10 items
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.