[Note from JFrater: It is not all too often that we publish lists on music for their own sake. But with my recent return to the site and my own personal love of all things ’80s retro, it was impossible to pass up this awesome list covering one of the most fascinating and fast growing musical genres of today.]

Top 20 Most Beautiful Songs Of The ’80s

Thanks to pop culture embracing the all-powerful ’80s nostalgia over the past few years, with shows such as Stranger Things or movies like Guardians Of The Galaxy, the unique electronic music genre that is Synthwave (or Retro Wave for nerds) has become quite popular. Some of the most recognized artists in the world, like The Weeknd or Taylor Swift, have been adopting its influences and slowly bringing it to mainstream audiences.

But there are artists who have been keeping Synthwave alive since its creation. Artists that most people might not know about. Brilliant minds who have explored the genre and shaped it into what is today and what it will be tomorrow. Here are the 10 most influential Synthwave artists of all time:

10 NINA

Meet the German Mother of Synthians. NINA made a name for herself after her single “We Are The Wild Ones” made its way into the Syfy TV show Being Human in 2013. She built an impressive track record, leading up to her 2018 debut album “Sleepwalking”, and solidified herself as a powerful vocalist and an undeniably gifted writer.

NINA is without a doubt one of the leading ladies of Synthwave. She is an important figure of the genre, and she has now reached a strong notoriety amongst fans and is thriving on the stage as well, doing live shows all around the world with her band.^[1]

9 FM-84

Originally a band with only one regular member, creator Col Bennett, FM-84 already had an impressive run over the years. But everything changed after collaborating with singer and songwriter Ollie Wride on their 2016 hit “Running In The Night.” The song (and their next collaborations) formed a long lasting relationship that eventually lead Wride to become an official member of the band.

FM-84 represents everything there is to love about classic ’80s bands. Their 2016 debut album “Atlas” is a dynamic ride that perfectly captures the nostalgic nature of Synthwave that makes you want to get in your car and drive on a road full of palm trees during sunset.^[2]

8 Tokyo Rose

[WARNING: The video above may cause epileptic fits in those with photosensitive epilepsy.] Tokyo Rose is an enigmatic producer from Jersey who has been present in the Synthwave world for almost a decade, since the release of his first EP “Chases” in 2014. He established his style early on, an imaginative mix between Cyberpunk and Dark Electro, and he has since become one of the most respected artists in the genre.

He is also known for his work with his best friend ALEX, with who he has released two joint albums. The first one, “Akuma” came out in 2017, and its sequel “Akuma II” came out in 2019. Both we released to great acclaim that eventually lead them to chart on Billboard, making them two of the few artists in the Synth-verse to do so.^[3]

7 Timecop1983

One of the most commonly known artists in the genre is none other than Timecop1983. The American producer is sort of an embodiment of what could be considered “traditional” Synthwave. From his very first body of work — which came in the form of his 2014 EP “Daydreaming”, his music became a true model of the genre. The smooth and melodic vibes of his songs bring you right back to the 1980s and make you want to dance the night away.

Timecop has explained over the years that his inspiration comes from cinema, more specifically from the 2011 movie “Drive”, that started it all for him. Since his start, he has collaborated with most of the best artists in the genre, and he shows no signs of stopping. His 9th album is set to be released in 2020.^[4]

6 Jessie Frye

Some of the greatest artists in Synthwave did not come from the Synth world. Jessie Frye is one of those artists. Originally a well known Rock girl in Texas, Jessie made a strong entrance in the genre during the summer of 2018. She teamed up with Timecop1983 on the song “Faded Memory”, an instant hit that made her an overnight sensation with fans.

She followed up that success with two singles, “Fantasy” and “Angel”, as well as two collaborations, “We Are The Night” with DJ Ten and “Fractions” with Wayfloe. The success of those projects quickly earned Jessie the status of superstar in the genre. Her vocal style takes roots from many different genres, making her songs incredibly unique and impossible to copy. She recently teased the release of her highly anticipated album “Kiss Me In The Rain”, which will serve as a continuation of this new artistic direction that has made her such a powerful figure.^[5]

Top 10 Classic Fantasy Movies of the 1980s

5 Starcadian

Starcadian is a producer and a movie director who has been around since 2011. He has had a significant impact on the Synthwave world, especially with the success of his 2012 song “HE^RT”, but in a different way than most artists. His music has since been featured in movies, TV shows and even in commercials for video games such as League Of Legends.

