prokopetz:

prokopetz:

The only reason I haven’t put together a “favourite pre-2000 Internet meme” poll to complement all those “favourite 2000s Internet meme” ones is that nobody actually remembers when the 1990s ended and I know for a fact that the notes would just be a solid wall of people going “dude, you forgot X” and me replying “bro, X is from 2005”.

@mashmaiden replied:

If you DO eventually do one, the dancing baby better be on there! That’s the first big internet “thing” I remember as a middle schooler back in the day. I remember having it on my computer and hearing about it on the news, and then it was on ally mcbeal. first “meme” I knew of in my internet life

An incomplete list of Internet memes that are actually from the 1990s:

• All Your Base*
• Colin Mochrie
• Dancing Baby
• Evil Bert
• Hampster Dance
• Mr. T Ate My Balls
• Stick Death

* the phrase itself, but not the the viral text-to-speech video; the latter first appeared in June of 2000

An incomplete list of Internet memes which are popularly cited as 1990s memes which actually debuted in 2000 or later:

• Annoying Thing/Crazy Frog (the sound clip of a guy making motor noises with his mouth is borrowed from an earlier meme, but the creature itself was created in 2003)
  
• Chuck Norris Facts (popularised in 2005)
  
• Hatten är din (the song is from 1981; the Swedish flash video that made it a meme is from 2000)
  
• Homestar Runner (though the eponymous character existed as early as 1996, the webtoon series that spawned the associated memes just barely misses the cut, debuting in January of 2000)
  
• O RLY? (though it’s uncertain precisely when the originating image macro was created, the owl photo it’s based on is not known to have been present online before 2001)
  
• Real Ultimate Power (the website went live in 2002)
  
• Tunak Tunak Tun (the song was published in 1998, but it didn’t achieve viral meme status until 2006)
  
• YTMND (Finding Forrester did not exist in the 1990s)