Ah, Internet sensations. Remember a time when everyone on mIRC was sharing that one particular irritating-yet-funny prank call about somebody kicking a dog? What about that time just about anyone you knew was using the line, “Is this real life, is this going to be forever”? Let’s not forget the “Harlem Shake” phase and that point in time when all your friends were flooding your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram news feeds with Grumpy Cat memes.
Which..is..still happening now for some people, we think.
Here are some of the most highly successful Internet sensations of our time, the ones that became so popular that they were hard to ignore and so popular that we hate (too much spam) yet love (but so funny) them all at the same time:
1. You Kicked My Dog
“You Kicked My Dog” is a prank call that was released in 1995. The call has previously been erroneously credited to the likes of The Jerky Boys, Adam Sandler, Tom Green, and Rickey Smiley, when in actuality it was a teenager named Travis Hopkins from Mississauga Ontario Canada that made it in the fall of 1993.
In this call, a character known as Kerpal uses an Indian English accent to call a man in Malton Ontario Canada and verbally abuse him and his family. The man in the prank call claims to be of “Pakistani” descent (highlighted by the last dialogue spoken by him in the call, “Just because I’m Paki does not mean I stink!”). A man known as Abtar answers the telephone. Kerpal then alleges that Abtar’s older daughter kicked his dog. Abtar asks his daughter in Punjabi, “Dog noo kick kita see?” (Did you kick the dog?). After minutes of confusion, it is revealed that the daughter knows nothing about kicking Kerpal’s dog, let alone who Kerpal is.
The call eventually degrades into a shouting match with Kerpal shouting obscenities:
At least 3 different Flash animations have been created to visualise this call. The simplest one, thought to be the original, was created by Adam Letalik and published on FlatPlanet in late 1999.
This phone call is still played by radio stations, notably KQRS-FM in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The line, “You know damn right!” is a catchphrase of KQRS personality Tom Barnard.
2. Charlie Bit My Finger
“Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!”, more simply known as “Charlie Bit My Finger” or “Charlie Bit Me” (referring to a quotation in the video), is a May 2007 Internet viral video famous for formerly being the most viewed YouTube video. As of November 2014, the video ranks as the third most viewed video on YouTube with nearly 800 million views.
The 55-second-long video features 2 English brothers, Harry Davies-Carr (aged 3) and Charlie Davies-Carr (aged 1). The 2 are seen sitting in a chair when Harry puts his finger into Charlie’s mouth and gets bitten. “Charlie bit me!”, he observes and puts his finger back into Charlie’s mouth, which gets it bitten harder. Harry, who is hurt, says “Ouch” repeatedly and his brother begins to giggle. Afterwards, Harry smiles and repeats, “Charlie bit me!”
It was reported that in 2011 the family made over £100,000 off advertising revenue from the video, and the profit from the video was enough for the family to purchase a new house.The pasta sauce company Ragú also produced a commercial based on the video with the boys.
At one point in time, their father Howard Davies-Car stressed that he didn’t want to commercialise the boy’s success but realised that unlicensed merchandise was being sold based on their video. In response to requests from viewers online the family created “Charlie Bit My Finger” T-shirts, mugs and limited edition calendars.
As of 2012, the profits from the video were over £300,000 – their success has been compared to winning a lottery. The family plans on using the money being made to go towards the boys’ future education.
3. Double Rainbow
“Double Rainbow” is a viral video filmed by one-time MMA fighter Paul “Bear” Vasquez. The clip, filmed in his front yard just outside Yosemite National Park, iUS, state of California, shows his ecstatic reaction to a double rainbow. We say “ecstatic reaction” but we really been overly amazed and obviously overwhelmed response which included philosophical questions about the rainbows, such as, “What do they mean?”.
Comedian and late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel linked to the video in a post on Twitter, saying that he and a friend had declared it the “funniest video in the world”. As such, the video quickly gained over one million views. Subsequently, the video went viral, and an auto-tuned remix named the “Double Rainbow Song” using the video’s audio track was later released by the Gregory Brothers, receiving more than 30 million views and becoming another meme.
As of August 2014, the video has accumulated more than 40.2 million views on YouTube.
4. Zeddie Little
Then 25-year-old Zeddie Little, 25, was running a 10k race when a photographer randomly took his picture and put it on Flickr. The amateur photographer, Will King, took a picture of him with his beaming smile and flowing hair, and tagged it on his Flickr account as “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy“. Zeddie’s ridiculous picture instantly an Internet meme with others adding cheeky captions to the picture such as, “Goes For Run: Inadvertently Teaches World How To Spell ‘Ridiculously'”, and “Goes for a jog… whole town follows him”.
However, while women from all around the world swooned over ridiculous Zeddie, his father, 58-year-old Jack Little confirmed to MailOnline that the Internet sensation is in a serious relationship. At that time, he was said to be Zeddie Little very committed to his girlfriend of 5 years.
Source: Flickr
As of November 2014, “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy” has had over 3.9 million views. He even has his very own dedicated Facebook page that has oh, only about over 81,000 fans.
He even went on to appear in ABC’s Good Morning America in New York, alongside the photographer who was responsible for making him famous. Yup.
