We must go further. We need… FAXED MEMES
Those existed! Oh man I remember my dad had a collection of photocopied comics and stuff.
I specifically remember there being one of a frog in a stork’s mouth holding its throat shut so it couldn’t be swallowed and it said “Never give up.” I thought it was so funny at the time.
Then there were joke pages about drinking beer and hating your wife. They’d photocopy and pass these around. I’m not sure if they were ever actually faxed.
I wasn’t born yet at the time (a 2003 baby) but I heard they faxed fake virus hoaxes to scare people; Weird Al Yankovic’s Virus Alert makes fun of those
I don’t remember anything like that, but I would have been under 10 when this was going on.
Dude, the frog in the storks mouth was EXACTLY the one I had in mind
I did some googling. “Frog and stork” led to is autofilling “never give up”
It’s been redrawn a number of times over the years, but this is the closest to what I remember:
This is my first time seeing it in colour. It was always a black and white shitty photocopy to me.
Edit: I have since learned that it’s supposed to be a Heron.
That has got to be literally older than the internet. I swear I remember seeing it hanging in my grandpa’s garage when I was a kid, and it was already yellowed by then.
Credit to the incredible artist responsible for this: https://linktr.ee/rob_sheridan
Possibly the first internet meme to be referenced in a primetime TV show (Ally McBeal). I was a little too young to care about TV shows about adults but I remember my parents laughing at this, even before we had the internet.
We’re so close to posting chain emails, or those super long joke emails my grandparents used to send me lol
I remember this seeing as a kid, received from CD on Windows 98 (we didn’t have the internet at that time). The difference was that it had 144p-ish AVI quality and Macarena playing in the background.
hah, the literal first viral gif!
