The End of the World (End of Ze World)

Jason Windsor was 18 when he made it, and it hit the web in 2003 in the shadow of the Iraq invasion: a thin-lined, deliberately dumb Flash animation in which a narrator introduces the planet ("H'okay, so here's the Earth"), then runs through what the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and Australia would do once the missiles started flying, each in a cartoon accent, with a caricature of George W. Bush along the way. It ends with everything nuked and a nuclear winter settling over what is left. It was posted on Albino Blacksheep and passed around everywhere Flash cartoons lived.

What made it stick were the lines. "Fire ze missiles." A soldier's weary "but I am le tired." Russia's "AAAHHH MOTHERLAND." For a few years it was hard to get through a school day without hearing one of them, delivered in the accent. The Daily Dot, looking back, described it as the video you "may recall being the first thing you ever shared on the internet," which for a certain age of kid is close to literally true.

It kept living after Flash died. A copy Albino Blacksheep uploaded to YouTube in 2008 ran up roughly 14 million views before the site abandoned it for a higher-resolution version. Asked about it in 2017, Windsor told the Daily Dot "I don't know that I really thought that the world was going to end," describing it instead as the first time he had to take in the idea of other countries holding nuclear weapons. On January 20, 2018, fifteen years on, he released a sequel, "End of ze World ...Probably for Real This Time," a four-minute update aimed at the Trump presidency, with a much stronger political slant and a comment section to match.