5. Hide Yo Kids
In 2010, Antoine Dodson was interviewed by a local TV crew after an intruder attempted to rape his sister, Kelly Dodson. The video of the interview caught attention because of the passionate and flamboyant style of his delivery, speaking directly to the camera, in which he directly addressed his neighbourhood’s residents as well as the attempted rapist, and his use of street vernacular. It became an Internet sensation and even got its own auto-tuned song by The Gregory Brothers which sold thousands of copies on iTunes.
Titled “Bed Intruder Song” or more fondly known as “Hide Yo Kids”, the song created by Auto-Tune the News and features processed vocals of the interview with Antoine Dodson. The vocals were mixed and manipulated to make him appear to sing, coupled with a self-created backing track, and then used in a video which incorporated clips from the news broadcast. The song peaked at number 89 in the Billboard Hot 100, the only song that week to enter the chart on iTunes downloads only.
The original music video for “Bed Intruder Song” (as seen above) went viral, becoming YouTube’s most popular video of 2010. As of November 2014, the “Bed Intruder Song” garnered over 123,672,000 views on YouTube.
6. Jeremy Meeks
Ah, Jeremy Meeks, the hot convict. This dude became “The Hot Mug Shot Guy” after he was arrested on gun and gang-related charges and his mugshot was posted on the Stockton, California police department’s website. After his mugshot was posted along with others on the Facebook page of the Stockton police department in northern California it quickly received 50,000 “likes” and comments from 15,000 women discussing his blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones.
In case you missed it (though we cannot fathom why you would’ve):
Not only did convicted felon and jailbird Jeremy Meeks have hundreds of thousands of women swooning at his mugshot, offering to pay his bail, and declaring he can hide out at their house, he was also offered modelling contracts worth $30,000 upon his release from jail.
Whoa. You go, Jeremy?
7. David After Dentist
In May 2008, 7-year old David DeVore Jr. was taken to the dentist to have an extra tooth removed, due to a hereditary condition called hyperdontia. Because this was David’s first surgery and his mother could not be there, his father decided to video tape the experience to share with her and their family.
After the surgery, David was feeling confused from the anaesthesia he was given. While in the car, he was asking his father questions like “Is this real life?” and “Is this going to be forever?” and also telling him that he had 2 fingers. At one point he even attempted to push himself up from his seat (while still buckled in) and began screaming before sinking back in exhaustion.
7 months later, David’s father uploaded the video on Facebook. Being overwhelmed with people wanting to see the video, he decided to upload it to YouTube, but did not notice there was a private option. Just 3 days after the upload, it was seen over 3 million times:
David’s video became such a phenomenon that the DeVore family went on to appear on “The Today Show”, “Tyra Banks Show”, and “The O’Reilly Factor”o discuss the video. They were later made YouTube Partners. This gives YouTube the right to run ads over the videos they post, and in exchange, are given a share of the revenue. They also sell “David After Dentist” t-shirts and donate a portion of the revenue they earn to dental charities.
8. Grumpy Cat
Tardar Sauce (born 4th April 2012), better known by her Internet moniker “Grumpy Cat”, is a cat and Internet celebrity known for her grumpy facial expression. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, says that her permanently grumpy-looking face is due to feline dwarfism. She and her brother Pokey were born to normal parents with “a flat face, bubble eyes, and a short tail”. Tardar Sauce is undersized and has hind legs that “are a bit different”.
Grumpy Cat’s popularity originated from a picture posted to the social news website Reddit by Bundesen’s brother Bryan on 22nd Sept 2012. It was made into an image macro with grumpy captions. Ironically, although she has a grumpy expression on her face and called “Grumpy Cat”, Tardar Sauce is calm and “actually really nice,” whereas Pokey has a grumpy personality.
As of November 2014, “The Official Grumpy Cat” on Facebook garnered over 6.9 million likes. Grumpy Cat was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on 30th May 2013 and on the cover of New York magazine on 7th Oct 2013. The feline will even have a movie of her own.
9. Harlem Shake
The “Harlem Shake” is an Internet meme in the form of a video in which a group of people perform a comedy sketch accompanied by a short excerpt from the song “Harlem Shake“. The videos usually last about 30 seconds, which made it easy for it to be turned into a meme.
Usually, a video begins with one person (often helmeted or masked) dancing to the song alone for 15 seconds, surrounded by other people not paying attention or seemingly unaware of the dancing individual. When the bass drops, the video cuts to the entire crowd doing a crazy convulsive dance for the rest of the video. The dancing style should not be confused with the original “Harlem Shake” dance. Additionally, in the second half of the video, people often wear either a minimum of clothes or crazy outfits or costumes while wielding strange props. Typically, but not always, the video will end by converting to slow motion on the feline growl.
Needless to say, the “Harlem Shake” was replicated by many people, using the same concept, and this rapidly led to it becoming viral in early February 2013, with thousands of “Harlem Shake” videos being made and uploaded to YouTube every day at the height of its popularity.
Harlem Shake hit the 1 billion view mark on 24th March 24 2013, just 40 days after its first upload. From the day when the first video was uploaded until it hit 1 billion views, the videos were accumulating an average of more than 20 million views a day.
And with that, we end this with, if you would really, really like to annoy the living daylights out of your friends, simply yell “Colo Terrorita!” aloud. Don’t tell them we told you to do it, though!