tom cruise kills oprah meme

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• The Couch Jump That Rocked Hollywood

Tom Cruise’s 2005 appearance on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ was an iconic episode of television—and a turning point for how we discuss and understand celebrities

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In the spring of 2005, an unknown 20-something in California uploaded a 19-second video of himself to the internet. “Me at the zoo,” the first YouTube video, featured cofounder Jawed Karim rambling about animals. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks,” a man said, gesturing toward an elephant enclosure. It was boring, but it was the beginning of something.

That same spring, Karim’s YouTube quickly found one of its first hits. Its origins were far less obscure than a tech guy on a field trip. At the time, Tom Cruise had a more-than-reasonable claim to the title of biggest celebrity in America. He was the movie star, a leading man with mom-approved handsomeness, a nimble physicality, and a gung-ho intensity that played on the big screen as magnetic instead of disturbed. He counted Top Gun , Jerry Maguire , and two Mission: Impossible movies among the idol-making roles under his small belt. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey had already established herself as not only the biggest celebrity on daytime television, but the biggest celebrity in media. She’d made the careers of Drs. Phil and Oz. She’d debuted O, the Oprah Magazine . She’d hollered “You get a car!” to a euphoric crowd. Cruise’s May 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show seemed destined to be yet another fluffy meeting of monstrously famous minds. Instead, traditional media’s powerhouse duo was about to provide the new video-uploading service with a clip that would demonstrate the format’s growth potential far better than a rinky-dink recording of a random dude musing about zoos.

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Before Cruise came out on stage that day, the crowd at Chicago’s Harpo Studios had already hyped itself into an ecstatic frenzy, whooping and clapping and jumping in overwhelmed pleasure at being in the presence of Winfrey, in her space, living their best lives. By 2005, Oprah had transformed her daytime talk show from a variation on Phil Donahue’s talk theme into something new, something that took the voyeuristic thrills of seeing televised confessions and elevated them with the language of self-help seminars and the polish of Hollywood. “Oprah is sitting in the throne of American pop culture,” said WBEZ anchor Jenn White on the podcast Making Oprah , describing Oprah’s cultural cachet in the early aughts. “She commands a regular worldwide audience of tens of millions. She can turn a book into a bestseller, a product into a trend, and people into stars.” At that point, Christianity Today had identified Oprah as “one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America.” Her audiences resembled gaga congregants.

Cruise was in Chicago to talk about his upcoming movie, Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds . Instead of sticking to the promotional script, though, the compact action star gushed about his new girlfriend, actress Katie Holmes. “You’re gone,” Oprah said, searching for words to describe Cruise’s over-the-top infatuation. Within 15 minutes, Cruise had leapt onto Oprah’s couch in a spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for his personal life. Cruise’s offbeat showboating was memorable in part because of its unusual setting; The Oprah Winfrey Show was where celebrities traipsed to shine up their reputations and get a warm embrace from a sympathetic fellow star. Oprah would polish, not grill. But Oprah, usually so masterful at empathizing with her guests, appeared to be at a loss. “You’re gone,” she repeated. The charismatic preacher had been sidelined by an even more earnest proselytizer.

People hated it. More importantly, they loved to hate it. Most importantly, they loved to talk about hating it. Divorced from its context and remixed into YouTube clips and GIFs, Cruise’s couch outburst looked far more bizarre than it had during the episode, when at least the studio audience had been equally hyped up and Oprah had encouraged him to talk about his personal life. Within the context of the episode, Cruise’s behavior was strange but not outrageous. On the internet, isolated and amplified into a single furniture-leaping moment, it looked like an A-list meltdown . The most popular spoof was called “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah,” where Cruise appeared to kill Oprah with lightning. Family Guy parodied it. Even Sesame Street eventually parodied it. But the couch clip went beyond launching parodies and viral videos. The response to the Cruise episode signaled a changing of the guard in Hollywood media, from a pecking order where publicists and studios could strike deals with access-hungry press toward a more democratic and chaotic media landscape. Even though Cruise had been in a terrific mood during his Oprah appearance, it was appropriate that his tomfoolery was reframed to look far more aggressive than it was. The internet and the media were about to get much sharper.

