Here are just 10 videos that went viral before YouTube, Facebook and every other social site we use now ever existed. According to Know Your Meme, the video was uploaded to Kazaa and then spread from there, ending up on several Internet humor websites and was eventually transformed into parodies and remixes created with different special effects added to it. It’s been estimated that the original unedited Star Wars Kid video has now been viewed over one billion times. This video went viral via forwarded email chain messages, back when we were still in the first stage of the World Wide Web, long before the Web 2.0 era. If you want to know the full story behind it, you can check out this TechCrunch article for a brief history of the Dancing Baby meme. Quotes like “I am a banana” and “My spoon is too big!” from the film became popular one-liners that have been reenacted and parodied by all sorts of fans of the original. It brought smiles to a lot of people’s faces and thus went viral. The video has been viewed millions of times since it was uploaded — possibly even reaching over a billion views by now with all the copies of it spread across the internet today. Several parts of the narration in the cartoon became iconic Internet catchphrases, like “I am le tired,” and “WTF, mate?” After it made its first debut, uploads of the video quickly spread to other humor sites as well, obviously adding to its virality. The robotic sounding, grammatically incorrect catchphrase crept on to the Internet in as early as 1998, according to Know Your Meme, and grew into a viral hit in the early 2000s on sites like Something Awful, Newgrounds and forum discussion boards across the web. The song just repeats the word “badger” as several badgers pop up, then “mushroom” a couple of times, and lastly “snaaaake, it’s a snaaaaake!” The entire animation only lasts a few seconds but went on in an infinite loop, and before long, it became the inspiration for many parodies, spin-offs, and remixes. After all the llamas, the song starts listing off more unrelated objects, people, and ducks. According to Know Your Meme, the video quickly racked up over 50,000 views on DeviantArt before spreading to Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, where it attracted hundreds of thousands of more views. It’s nothing more than a slightly annoying dancing banana the whole way through the video, the but the clip went on to spawn all sorts of parodies and remakes in the early to mid-2000s. Eventually, We Like the Moon got picked up by Quizno’s, and it became the inspiration for some of its advertisements that appeared on television for a short while.
