10 True Origin Stories Behind Popular Memes

• What meme kid ended up helping his father pay for a kidney transplant?
Whose image macro stardom helped them build a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers?
Here’s 10 stories about where the biggest internet memes came from, and where they are
now.
10 – Scumbag Steve • Scumbag Steve is exactly who you think
he is.
The famous photo of one Blake Boston was taken by his mom, and used on the cover of his indie
rap album, “Ma Gangsta.”
• That’s right, he was that 16-year old guy making random hand symbols and thinking
he could rap.
He even called himself “Beantown Mafia.”
• The photo was pulled off his MySpace page, because of course it was.
Today he’s a settled-down father, but he still has dreams of making his music career
happen.
9 – Bad Luck Brian • Kyle Craven’s awkward, braces-laden
photo became an avatar for bad luck stories in early 2012.
• The photo itself was his seventh-grade school photo.
His school principal made him take the photo over again because he assumed he was making
the awkward face on purpose.
• Ironically, the man known as Bad Luck Brian has generally had pretty good luck.
He once won an Xbox 360 and a PSP for free in separate contests, within a span of 2 weeks.
8 – Disaster Girl • Zoe Roth was 4 years old when she took
a photo in front of a burning house with a face that seemed to imply guilt.
• But the photo isn’t nearly as sinister as it appears to be.
The burning house in the background was part of a controlled demonstration by the local
fire department.
• Today, Zoe Roth is a teenager who is good at calculus, speaks fluent Mandarin, and does
volunteer work in Haiti.
And as far as anyone knows, she is not an arsonist.
7 – Success Kid • Success Kid is a picture of an 11-month
old Sammy Griner looking like he’s doing a victorious fist-pump.
• Actually, this picture was taken mere moments before he put sand in his mouth.
• In 2015, Sammy’s father Justin had a crowdfunding campaign for a kidney transplant
that succeeded, largely thanks to Sammy’s popular meme.
So there was some actual success involved.
6 – Ermahgerd Girl • In 2012, an image surfaced of a girl making
an awkward face as she help three copies of Goosebumps.
• The awkward appearance of the photo is, oddly enough, on purpose.
Maggie Goldenberger and her friends used to dress up and take intentionally hideous photos
of either other.
So she put on an ugly, clashing outfit, did her hair up into pigtails, grabbed the books
as props, and put her retainer in to help her make a weird face.
• She now works as a nurse in Phoenix, Arizona.
5 • Doge comes from a couple different places.
The actual misspelling “D-O-G-E” traces back to an episode of Homestar Runner’s
puppet series called “Biz Cas Fri 1.”
• The photo of the Shiba Inu we know as “Doge” today was posted in 2010, by Japanese
kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, who got her dog Kabosu from a rescue shelter.
• However, those things didn’t combine to become the “Doge” meme until 2012.
4 – Overly Attached Girlfriend • Laina Morris embraced her accidental internet
fame better than most, partially because she’s responsible for it.
So for once, it actually wasn’t an accident.
• The wide-eyed stalker-like image known as the “Overly Attached Girlfriend” comes
from a video of Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend” that Morris herself created for YouTube.
She sang it from the perspective of, well, an overly attached girlfriend.
• Morris is still a YouTuber today, with over 1.2 million subscribers.
She has turned the “Overly Attached Girlfriend” into a character on her channel.
3 – Smug Wendy’s • If you’re not much for using Twitter
these days, you may have missed the glorious savagery that is @Wendys.
• The fast food chain’s Twitter handle has become a viral sensation since it decided
to start brutally scorching rivals and critics.
The woman behind the tweets, Amy Brown, left her post as Wendy’s social media manager
at the end of March.
• But before that happened, the red-headed, pigtailed mascot for the franchise was re-imagined
by the internet as a smug, snooty anime girl who is constantly looking down on you.
So if you see an influx of Rule 34 Wendy’s girl in the coming months, you know why.
2 – Grumpy Cat • The real magic of Tardar Sauce, the snowshoe
now known as Grumpy Cat, is that the famous image of the cat’s unimpressed face isn’t
just an awkwardly-timed shot.
• That’s pretty much the face this cat has on at all times.
And despite the cat looking like a grumpy old man, Tardar Sauce was actually born in
April 2012, and the famous frowning photo is of him as a 5-month-old kitten.
• It took all of 48 hours from the time the first Grumpy Cat photo was posted on Reddit
and Imgur to the time it topped 1 million views and spawned hundreds of offshoot posts.
He now has a website, Twitter account and Facebook page, and just about every photo
of him still features the same signature frown.
1 - Dolan • Come on, of course we had to talk about
the Planet Dolan namesake, right?
You know what Dolan Duck is, but do you know where it originally comes from?
• The original Dolan Duck was created by Finnish artist Sakolut, who began posting
his comics on a Finnish image board in 2010.
The comic titles translated to “Donald Duck” in Finnish, but came to be referred to as
“Dolan” once they hit English-language image boards.
• Gooby is a related meme, starring a MS-paint-drawn Goofy, usually driving a Ferrari.
So now you know where both of them come from.
Which of these meme stories is your favorite, and which one did we miss?
Let us know what you think in the comments below, and we’ll pin our favorite!

10 True Origin Stories Behind Popular Memes

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