“Tom’s couch-jumping coincided with the rise of gossip blogs,” Matt James, who runs the celebrity gossip site Pop Culture Died in 2009, told The Ringer . “The entire incident became a testament to the way public opinion could form online in the pre-Twitter era, and how damaging it could be in the long run.”

Longtime Hollywood gossip blog Lainey Gossip also credited Cruise’s leap onto Oprah’s couch with galvanizing the media landscape. “This rise of the gossip blog quickly accelerated,” site creator Elaine Lui wrote in 2015. “Celebrities were not being contained the way they used to be. And the PEOPLE and Entertainment Tonight coverage just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Not when these illusions were so quickly being destroyed. This incident became one of the most critical chapters in the Origin Story of Internet Gossip.” The intense online response to Cruise’s convention-breaking presaged a shift in how celebrity freakouts were covered, as it was one of the first major entertainment-world meltdowns to saturate the blogging world. “There was something so personal, so oversharey, so necessarily engaged with the audience in Cruise’s couch-jumping that it set the tone for the kind of one-person media circus we’d expect and enjoy in the years to come, to varying degrees of sadness (Britney Spears), amazement (Charlie Sheen) and despicableness (Chris Brown),” Gawker ’s Rich Juzwiak wrote in 2012. While the word “meme” hadn’t yet entered the mainstream lexicon, Cruise’s furniture leap went viral. “Culturally, it was, in my mind, one of the first celebrity memes,” Brandon Ogborn, the writer behind The TomKat Project , an excellent play examining Tom Cruise’s reputation, told The Ringer . “That clip was reenacted so many times. It was kind of a watershed moment for internet culture.”

Along with memes came a cascade of internet commentary on Cruise’s behavior, most of it overwhelmingly negative. While Oprah’s studio audience had been pleased with his effusiveness, the story line soured in the digital world. “Now, whenever something happens in the news, we can go online and quickly find the tide in which public opinion is turning. In the early days of the internet, it wasn’t that distinct,” James said. “That changed with Tom. The people who watched Tom’s appearance and felt it was maybe even the slightest bit heartwarming went online to find that the majority opinion was Tom had lost his mind.”

It was an exciting time for bloggers, and terrible timing for Cruise. He had fired his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, in March 2004. Kingsley was a powerhouse with a viselike grip on the dicks of traditional outlets. “She was adamant about keeping Cruise out of the tabloids. At press junkets, she demanded that journalists sign contracts swearing not to sell their quotes to the supermarket rags,” film critic Amy Nicholson wrote for LA Weekly in 2014, arguing that internet culture was to blame for Cruise’s fall from grace. “Then Kingsley expanded her reach and insisted that all TV interviewers destroy their tapes after his segment had aired.” Without Kingsley, Cruise didn’t have his usual PR fixer at hand to tell him what not to do, to tell him how to course-correct once the backlash began, or to tell the press to lay off. Instead, Cruise had replaced the flinty Kingsley with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, a fellow Scientologist. The public reaction to his romance with Holmes was no good even before The Incident. According to a People poll, the majority of respondents saw the relationship as a publicity stunt . “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit,” Perez Hilton wrote. Cruise’s past habit of keeping his private life to himself and manicuring his public image had given him an idyllic but distinctly artificial sheen, one that may have counterintuitively exacerbated the response when he finally stepped out of line. “He had never done anything publicly wrong before,” Nicholson told The Ringer . “He’d always been so perfect.” Cruise’s over-the-top display of hyper-public affection, possibly made more intense by his desire to prove that his love was real, backfired. Instead of making people think he was a romantic, Cruise just made people think he was weird.

He quickly got weirder, and darker. Shortly after his couch leap, Cruise started a feud with Brooke Shields by dismissing her experience with postpartum depression. He went on Today to go even further, insisting that psychiatry and psychiatric medicine were dangerous. While Cruise was a longtime Scientologist, he had never openly advocated for the abusive group’s more controversial beliefs so publicly before. “It was a time when he really just let himself go, and let his freak flag fly. And it was also a time when he was really proselytizing for Scientology. I think it was a huge explosion of press that was bad press, because the Tom Cruise machine just stopped,” Ogborn said. “He said, This is who I am, I’m going to jump on that couch, I’m going to tell Matt Lauer he’s glib. ”