Starcadian’s albums (which he calls “original soundtracks” or “ear movies”) have a cinematic feel that distinguish his sound from most Synthwave artists. His music is so expertly produced that it eventually brought him to work hand in hand with companies like Izotope and Arturia to develop new sounds and synths for other producers to use. He is a true genius, with an impressive legacy forming around him.^[6]

4 The Midnight

Any person who has dipped a toe in the world of Synthwave has heard this name before. To make it simple, The Midnight are essentially Synthwave 101 for anyone entering in this era. They became icons of the genre pretty much as soon as their first EP “Days Of Thunder” hit the scene in 2014, and they since have been consistent with their success.

Their 2016 debut album “Endless Summer” is a staple of the genre, and their 2017 follow-up “Nocturnal” became one of the first Synthwave albums to chart on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic chart, reaching #17 upon release.

Their music sounds like what dreams feel like. It will transport you right back to the ’80s and make you feel so nostalgic, you will wish you could be in the next season of Stranger Things. With multiple albums and multiple sold out tours under their belt, The Midnight are without a doubt the current frontmen of the Synthwave universe, more so than any other artist currently active in the genre.^[7]

3 Wayfloe

Few artists can be credited for taking the Synthwave genre forward in a more creative way than this mysterious duo from Canada. Wayfloe is one of the newer acts on this list, but it is also by far its most unique.

Their body of work is one like no other. Their 2019 album “Neon West” has received acclaim for its originality and its unique sound that manages to seamlessly blend genres together, in a way that creates a sub-genre that is very much their own. In other words: if you hear a Wayfloe song, you know it’s them.

And while they only have one album on their resumé, it has not taken much time for them to dominate the Synthwave world in 2019, especially with their song “Fractions”, a collaboration with Jessie Frye that topped Iron Skullet’s “Top 40 Synthwave Songs of 2019” list, beating well known artists like The Midnight, FM-84, and even The Weeknd.^[8]

2 Danger

On the darker side of things, we have Franck Rivoire, AKA Danger. An older artist in the world of Synthwave some would even consider to be one of the pioneers of the genre. He has been around for well over a decade and is known for his sinister style — a strange mix between electronic and a retro horror movie soundtrack.

Danger is also known for the titles of his songs and EPs, generally comprised of series of numbers that represent important dates and times from his life, such as his hit songs “88:88” and “9:20”, or his first EP “09/14/2007”.

His influence in the Synthwave world is still very present today, and he continues to release some of the most original and out of the box work the genre has ever known.^[9]

1 Kavinsky

If there is one artist who has a right to take credit for shaping the Synthwave genre into what it is today, most people would tell you that Kavinsky is that guy. He appeared in 2006 and quickly built an audience with his dark production style compared to other French artists such as Daft Punk and Justice.

Kavinsky became an overnight star when his song “Nightcall” was featured in the Ryan Gosling movie “Drive” in 2011, making him the first artist in the genre to kick down the mainstream doors. The song became a huge hit, followed by the release of his first album “OutRun”, a classic that now serves as one of the biggest inspirations for most producers in the genre.

But, while he now has a true status of legend in the Synthwave world, Kavinsky has not released any music since 2013, and fans are impatiently awaiting a return that will probably never come.^[10]

Top 10 Most Nauseating Rip-Off 1980s Cartoons

Humanity has always had an intimate relationship with food. So it should come as no surprise that some of the most notable, influential figures throughout history have often had bizarre notions of how and what to eat.

10 Zuckerberg Only Eats What He Kills

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is famous for taking on yearlong challenges of self-improvement, such as wearing a tie every day in 2009 and studying Chinese every day in 2010. It came as a bit of a shock, though, when he announced in 2011 that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” After announcing the decision on his private page, he posted, “I just killed a pig and a goat,” which prompted various reactions from his followers.

According to an email that Zuckerberg sent to Fortune magazine, “I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.”

His instructor was Silicon Valley chef Jesse Cool, who introduced Zuckerberg to local farmers and advised him on the slaughters of his first chicken, pig, and goat.”He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” said Cool to Fortune. Zuckerberg’s first kill, however, was a lobster that he boiled alive. Initially, this was emotionally difficult for Zuckerberg, but he said he felt better after eating it. As he told Fortune in an interview, “The most interesting thing was how special it felt to eat it after having not eaten any seafood or meat in a while.”

