimes internet phenomena can gain popularity by being featured on certain websites, which include, but are not limited to 4chan, Albino Blacksheep, B3ta, Digg, eBaum's World, Fark, GameFAQs, Offtopic.com, Newgrounds, Slashdot, Something Awful, General [M]ayhem (Gen[M]ay), YouTube, MySpace, YTMND, IGN, Tribalwar, The Best Page in the Universe or Wikipedia. Often, internet phenomena are started by a single user on an Internet Forum. In William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition an interesting kind of Internet phenomenon—"the footage"—plays an important role.

What defines an Internet phenomenon is purely subjective; this list will attempt to document things that have had that term applied to it.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

People

Celebrities

• Chuck Norris — More famously known as Walker, Texas Ranger. At least one website was started with the goal of posting "Chuck Norris facts." The fad mostly consisted of short factualized statements and anecdotes making Chuck Norris seem "larger than life" or to have super human abilities. A chapter of the book The Alphabet of Manliness by Internet satirist Maddox was dedicated to Norris and used many of these Internet factoids.

• Howard Dean — 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and current chairman of the DNC. His famous 2004 "scream" has been widely parodied, sometimes referred to as the "Dean Scream." [1] The USA Today described the scream as having gained "cult-like status" on the web [2].

• Tila Tequila — She was discovered by Playboy scouts, but became popular as being the most-viewed profile on MySpace.[3] Her song "Straight Up" is included in the MySpace compilation record.

• Mr. T — The A-Team actor has become somewhat of an internet icon, spawning two popular memes: Ate My Balls, a site with images of Mr. T, captioned with various absurd and questionable statements. Eventually the phenomena was done with other subjects, both fictional and non-fictional and it spawned an entire Yahoo! category under "Tasteless Humor → Ate My Balls". The other meme is Mr. T vs ... a network of web pages depicting Mr. T fighting other celebrities, political figures, fictional characters, and other famous people in multi-page online comic books. Many classic quotes were created from this phenomenon, such as "Mr. T is helluva tough!"

• Ted Stevens — In 2006, the current senior United States senator from Alaska. In a speech on the topic of Internet neutrality, he uttered the now-famous words: "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes". The Daily Show picked up on this and did a segment about it on their show.

• John Howard — The happy, fun loving prime minister of Australia. This was started on an anoymous image board known as Eye Blood; Where the picture of John Howard was spammed until users gave in and accepted it. This is an example of a forced meme.

• David Hasselhoff - The former Knightrider / Baywatch actor has been the "victim" of multiple memes. These have included photographic parodies of him in his underwear, his hugely popular video "Hooked on a Feeling" (one of the most viewed on YouTube), an Internet campaign to get him to number one, a website using Bible code claiming that he is the devil, and his greatest hits album being reviewed on Amazon where respondents sarcastically call it a work of genius and declare Hot Shot City to be "particularly good". In addition to this, he has even appeared in TV ads in the United Kingdom where he declares himself "King of the Internet!" and references memes in his music videos.

• Jack Bauer - The hero of the popular 24 show. After the success of this show a lot of "Jack Bauer Facts" appeared on the Internet.

Non-celebrities

• Aaron Proctor — A write-in candidate for California governor in 2006 who ran his campaign entirely from his MySpace account.
• Amir Massoud Tofangsazan — A victim of "the eBay avenger", a disgruntled buyer who claims Tofangsazan sold him a faulty laptop. In retaliation, the buyer posted on a web page personal details, embarrassing photographs and other information about Tofangsazan that was gleaned from the laptop's hard drive. The site reached over 1 million page hits in 8 days in the month of May 2006, and was featured in major media outlets, such as the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Evening Standard and ITV.
• Anton Maiden — Known for his MIDI and vocal renditions of Iron Maiden songs.
• Brian Peppers — An Ohio sex offender with a facial malformity whose photo in the Ohio eSORN (Electronic Sex Offender Registration and Notification) database became widespread. Snopes has since confirmed the photograph to be real [4].
• Crazy Dave — English teenager Dave Mills who videoed himself racing his father in a tractor, became a cult hit after being shown on Sky Sports TV show Soccer AM.
• Ellen Feiss — A teenage girl featured in an Apple Computer advertisement, whose slurred speech and disoriented eyes provoked speculation that she was under the influence of illicit drugs.
• Elena Filatova — Under the nickname KiddOfSpeed posted photographs of her alleged motorcycle trips in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

• Enzodude — A black male who attained infamy at the VWVortex fora after a picture, showing him flexing his muscles in front of a Ferrari Enzo, became a popular subject for Photoshopped images.