In less than a year, Cruise contorted his reputation from a hard-working, eccentric leading man into Hollywood’s premiere guileless kook. “Cruise: I will eat the placenta,” a 2006 Daily Mail headline , is a good example of the sort of news he generated. When California banned the sale of ultrasounds for personal use that year, it was known as the “Tom Cruise law” because Cruise had publicly purchased an ultrasound machine to view his daughter in the womb. South Park went for the jugular, as expected, but ridicule came from all over. Noah Baumbach wrote a New Yorker piece where the joke was that his dog was stupid and enthusiastic … just like Tom Cruise. Even Lauren Bacall dissed him to reporters. People still showed up for Cruise movies. War of the Worlds had a huge opening , but studios feared that Cruise’s bankability was tainted after Mission: Impossible III made nearly $150 million less worldwide than its predecessor. Cruise’s reputation was undeniably threatened. His Q rating, used to measure celebrity appeal, dropped 40 percent. “From that point on, we all accepted Tom Cruise was crazy,” James said. “It was a done deal.”

Cruise’s uninhibited media blunder bender cost him a lucrative, long-term production deal with Paramount. His behavior was blamed for the deal’s destruction. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount,” Viacom chairman Sumner M. Redstone told The Wall Street Journal . The Oprah Winfrey Show , meanwhile, continued on as an unstoppable cultural force. From all accounts, as much as the couch-jumping episode yoked Oprah and Cruise together for eternity as a punch line, it also ruffled feathers at Harpo. “She was not invited to his wedding, and he was not invited for a very long time to come interview with her,” Ogborn pointed out, noting that Harpo employees would frequently come talk to him after the Chicago run of The TomKat Project to discuss that period of time. “They said she was fucking pissed when it happened.”

Regardless of Oprah’s personal opinion of Cruise’s behavior, the interview didn’t hurt her professionally. A mock set from the show is now on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of an exhibit on Winfrey. There was no lasting damage to her legacy. (Curators declined to comment on the role of the interview in her cultural history.) If anything, the couch-jumping episode only provided a bolstering example of Oprah presiding over must-watch TV. The show’s guiding ethos focused on going big and doing the best, resulting in ever-more-elaborate gift giveaways and surprises for the audience. While Cruise’s antics might have thrown off the dynamic between guest and host that Oprah preferred, his interview ultimately fit the bill for the gripping, unexpected, and wholly memorable. “Tom’s televised freakout was just another notch in her belt,” James said. Talk-show hosts now manufacture segments specifically to do well on YouTube and other online platforms, but it was Oprah who generated the first viral talk-show clip.

The incident certainly did not kill Cruise’s career, either. In 2008, his comic turn in Tropic Thunder helped undercut his reputation for unrelenting self-seriousness. (The same year, Cruise reunited with Oprah for a much calmer interview.) Cruise maintained his career throughout his reputational turmoil by sticking with Mission: Impossible and thematically similar films. “He’s always done such great work with this franchise, but he’s almost clinging to it nervously, like he’s afraid to let go and take a real risk,” Nicholson said. “He’ll take risks inside the film with stunts, but he’s not taking risks inside his own career, like doing the dramatic work that marked a lot of what he did in the ’80s, or by chasing an Oscar, which is something he gave up on.” Although he never quite regained his status as a Hollywood golden boy, he has mellowed into an aging statesman of action flicks—and anyway, his divorce from Katie Holmes and continued association with Scientology have left a longer-lasting stink on his name than his exuberant talk-show appearance. In 2015, GQ heralded “Cool Tom Cruise.” This summer, he is starring in the sixth Mission: Impossible movie. The critical response to both the film and Cruise’s performance has been overwhelmingly positive. “What’s always been so ironic to me about the Tom Cruise quote-unquote backlash is that it seemed to me that audiences still really loved him, even if newspapers were telling them that they didn’t,” Nicholson said. “I feel like he’s proving something that never needed to be proven.”

The real legacy of the couch-jumping incident has almost nothing to do with Cruise or Oprah specifically and everything to do with how people reacted online to the moment. Tom and Oprah’s strange conversation, and the reaction it provoked, is now preserved as thousands of digital artifacts, emblematic of how information traveled in the early aughts. Rewatching the episode and the viral videos it spawned feels quaint now. The bloggy media cycle that produced Cruise memes has been replaced by a cesspool of broken newsfeeds smushing conspiracy theories and branded content against real news and irrational presidential tweets with such velocity that it seems deeply unlikely that Cruise’s hop onto a loveseat would provoke much at all in 2018. However, it’s even less likely that Cruise would’ve been able to make it so far into his career without finding his kooky personality exposed as he did in 2005.