9 Beethoven’s Soup

Ludwig van Beethoven is known for many things, but few know just how seriously he took his soup. According to the famous composer, only a housekeeper or cook with a pure heart could prepare a pure soup. Beethoven brooked no opposition, particular not from his long-suffering secretary Anton Schindler. If Beethoven thought a soup was bad and Schindler disagreed, Beethoven would send him an insulting note: “I do not value your judgment on the soup in the least, it is bad.”

One of Beethoven’s favorite dishes was a mushy bread soup, which he consumed every Thursday with 10 large eggs to be stirred into the soup. He inspected the eggs by holding them to the light and then cracking them open with his hand. Woe to the housekeeper if they weren’t all entirely fresh. Beethoven would call her in for a scolding. She only half-listened because she had to be ready to flee, as it was Beethoven’s custom to pelt her with the eggs as a punishment.

According to Ignaz von Seyfried, an opera conductor during Beethoven’s time: “[Beethoven’s housekeeper] held herself in readiness to beat a quick retreat before, as was customary, the cannonade was about to begin, and the decapitate batteries would begin to play upon her back and pour out their yellow-white, sticky intestines over her in veritable lava streams.”

8 Gerald Ford’s Strange Lunch

It is a commonly cited piece of trivia that President Richard Nixon ate a daily lunch of cottage cheese covered in ketchup. After he was elected president, an article in the Washingtonian quipped that elegant White House dinners had been replaced by cottage cheese and ketchup. He even had cottage cheese with pineapple slices for lunch on the day that he announced his resignation from the presidency.

Less commonly known is that President Gerald Ford was also an aficionado of the bizarre but strangely appealing lunch menu item, which he consumed every day while reading or working. An Air Force One staffer revealed in the book Inside the White House:

President Ford had A-1 sauce and ketchup, mostly A-1 sauce, with the cottage cheese. We always had a vegetable garnish with spring onions, celery sticks, radishes. We always served ketchup and A-1 sauce with it. In most cases, he used A-1 sauced mixed in. [ . . . ] When we were going to land, he used mouthwash because of the onions.

Ford also liked a drink, although he could usually handle his alcohol. He once got drunk on martinis on Air Force One while returning from a meeting with the Soviet premier. That same staffer said, “We put him to bed. In the middle of the flight, he came out in his underwear and said ‘Where is the head?’ Normally, he knew where the head is. He could walk. He was slurring words. It was the one time he overindulged and was tipsy.”

7 Nicolas Cage’s Diet Of Dignified Animals

Nicolas Cage is known for a storied career of both great and terrible performances. There are certainly enough strange things to say about him, but his diet may top them all. He only consumes animals that he judges as mating in a “dignified way.”

Explaining the reason for his choice to The Sun, Cage said, “I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales—sentient life—insects, reptiles. I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are very dignified with sex. So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl.”

He may not eat those salacious swine, but he has consumed strange things in the name of art. The 1988 movie Vampire’s Kiss called for Cage to eat a live cockroach, which he did with some difficulty. “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it,” said Cage to The Telegraph. “But I did it anyway.”

6 Henry Ford’s Weeds

Henry Ford was a picky eater who usually had nuts or raisins in his pocket. In his youth, he was largely uninterested in food and mostly moved it around on his plate to give the appearance of eating it. This changed when he started to perceive his body as a machine and his stomach as a boiler that he needed to give the right fuel.

The act of eating was more practical than sensual, and Ford experimented with wild weeds as a source of nutrition. His dietary experiments caused misery to his business associates, although they were better received by his friend George Washington Carver, who was of a like mind on that sort of thing.

Even though Ford received a salary of almost $1 million a year, he preferred a diet of “roadside greens,” which were essentially edible weeds that Ford gathered from his garden or outside. According to biographer Sidney Olson: “There is nothing quite like a dish of stewed burdock, followed by a sandwich of soybean bread filled with milkweeds, to set up a man for an afternoon’s work.”

The weeds that Ford collected were often lightly boiled or stewed and then used in salads or sandwiches. However, the diet seemed to pay off because Henry Ford was rarely sick and lived to the ripe old age of 83.

5 Evo Morales’s Gay Chicken

Bolivian President Evo Morales caused controversy in 2001 when he claimed that eating hormone-injected chicken was a root cause of homosexuality. At the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, he shocked the socially progressive audience with his views. “When we talk about chicken, it’s pumped full of female hormones,” he said, “and so when men eat this chicken, they stray from being men.”

