LaCarte’s website did not get popular until March 1999, by that summer the site had over 17 million views.
The animal age meme full#
The site’s full name was Hampton’s Hamster House in honor of her pet hamster, Hampton Hamster. The site was created by Canadian art student Deidre LeCarte in 1998 and featured rows of animated GIFs of hamsters and other small rodents dancing to a sped-up sample of Roger Miller’s “Whistle Stop”. LaCarte created the webpage because she was in a competition with her sister and best friend to see which one of them could generate the most web traffic. Hampster Dance, which is purposely misspelled, is one of the earliest single-purpose websites.
Since its rise in popularity, the phrase has become a part of popular culture and even influenced the title of a Family Guy parody of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, called “It’s a Trap!” It spawned another popular meme, It’s a Tarp!, where the misspelling is intentional. The original macro image was created by a Something Awful administrator and the meme initially was used as a reaction to photos of people who look sexually ambiguous.
The animal age meme movie#
Although the movie is from 1983, the meme was not popularized until sometime in the early 2000s. The meme features an image of and a quote from Admiral Ackbar, a character from the film Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi. It’s a Trap! is one of the earliest reaction image memes and is often used to warn people of a potential bait-and-switch. The popularity of the meme eventually led to the creation of a Flash game, which then spawned a wave of other ASCII art animations based on popular internet slang. In 2004, a website,, was registered and only featured a GIF of an ASCII helicopter with the abbreviations “ROFL” and “LOL” as blades. The usage of ROFLcopter became really popular after it was featured on the Something Awful forums.
It first gained attention on forums such as Fark and was initially used to poke fun a new users who overused “l33t” (elite) acronyms such as ROFL (roll on the floor laughing). The ROFLcopter meme is one of the earliest and most notable examples of using ASCII art. Several of these old memes are still widely used today online and in everyday life. While modern memes come and go in the blink of an eye, some of the earliest memes have left a lasting impression not only on the internet, but on popular culture as well. These days, new memes are spawned almost instantly and take hold of the internet until the next day when a new meme gains popularity. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a way to explain how cultural information spreads and meme culture began to emerge in the 1980s as people frequented early internet forums such as Usenet.
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