#meme appreciation

[ninalevy]

Penguin Attack

Inktober 2020 Day 11:

Because sometimes you just want to watch a clip of a penguin shooting out of the water and bouncing off a man.....repeatedly.

[ninalevy]

The Gayest Flamethrower You Have Ever Seen:

Inktober 2020 Day 22

This clip has been around since 2016, but my older son was enjoying it enough recently to show it to me. I thought it looked like it came from a movie, but couldn’t place it immediately. A disheveled man sitting on a bus suddenly jumps up and yells out the bus window in Russian, “Great Jacket! Where can I get one?” at a man who appears to be wearing a top made of mirror shards. The mirrored man responds promptly by shouldering a flame thrower and setting the bus on fire.

The clip is easily found online by searching for ‘Great Jacket’.... or by the preceding line delivered in English by the same character, “That has got to be the gayest jacket I have ever seen!” One can also discover that the clip comes from the 2016 Russian film, “Hardcore Henry.”

I remember how much our younger son wanted to see the movie when it was released. It is essentially a feature length first person shooter, filmed by literally strapping the camera to the central character’s face. Henry is relatively inactive in these few seconds of film, but for the rest of the movie he is shooting, punching, jumping, running, or blowing things up nearly incessantly.

I don’t think I have the stamina to make it through the entire movie, so I cannot explain the reason or the sexual orientation behind the mirrored jacket. But it is an incongruous moment in the movie, perfectly suited to memehood.

[ninalevy]

Continuing to Fill The Cat Quota:

Inktober 2020, Day 28

The urban legend in the early days of the Internet was that the web was 15% pictures of cats. I seem to remember that statistic was disproved, but...depending on the day, it can seem like an underestimate.

This one, “Unhappy Kitten” comes to our family from @perfectlycutscreams which is is both a social media account and a genre. The unifying characteristic is of course that the video ends with a cut off scream. The unhappy kitten might not be in fact a perfect instance of the category as there is a scream in the middle also, but it’s got a cat in it.

[ninalevy]

God-zil-la, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo

Ok, so I did have to ask my kids to explain the “Baby Shark Challenge” phenomena to me. I had somehow missed out on the international, egregious ear-worm that is the Baby Shark song.

You are now either shocked by my amazing ignorance, or don’t know what the hell I am talking about (hi Grandma!).

I suspect most who are still reading (besides my aforementioned, endlessly indulgent mother) can’t stand to slog through my explanation of the Baby Shark juggernaut.

But the bare facts according to Wikipedia:

(Everyone else just skip past the bullet points if you haven’t already stopped reading)

* The point of origin was maybe a campfire song with no particular author, but the song usually had colorful verses including dismemberment by shark, attempted CPR, death and the meeting of Jesus.

* Pink Fong released a child friendly version on @YouTube kids on November 25, 2015 and, “as of May 2019 this version has garnered over 2.8 billion views on YouTube, while all videos related to Pinkfong's song approach 5 billion views, making it the most-viewed educational video phenomenon of all time” (“educational”?)

* "Baby Shark" broke into the Billboard Top 100 at #32 during the week of January 7, 2019

* “Due to its popularity, this version of the song has spurred an online dance craze (sometimes referred to as Baby Shark Challenge) cited as ‘the next big thing after the domination of Gangnam Style’”

When debating which characters to draw making the Baby Shark Challenge dance moves, it seemed inevitable to me that it had to be giant monsters. The most popular giant monsters of the moment are of course those in the recent Godzilla: King of the Monsters movie.

My son, Kaiju fan that he is, told me this drawing was ok... but that if I revealed the Baby Shark theme, we would immediately lose a lot of followers.

But I am afraid, that almost 10,000 departed Instagram followers later, (yes, we were once at 29,000 plus on that platform) it’s too late for me to start strategizing about social media popularity now.

[ninalevy]

Every Day. We Stray Closer to the God of Memes.

Perhaps.

Our son brought home a nice drawing of “Doug,” a perplexing pigeon/penguin sort of creature clad in a T-shirt emblazoned with a pseudo biblical aphorism.

I asked questions about where this image came from...not questioning its originality, just its antecedents, as I suspected it had not come from nowhere.

He did direct me to the “Every Day We Stray Further From God’s Light” meme. Apparently, since mid 2015, the phrase has been paired with various images or texts deemed “cringeworthy” by the meme-maker.

At the end of 2015, the catchphrase was attached to a photo of a strange t-shirted creature with a stuffed animal head and a human body.