He also linked the consumption of fowl with male baldness. Within a few hours, the impact of his comments had spread to the international media.

Morales’s government quickly went into spin doctor mode, insisting that the president had been referring only to genital abnormalities. In a public statement, the Foreign Relations Ministry explained, “[Morales] made no mention of sexuality. Rather, he said that eating chicken that has hormones changes our own bodies. This point of view has been confirmed by scientists, and even the European Union has prohibited the use of some hormones in food.”

Many gay rights activists were unconvinced. The president of the Argentina Homosexual Community, Cesar Cigliutti, said, “It’s an absurdity to think that eating hormone-containing chicken can change the sexual orientation of a person. By following that reasoning, if we put male hormones in a chicken and we make a homosexual eat it he will transform into a heterosexual.”

In a different vein, Morales also took shots at Coca-Cola. “If the plumber comes to your house and can’t get the job done with all his tools,” said Morales, “have him pour Coca-Cola down the clogged toilet, and problem solved.” This was received more favorably as many in Bolivia believe that the US soda company exploits Bolivia’s coca supplies. Also, a local company had just launched a rival drink called “Coca-Colla,” with “Colla” being a reference to the native Andean highland people.

Morales has a long-standing antipathy toward unhealthy American food, complaining at the UN in 2013 that “the fast food of the West is a great harm to humanity.” He accused fast food companies of causing cancer and conspiring to suppress the rise of quinoa as a healthy alternative source of nutrition.

4 Howard Hughes’s Food Fetishes

Movie mogul, industrialist, and businessman Howard Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was reflected in his eating habits. He gave a number of bizarre food preparation and serving orders to his servants, including wrapping spoon handles in tissue paper. They were then sealed with cellophane and wrapped in a second piece of tissue paper. He would only touch the covered handles because he was obsessively afraid of germs.

His servants had to open cans of food in a specific way, too. First, the servant would hold the can under warm running water. Then he or she used a brush and special bars of soap to remove the label 5 centimeters (2 in) from the top of the can. Next, the can was soaked to remove any dust and germs. Then the bottom was cleaned in the same manner as the top. All the indentations of the can also had to be scrubbed with soap and rinsed. Throughout the process, the servant was not permitted to let go of the can.

Hughes suffered constipation because he refused to eat leafy vegetables. His meals were very uniform, and he enjoyed a regimented menu that he changed every few months. He usually ate a medium-rare butterfly steak with 12 peas of uniform size. If any of the peas were too large, Hughes would send them back to the kitchen to be replaced. He ate almost every meal alone. According to his chef, Hughes didn’t even eat Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners with his wife.

But Hughes liked fudge. When he became reclusive in his later years, he virtually subsisted on chocolate bars and milk. He isolated himself in a studio near his home, surrounded by empty milk bottles and containers which he used to relieve himself when nature called. This reclusive lifestyle took a toll on his health. When he finally died, people compared the state of his body to that of a Japanese prisoner of war.

3 Hitler’s Flatulent Vegetarianism

Many meat lovers enjoy telling their vegetarian friends that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and vegetarians often vehemently disagree. The truth is more nuanced. Until the early 1930s, Hitler showed a penchant for certain meat products, particularly liver dumplings and sausages. He is said to have subscribed to Wagner’s theory that “[the] thirst [for flesh and blood] . . . can never be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage.”

Yet he did not completely turn against the consumption of meat until his niece and possible lover Geli Raubal committed suicide in 1931. After that, he refused to eat breakfast ham. “It is like eating a corpse!” he said.

Hitler also turned away from meat because he believed it caused chronic constipation and flatulence. He ate his vegetables raw or pulped into a mush. Some of his favorite foods were oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichoke hearts, and asparagus tips in white sauce.

The high-fiber diet had precisely the opposite effect on his bowel drama. After Hitler consumed a particularly large plate of vegetables, his physician, Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that Hitler experienced “constipation and colossal flatulence . . . on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

Of course, this is not only the fault of his vegetarian diet but also the ridiculous regimen of drugs and treatments administered by his doctor, which included chamomile enemas and a heavy dose of supplements. Some of those supplements were vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose, opiates, and poisonous strychnine tablets for gas.

The argument over Hitler’s vegetarianism is a bit of a red herring. He did occasionally indulge in animal products, but so do 70 percent of vegetarians. Even so, Hitler’s decision to become a vegetarian in no way refutes the moral arguments that vegetarians hold against meat eating.