Up-and-comers have learned to respond to a different and less controllable form of media attention. There is a whole brand of celebrity in which the famous are expected to engage with fans on social media. Celebrity PR disasters don’t often happen in such glossy settings anymore; instead, they are frequently facilitated by social media and accelerated by fans and detractors who dig up old tweets . The last time a daytime talk-show guest created a media supernova after their appearance, it was Danielle Bregoli, a.k.a. Bhad Bhabie, a.k.a. “Cash Me Ousside” Girl, who parlayed a viral moment shit-talking on Dr. Phil into a viable rap career . I doubt Bregoli knows about Tom Cruise’s Oprah appearance, but her own twist on the daytime meme underscores how much has changed since Cruise took his happy hop. Performative, contrived freakiness in front of a live studio audience can be an asset now. The big leap is figuring out how to navigate internet criticism without spinning out—a frequently impossible mission.

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Tom Cruise Jumped on Oprah’s Couch, Freaked Out Over Being in Love With Katie Holmes 10 Years Ago – Relive the Moment!

“Calm yourselves!” That is what Oprah Winfrey had to tell the audience when Tom Cruise appeared on her talk show 10 years ago — little did she know, it would be Cruise himself who needed to calm down.

Related: PHOTOS: TomKat -- the way they were

As the world is well aware, the Mission: Impossible star couldn’t contain himself while declaring his love for then-girlfriend Katie Holmes during a 2005 interview with Winfrey. Cruise, who was known as an uber-private celebrity, pumped his fist in the air, kneeled on the floor, and most notably, jumped on Winfrey’s couch with giddiness while confessing his infatuation with Holmes in a moment that has since gone — and stayed — viral.

“I’m in love. I’m in love and it’s one of these things where you want to be cool, like, ‘Yeah I like her’…that’s not how I feel,” a hyper Cruise told the talk show host. “I admired her and I thought I wanted to meet her so I called her because I wanted to meet her. You see someone’s work and you hear about them and you hear what a special person she is…and I wanted to meet this person and I met her and she’s extraordinary.”

Related: PHOTOS: Kaite's life after Tom

While Cruise was unable to contain his emotions, a shocked Winfrey explained to the crowd: “I’ve never seen this. What happened to you?!” After he jumped on her couch — repeatedly! — Oprah concluded: “He’s gone. He’s gone. The boy is gone!”

Following the 2005 interview, the clip was turned into thousands of memes, including standout “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah.”

Winfrey, however, wasn’t exactly in on the fun. “Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did,” she later told TV Guide Magazine . “I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman… would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her,” she said, while adding that she thought that re-airing the footage would be “really, really unfair.”

Related: PHOTOS: How Katie transformed for Tom

As for Cruise and Holmes, well, we all know what happened. The couple announced they were expecting their first child together, Suri, just six months after going public with their romance. Suri Cruise was born in April 2006, and that December her parents tied the knot. Before starting their life together, Holmes, who was born Catholic, converted to Scientology for Cruise. The religion is rumored to be the downfall of their marriage.

After five years together — and a complete glam transformation for Holmes — the Dawson’s Creek alum filed for divorce in June 2012. In a statement to Us Weekly , the actress’ attorney told Us at the time: “This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family. Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.” While Cruise’s rep offered: “Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy.”

During an August 2014 appearance on the Today show , Holmes, who is now happily dating Jamie Foxx , said she never reflects on their split.

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Related: PHOTOS: Suri's fabulous life

“I never really look back. I just approach life [taking] it one day at a time,” she told Matt Lauer . “I’m really excited about where I am right now. I’ve had some really wonderful creative experiences. I’m just really grateful.”

Cruise, who has yet to publicly date anyone since their split, and Holmes continue to share joint custody of their now 9-year-old daughter, Suri.

Prior to Holmes, Cruise was married to Nicole Kidman from 1990 to 2001 and then dated Penelope Cruz for three years until 2004.

