20 items
![Video thumbnail — 300 - Official Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UrIbxk7idYA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Zack Snyder's 2007 comic adaptation: 300 Spartans against the Persian king Xerxes, rendered bronze-and-crimson with slow-motion everything. It broke the March box-office record, launched a thousand ab jokes, and gave the internet "This is Sparta!"
A hilariously broken line of video-game English that became one of the internet's first true memes. In February 2001, a techno remix and a Newgrounds video put 'All your base are belong to us' on forum signatures, Photoshopped billboards, and eventually YouTube's own maintenance page.
Twelve cartoon badgers do calisthenics to a chant that never stops, interrupted by a mushroom and a snake. The joke is that it loops forever and you cannot escape it — one of the great earworms of the early internet.
A 2007 candy commercial became a 2021 TikTok explosion. The Little Lad — a grown man in old-fashioned page-boy clothes chanting "berries and cream" with a marionette dance — sat dormant for 14 years before the internet crowned him. The flavor was fine; the ad is immortal.
A grumpy unicorn gets badgered into a Candy Mountain quest in this absurdist fever dream. They wanted his kidney. Time magazine marveled that something so nonsensical could earn a cultlike following — and for once, the magazine was right.
Tay Zonday's impossibly deep baritone over a looping piano, delivered stone-faced into a home microphone. The joke was the caption: "I move away from the mic to breathe in." Beneath the meme, the lyrics were a metaphor about racism in America — a fact most people quoting it never noticed.
Chuck Norris can divide by zero. The absurdist one-liner engine of 2005 colonized forum signatures, email chains, and lunchrooms — hyperbolic "facts" about one man's toughness that became a shared vocabulary for the whole internet.
"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?" Clippy, Microsoft Office's animated paperclip assistant, was the most helpful thing nobody asked for — so universally mocked that Microsoft built an ad campaign around firing him, and so fondly remembered that he came back as an emoji.
The That's So Raven spinoff that moved Cory Baxter into the White House — and, a decade later, got crowned the internet's favorite ironic 'best anime ever.' Kyle Massey ran get-rich-quick schemes out of the presidential kitchen for two seasons of peak Disney Channel.
A prairie dog — not actually a chipmunk — whips its head toward the camera in slow menace, scored with a sinister orchestral sting from a 1974 Mel Brooks film. Five seconds of pure reaction gold that became the internet's shorthand for "something just happened."
The early-2000s comedy and media dump every kid browsed instead of doing homework. Flash cartoons, prank-call soundboards, funny clips, and simple games — all stamped with the site's inescapable watermark, which became the running joke and the scandal at once.
A World of Warcraft guild meticulously plans a raid — and then Leeroy Jenkins, back from making chicken, bellows his own name and charges in alone, wiping everyone. "At least I have chicken" became the internet's shorthand for glorious reckless abandon.
A grey cat with a caption. In 2007, a website launched around a single image of a cat asking "I can has cheezburger?" — broken English, instant appeal, zero cynicism. Within months the site was pulling over a million hits a day, and a niche 4chan tradition became a phenomenon covered by Time magazine. Lolcats became the grammar of internet humor for a decade, the template for every image macro that followed.
"Everybody gets a car!" On one September afternoon in 2004, Oprah handed 276 audience members a new Pontiac each — and handed the internet a meme it would still be pointing with twenty years later.
A pixelated banana, dancing. A frantic novelty song, repeating. Together they conquered the early-2000s internet through sheer absurdity, until someone in every room could yell "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!" and everyone else would groan on cue.
Xzibit takes your hopeless beater to the shop and it comes back with a fish tank, seven screens, and flames. MTV's most gloriously absurd makeover show — and the birthplace of "yo dawg, I heard you like…"
A portal gun, a passive-aggressive AI, and a promise of cake. Portal shipped in 2007 as the little extra in Valve's Orange Box — built by fewer than ten people — and walked away with the whole bundle's spotlight, a Game of the Year trophy, and half the internet's vocabulary.
Somebody once told me — you know the rest. Smash Mouth's 1999 radio staple peaked at #4 on the Hot 100, but immortality arrived in 2001, when it played over Shrek's opening credits and fused itself permanently to a green ogre. The internet did the rest.
The internet's town square of homework panic and genuine confusion. Anyone could ask, anyone brazen enough could answer, and askers crowned a "Best Answer" from strangers of wildly varying wisdom. At its 2009 peak, Yahoo claimed 200 million users were on the site asking the things they were too shy to Google.
"You're the Man Now, Dog." A whole website built on one dumb, perfect formula: a single looping image, a blaring sound clip, and a line of zooming text — repeated forever until it was either hypnotic or unbearable.