• Guy Goma — In 2006, a BBC News 24 job applicant, Guy Goma, was ushered into a live television interview after mutual error resulted him being mistaken for the intended interviewee, Guy Kewney (an Internet expert). Goma, who only realised the mistake on air, played along with the interview and the subsequent video gained immediate notice in both mainstream news and as well as online.
• Henry Earl — A homeless African-American man from Kentucky, Earl became famous primarily because of his extensive police record, mostly for non-violent alcohol-related offenses, and the subsequent often humorous and widely varied mug shots. Henry has made numerous talk show appearances and has been featured in national and international media venues, including MSNBC, the UK Sunday Mail, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
• John Titor — A man claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036 who made many strange statements about future events. Supposedly documented on various message boards in 2000 and 2001, many people claim his words are, in fact, accurate predictions, even though many of his predictions haven't happened at all.
• Katilce Miranda — A Brazilian girl who received a kiss from Bono during a U2 show. People watching the show on TV quickly discovered her Orkut profile and in less then 48 hours she received more than 1,500,000 scraps on the relationship site; the total eventually exceeded 4 million just before the profile was deleted, a week after the show.
• Keyra Augustina — An Argentinian College student who made webcam videos of herself prominently featuring her buttocks. These videos originated on Supertangas.com and were later containing hosted on sites like YouTube and IFilm.
• Kimbo Slice — a 32-year-old Miami, FL based underground boxer and street fighter. He has appeared in three full-length bare-knuckle fights available through the Internet and P2P file-sharing networks.
• Lee Hotti — A young adult who was a frequent poster on Sherdog.net who received wide criticism on the forums while posting pictures of himself, family, and friends for all having long straight spiked hair, overly tanned skin, a flipped up shirt collar, and headband. Subsequent videos and pictures were created using the original pictures. The original and edited pictures spread across the Internet in a matter of weeks. A website, [5] was created within a month.[6]
• Lucy Gao — A Citibank intern whose 21st birthday party made front-page news around the world in 2006 [7].
• Masaki Sumitani — Japanese wrestler and comedian better known as Razor Ramon HG (Hard Gay), whose video clips from the show Bakushō Mondai no Bakuten! became notorious on the Internet.
• Star Wars kid — A Quebecois teen named Ghyslain Raza taped himself acting like the Star Wars character Darth Maul. The video was subsequently placed on the Internet by classmates. It became widely parodied on the Internet and on TV shows such as Arrested Development, Adult Swim, The Venture Bros., The Colbert Report and American Dad. He also appeared in a secret place in the video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2.
• Tron Guy — An overweight computer consultant who made a costume inspired by the programs in the movie TRON, Jay Maynard's website showing the costume's creation in detail quickly became a parody fixture. Maynard appeared on numerous episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2004.
• Ze Frank — A personal site with loads of flash, video, interactive games, etc. Ze Frank gained popularity after he videotaped himself dancing and sent it to his friends.
• lonelygirl15 — A Youtube project orchestrated by Hollywood artists featuring an actress portraying a fictitious girl and her exploits.
• Vincent Ferrari — A New York blogger who became famous in 2006 for his dealings with AOL and its customer service. His airtime on CNBC has been available on many Internet sites.

Bands

• Beatallica — A satire band that played music combined from songs written by the Beatles and Metallica. The band received most of its initial fame (and its name) from Milwaukee resident David Dixon who created a web page about them in 2001.
• Dschinghis Khan — A late-70s to mid-80s group that was practically unknown in the US until the "Moskau" fad. Besides being a short video with crazy dancing and happy German music, the Dschinghis Khan clip is also included in some Flash files.
• Elektronik Supersonik — An allegedly Eastern European pop song and music video, featured on the Molvania website. It was intended as a parody of Eastern European pop culture.
• Gröûp X — Makers of the songs "Bang Bang Bang", "Schfifty-Five", "Too Many Guys", and "Mario Twins," the latter of which is a parody of the Super Mario Bros. theme song. Many of their songs have been adapted into Flash videos.
• Mats Söderlund — A Swedish pop singer, club owner, and former model who is best known under his stage name Günther. His band, Günther and the Sunshine Girls, started their musical career with the song "Ding Dong Song", which became an Internet meme, in part due to Söderlund's mullet, moustache, large black sunglasses and facial expressions featured in the song's video.
• Hurra Torpedo — A Norwegian band that appeared in a video where they cover a Bonnie Tyler song using kitchen appliances, later being sponsored by Ford Motor Company for a mock U.S. tour.
• Lemon Demon — A one-man band by Neil Cicierega, music videos were animated, particularly by Andrew Kepple and Shawn Vulliez. The band's popularity breakthrough comes from The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
• Lodger — Finnish indie rock band famous for its Flash music videos, most notably "I Love Death", "God has Rejected the Western World" and "Doorsteps".
• Loituma — Finnish folk group that became famous on the web after their "Ievan Polkka" was used in a short flash loop.
• OK Go — Their complicated, nontraditional and synchronized dance routines to "A Million Ways" and "Here It Goes Again" became internet memes and many copies have been made.
• Basshunter — Swedish musican who is famous for doing nerdy songs. He has made songs such as "Boten Anna" (Anna the Bot) and "Vi sitter här i Ventrilo och spelar lite DotA" (We're sitting here in Ventrilo playing some DotA).
• Kersal Massive - Three british chavs famous for a subpar, much-remixed rap video.