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It’s Been 10 Years Since Tom Cruise Made Oprah’s Couch Famous

Tom Cruise’s infamous Oprah interview turns 10 on May 23. And while the episode of the show has been exaggerated in the popular consciousness (Cruise never really jumped up and down on the couch, merely stood on it briefly and then did a lot of kneeling), the Internet never forgets.

That’s thanks largely to videos like “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah” and an endless succession of GIFs and memes that cemented Cruise’s appearance on the show in the zeitgeist.

“Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did,” Oprah told TV Guide later . She has since refused to re-air the footage, calling the wave of viral clips that have sprung up around it “unfair.”

But it continues to live on, particularly in situations like the one above, in which Wayfair PR placed a couch in Boston’s Copley Square and asked people what would make them happy enough to jump up on it, à la Cruise, complete with Oprah and Cruise masks.

This article originally appeared on People.com .

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It's the 10-Year Anniversary of Tom Cruise Jumping on Oprah Winfrey's Couch—Watch to Relive It All Over Again!

See the "brouhaha" all over again.

It has been TEN years since Tom Cruise famously jumped on Oprah Winfrey 's couch while declaring his love for then-wife Katie Holmes . Can you believe it?!

It has been a decade since he told Oprah's audience, "I'm in love," before hopping up and down like a madman on that famous gold couch. Do we feel old? Do we feel deceived? Who could've known that the man who was so in love with the Dawson's Creek alum would later get divorced to the subject of his hyperactivities?

Color us surprised about the fallout, but at least the Internet has blessed us with the ability to re-watch this momentous occasion all over again. While watching the video on a loop might make you think he's a little crazy, his actions were entirely out of his excitement and love for Katie.

"She's truly extraordinary," he told Oprah and the riled audience of his then-girlfriend while promoting War of the Worlds .

"Dear God, you are gone," Oprah told him between laughs.

"I'm gone and I don't care," Cruise responded.

PHOTOS: Over-the-top celebrity weddings

With the dawn of YouTube, the clip went viral and even spawned another video,  Tom Cruise Kills Oprah , using some graphics and the meme on a loop. His zealous attitude about Katie at the time might have affected the way many perceived the Hollywood A-lister, and even the talk show host later came out and said she felt bad for the way that interview turned out.

"Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did," Oprah later told  TV Guide Magazine . "I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman… would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her...I think the use of that clip was really, really unfair."

She refused to re-air the footage afterwards, calling the wave of viral clips "unfair."

NEWS: Did Tom Cruise lose a tooth?

Even though they would go on to get married in 2006, many believed the courtship was a farce. An opinion piece in the  New York Times  called the romance a "lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business."

The marriage may not have lasted forever, but this video will. Watch the clip above to see Tom Cruise make Oprah's couch debatably more famous than he is. 

PHOTOS: Tom Cruise's leading ladies

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You’re No Longer the Man Now, Dog!

One of the World Wide Web’s most influential platforms has gone dark. With little fanfare, YTMND vanished over the weekend; trying to visit the site now yields only connection timeouts and database errors.

YTMND’s origins stem from a gag website set up by creator Max Goldberg in 2001. The site, yourethemannowdog.com , featured an infinitely repeating picture of Sean Connery along with WordArt text proclaiming, “YOURE THE MAN NOW DOG.COM.” Audio of Connery reciting the phrase in his Scottish accent (ripped from the film Finding Forrester ) played on a loop. The site’s popularity soon led to copycats, and eventually Goldberg created a centralized platform for them, YTMND.com. It might be difficult for you to fathom now, but when YTMND launched in 2004, it was one of the earliest websites that allowed users to easily merge visuals and audio and present them to users. YouTube would not launch for another couple of years, and web browsers had not yet adopted open standards for multimedia.

The limitations of the form — all YTMNDs were composed of a single image file, a single audio file, and maybe a text overlay — helped lead to the development of what we now know as “internet humor.” That is, humor that is often random or nonsensical and motivated by an intention to troll and confuse anyone who’s not in on the joke. It also led to a flowering of creativity, given that it was not particularly easy to create animated GIFs in 2004 or remix music or edit audio.

Many YTMND fads relied on remixing both the visuals and audio of a popular trend, like an old clip of the Night at the Roxbury guys bopping their heads to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air extolling the virtues of “pillowy mounds of mashed potatoes.”