2 Mussolini’s Milk Addiction

Benito Mussolini also had digestive problems and weird eating habits, such as refusing to eat anything at banquets. He believed that eating was an activity to which one should devote one’s complete attention and that eating in the presence of others would make one “apt to eat wrongly.”

In 1925, he vomited blood while at his house in Rome and was forced to take several weeks off from public appearances. Rumors circulated that Mussolini might have to be replaced as the National Fascist Party leader. Doctors diagnosed him with a stomach ulcer and recommended a drastic change in diet after he refused to have surgery. His new diet was mainly composed of fruit and up to 3 liters (1 gal) of milk every day. This apparently didn’t help him because he suffered another ulcer in 1929.

After the Allies invaded Italy and the Fascists retreated to a German satellite state called the Salo Republic, Mussolini sought the assistance of a physician named Dr. Zachariae. Shocked by his patient’s appearance, the doctor said, “I found myself before a ruin of a man who was evidently on the brink of the tomb.” Mussolini suffered from ulcers, anemia, constipation, insomnia, and low blood pressure. His skin was dry and inelastic, and his abdominal area around his liver was engorged.

Zachariae blamed Mussolini’s ridiculous milk diet and cut his milk intake to 0.25 liters (0.5 pt) each day for a week. Then he went cold turkey. The doctor began to treat Mussolini with small doses of vitamins and hormones, which had an immediate positive effect. After his liver returned to its normal size, Mussolini remarked, “I must tell you I feel liberated. I no longer feel pains in my stomach, and I don’t fear the night.”

The doctor insisted that Mussolini eat some light vegetables like carrots and potatoes, which he had once been unable to stomach, and to take his tea without milk. Although Mussolini preferred vegetarianism, the doctor insisted that his patient eat small amounts of boiled chicken and fish to increase his protein intake. Along with injections of vitamins B and C, the new diet caused his red blood cell count to rise and his health to improve. Despite Mussolini occasionally refusing to take food while the Italian people were starving, Zachariae later boasted that he had restored Mussolini to the health of a man of 40.

1 Kim Jong Il’s Gastronomy

Due to the testimony of Kim Jong Il’s former personal chef, Kenji Fujimoto, we know quite a bit about the eating habits of the former North Korean tyrant. While much of the country was starving, Kim indulged in expensive and elaborate food and drink. He had a wine cellar with over 10,000 bottles and a library with thousands of cookbooks.

Kim was committed to getting the best food and often sent Fujimoto on foreign excursions to pick up delicacies: Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, France for cognac, Denmark for pork, western China for grapes, Thailand for papayas and mangoes, and Beijing for McDonald’s fast food. Former North Korean diplomats also sent back exotic delicacies, such as camel’s feet, from the countries in which they were stationed.

Kim established an institute of top doctors and scientists to design a diet to increase his longevity. This was a source of concern, as the 158-centimeter (5’2″) dictator’s former eating habits had brought him to a weight of almost 90 kilograms (200 lb). The doctors began to inspect every grain of his rice by hand to make sure it was perfectly shaped with no cracks or chips. Kim insisted that the rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mount Paektu, a legendary mountain on the border with China.

Fujimoto also revealed the dictator’s love of sushi. When Fujimoto sought to leave North Korea (after being banned from travel abroad), he did so with a cunning ruse. He showed the “Dear Leader” a new episode of the cooking show Iron Chef, in which the secret ingredient was sea urchin roe, or uni.

He casually mentioned that the best place to acquire the ingredient was from Rishiri Island off the coast of Hokkaido. Kim couldn’t resist sending the chef, who eluded his handlers at a fish market in Tokyo and disappeared into the crowd. Fujimoto didn’t return to North Korea until after Kim Jong Il’s death.

David Tormsen only eats shoe leather and chives. Email him at [email protected].

These are Top ten of the most influential photos of all time. There is no formula that makes a picture influential. According to time magazine editor; “Some images are on our list because they were the first of their kind, others because they shaped the way we think. And some made the cut because they directly changed the way we live. What all 100 share is that they are turning points in our human experience”. More info: time.com

Have a look at 10 most influential photos of all time.

The Terror Of War, Nick Ut, 1972

This photo is taken by Nick Ut, on June 8, 1972. A 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc running alongwith a group of children and soldiers. She had been hit by napalm that South Vietnamese air force mistakenly dropped on the village. The photo was awarded Pulitzer prize in 1973. See historical images.