Videos

• Aicha — A Belgian teenager with acne going by the name of Gellieman lip-synchs a love song for his girlfriend. Numerous parodies have resulted as well as a false rumor of him committing suicide after the video.
• The Amazing Racist — A series of sketches by Jewish comedian Ari Shaffir in which he pretends to be an obnoxious racist. They are featured on National Lampoon DVDs Lost Reality and Lost Reality 2.
• Ask a Ninja — A series of comedy videos about the image of ninjas in popular culture. The videos consists of a ninja answering fan questions in a silly manner.
• Back Dorm Boys — A Chinese male duo who gained fame for their lip-synch videos to songs by the Backstreet Boys.
• The Backstroke of the West — A very poor Chinese translation of a pirated copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The final scene has Darth Vader bellowing a long, anguished "No!" that is translated literally as "Do not want".
• Bad Day — A man takes out his rage on his computer.
• The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins — Leonard Nimoy sings an up-tempo bubblegum pop song about the J.R.R. Tolkien character in a 1968 music video.
• Boom goes the dynamite — Brian Collins, a nervous and extremely awkward sports anchor attempts to call highlights for his college's news show, fumbling through most of the segment until finally uttering this now-famous catch phrase. [8]
• Brokeback Mountain parodies — The movie Brokeback Mountain inspired many parodies in 2005, Chocolate Cake City's Brokeback to the Future probably being the most famous of them all. Created by two Emerson College students, the mock trailer re-worked scenes from the Back to the Future trilogy to show a previously non-existent romance between Marty McFly and Doctor Emmett Brown, which led to many other movies and TV shows to be re-worked in the same way.
• Bubb Rubb — A man who rose to fame thanks to a humorous local TV broadcast where he was interviewed on the topic of whistle tips.
• The Bus Uncle — A video clip incident of a middle-aged man scolding a teenager for nearly seven minutes on a bus in Hong Kong. The incident spread across Asia, and two clips of dialogue became extremely well-known, being used in multimedia and advertising.
• "Call On Me" by Eric Prydz — A popular music video based on the song, featuring a male in a female aerobics class. Many spoofs followed, the most famous of which features a female in a male Naval aerobics class.
• Catherine Bosley — A video of the anchorwoman appearing nude during a wet T-shirt contest.
• Chin2 — Two Korean youths dancing in front of a mirror.
• Crazy Bus Driver - Footage from a bus surveillance camera of a bus driver hitting a passenger.
• Crazy Old X-box 360 Lady -X-box 360 advertisement in which a man and a old lady pretend firing various guns.
• Croyt — A videogamer whose angry rants during sessions of Halo 2 play was turned into two Internet videos, "Croyt's Anger" and "Croyt's Rage", which have gone on to receive cult popularity.[9][10]
• Cruisin USA — A four-minute time lapsed video of a person's road trip from Portland, Maine to Los Angeles, California.
• The Dildo Song — One of the earliest and most popular viral videos in Internet history.
• Evolution of Dance — A comedian performs a medley of various popular dances throughout the history of pop music, from Elvis Presley to 'N Sync.
• Exploding whale — An old news story, also a true urban legend, gets a second following with the postage of a news footage video.
• funtwo — Guitar whiz (Jeong-Hyun Lim) from South Korea. The New York Times wrote an article about him. [11]
• Geriatric Gripes and Grumbles — A British 79 year old, known as geriatric1927 or Peter, explains how he became addicted to the popular website Youtube. It became so popular that many started producing their own versions, some of them Old Age Pensioners, others are teenagers.
• Hot Hot Hot — Appalachian State University promotional video that had an unintended response.
• Inside Landmark Forum - 2004 exposé Documentary about Landmark Education, made by France 3's investigative journalism program Pieces a Conviction. Landmark Education has created a chilling effect over the internet by making legal threats against YouTube and Internet Archive. The video can currently be viewed and downloaded at Google Video, under the heading 2003 Inside Landmark Forum.
• Is This the Way to Armadillo — Spoof music video of Peter Kay's version of "Is This the Way to Amarillo" made by UK troops stationed in Iraq. It was so popular it crashed the army's server.
• John Daker — A singer who makes up for his lack of ability and his unusual voice with bizarre facial expressions.
• Kill Christ — Parodying The Passion of the Christ, this is one of many mock trailers made from re-cut footage of existing films.
• Kure Kure Takora — A Tokusatsu children's comedy show from Japan.
