Featuring Jenna Marballs as Miley in Wrecking Ball, Kid President being rad, Smosh in their undies, and Epic Meal Time hanging out with Overly Attached Girlfriend, prepare for some epic-level awesomeness from YouTube’s 2013 mashup.
Also featured: Prancercise wonders what the fox says, if you’re looking carefully, you’ll spot GloZell in a horsemask, and there’s cameos from Jimmy Fallon, Macklemore, Jamie Oliver, and the Cookie Monster.
Enough of the writing, time to get watching!
And check out all the behind-the-scenes action here:
Who doesn’t love a good viral hit – at least for the first week? I’ve collated some of the biggest into this list, in no particular order.
Ridiculously Photogenic Guy
On a sunny March day in South Carolina, Zeddie Little was participating in the Cooper River Bridge run when his picture was snapped by Will King. Will put Zeddie’s photo onto Flickr, and then Reddit where it received more than 40,000 upvotes.
The photo quickly became meme fodder
And Zeddie ran his way into hearts across the world.
Ecce Homo – aka Potato Jesus Now to the polar opposite of Ridiculously Photogenic Guy: A century-old painting of Jesus was restored by an elderly woman, but comes out of it looking like a potato.
Yeah. It was only a matter of time before this happened:
Grumpy cat What would a top 10 viral list be without an entry about a cat? This one is a cat named Tardar Sauce, who is the unhappiest looking cat you’ll ever see.
Instant viral hit.
Bonus: Here is a video of grumpy cat being patted:
Overly Attached Girlfriend Meet Laina. She likes you. She really, really likes you.
It all started with this video, which includes the lyrics “If I was your girlfriend, I’d never let you leave without a small recording device taped under your sleeve.“
Which quickly spawned a huge Overly Attached Girlfriend meme!
This grew into Misunderstood Girlfriend
Laina’s now done deals with large companies to capitalise on her new-found viral fame. Here’s something she did with Samsung…
2012 was the year we called our dogs out for their terrible behaviour. Dogshaming started as a tumblr in August with this photo:
And grew…
And grew!
Kony 2012 The Invisible Children wanted to create a project to focus the world’s attention on capturing African rebel leader Joseph Kony. And boy, did they do that and then some.
It’s unusual that a half-hour video would viral, but that it did – nearly 7 million views in 16 days on Vimeo, and 43 million views in 72 hours on YouTube.
Almost immediately, a bunch of celebrities came out in support of the project, #StopKONY became a global trending topic on Twitter, and a critical Tumblr was launched to point out some of the issues with the video and Invisible Children. Debate raged over Kony, what governments should do, and the nature of the Invisible Children organisation
In March, one of Invisible Children’s co-founders was taken into police custody after he started running around San Diego naked, drunk, masturbating and screaming. The incident quickly spawned its own meme.
Kony is still at large.
Gangnam Style The number one most-watched clip on YouTube, causing Beliebers everywhere major heartbreak, is now Gangnam Style, by K-Pop act, Psy.
It spawned this amazing version, featuring five people playing the one guitar
…Got historical
…And even the Queen got amongst it
Call Me Maybe I just met you, and this is crazy. Here’s the video, watch it, maybe?
Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit was technically released in 2011, but didn’t become a viral hit until Justin Bieber, Selena Gomex and Ashley Tisdale released their lip dub tribute in February.
Someone cut a Barack Obama version
As well as the memes and videos, the song even inspired a range of business cards.
If you haven’t heard Carly Rae Jepsen’s catchy song Call Me Maybe, where have you been? This song has been played and parodied all over the place. Please stop listening to sad.fm and hanging out on boring websites, and check out the original track here.
For the rest of you, here’s a compilation of the best videos, rage comics and meme pieces floating across the interwebs. Please add your favourites in the comments!
How much fun are Jimmy Fallon and The Roots having with Carly on this cover?
You know it’s blown up when ObamaDubs gets amongst.
The powercut version: With all your favourite internet stars like Keenan Cahill and Sam Tsui, pop stars Katy Perry, Jesse J and Justin Bieber, and actor James Franco:
With lines like “If Twitter raised the character limit from 140 to 200, it would finally allow 90 million German speakers to finish a sentence” and “The world’s 2nd most common lie after “I love you too” is “You have successfully been unsubscribed from our database””, this parody video is well worth a watch.
There’s a video that’s in the beginning stages of viral – and it won’t be too long before it becomes a fully fledged “thing”.
The reason for the viral is partially because the video is very funny, partially because it’s very odd.
An Indonesian woman dances in heels and a short skirt, on butter, to Adele’s Someone Like You.
Just watch the video.
Confused?
Melati Suryodarmo is a performance artist. In the original piece, she dances for 20 minutes on 20 blocks of butter to Indonesian shamanistic drums. When a YouTuber got hold of the clip, he replaced the original music with Adele, and so a viral video was born.
Here she is, dancing to Skrillex. It’s not quite as poignant though.
And incase you were wondering, here’s the original butter dance, complete with all the, erm, natural sound effects.
I’m really enjoying this ad, newly released by the New Zealand Transport Authority. It’s a departure from their usual shock value ads – and other attempts into this territory have fallen flat (Google “mantrol” and “manis”) – but they seem to have struck it right with this one.
“Bro, Monique says you’re dumb”
“Puzzle time!”
“You know I can’t grab your ghost chips”
“I’ve been internalising a really complicated situation in my head”
Music is by Franklin Road Studios, especially for the ad. The main actor is Darcey-Ray Flavell (who you may recognise him from Boy). The agencies are Sweet Shop and Clemenger BBDO – you bloody legends.
UPDATE: There’s now a Ghost Chips song – it’s by The Cuzzies and here’s the official video:
Before you ask where you’ve seen that guy before, it’s Jermaine Leefe, who used to be a VJ on C4.
Nyan Cat isn’t a new meme, but it has just recieved a delightfully Kiwi twist.
For those of you who don’t often visit the meme-world, Nyan cat is pretty much just a cat, made of pop tarts, racing across the sky, leaving rainbow trails. That’s it. Seriously, that’s it. And it’s annoying, and it’s addictive.
Here it is:
I WARNED YOU.
Anyway, it’s had several incantations…
Nyan Cat metal version:
Nyan Cat meets Lady Gaga:
Nyan Cat killing Peter Griffin:
The Rebecca Black version:
And now, a New Zealand version! Featuring a version of Dave Dobbyn’s Slice of Heaven, here is Kiwi Nyan Cat!
If you’ve got a favourite Nyan Cat, please pop the link in the comments – I’d love to see them 🙂
