Season 6
Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume DQ
Credited to Wario
Requested by MtH! (@mth-emma)
It really has been fascinating to follow SiIva's timeline of events, and in the process also follow the timeline of what comes in and out of fashion with that certain demographic of internet users. During Season 3, with the original King for a Day Tournament, the clear breakout star was Unregistered Hypercam 2, and his setlist of immensely charming sources all meant to evoke the earliest of times on YouTube. I've covered my affection for plenty of these on the blog already - YACKER TOILET, Never Gonna Give Up Mahjong, Unregistered CyberSpace 4-5: Arrow of 2009 and THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. have together pretty much covered most bases of Hypercam's particular brand of rips.
Yet...there was one song that was suspiciously missing - one that, even in my time exploring this old age of the internet that I was just shy of participating in, I hadn't really heard before. This is the Hampster Dance, and Wario's Hampster Mine.
It's kind of nuts to think that The Hampster Dance's origins as a meme precede the shift of the millennium - its often cited as one of the earliest memes ever made, and was originally just a joke website playing a sped-up Disney song with a bunch of Hamsters. But, that was enough to grab people's attention, the sheer force of "SO RANDOM!!" humor turned the site into an internet-wide in-joke, and in the year 2000 we'd get an official Hampsterdance theme, based on the site's original 7-second looping music. A meme had officially been born, and exploded in popularity.
The King for a Day Tournament was over five years ago at this point, yet it to me was the first sign that nostalgia for the old internet was going to become a very real thing - the novelty that Hypercam introduced has now become an immensely popular aesthetic, and its one that I'm very much a fan of. Hell, it was thanks to this new uptick in popularity - thanks to rips like Wario's Hampster Mine - that I even learned what the Hampster Dance meme was. Despite being such a crucial piece of early internet history, it had completely slipped me by until Season 6, and the 22nd anniversary of the official theme's creation. SiIva celebrated the occasion with an event filled with rips like this one, and it was an immensely fun time.
Of course, I mainly covered this one for being a request, but I'd probably have picked this rip from the event as well due purely to my Mario Kart Wii bias. Wario's Gold Mine is an absolute banger of a track in every sense of the word and already has such an inherently silly energy to it, that it only made sense to be arranged in this fashion. And, yeah - though I don't know who exactly to thank to it, the arrangement is very well done, in line with the spirit of the original meme whilst still following every part of Wario's Gold Mine seamlessly. Its a truly excellent tribute to perhaps the oldest of internet shitposting culture, the seed that would eventually bloom into the random, zany, silly internet culture of the early 2000s. The one that helped start it all.
I am watching The Muppet Show, Roger Miller is the guest star, and he just sang: "Roses are red, violets are purple, sugar is sweet and so's maple syrple."
I THOUGHT ONLY MY FAMILY CALLED IT MAPLE SYRPLE
I mean logically any number of people could have come up with that particularly facile bit of wordplay but it's my first encounter with it in the wild and I did not expect it to come to me from the depths of 1979 via the King of the Road