• Lazy Sunday — A music video starring Saturday Night Live cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg that aired on the December 17, 2005 episode of the show.
• Leeroy Jenkins — A party of World of Warcraft players gets wiped out thanks to the actions of one of their group.
• Little Superstar — A video from the 1986 Tamil Movie, Adhisaya Piravi, featuring a midget dance scene.
• Matrix ping pong — A group of people playing ping pong "Matrix style" with the aid of several stage-hands. The clip originates from a Japanese game show.
• Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video For Being Appraised as an "Ex-fat Girl" — A "fitness video" which shows people inexplicably dressed as poodles.
• Milk and Cereal — two college guys lip-synch to "Milk and Cereal" with milk and cereal props in their dorm room.
• More Cowbell — The popular line from a famous April 8, 2000 Saturday Night Live comedy sketch about the recording of the song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult featuring guest host Christopher Walken and series-regular Will Ferrell.
• Moskau — An excerpt from a German music video with happy lyrics and crazy dancing.
• Muslim Rave Party Sensation — An Imam goes bonkers as his followers bang their heads and try to restrain him. It is synched to the song Balla Da Li by Boom Box.[12]
• N64 Kid — A short clip that originated as a home video of a boy and his sister opening a Christmas present that happens to be a Nintendo 64. This present produces a surprisingly exuberant reaction from the two. This video sparked many YTMND sites as well as the success of the actual N64 in question being sold by the N64 Kid on Ebay.
• Numa Numa Dance — An overly enthusiastic kid (Gary Brolsma) sings along to a Romanian-language dance song ("Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone). It was featured in the February 25, 2005 issue of the New York Times.
• Pure Pwnage — A series of episodes about the lives of "pro gamers" Jeremy and FPS Doug, along with their friends. The series alludes to gaming language, like leet speak and makes fun of newbies.
• The Pokémon Theme Video — A video of two teenage boys lip-synching to the theme to Pokémon. It was featured on tv in print numerous times. It became a phenomenon after being submitted to YouTube in the winter of 2005.
• Shakira Spoof - A video of three college students spoofing "Hips don't Lie".
• Prophet Yahweh — This video of the prophet supposedly summoning UFOs was widely circulated on the Internet in June of 2005.
• Real Life Simpsons Intro — A video created for the British BSkyB network that very accurately depicts The Simpsons intro with real actors.
• Ridge Racer! — A line from the E3 Press Conference video with Kaz Hirai yelling "Ridge Racer!" Many people have parodied it along with the Giant Enemy Crab.
• Smash My iPod — They raised money in donations to buy an iPod (and later an Xbox360) to destroy them. SmashMyXbox even got them onto MTV.
• Soup of the Day — The story of one man dating three women at the same time told completely in viral shorts over 19 episodes. It is the first movie that is told using viral video as a story telling device.
• The Spirit of Truth — A one man show by an unnamed man who would profess that he came "in the name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit" originally aired on Los Angeles public-access television in 1997. He gained wide spread attention across the Internet in 2006 for his energy and frequent swearing while preaching the name of God. Only two "episodes" are available.
• Star Wars fan films — Fan films range from simple backyard antics to professional looking films such as Duality, some of them utilizing horrible special effects as a part of the joke.
• Star Wreck — A series of Finnish Star Trek parodies. The latest episode Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was downloaded over 4 million times and recently acquired a DVD distribution deal with Universal Pictures.
• Stealth Disco — Videos of people rocking out behind unknowing victims.
• Tunak Tunak Tun — An Indian music video by Daler Mehndi.
• What Is Love — A scene taken from a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring characters from the movie A Night at the Roxbury headbanging in a car.
• Video Game Pianist — Piano player who plays both old and new video games' themes. Formerly called "The Blindfolded Pianist."
• Wizards of Winter — A display of Christmas lights synchronized to a song (The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Wizards of Winter) by electrical engineer Carson Williams, this video was recently adopted by Heineken for a TV advertisement.
• Yatta — A music video featuring the Japanese group Happa-tai. The members of the group wear nothing but a green fig leaf over the front of each of their briefs, and the video is filled with positive, care-free quotations, such as "Easy come, easy go go" and "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" The song was also made into an animutation "Irrational Exuberance".

