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A curated archive of the internet's most iconic memes — complete with origin stories, year of birth, and the cultural context that made them spread.

A viral video meme based on footage shot at Berlin's Fuckparade in July 2000 and uploaded to the internet in 2001. The clip shows a muscular man dancing forcefully after confronting another participant, and it became widely known after being reuploaded to YouTube in 2006 and going viral in 2007. The character became one of the best-known early viral video figures of the web era.

An image macro series that began with a Geocities page in October 2002. It used a still of Jeff Goldblum from The Fly and was originally meant as a bathroom-stall joke, with the idea that the celebrity was 'watching you poop.' It helped establish an early meme template built around the snowclone format 'X is watching you Y.'

In 2002, 14-year-old Ghyslain Raza filmed himself swinging a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber in his school's studio. The tape was found by classmates and uploaded to Kazaa in 2003 without his permission. It became one of the first major viral videos, viewed hundreds of millions of times. Unfortunately Raza was bullied severely and his family sued the classmates. He later became a lawyer and advocate against cyberbullying.

Born from a notoriously bad English translation of the 1989 Japanese arcade game Zero Wing. The opening cutscene featured the villain CATS delivering the line 'All your base are belong to us' to the game's captain. The phrase went viral in 2001 through a Flash video that set the quote to music and spawned thousands of image macros. It was one of the first major coordinated internet memes.

Thomas C. Lea III's 1945 painting depicting a soldier's exhausted expression became an internet meme in the early 2000s. The image represents being overwhelmed or mentally exhausted. It predates the internet but was adopted as a meme format around 2002-2003 for expressing resignation to terrible situations.

The term 'epic fail' emerged in the early 2000s on forums and message boards to describe spectacularly bad attempts at anything. By 2005-2006, it became a universal meme format accompanied by images of people failing. The phrase predates rage comics but spawned the entire fail video genre that dominated YouTube in the late 2000s.

From the 2000 film Finding Forrester, Sean Connery's awkward quote became the foundation for YTMND.com in 2001. The site grew into a major creative hub for remix culture and mashups. The phrase itself became a meme representing triumph and competence. YTMND.com pioneered the image macro format that dominated the 2000s internet.

The Banana Man dancing to the song 'Peanut Butter Jelly Time' by Buckwheat Boyz became a viral phenomenon in 2002. The animated dancing banana character spread through email chains and early social media. It reached peak popularity in 2003-2004, appearing on everything from t-shirts to TV shows. It was one of the first animated GIF memes and is considered one of the earliest emojis.

From The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), where a character urgently reports the Hobbits have been captured. The line became a meme in 2003-2004 for expressing urgent alarm about any situation. It's one of the first major movie quote memes predating modern image macros.