Starving Child And Vulture, Kevin Carter, 1993

The most haunting image on the most influential photos of all time. In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan, where he took an iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod. See more details.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper, 1932

It’s the most dangerous or risky yet playful lunch break ever captured. 11 men casually eating, chatting and sneaking a smoke as if they weren’t 840 feet above Manhattan with nothing but a thin beam keeping them aloft. That comfort is real; the men are among the construction workers who helped build Rockefeller Center. But the picture, taken on the 69th floor of the flagship RCA Building (now the GE Building), was staged as part of a promotional campaign for the massive skyscraper complex.

Alan Kurdi, Nilüfer Demir, 2015

The war in Syria had been going on for more than four years when Alan Kurdi’s parents lifted the 3-year-old boy and his 5-year-old brother into an inflatable boat and set off from the Turkish coast for the Greek island of Kos, just three miles away. Within minutes of pushing off, a wave capsized the vessel, and the mother and both sons drowned. On the shore near the coastal town of Bodrum a few hours later, Nilufer Demir of the Dogan News Agency, came upon Alan, his face turned to one side and bottom elevated as if he were just asleep. See details.

A Man On The Moon, Neil Armstrong, Nasa, 1969

Jewish Boy Surrenders In Warsaw, 1943

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936

The picture that did more than any other to humanize the cost of the Great Depression almost didn’t happen. Driving past the crude “Pea-Pickers Camp” sign in Nipomo, north of Los Angeles, Dorothea Lange kept going for 20 miles. Migrant Mother has become the most iconic picture of the Depression. Through an intimate portrait of the toll being exacted across the land, Lange gave a face to a suffering nation. See also; The Disturbing Photographs Telling Tales Of Disaster.

The Hindenburg Disaster, Sam Shere, 1937

This photo of 804-foot-long German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg, was taken by the Sam Shere of the International News Photos service, at the Lakehurst, N.J., Naval Air Station on May 6, 1937. It was taken exactly when, the grand ship’s flammable hydrogen caught fire, causing it to spectacularly burst into bright yellow flames and kill 36 people.
Shere was one of nearly two dozen still and newsreel photographers who scrambled to document the fast-moving tragedy. But it is his image, with its stark immediacy and horrible grandeur, that has endured as the most famous—owing to its publication on front pages around the world and in LIFE and, more than three decades later, its use on the cover of the first Led Zeppelin album.

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still, 1978

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Since she burst onto the art scene in the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman the person has always been obscured by Cindy Sherman the subject. Her images have become some of the most valuable photographs ever produced. By manipulating viewers and recasting her own identity, Sherman carved out a new place for photography in fine art. And she showed that even photography allows people to be something they’re not.

Untitled (Cowboy), Richard Prince, 1989

The picture by Richard Prince taken in 1989, named Untitled (­Cowboy). It was sold for $1.2 million at auction in 2005. It was the highest publicly recorded price for the sale of a contemporary ­photograph. See also; Top 10 Most Expensive Photographs Ever Sold.

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We have done numerous lists of people and things that have had a great influence on man and they are always popular, so today we are presenting another list of influential people – but this time, they are people who never existed. There were hundreds of people to choose from, so this has been a fun list to compile. We hope you agree with our choices, but if you don’t, feel free to use the comments to tell us who you would have put here instead.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Things That Don’t Actually Exist

10 Santa Claus

What child has not been frightened into behaving thanks to the ever-present youthful fear of Santa not providing come Christmas? Almost all western children were told by their parents that Santa would leave them nothing if they misbehaved. I speak from experience when I say that it was one of the most effective methods of stopping tantrums! Funnily enough, though, the fear always dissipates on Christmas Eve as you just know that Santa will be coming – even if you did slip up a few times.

9 Barbie

As Barbie has progressed from a pretty young woman to whom all girls could aspire, to something often verging on the likeness of a harlot, one can wonder whether it was Barbie influencing children, or children influencing Barbie. There are certainly many similarities. Barbie has depicted almost every possible female lifestyle choice and I think there can be no doubt that she has been at the start of the path many women have taken in life.

8 Robin Hood

This could potentially lead to a debate about whether Hood existed or not, but I am of the opinion that he did not. Therefore, he is listed as my number eight on the list. I am sure we have all heard someone justifying theft because the victim is wealthy – and where did this justification come from? Not just the principles of redistribution of wealth that many of us live under in Western Society (read envy taxes) but the fact that to this day, we are all raised believing Robin Hood was a hero – when, in fact, he was a thief. Stealing is almost always wrong, and just because Robin Hood gave the proceeds of his crimes to poor people, it is not a valid justification. As for the previously mentioned taxes, there is every reason for us to believe that the majority of people accept these taxes because of their prior belief in the false morality of the Robin Hood story.