Animation-based

• All your base are belong to us — A Flash animation with a montage of images depicting the famous Zero Wing quote, "All your base are belong to us" in various images. This quote is more familiar with the video gaming world since Zero Wing is a game that received its infamy from its poorly translated dialogue. The phrase is an example of Engrish.
• Angry Alien — The 30 Second Bunny Theatre shorts where feature films are acted out by cartoon bunnies. Some have been shown on Starz!
• Animutations — Simple Flash animations usually containing foreign music and pop-culture references, such as "We Drink Ritalin". The fad first gained widespread popularity with "Hyakugojyuuichi". It was popularized by Neil Cicierega.
• Badger Badger Badger — An animation to a repetitive song about dancing badgers, a mushroom, and a snake produced several variations.
• Bananaphone — Various animations with the song "Bananaphone" by Raffi Cavoukian have been created, the first and most widespread featuring Osaka with a "Gundam Bananaphone".
• Bear is Driving — A scene from Clerks: The Animated Series in which Dante and Randal find themselves in a car driven by a bear, just one of the surreal events that occurs after the episode is handed over to Korean animators.
• BT Pipeskater — A repetitive game, loosely based on BT Broadband, hosted on the BT website as an advertisement for their wholesale broadband product. The game has become phenomenally popular with schools in England in which Safety Filters block out most games sites.
• Charlie The Unicorn -A popular video featuring three unicorns' journey to candy mountain.
• Dancing baby — A 3D-rendered dancing baby first appeared in 1997 by the creators of 3-D Studio Max, and became something of a late-'90s cultural icon. [13]
• Dancing Banana — A sprite animated banana became famous after being adapted in an animation dancing to the Buckwheat Boys' "Peanut Butter Jelly Time". It was paid tribute in an episode of Family Guy.
• Dr. Tran — An animated short series which originally premiered on Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and soon after aired on G4 has since been downloaded and spread over the internet. The most popular is a 7.25 minute animation which features a small Asian child named Tran distraught over the claims that he is an amazing action star coming from a movie trailer-like voice over. Created by Breehn Burns and Jason Johnson.
• Hampster Dance — A page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It ranked #1 on CNET's Top 10 Web Fads list and has spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.
• Happy Tree Friends — A series featuring cute animals that meet violent ends. Some have been shown on G4TV
• Hatten är din (The hat is yours) — A Swedish animation featuring an assortment of bizarre imagery (centered around a floating hat) and Swedish phonetic "subtitles" to Middle Eastern music.
• Homestar Runner — An online series created by The Brothers Chaps (Mike and Matt Chapman), with voices by creators and Missy Palmer, that features cartoons of varying lengths, games, and the popular "Strong Bad Emails", in which viewers can email one of the main characters, to which he wittily responds. The site is updated on a weekly basis; thus, it is more of an Internet fixture rather than a short-lived phenomenon.
• How to Kill a Mockingbird — AwesomeFunny.com is best known for this video, which is a parody of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird that quickly deviates into a fantasy about pirates, dinosaurs, robots, and ninja.
• Internet Pranks — Flash animations, videos or other things that tend to catch people off guard. They can be heart jumping "screamers" or just simply flashes such as "You Are An Idiot". Also see "shock sites".
• JibJab — This website's Flash animation "This Land" became wildly popular for its satirizing of the 2004 Presidential Election.
• The Juggernaut Bitch — Part of an episode of the X-men cartoon was dubbed over by two amateur filmmakers; the recreated episode features comedy based upon the series' characters, as well as a gangster version of the Juggernaut infamously yelling "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" This line was most notably homaged in the major motion picture X-Men: The Last Stand.
• Kenya — This Weebl cartoon extolls the virtues of a vacation in Kenya: "Where can you see lions/tigers, Only in Kenya! Come to Kenya, we've got lions/tigers..."
• Kitty cat dance — Flash-based video featuring a dancing cat saying "Cat, I'm a kitty-cat, and I dance, dance, dance, and I dance, dance, dance."
• The Llama Song — A Flash animation to a song about llamas accompanied with pictures to fit the repetitive lyrics. It is often rewritten to fit one's fandom.
• Loituma Girl — A 26-second segment from a cheerful Finnish song in combination with a four-frame anime clip on endless repeat.
• Miko Miko Nurse — Various flash animations based in an opening song of a Japanese hentai game. The particularity of this song is its last part that repeat "Miko Miko Nurse" many times.
• Neurotically Yours — A series featuring a Goth and her pet squirrel.
• Postman Pat's Banging Day Out — An overdubbed version of Postman Pat replete with foul language.
• Potter Puppet Pals — This spoof of the Harry Potter series created by Neil Cicierega uses animated puppets to tell comical stories. Its storyline, limited movements of the puppets and the character's mindlessness contribute to the humor.
• Red vs. Blue — A popular and commercially successful machinima series using the Microsoft Halo and Halo 2 video game engines.
• Rejected — Satirical animation by Don Hertzfeldt; supposedly a series of TV spots the animator was commissioned for (by non-existent companies), all of which are of a nonsensical and/or gruesome nature and were thus "rejected" outright.
• Retarded Animal Babies — An obscene Flash series about the vice-filled lives of various pet animals.
• Salad Fingers — A series of eerie, absurdist flash movies (created by David Firth) about a bizarre character who engages in dialogue with nonexistent persons and enjoys touching rusty objects with its "salad fingers".
• Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman — Flash movie of a superhero that defends soy-sauce as the best sauce to put on everything. It contains the popular line "Destroy all foreign sauces." It also features a good deal of Engrish.
• Star Wars Gangsta Rap — Featuring Star Wars characters rapping through A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, this was one of the first popular Flash movies.
• Stickdeath.com — A website featuring several animations done in Macromedia Flash of stick figures dying in various, often gruesome ways. This site featured updates and was more of a running series than a shortlived fad.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny — A fight to the death from various pop culture icons and other characters. Animated by AltF4 and audio by Lemon Demon.
• Weebl and Bob — A series about two egg shaped friends. It has been featured on UK MTV stations.
• Weeeeee! (Gonads and Strife) — A Flash song/animation featuring a squirrel singing absurdist lyrics.
• Xiao Xiao — An Internet flash cartoon series by Chinese animator Zhu Zhiqiang, featuring stick-figure men performing choreographed fight scenes.

