"}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 \u00e4r 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)