Source: File Under: Birthday Celebration, Entertainment, Money, tech, Videos, Youtube
YouTube turns 5 this month, and the world's most popular video-sharing website is celebrating the occasion with -- quite fittingly -- video tributes from celebrities who have rounded up some of their favorite viral hits from the past half-decade. As the website celebrates a birthday we look back at popular viral hits like 'Keyboard Cat' and 'Chocolate Rain.'
With so many videos to choose from (more than 120 million in total, at latest count), narrowing down one's favorites is a tall order. Still, based on sheer viewership as well as references in other media, some clear favorites can be determined.
1. "Downfall Rant" The climactic speech delivered by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler in the 2004 historical drama "Downfall," about the fall of the Third Reich, has gone on to become one of the most-parodied of all time. Its subtitles have been rewritten to convey irrational tirades against all sorts of wholly unrelated topics, from the Apple iPad to sports victories to the mortgage crisis to even the recent decision by the film's production company, Constantin Films, to begin requesting YouTube to remove said parodies. But no matter how many are taken down, there's a good chance that, somewhere out there on the Internet, Hitler will still be ranting and raving about something.
YouTube turns 5 this month, and the world's most popular video-sharing website is celebrating the occasion with -- quite fittingly -- video tributes from celebrities who have rounded up some of their favorite viral hits from the past half-decade. As the website celebrates a birthday we look back at popular viral hits like 'Keyboard Cat' and 'Chocolate Rain.'
With so many videos to choose from (more than 120 million in total, at latest count), narrowing down one's favorites is a tall order. Still, based on sheer viewership as well as references in other media, some clear favorites can be determined.
1. "Downfall Rant" The climactic speech delivered by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler in the 2004 historical drama "Downfall," about the fall of the Third Reich, has gone on to become one of the most-parodied of all time. Its subtitles have been rewritten to convey irrational tirades against all sorts of wholly unrelated topics, from the Apple iPad to sports victories to the mortgage crisis to even the recent decision by the film's production company, Constantin Films, to begin requesting YouTube to remove said parodies. But no matter how many are taken down, there's a good chance that, somewhere out there on the Internet, Hitler will still be ranting and raving about something.
2. "Chocolate Rain" This cryptic, oddly entrancing song first appeared on YouTube in 2007, from which it quickly exploded around the Web, gaining even more steam after being referenced in the press, on the radio, on TV and in other media. Written and performed by 28-year-old American Tay Zonday, the song is actually about race relations in America, although Zonday has acknowledged the meaning may be lost on the general viewer, telling HHN Live that he was "pretty sure the 'Chocolate Rain' attention started as a joke at 4chan.org, an image board that is credited with starting lots of popular Internet phenomena. It spread to a general audience and people started uploading spoofs. I don't know what causes people to listen to my music. If I could speak it, there would be no reason to write songs."
3. "Dramatic Chipmunk" In retrospect, how could a five-second close-up of a prairie dog looking intensely back at the camera while performing on a Japanese children's game show not have succeeded wildly on the Internet? And how could the Web be expected not to mislabel the animal as a "chipmunk," instead of the prairie dog that it actually is? The latter accomplishment is credited specifically to CollegeHumor.com, which first uploaded the clip in its best-known form in June 2007, accompanied by a part of the score from Mel Brooks' classic 1974 film "Young Frankenstein."
4. "RickRoll"/Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" Image board 4chan is again credited with bringing this particular '80s gem out of the New Wave graveyard and onto screens around the world. That's because the pranksters who frequent 4chan thought it would be funny to use the old "bait-and-switch" technique, tricking people into watching the video by linking to it from completely unrelated topics, beginning in May 2007. Some of the most notable "RickRolls" have since occurred off the Web, in real life, including in the New York Mets home opener in 2008 and outside Scientology churches as a protest song the same year. Eventually, even Rick Astley got into the fun himself, "RickRolling" the 2008 Macy's Day Parade.
5. "Keyboard Cat" Cats are already considered by many to be the unofficial animal of the Internet, thanks to their appearance in countless viral videos. Of course, a cat doing anything as spectacular as playing a keyboard is bound to capture the attention of millions of Web users. But it took both Charlie Schmidt's original 1984 video of his cat Fatso being moved around to make it look as if he were playing a piano (first uploaded to YouTube in 2007), and Brad O'Farrell's 2009 recutting of the video as a vaudevillian gaffe indicator to really turn the video into a bona fide viral sensation. It is the perfect ending to any list of viral videos.
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