Friends… there are times when I feel my age. Namely when I get something stuck in my head from the early years of the internet. Essentially for me, there is this time from the late 90s to the existence of YouTube where the internet was a wild place. Instead of Social Media you had forum culture, SlashDot, Ebaums World, and New Grounds. It is still a marvel how in an era of so many disconnected islands, things still managed to go viral. If you were “very online” it is certain that you know what the above image represents… and you are finding yourself singing along to it in your head without me needing to post a compilation video where it loops for 10 hours.
The first one of these that I remember was Hamster Dance, which is itself just a page filled with animated gifs that has a looping wav file. The “song” only lasted a few seconds and was an extremely sped-up loop of a portion of Whistle Stop from the 1973 Robin Hood movie. If you are really curious about this page, there is apparently a CBC deep dive into the story behind it. What matters more was the fact that it was a signpost on the internet that everyone of a certain age knew about. It was even printed out in various physical guidebooks to the internet that inexplicably existed from the era. I think things like this achieved a state of virality, just because there was so much less content being created. While I started fucking around with HTML circa 1993/94ish… most people were completely in the dark bout how to craft any sort of online content until the mid-2000s. So when something novel and interesting sprung up, word tended to spread quickly.
It is now time to bring this discussion around to what is actually stuck in my head right now. In the era of the internet prior to YouTube… video was very much an unsolved problem. Sure you had RealPlayer and QuickTime… but the proliferation of motion video did not really happen in a large way until Macromedia Flash came on the scene. Download speeds were a problem as most of the folks online were still connecting through a 56k or worse dial-up modem. I believe I managed to get DSL in 2000, but I was one of the very first people in my town and Cable Internet existed… but was still very limited in its reach. Instead of transferring frames of video, Flash allowed you to effectively transfer a number of highly compressed assets and vector animation paths, that were then recreated into something that resembled video on the end user’s machine through a browser plugin.
This created an explosion of websites sharing short looping animations. “Look at my Horse” mentioned above is one of these from Weebl who also gave us “Badger Badger Badger“. The one that is stuck in my head however comes from Rather Good, and features a duo of crudely mashed-together characters known collectively as “Spongmonkeys”. This pops into my head at the least appropriate times… and I am forced to belt out “We Like Tha Moon!”. I was working at a small startup with my good friend Chuck/Vernie and for whatever reason… we got this stuck in our head for weeks. There was a whole series of these videos featuring these abominations, but nothing really hit as hard as the first one. It is when you get to the “We Like Cheese We Like Zeppelins” that tends to make me lose my shit.
If people remember these now, however… they tend to be referred to as the “Quiznos Rats“. How “We Like Tha Moon” got stuck into my head recently is because I saw a meme talking about how no one would believe you that this was a commercial. It wasn’t just a commercial… it was a Super Bowl commercial. The mid-2000s was this time when advertisers had no clue at all how to deal with advertising to an internet-enabled audience. Meme culture existed, but no one really knew what to do with it once it left some random forum of friends. What these ended up being is a weird sly nod to the aggressively online like me… and completely fucking baffling to random Grandmothers in Wisconsin. Everything was weird in the heady days before the Dot Com Crash.
So you might be asking yourself… “Old Man Bel, Why are you talking about this nonsense?”. The other day I came across a video that made me “lose my collective shit” in a way similar to those classics of a bygone era. The problem is… it is so damned ephemeral that I could not track down the original version on TikTok. I could not embed the version posted on Mastodon, and in order to get something with enough permanance to feel comfortable sticking it in a post… I had to download the damned video and generate a nonsensical unlisted YouTube video. None of the original sites surrounding the content I have talked about today still exist. RatherGood seems to have been sold off probably several times over, and Weebl to the best of my knowledge has not existed for a very long time. What we have instead is crappy Youtube copies of the originals that were made in an era of postage stamp resolutions. Even then… only the most popular things remain. I was looking this morning for another video from RatherGood called “Jamie and the Magic Todger” and could find no version that still played.
I guess it concerns me that there is this entire era that just is ephemeral. I already find myself questioning my memory of these things. Did they really exist or did I just imagine them? We will likely always have David After Dentist as long as YouTube still exists, but Charlie Bit My Finger appears to be gone from the site as apparently it was sold as an NFT. We are living in the worst timeline. I guess the slow death of Twitter and Reddit, have made me contemplate the mortality of internet culture. Things that I once took for granted, like the ability to watch Charlie the Unicorn any time I want… now suddenly seem a bit less certain when I am not really certain that YouTube actually turns a profit. The end of the era of unlimited VC funding seems to be over, and it does make me wonder if there is a way to archive all of this for future generations. Like I am not necessarily saying that We Like Tha Moon, rises to the level of high culture… but it is at least important to me.
Anyways… Happy Thursday. Sorry to be a downer.
I quote Charlie the Unicorn to this day, and only like three other people ever get it, one of whom I have known for 20+ years and can vividly remember watching those videos over and over and over with in the good old Aughts.
My feeling is always that most things are meant to be ephemeral. They’re to be enjoyed in the moment then left behind. A brief memory life then gone forever. Also, when things get really hard to find, it’s so much more satisfying when you do actually manage to find one.
A much greater problem, in my opinion, is the mania for retention that sees vast resources being consumed just to store unimagineable quantities of absolutely ephemeral images and words that for the extreme most part will never be seen or read again by anyone… and yet there they are. It’s unsustainable. At least it is until the next step-change in data storage, I guess, but that won’t do anything to make any of that data meaningful or useful to anyone. It’ll still just sit there only hopefully in a less ecologically damaging way.
Sadly the demise of flash and it’s part in the glorious fabric of content that was the Internet back then is truly sad. I had hopes that some of the conversion tools would be elements could be saved and housed somewhere like the Internet Archive. But the appetite and appeal of that process is not there.
I was talking with one of the younglings at work and when he was talking about YTMND and I said, oh ‘You’re the Man Now, Dog’. They stopped, blinked a few times, then said, “I never knew that was it’s actual name” 😄
It’s hard to explain to people the way things have shifted, yes we had the internet, but almost everything was not in real time, you had to manually F5 a page to see new content, voice chat was very limited and awful, there was no centralised “one stop shop” for anything.
In early 2000’s I would consume all the content that was in the orbit of the B3ta website, Weebl and RatherGood, alongside others.
P.S. My favourite RatherGood is Pavarotti Loves Elephants.
Wow, so many memories. I’ma come back later and replay all those videos.
I don’t mind ephemera. One of my most comforting thoughts is that in a million years, nobody will know we ever existed as people or as a species. The early internet meant something to us back then, but now it’s just nostalgia. Not that I don’t indulge in that, quite a lot.