Meme-A-Thon: All Your Base Are Belong To Us
HEAR YE, HEAR YE: the King of Memes assumed the throne long ago. Hailed by early internet minions. Worshiped through viewership from 1998 onward. Recognized in many circles as the most prominent meme of all time: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
What a pairing this King would make with the Queen of the early internet: the Rainbow Bar. OK, that’s a step too far into early internet fantasies…
But why was “All Your Base” so infectious? Let’s unpack it.
First, recall how you felt when you first saw the darkly decorated character, face half overtaken by robotics, and the sterile, computer-generated voice warbling its famous quote.
Maybe confused? Destabilized? A tad bit intimidated? To be sure, an innate sense of mystification clouded our minds. To deconstruct why it had this emotional impact, which in turn drove us to share the meme with fascination, you must look at the words.
All Your Base…
What is the Base? Does this refer to military bases?
Or is a Base simply a secure foundation?
…Are Belong…
Other worldly, as if an invader from another planet was trying to speak to us in our language. Here begins the intimidating feeling.
…To Us.
We’ve taken away your Base… your foundation… your security.
Wow… OK then.
With such a dramatic statement, shaking our security to the core, it’s not difficult to understand the outpouring of humorous spin-off memes. Perhaps applying “All Your Base” to a Budweiser ad with ladies in swimsuits took the edge off!
But the original meme appealed to a sense of fear in all of us, and that amygdala impact drove our “sharing” behavior. What’s more, we connected culturally with the “All Your Base” sentiment. We instinctively understood it to refer to any circumstance outside of our control – situations in the hands of some unforgiving and often unseen power. However, the use of “are” and lack of plural on “bases” offered a hilarious and kitschy counterbalance to our “baser” interpretations (pun intended). We could not help but laugh in the end.
Beyond the cogent insight into how emotion drives our online behaviors, in actuality “All Your Base” was just All Meaningless. Simply a snippet of poorly translated English from a Japanese video game called Zero Wing. But, to such a great effect!
For the unindoctrinated or the nostalgic, here’s the original 2008 video including all the amusing spin-offs. One viewer aptly described it as “an elegant meme from a more civilized time”.
Members of King Meme’s Court
“All Your Base” was hugely popular, but in the Runner’s Up Circle of the earliest and most pervasive internet memes is Badger, Mushroom, Snake.
Well, there might be less to talk about on this one. There was just a Badger. A Mushroom. And a Snake.
The backstory, however, was that this was originally a Flash animation. It ran on an endless loop, which you can’t fully detect in the 3-minute YouTube video that remains today.
When the original Flash hit the web, there was something about its never-ending, incessant quality that kept us watching a long time.
We wondered: Will the loop change? What will happen when it “ends”? Is there another animation to be revealed?
So we watched, and watched, and watched… So long… We, the early web builders, kept it playing while we were working on web graphics, website coding, and emails.
And if it ran long enough, I’d say 2 hours in, the audio and animation would start to mis-sync. We’d hear about the snake before it appeared. Badgers would mash in with the mushrooms. That was all we got as a reward for our patience.
And then maybe the browser would just crash.
The lessons in all of this?
First, perhaps we can gain a little insight about engagement and stickiness from our internet ancients.
And speaking of ancients: In our old-school way, we like to talk about “What Grandma did before the internet existed”. But now, nostalgically we can say: “This is what Grandma did when the internet first started”! 🙂
P.S. – Honorable Mention in the King’s Court:
As a parting cherry on top, I bequeath my favorite meme to you, dear Reader. The first and best cat meme in memory. It’s significant, since we know how cat and dog memes persist on today’s internet like a Happy Plague.
Let’s crown her the Princess of Memes:
P.S.S. – Didn’t experience the oldest internet memes the first time around, but still curious? Let’s not forget the Dancing Babies, Bananas, and Hamsters: see this article for more!
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments. What are your favorite early internet memes?
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