19 items
The doo-wop bassline of "Stand by Me" under a Jamaican-American teenager crooning that beautiful girls have him "suicidal, suicidal" — the inescapable song of summer 2007. Every school hallway sang the hook; half of radio wasn't sure it was allowed to.
A dad filming his toddlers in England. The youngest bites the oldest's finger. "Ouch, Charlie! Charlie, that really hurt!" The giggle that followed became the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — and held the crown into 2011.
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.
Let it rain, and clear it out. "Chicken Noodle Soup" rode a Harlem dance from the block to grainy YouTube uploads to the Billboard charts — part of the first wave of dance crazes the internet taught America.
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.
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."
One man, a black T-shirt, a spotlight, and a six-minute journey through decades of dance moves. Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" was the video everyone forwarded to everyone else — proof that YouTube could make a star out of anybody with an idea and a camcorder.
The pocket camcorder of the early YouTube era. Just press record, flip out the USB arm, plug into your computer — that was the whole idea. Barely any buttons, cheap, and it became the best-selling camcorder in America before its own parent company killed it.
The squealing, sped-up voice that ruled early YouTube and echoed off every playground. Fred Figglehorn — teenager Lucas Cruikshank's hyperactive six-year-old alter ego — turned pitch-shifted freakouts into the platform's first million-subscriber empire, and kids either quoted him constantly or begged them to stop.
"Shoes. Shoes. OH MY GOD. SHOES." Comedian Liam Kyle Sullivan's deadpan drag creation Kelly growls her way through a birthday shoe rampage in one of YouTube's first true viral videos — the clip a whole generation quoted at every mall for years.
An orange cat in a blue baby T-shirt, propped up at a keyboard, "playing" a jaunty tune while an off-screen owner works its paws. Charlie Schmidt shot it on VHS in 1984, uploaded it in 2007, and in 2009 the internet decided that every fail video should end with him: play him off, Keyboard Cat.
Draw freehand lines and watch a tiny scarf-wearing sledder named Bosh ride them, obeying nothing but momentum and gravity. No goal, no score, no way to win — just physics and creativity in a browser. It was a toy, not a game, and that was exactly the point.
A high-school kid from Hilo, Hawaii, teaching you How To Be Ninja, How To Be Gangster and How To Be Emo in a living room with his friends. Ryan Higa's nigahiga channel was the most-subscribed on YouTube for 675 straight days between 2009 and 2011, the first to pass three million, and a template for a decade of YouTubers.
A man in a black cap and glasses screams at the movies of your childhood. Doug Walker started posting Nostalgia Critic reviews to YouTube on July 3, 2007, got thrown off the site over copyright, built his own, and became the loudest critic of the Flash-era internet.
Four guys, eight treadmills, one continuous take. OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" video cost about $4,000, was shot in Damian Kulash's sister's house in Orlando, and went up on YouTube on July 31, 2006, when the site was just starting to take off. It won a Grammy and showed the music business what a viral video could do.
Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. If your brain just added the next line, you were on YouTube in 2007. Neil Cicierega's felt-puppet Hogwarts reduced the wizarding world to bickering hand puppets — and produced one of early YouTube's most-watched videos ever.
Two teenagers lip-syncing the Pokémon theme in their living room, mouths flapping with total commitment. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making dumb videos with their friends before "YouTuber" was a word — and for long stretches of YouTube's first decade, nobody on the platform was bigger.
"An SNL Digital Short" was the title card that meant Monday's homeroom had material. When "Lazy Sunday" leaked onto a fledgling startup called YouTube in bootleg uploads, it did as much for YouTube as it did for Andy Samberg — and "Dick in a Box" won an actual Emmy.
"Will it blend? That is the question." Blendtec founder Tom Dickson, in a white lab coat, fed marbles, a rake handle, golf balls and eventually a brand-new iPhone into his blender and reduced each to dust. It started in October 2006 on a $50 budget and became the viral campaign every marketing class studied.