7 Cowboys

This is one for the boys obviously! Even in remote New Zealand where I grew up, all the boys played “Cowboys and Indians”. The cowboy was a great hero with a shining gun who represented the morality of Western ideals: manliness, defense of justice, protection of women and children. No doubt many now cringe at the lack of political correctness involved in the game and stereotype, but kids aren’t politically correct (thank God) and certainly won’t be hindered because of it. The influence of the Cowboy movie genre is indisputable an immense one. Oh – and for those who say “but cowboys are real!” – yes – but this is about the concept – not about a specific person – just as we might say Santa existed as St Nicholas, the concept is bigger than any one person.

6 The Marlboro Man

How many men reading this list who smoke, are smoking cigarettes with filters? Venturing a guess I would say all of them. Before the Marlboro Man campaign began, “real men” didn’t smoke cigarettes with filters – they were for women. The aim of the Marlboro Man campaign was primarily to get men smoking filtered marlboro cigarettes. The influence of the campaign is abundantly clear today. The campaign is considered to be one of the best in all history. According to Wikipedia, it transformed a feminine campaign, with the slogan ‘Mild as May’, into one that was masculine, in a matter of months.

5 Rosie the Riveter

And now another for the girls! Rosie the Riveter may not be a familiar name, but her picture certainly is. Rosie the Riveter told women that they can do anything – and they did! Rosie managed to motivate an entire generation of working-age women to get out of the home and in to factories to help the war effort. This is probably one of the most influential events of the Second World War. Once the floodgates of women working were open, they would never be closed again. All women working in traditional male jobs have Rosie to thank.

4 Daedalus and Icarus

In a short 24 hours, you can fly from one side of the planet to another. This (one of man’s greatest achievements) may never have happened if it had not been for the mythological characters Daedalus and Icarus. The story tells of Daedalus building mechanical wings for his son Icarus and ever since the tale was told, man has lusted after the ability to take the sky and fly. This eventually came true and the entire planet is a changed place as a consequence of it.

3 The Little Engine That Could

The moral of this children’s tale is that self-belief, optimism, and hard work result in achievement – of even the most difficult tasks. The book first appeared in a slightly different version to today, in 1906. It has been regarded by many as a metaphor for the “American Dream”. The popularity of this book may also be a contributing factor to the huge number of self-help and “positive thinking” seminars and books that we see today.

2 Big Brother

A relatively modern addition to this list, Big Brother has been a influence in so many social protests that he has to be included here. His name comes up every time a government passes a restrictive law or a law which seems to remove aspects of our eternal freedoms. Everyone recognizes his face, everyone knows what he stands for, and everyone is terrified of the potential for our own lives to be governed by our own version of the fictional character. Big Brother was, of course, created by George Orwell for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

1 Romeo and Juliet

Not only can Romeo and Juliet be blamed for much of our ideas of the “perfect relationship” – I think it can also be blamed for a high percentage of divorces. Couples going in to marriage seek the ideal of a relationship based entirely on passion and romance, and when that romance dims (as so often is the case) they feel cheated and believe the marriage has failed. When in reality, passionate romance is not required for a healthy marriage – while respect, love, and charity is. Romeo and Juliet have much to answer for!

The year 2010 recorded some of the worst natural disasters in history. The events have had a strong impact on people as we move into 2011. Many of the disturbances have been blamed on the world’s current global weather disruption. In researching various articles on the internet that explore the most shocking news stories from 2010, Sandra Bullock’s name was far too frequent. You won’t find any updates on celebrity relationship status in this article. All of these news stories have had a direct impact on world societies. Some important stories that were deserving but left out of the list are: the 2010 earthquakes that hit Haiti and Chile, Typhoon Megi, the Phnom Penh stampede and the death of Néstor Kirchner.

In the early 1980s, a collection of black women began to turn up dead in the alleyways and dumpsters of South Los Angeles, California. On September 23, 1985, the police announced that they believed a single individual, labeled the Southside Slayer, was responsible for the crimes. The case turned cold until May 2007, when the murder of Janecia Peters, 25, was linked by DNA analysis to 11 unsolved murders attributed to the Southside Slayer. The attacker was soon dubbed the Grim Sleeper by the local press, because he supposedly took a 14-year hiatus from his crimes, from 1988 to 2002. In August 2008, the LA Weekly conducted an extensive interview with the sole survivor of the Southside Slayer attacks and she provided several important details, describing him as a “thin, neat, polite and well-groomed African-American guy.”