Other classic posts include the dramatic reading of a breakup letter, which spawned a whole web-content genre of its own, and the electronic remix of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

The appeal of YTMND was in part that it made a quasi-video experience possible through a web browser. One of its most popular creations, Tom Cruise Kills Oprah, was an approximation of a popular viral video traveling around at the time. The 15-second clip shows Tom Cruise proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes on Oprah, except that when he grabs Oprah’s hands, lightning shoots out of them and into her body. Instead of the original audio, Cruise is dubbed with the laugh of Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine.

Like many early internet communities, it was full of misanthropes and racist trolls. As Gizmodo reported in 2016, Goldberg “ran the site with techno-libertarian views on free speech” similar to those prevalent on 4chan.

“People would upload child porn and make death threats and people uploaded other people’s addresses,” Goldberg said. “Even if you’re doing it as a full-time job, when there’s 300,000 people actively using the site it’s hard as a one-man operation.” This was especially true of the site’s forums, though it became increasingly true of the site as a whole. An archive of the original Wikipedia entry for YTMND reads, “By October 1st, 2004, the forums, in Max Goldberg’s own words, had become the next ‘STORMFRONT, a stomping ground for SS men in training.’” That quote is no longer sourceable to any particular forum post.

Just as 4chan became a breeding ground for both lolcats and the alt-right, YTMND experienced a similar dynamic. Despite its relatively significant popularity and influence, its grimier parts made it tough for Goldberg to monetize the site and bring in enough revenue to render its upkeep worth the trouble. Eventually, Goldberg stopped maintaining YTMND and the ship sank. Goldberg hasn’t really said anything publicly (his disdain for the site is clear in that Gizmodo piece), though he did retweet the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott, who posted that YTMND had been archived in full last year.

In retrospect, what was nice about YTMND was that it existed in a time before “content monetization” was a thing people cared about, and that lack of incentive made YTMND less of a horse race and more of a large-scale collaboration. Now, of course, large platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are full of “creators” trying to “monetize” their “brand.” This is not in itself a problem, but it’s made riding trend waves an omnipresent, never-ending competition. YTMND was people trying to put their own spin on jokes, for no reason other than that it made them laugh. It was full of what the Verge described as “technical memes,” whose appeal is drawn “not from aesthetic pleasure, but a workmanlike commitment to an arbitrary premise.” The existence of such an elaborate joke is, in itself, the joke.

There’s a YTMND I always think about whenever I remember the site (less and less frequently); it was called “Abyss family polaroids” and lived at the URL abyssvacation92.ytmnd.com. As Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” plays, a series of Polaroids pile up onscreen, depicting humdrum memories — a basketball-team photo, a yearbook superlative, a dog walk. In all of the photos, however, the subject is not a person but an enormous hole in the ground, the abyss. (You can watch it on the Internet Archive, and if the audio isn’t working, just open “Holiday Road” in another browser tab.)

Its inspiration was a looping GIF made by another YTMND user, Bob-the-Builder, ripped from a clip of the documentary Planet Earth . According to the YTMND wiki , the “Into the Abyss” clip spawned its own fad:

In just a week, many spinoffs developed from Into The Abyss, enough to be recognized as a small fad for the time being. Although the creation of spinoffs on Bob-the-Builder’s past Planet Earth loops have died out within a week themselves, Into The Abyss appears to have won over YTMND’s audiences in general.

“abyssvacation92” is so funny to me. I have no idea why. It’s just a perfect combo of ideas: a family of negative-space objects living in human society as if it were completely normal, looking back on old family photos as Lindsey Buckingham sets the mood. In just a few frames, it creates an entire world. It’s perfect. I will never forget it.

A closing anecdote: This morning, I put on Vampire Weekend’s newest album on Spotify, and as the music played on my phone, an animated version of the album art pulsed in the background of the interface, looping infinitely. YTMND may be gone, a figment and mystery to the next generation of internet users, but its influence lives on.

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Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch with Willa Paskin You're Wrong About

Willa Paskin (of Slate's Decoder Ring) brings Sarah back to 2005, when Tom Cruise jumping on a couch became the talk of the town. We will return to Amityville (part 3 of 3) next time! Here's where to find Willa:Decoder RingSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchTom Cruise on the couch notesOprah episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=930BhfJxFxUTom Cruise Kills Oprah meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRbhE3GRiUEAmy Nicholson's revelatory piece reframing ...

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