Images

• Batgirl — A meme that began in January 2006 that quickly spread through sites such as LiveJournal and Deviant Art. Participants drew thousands of variations of the DC Comics character Batgirl in a variety of costumes/situations.
• Bert is Evil — This fad using Photoshopped pictures of the Muppet Bert placed with questionable people and situations gained notoriety when one was seen on a poster in a crowd of Osama bin Laden supporters.
• Boilerplate — A 19th Century robot hero.
• Bonsai Kitten — A series of hoax images showing how cats can be "grown" in amusing ways if crammed into small jars.
• Bunchies — A GIF of a strange galloping creature.
• Dog poop girl — A woman's dog relieves itself on a subway car floor and she refuses to clean it up; the Internet community heard about the story and punished her.
• Eul-Yong Ta — The picture of Lee Eul-Yong looking down at Li Yi with anger has sparked many parodies in South Korea
• Every time you masturbate… God kills a kitten - A kitten chased by two Domo-kun.
• Fatmouse — Images of obese mice that became widely circulated, similar to Tubcat.
• HA! HA! guy — A customizable image of a laughing Quaker minister gained popularity on Fark.
• Icy Hot Stuntaz — Three white rappers whose image on their website attracted insults and numerous parodies on the Internet.
• Image macros — Pictures with superimposed text used in discussions. Common accompanying texts include "Owned", "STFU", and "O RLY?".
• Lootie — This man was photographed looting beer while walking through waist deep waters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
• Lulu and Junior — A pair of Tennessee Volunteers fans are caught distraught on national TV and photoshopped into various yokel stereotypes.
• Mr. T Ate My Balls — A Yahoo! site with images of Mr. T, captioned with various absurd and questionable statements. Repeatedly done with other subjects, both fictional and non-fictional, it spawned an entire Yahoo! category under "Tasteless Humor → Ate My Balls".
• Mustard Man — Picture of a supposed fast food employee spilling mustard all over himself.
• Naked tea kettle guy — A seller submits a photo of a tea kettle to eBay unaware that the picture is revealing a reflection of his naked image. The photo led to a trend known as "reflectoporn" [14].
• Nevada-tan — An imageboard meme featuring CG artwork of a Japanese schoolgirl who murdered her classmate.
• O RLY? — Originally captioned to a snowy owl with an incredulous expression, the phrase "O RLY?" has been added many images. Some versions also feature a Great Horned Owl replying "YA RLY".
• Oolong the Rabbit — A Japanese rabbit whose owner placed various objects on top of its head (the most well-known being pancakes) and then posted pictures (also known as "Pancakebunny").
• OS-tan — Operating systems personified as cute mascots by various Japanese artists.
• Preved bear — A bear from the modified John Lurie watercolor Bear Surprise is placed into pictures, photographs and videos. The phenomenon has currently made its way outside the Internet.
• That guy — Various pictures featuring people in the background not meant to be in the shot, or intentioinally goofing off, became popular at collegehumor.com.
• Tourist guy — The same person Photoshopped into photos of different events, (mostly disasters). Originally a hoax based on the 9/11 attacks.
• Tubcat — A very fat cat.
• Sniper kitten — An image of a kitten with a sniper rifle [15].

Films

• Snakes on a Plane — This 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson became an Internet meme due to its ridiculous title and premise a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released. Producers of the films responded to the wide Internet buzz by adding several scenes to the film which catered to the fans. [16] The Internet buzz surrounding the movie has been featured several times by Keith Olberman on his MSNBC news show Countdown.

