Ahhhhh, the Internet, the greatest invention of
all-time. Forget the wheel, forget fire, the Internet is #1 in
my book. And for good reason. The Internet has always been the
place for the everyman to create, distribute, and shock the
world with cleverness, strangeness, and any other -ness one could
possibly imagine. And surprise has he ever!
Below are ten of the greatest fads born of the Internet
and ingrained in our memories forever. Most are beloved, others
loathed, and many misunderstood to this day. Regardless, these
are the phenomenons that rose to the top, one way or another,
carving their niche in the annals of Internet lore for all-time.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us (1998)
(Revival 2001)
An obscure, mistranslated video game transformed into a music
video photoshop extravaganza All Your Base Are Belong To Us
makes little sense but is nonetheless astoundingly mesmerizing.
The original game, Zero Wing may be a thing of the past
but its legend lives on in this strangest of all Internet phenomenons.
Hot or Not(2000)
A seemingly unending supply of user submitted photos we get to
rate on a scale of 1-10? That premise is all there is to HotorNot.com
but boy did it prove popular. So popular, in fact that it inspired
the extremely short lived television reality program Are You
Hot? The Search for America's Sexiest People. Now if you
think the website is crap then imagine the same thing on a stage
with Lorenzo Lamas critiquing with a laser pointer. 'Nuff said.
Who can forget the cartoon puppets of John Kerry, George W.,
and seemingly every political talking head of the time parading
around a flash animated world singing, dancing, and lamenting
2004's sad state of politics to the tune of This Land is Your
Land? Perhaps the most well done political satire of the
entire election if you didn't see this groundbreaking video than
you owe it to yourself to do so right now. Simply hilarious and
probably the most worthy Internet fad ever.
Who would have thought staring at people with unfortunate hair-don'ts
could turn into one of the web's earliest past times? Well, someone
must have because Mulletsgalore continues to thrill showcasing
user-submitted pics of the most famous hair style of all-time.
The first time I saw this website, which promises a man in a
full size chicken suit doing whatever you ask of him on his home
web cam I was smitten. Surely there can't be a guy really sitting
at home getting paid to do this? And the answer, of course, is
no, but fiddling around with commands seeing just what he will
do guarenteed The Subservient Chicken classic status as a
time waster of the least common denominator.
This website that allows you to host your party's invitations
wasn't always the most useful yet despised site on the web. Quite
the contrary, shortly after its debut it was nothing short of
an Internet phenomenon. At the time it truly seemed everyone was
planning everything over Evite from work gatherings to birthday
parties to you name it. Evite got so popular I recall
once seeing an Evite wedding evitation! How's that for Internet
power?
Today, Evite gets slammed by many who claim it is outdated, choked
by advertisements, and just plain silly. Those people, however
are merely haters without just cause. Nine years after its debut
Evite continues to serve a useful purpose that even network sites
like Facebook and MySpace fail to adequately capture. Still, nothing
can compare to Evite's peak when it existed as a quintessential
Internet fad stretched far beyond its humble beginnings.
Ghyslain Raza, the chubby Canadian Star Wars fan with
the penchant for twirling around a golf ball retriever while making
light saber noises got his fifteen minutes of fame merely for
being his dorky self. Sure, even the least dorky of us have picked
up something during our time and whirled it around pretending
it is a laser sword, but it is the most special among us who tape
themselves doing it and then have it broadcast all over the Internet.
Ghyslain just happened to be in the right place at the right time
and have friends cruel enough to exploit him for it. That numerous
admirers along the way seized the video and enhanced it with Star
Wars sound effects, graphics, and all manner of parody is
the icing on the cake.
Hampster Dance(1998)
Good God I hate this stupid animation song silliness. Cartoon
hamsters singing and dancing all over my desktop? And everyone
loves it!? I don't know how or why this Chipmunks on acid cartoon
got popular but anyone who was sitting around an office in the
late '90s surely has their own tale about when they first saw
this giant bit of Tom-foolery. Love it or hate it no doubt it
is an all-time classic Internet phenomenon.
Dancing Baby AKA Baby Cha-Cha (1997)
A creepy animated dancing baby and that's all there is to it.
Who liked this frightening thing anyway?
Snakes on a Plane(2006)
The Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Snakes on a Plane is supposed
to be one of those movies that is so bad it's good. Hyped over
the Internet for months before its release the Snakes phenom was
like the propaganda for The Blair Witch Project on steroids.
Unfortunately, the movie wasn't so much utterly awful that it
was good, as it was just plain horrible. The result: a quick and
painless death for those who witnessed the hype but escaped without
seeing the actual film and pure Hell for those who didn't.
There are certainly numerous other Internet revolutions over the
past 15 years but the ones above are my choice for the strangest
and most fad-like. Websites such as the dude who thinks he is
Peter Pan or the real life Borat are amusing and certainly were
popular at one time but I'm not keen on being ironic about people's
real life obsessions so they are not included here. On the other
hand, Internet ideas such as Napster, Bittorrent, YouTube, MySpace,
Blogger, etc. are more useful and revolutionary than mere fads
so they don't qualify as the drops in the bucket those on my list
do. Maybe someday I will visit The Internet's Greatest Revolutions
and/or My Favorite Internet People but until then enjoy
the fads while you can... they may not be around forever!
The above website snap shot images are the property
of the artists and/or their publishers. They are used soley to
illustrate the fads in question.
