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Throwback Thursday: Let's talk old flash and memes!
Inspired by some conversations I had over Discord where I realized that a lot of memes and videos from the early days of the Internet which were common knowledge are now just totally unknown. So, let's have a proper Throwback Thursday and reminisce over purer times.
My contributions: The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, which may still be the biggest crossover ever and is a great time capsule of early to mid 2000's pop culture. I forgot how much people used to joke about Chuck Norris being invincible.
The Llama Song is another old favorite to pop into my head recently. Some of the purest silliness you could find from the 2000's Internet, totally nonsensical lyrics and a catchy melody.
Oh god the llama song :D
Then I feel like it is obligatory for me to throw in All your base
I'd forgotten I even knew the llama song, and am horrified that I still have it down word and pitch perfect.
Similar songs also burned into my high school brain that will never vacate: We Like The Moon (also responsible for the Quiznos spongmonkies fever dream) and Magical Trevors 1-5.
The most well known flash game of my youth was The Impossible Quiz. My friends and I would strategically trade solutions at lunch, trying not to give too many answers otherwise the other person might finish the quiz first.
I haven't thought about The Impossible Quiz in a hot minute! I never finished it and I don't think any of my friends did, but boy did we spend ages trying! Can't believe you can still run it in a browser. I assume it's been updated somehow?
I recently played through Castle Crashers on PS5 with my family. Fun couch coop. I remember the creators had their start back in the day on Newgrounds. Playing that game reminded me of those days. The amount of work that went into the videos and games made in Flash!
I was a fan of Ill Will Press and recently looked up the Starbucks episode to show my wife. Good times!
The ones that tend to stick in my mind are all the old song videos, typically those that employed humorously crappy MS Painted artwork or clever editing, as was the style at the time*. And I'd argue that Hollywood still hasn't caught up with the quality of action choreography in the stick figure animations from that era.
Group X - Schfifty Five
Dark Materia - The Picard Song - there was a great flash video for this but can't find it atm
Badger Badger Badger <- stick on infinite loop
Charlie the Unicorn
Xiao Xiao Stick Fight
The End of the World
Animator vs Animation
Weebl and Bob
Salad Fingers
* Along with wearing onions in our belts
Oh man I remember the stick figure fights and wanting to recreate that on animation tools.
I also remember Charlie the Unicorn and Salad Fingers. My older sister is emo/scene and it was very big among that millennial crowd. Charlie for the “so random” humor and Salad Fingers for the Burton-esque atmosphere. There’s actually a current TikTok meme that uses the music from Salad Fingers.
I'm completely oblivious to TikTok trends but knowing that Salad Fingers is out there disturbing a whole new generation of Internet users is wonderful to hear ha 😁
Does anyone remember the Big Red Button?
Flash "game" thing ... started with a Big Red Button on the screen, with a message "Do not press the Big Red Button" ... and so, of course, you press it, which started a whole 15-20 minute long extravaganza of button-pressing.
I first learned what a meme was like in 2011. I started using 9Gag cause a middle school friend of mine recommended it. I would then spend endless hours scrolling.
To me a meme was what is now known as Advice Animals. That was a meme to me. Rage comics also existed but I didn’t consider that a meme. While I loved them at the time with my 11/12 year old brain, looking back a lot of that stuff was terrible. A lot of “le Justin Bieber terrible.” I ran into a video in 2020 that encapsulates the meme culture of the time.
In my opinion meme culture became much more refined in 2016. With Reddit’s me_irl stuff going mainstream, dankmemes picking up pace, as comedy stuff like Cumtown being big. That era on its own I think is really good, but I think the current era is also better than the stuff I grew up with. I love a lot of TikTok memes, I love that there’s an editing format for them. Sometimes I wish I was ten years younger because I feel like this meme culture is more to my taste, and I would probably be making tiktoks and whatnot.
Welcome to zombo.com
Reminder of the Flashpoint project, which is to preserve as much as they can without trampling on copyright. Sorta. I think? Anyway, it has a big database you can sort through.
My favorite flash game is Steamshovel Harry, one of the most flash games ever.