Things

• eBaum's World Controversy — After an uncredited YTMND appeared on the site eBaum's World, users from major forums (including YTMND, SomethingAwful, IGN, LUElinks, GameFAQs, TribalWar, and AlbinoBlackSheep) attacked the site en masse with DDoS and spam, resulting in a massive flame war.
• eBay Haunted Painting — A painting for sale on eBay which was believed to be haunted.
• Hipster PDA — A paper-based personal organizer.
• Mercedes SLR Replica — A scratch-bulit replica of a Mercedes SLR (concept project, not the one produced), which was constructed in Poland. It was posted in 2003 on the VWvortex forum and gained great popularity among car fans, as the thread was viewed more than one million times through the years. The extremely high popularity was achieved because of many publications (with link to the thread) in car magazines and TV programmes around the world, as well as being posted on Slashdot.
• Unusual eBay auctions — Examples include a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich with a supposed semblance to the Virgin Mary. Often shown on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Attack of the Show.
• Giant Enemy Crab — Became a fad after E3 2006 when the producer of Genji 2 claimed the game was based on "famous battles that actually took place in Ancient Japan." However, the gameplay shown after this contained a "giant enemy crab," indicating that it may be more based on Japanese legend than history.
• HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead — A low-budget commercial for a topical headache cure in which the phrase "Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead" is repeated over and over. The so-called "cure" is a homeopathic remedy; the reason the commercial never mentions that it's a headache cure is to avoid having to prove that it actually works. [17]
• Time Cube — Explores an unintelligable pseudoscience theory about the cubic nature of time.

Websites

General

• Fat Chicks in Party Hats — A website that features photographs of overweight women (and men) culled from the internet. The site's humor came from the derogatory comments in broken English accompanying the photos.
• Million Dollar Homepage — Alex Tew sells one million pixels for $1 each. This spawned the craze for pixel advertising.
• Neurocam International — This mysterious art project/social experiment/life role play website was initially advertised with no information other than its slogan, "get out of your mind".
• Ninja Burger — A humorous cartoon about a ninja who delivers fast food. Later published as a book, Ninja Burger: Honorable Employee Handbook.
• Notpron — An Online riddle, famous to steal the sleep of millions of people and to stop work in companies world wide.
• One Red Paperclip — Website for Kyle MacDonald, who began with a single red paperclip and traded for bigger or better items 14 times until he reached his goal of a house in one year.
• Real Ultimate Power — A website devoted to ninjas. It spawned the "Pirates versus Ninjas" debate.
• Save Toby — A rabbit was found and scheduled to be eaten unless money was donated. Several copycat pages followed.
• Shock sites — As the name suggests, these websites are constructed primarily to shock the visitor. Sites such as Goatse.cx, Lemonparty and Tubgirl (now offline), are shock sites frequently linked from Internet forums and IRC channels, while Rotten.com contains various images and news.
• Zombo.com — Parodies the dot-com boom.
• Alex Chiu — A website which claims to sell immortality rings.

Personal sites

• Asian Prince — An Asian "rock star" who set up a website on Geocities to look for a girlfriend.
• Emotion Eric — A person makes various emotional expressions by request.
• Hello My Future Girlfriend
• Mahir Çağrı — A resident of İzmir, Turkey, Çağrı became an Internet celebrity in 1999, when his picture-laden homepage, which exclaimed in broken English his love of the accordion and travel, was visited by millions and spawned numerous fansites and parodies, one featured on Fox's MadTV (season 4, episode 20). Mahir was ranked #2 in CNET's Top 10 Web fads (July 15, 2005). [18] He was flown to the U.S. and fêted at a dot-com party later that year, at the Hamm's Building, in San Francisco.
• JenniCam — Jennifer Ringley created the website "Jennicam", in which people could watch her via webcam. She also had her own Internet program, "The Jenni Show".
• Project Denny's — A travelogue started by Jason Alan Pfaff, in which he attempts to visit every Denny's in North America, and to prove that every Denny's manager bears resemblance to "Weird Al" Yankovic.
• Maddox — Claiming to be a "pirate", Maddox is the online pseudonym of George Ouzounian, author of the popular website, The Best Page in the Universe, with over 100,000,000 visits. Maddox has also authored the New York Times Best seller The Alphabet of Manliness. The individual articles from this site often spread memetically.
• Matt Harding — An American computer programmer living in Australia, Harding quit his job and started a website, documenting himself dancing wildly in front of various world landmarks. He was featured on a variety of television programs, including MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and the Ellen Degeneres talk show.
• Randy Constan — He posted pictures of himself on his website wearing self-made Peter Pan costumes.

