Its 2016 and with technology everywhere our world has become ingrained with cyberculture (a culture based around the ways of communication through the internet like social media, videos, blogs, etc.) In the early to mid 2000’s there were some pioneer websites that normalized this sort of communication and made it a part of our everyday lives. Myspace was the original social media site, AOL Instant Messenger became a new way to communicate, and YouTube was the original video sharing website.
YouTube has changed styles and the way they market themselves a lot in their 11 year history, but when it just got started in 2005 it was a space where anyone can share their creativity. You’ll notice all early YouTube videos don’t follow a theme, they are just, for lack of a better term, a bunch of videos of random shit. This creative boom gave us a wide variety of both entertainment and “…uhh okay this is cool…I think…but why am I watching this” (Numa Numa Kid). Within this category, you can’t help to forget Jason Steele’s “Charlie the Unicorn”.
With 27 million views and millennials everywhere being able to recognize that annoying voice saying “CHAAAARRLIEEE”, it’s safe to say that everyone has seen this video. The creator, Jason Steele, has been making videos in his absurdist animation style for almost the entire history of YouTube including Charlie the Unicorn 2-4…yep that’s right there are more. Charlie the Unicorn’s popularity within early YouTube’s community of random videos helped put the website on the map ass one of the pioneers of cyberculture. Therefore it helped ingrain all of these memes and internet things into mainstream pop culture.
This video resulted in 3 sequels and at the end of 2016, he is releasing a half hour finale to the series. With this finale coming out, it marks the end of a series containing one of the most important videos of our generation. Even though it is absurd, even though they are just animated unicorns, we should all watch. If not to appreciate, then to reminisce on the days where we were at the lunch table in Middle School quoting this stupid video.
Half Lugan 