The five most legendary memes
August 27, 2019
In recent years, the meme community took the internet by storm with their unique comedic value and colossal amounts of members. These memes proved to become such a force, that they managed to provide over 2,000,000 participants to raid Area 51 with the mindset, “they can’t stop us all,”. Events such as this provide an example of how the people of the community exercise a massive amount of influence.
While the exact phrase remains unknown, “Me and the Boys” became a frequently used caption for photos on various social media platforms. The meme resurfaced on Reddit in May of this year, featuring a still image from Stan Lee’s 1967 animated TV series Spider-Man. The image features Spiderman villains (left to right) Rhino, Vulture, Electro and Green Goblin. The photo usually features a group of people engaged in casual acts such as going shopping “with the boys” going fishing “with the boys”, and anything else “with the boys”.
“Rickrolling” involves a prank that incorporates posting a hyperlink that supposedly relates to the topic (usually serious) at hand in an online discussion, but redirects the viewer to the music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up,” a 1987 dance-pop song by English singer and songwriter Rick Astley. Since 2007, numerous versions of the music video have gathered hundreds of millions of people, largely driven by the widespread practice of “rickrolling.” Speaking of that, check out this video of Principal Moody flossing.
This meme originally came from CaptainSparklez’ “Revenge”, a Minecraft themed parody of the dance-pop song “DJ’s got us Falling in Love Again” by Usher. Written and produced by Minecraft-gaming Youtuber CaptainSparklez and sung by Youtuber TryHardNinja, The song became the most popular Minecraft parody on the site and the most-viewed Minecraft video of all time. The song opened up multiple doors for content creators to create memes.
The “Wave Check and AirPods” meme includes digital edits in which the subject wears a modern, curly hairstyle known as “waves” photoshopped over their original hair, and AirPods paired along with it. This meme attempts to highlight the flex motive, which became essentially what the term “wave check” represents. This meme quickly spread across the internet, resulting in photoshopped pictures of celebrities and even current and past U.S. Presidents like Barack Obama to Bill Clinton.
Ultra Instinct Shaggy features the character Shaggy from the show “Scooby-Doo” undergoing the “Ultra Instinct” transformation of Goku from “Dragon Ball Super.” After this feature of Shaggy grew popular, the character developed a fandom online. Popular Youtuber Midya posted an Ultra Instinct Shaggy remix of Shaggy fighting a gang of thugs on October 12th, 2017. After the video was posted, the character inspired fan art and further video edits heading into the Internet meme world.
Even after these classic memes have created a huge popularity spike for content creators, they continue to grow in popularity and numbers. The creativity of memes reached its highest peak recently, due to the expansion of the Internet and several social media platforms. Meme creators continue to use these classics as a symbol for how they have helped raise this community to its zenith.