Political sites

• Black World Wide Web protest — Thousands of webpages turned black for 48 hours to protest the Communications Decency Act.
• Blue Ribbon Campaign — Many webpages have linked to a blue ribbon image from EFF to raise awareness to laws that may affect online freedom of speech.
• First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — Parody religion set up to satirize intelligent design.
• General Zod For President 2008 — Official site for the campaign of General Zod.
• We're Not Afraid — Started just after the July 7 2005 London bombings, this site contains thousands of pictures of people around the world holding signs showing they're not afraid of terrorism.
• Sorry Everybody — A site made up of images of Americans holding signs telling the world they're sorry that Bush won the recent election.

Blogs

• Blogebrity — A website purporting to be a tribute to bloggers was put up as a mockery of the blog phenomenon.
• Furong JieJie — A freespirit Chinese blogger.
• Mu Zimei — A Chinese woman that wrote about her sexual encounters. She is credited as starting a new sexual revolution in an otherwise suppressed China.
• PostSecret — An ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on homemade postcards.
• Tucker Max — This blog, focusing on a man's skills with alcohol, women, and insults, has an enormous cult following.

Audio

• Arnold Schwarzenegger prank calls — A popular trend using audio clips of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the movie Kindergarten Cop to prank unsuspecting victims began, which led to many other celebrities' voices to be used in the same way.
• Crazy Frog ringtone/"The Annoying Thing" video
• Internet is for Porn Avenue Q song which extolls the vitures of the internet (and porn).
• Jared: Butcher of Song
• Kerpal — "You kicked my dog!" prank call.
• MC Hawking — A text-to-speech rapper based on Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice.
• Michael Cole — The WWE Commentator launching a verbal attack on a caller during his short-lived Sirius radio show.
• Milena Nawrocka (the Virgin) — Born in Poznań, Poland, she became popular after an audio cassette message sent to her boyfriend was leaked in mp3 format onto the Internet on December 26, 2001. Milena was overbagged with anti-fans because her boyfriend published her telephone number and home address. She was later invited for interviews on the popular Polish talk show Rozmowy W Toku and magazines such as Super Express.
• Schnappi das kleine Krokodil — A song about a crocodile sung by a very young German girl, whose huge commercial success would not have been possible without P2P networks.
• The Chrono Trigger Mixtape, Vol. 1 — An album consisting of hip hop remixes from the SquareSoft Video Game, Chrono Trigger.
• ThunderCats outtakes
• WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY — An eerie sound taken from a game based on the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and put into a strange Flash animation.
• Shadow the Hedgehog quotes — Several one-liners from the video game have become popular memes, most notably the phrase "Find the computer room!" and "Where's that damn fourth Chaos Emerald?" spoken by Vector the Crocodile and Shadow the Hedgehog, respectively.
• Western BBQ Burger — An irate woman places a 911 call demanding the police enter a San Clemente, California-area Burger King and force the employees to make her and her kids a "Western Barbecue Burger" [19].

Text-based

• A winner is you — Originating from the Pro Wrestling game for NES, this phrase is an example of Engrish.
• Densha Otoko — Online postings about a man who meets someone by saving her on a train, which was later adapted into a comic book and TV-movie.
• First post — Participants strive to be the first person to add a comment (post) to a new article or discussion thread.
• For the win — An internet catchphrase coined from TV game shows, often seen on blogs.
• In Before The Lock - Forum users, recognizing the appearance of a thread which is in violation of the forum policies, will sometimes post "IBTL" in it as a sign its locking is imminent.
• Leet speak & AOL speak — These may also be considered forms of memetic Internet phenomenon.
• There Is No Cabal — A phrase used on Usenet.
• This is Bunny — A simple ASCII art bunny is often posted on web forums, accompanied by the text: "This is bunny. Copy and Paste bunny into your signature/webpage and help him on his way to world domination." This has spawned many other ASCII art animal signatures.
• Smurf Communism — A set of theories drawing similarities between Communism and the fictional society of the Smurf characters was spread across the Internet as far back as 1992.

Advertising

• Anabukinchan — A Japanese construction company's advertisement about "growing".
• The Spongmonkeys — Bizarre creatures that sing, later used to advertise for Quiznos.
• HeadOn — An American advertisment for the headache relief product HeadOn, originally shown on television but gained worldwide fame on the internet, and spawned many parodies.
• The Subservient Chicken — A Burger King promotional website that features a "live" chicken that can obey thousands of typed commands.

In Fiction

• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex contains a story arc centering around a mysterious hacker known as The Laughing Man. The Laughing Man becomes an internet phenomenon and cultural icon and one episode centers around a chat session discussion the "Laughing Man Incident."

See also

• Fad
• Shock site - Often become Internet memes due to the immense volume of unwitting visitors they receive.

External links

• Memes on the Internet Article regarding the spread of Internet memes.