If you watched a lot of Disney programming between 2007 and 2016, you might recognize that the head is that of “Perry the Platypus” from the animated show “Phineas and Ferb.” (Perry is a fedora wearing platypus who is a secret agent, but pretends to be a dumb family pet....not that this matters)

I recognized Perry, but the source, and the larger why (or maybe the WHY?) of the image was unclear to me.

For some reason, (again, WHY?) this concerned me, so I did some research, and discovered the source of the image from a- what do we call this?- a Disney World Splash Mountain candid? I’m sure there is a industry term for the photos amusement parks take of unsuspecting people screaming on rides and then try to sell copies to them afterwards. During our rare family trips to theme parks, I have always been excessively annoyed by those photos.

But clearly the person in this photo with the Perry head was prepared and planning to purchase.

So then, after inexplicably spending time on this, I had to draw my own version. Which is definitely not a good as my son’s. I spent far too much time mulling over what was the most compelling aspect of the thing. And in the end, failed to capture it.

It sounds pat and even patronizing when I say that I always learn things from my kids’ drawings.

It is true...but not always immediately useful.

[ninalevy]

RIP Harumbe

(Back to the perhaps unfortunate “meme appreciation” series)

My older son has paid a surprisingly amount of attention to Elon Musk’s activity on social media. Who knew Mr. Musk’s target demographic was video-game-playing, anime-watching 16 year old boys?

My son sometimes updates me on Musk’s twitter activity. In early April, he enthusiastically showed me the bizarre auto-tuned rap song “RIP Harumbe” that Musk had posted on SoundCloud on March 31st.

The actual tragic events that led to Cincinnati Zoo gorilla Harambe’s untimely demise by gunshot and the ensuing online meme tsunami happened way back in 2016. (Ok...possibly for the benefit of my kids’ grandparents, I will offer a synopsis: a perhaps poorly tended 3 year old human person fell into Harambe’s enclosure and the gorilla dragged him around in a potentially harmful manner while the humans outside vocalized a lot of stress and anxiety...until a zookeeper shot him. The kid was uninjured.)

I did not pay much attention at the time to the unfortunate real life events or the rich metaphorical opportunities for the critique of wildlife management, contemporary parenting, and human responsibility/guilt on the grand scale. But I was nonetheless aware of it because our kids were aware of it. Harambe memes went all sorts of places at the time, a good many of them regrettable.

But the beauty of memes is that they are always out there and can be resurrected and repurposed at any time....And synergy between memes and famous individuals can become a popularity multiplier.

Some hypothesized that Mr. Musk was just demonstrating that he is so famous that he can post any ridiculous thing online

and receive a ridiculous amount of attention.

Elon Musk’s likeness on this napkin is definitely not one of my better, so I have been putting off posting this one. But Harambe’s is not terrible, so at least there’s that.

But I think we can all agree that I should have included a flame thrower.

[ninalevy]

Identified as a Flying Attack Unicorn:

(Continuing the meme series, for National Unicorn Day)

While my feelings about my sons’ developing gender politics are ambivalent, (“Mom, is the wage gap a REAL thing?”) I do understand that they are growing up in an entirely different landscape than the one I experienced long ago when I was a young cishet person.

If you are asking yourself if the previous sentence has a typo in it, then you might be late to the gender nomenclature party. My son has high school friends who use “they” or “hir” as their pronoun. The school addresses teacher reports in the 2nd person (“You wrote a good essay”) to avoid inadvertently using an inappropriate pronoun.

We’ve come a long way on the topic of gender and self determination...Well, not universally of course... But the conversation is certainly out there for everyone to see and participate in, complain about, or make fun of through memes.

One such gender-discomfort meme is “I Identify as an Attack Helicopter.” According to knowyourmeme.com, this one parodies “absurd gender and sexual identification posts often found on forums and blogging sites, most notably Tumblr.”

While I have some serious misgivings about the appeal of backlash memes, (particularly to my sons)....it is a confusing time for many, and we do have stuff to process....Humor could help...maybe.

At any rate, while I can’t really support the Attack Helicopter Meme, I find the spin-off than my son favored: “I identify as a flying attack unicorn” to be more charming.

Because. Unicorns. Why not?

In this drawing, unfortunately, I did not do said unicorn justice. I was thinking that maybe it should be helicopter/robot-like, but, giving my poor skill at rendering mechanical objects, this was not a wise choice.