An Anniversary for Great Justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 Years Later
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
An anniversary for great justice: Remembering "All Your Base" 20 years later:
As the Internet began crystallizing into its modern form-one that now arguably buttresses society as we know it-its anthropology of common language and references matured at a strange rate. But between the simple initialisms that emerged by the '90s (ROFL!) and the modern world's ecosystem of easily shared multimedia, a patchwork connection of users and sites had to figure out how to establish a base of shared references.
In some ways, the Internet as we know it really began on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago today, when a three-word phrase blew up: "All Your Base."
On that day, a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com, one of the Internet's earliest and longest-lasting dumping grounds of Flash multimedia content, and went on to become one of the most beloved Internet videos of the 21st century. Though Flash support has since been scrapped across the entire Web-browsing ecosystem, Newgrounds continues to host the original video in a safe Flash emulator, if you'd like to see it as originally built instead of flipping through dozens of YouTube rips.
In an online world where users were previously drawn to the likes of the Hamster Dance, exactly how the heck did this absurdity become one of the Internet's first bona fide memes?
A dub(?) of the intro sequence is available on overclocked.org as a .mov file.
YouTube video which starts with actual scenes and then runs wild with the meme. (Has a catchy, techno soundtrack, too!)
Obligatory: xkcd.
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