The killer documented his attack with a Polaroid camera. The female victim blacked out, but was startled awake by the bright flash of the camera. On July 7, 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that an arrest had been made in the Grim Sleeper case. The suspect is Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who is 57 years old. Originally, the police had not been able to obtain a DNA match between evidence found at the crime scenes and people in California’s DNA profile database. However, officials located similar DNA belonging to Lonnie Franklin’s son, Christopher, who was convicted of a felony weapons charge. Ultimately, the police used a piece of discarded pizza with Lonnie Franklin’s DNA to make the link.

In order to obtain the evidence, a federal detective pretended to be a waiter at a restaurant where the suspect ate. He collected dishes, silverware, glasses, and pizza crusts to obtain DNA. Saliva found on the victim’s breasts was used to obtain a DNA match linking Lonnie Franklin to the murders. Along with the DNA evidence, the police discovered a large collection of circumstantial evidence against Franklin when searching his home. On December 16, 2010, the Los Angeles Police Department released 180 photos of women found in Franklin’s home. Officials released the images after unsuccessful attempts to identify the people, who are possibly additional victims.

In all, investigators found over 1,000 photos and several hundred hours of video in Franklin’s home. The images show mainly African American women of a wide age range, from teenagers to middle-aged and older, often nude. Police believe Franklin took many of the pictures, which show both conscious and unconscious individuals, and date back up to 30 years. As the history of serial killers has taught us, the number of linked murders to a specific DNA specimen does not indicate the entire murder count. The photographs suggest that Franklin may have killed hundreds of unidentified women. Currently, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. is charged with 10 homicides and 1 attempted murder. He is being held without bail and could face the death penalty if convicted.

Nodar Kumaritashvili was a Georgian luger, who suffered a fatal crash during a training run for the 2010 Winter Olympics competition in Vancouver, Canada. Georgia is a sovereign state that is situated at the juncture of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. The country is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. Nodar Kumaritashvili first began to compete in the sport of luge when he was 13 years old. He came from a family of seasoned lugers. In 2010, Nodar qualified for the men’s singles event at the 2010 Winter Olympics, which would be his Olympic debut. On February 12, 2010, he was killed in a crash during a training run at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

Kumaritashvili lost control in the final turn of the course and was thrown off his luge and over the sidewall of the track, striking an unprotected steel support pole. He was travelling at 143.6 km/h (89.2 mph) at the moment of impact. The luge course at Whistler is notoriously fast and, before the competition, Josef Fendt, president of the International Luge Federation (FIL), publicized his concerns about the Sliding Centre. Nodar Kumaritashvili was the fourth athlete to die during Winter Olympics preparations, after British luger Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypeski, Australian skier Ross Milne (both Innsbruck 1964), and Swiss speed skier Nicolas Bochatay (Albertville 1992). He was the sixth athlete to die in the long history of the Olympic Games. During the opening ceremony, a moment of silence was held to honor the young man’s memory, when both the Canadian and Olympic flags were lowered to half-staff.

Eyjafjallajökull is one of Iceland’s smaller ice caps, located in the far south of the island. It is situated to the north of Skógar and to the west of the larger ice cap, Mýrdalsjökull. Eyjafjallajökull covers the caldera of a volcano, with a summit elevation of 1,666 meters (5,466 ft). The volcano has erupted relatively frequently since the last ice age. Before 2010, the most recent major event was in 1920. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruptions weren’t the largest ever recorded, but the subsequent ash clouds that were released caused an enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over a six day period in April 2010. It was the highest level of air travel disruption since the Second World War.

The most severe explosion occurred on April 14, 2010, and resulted in an estimated 250 million cubic meters (330,000,000 cu yd) of ejected tephra. The ash plume rose to a height of approximately 9 kilometers (30,000 ft). The subsequent air traffic closures caused millions of passengers to be stranded, not only in Europe, but across the world. Between the months of April and May, 2010, various regions, including Ireland, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, northern Italy and Austria, had to completely close their airspace. The volcano was able to inject its ash plume directly into the jet stream. The ash was then carried over Europe into some of the busiest airspace in the world.

Previous eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have historically been followed by eruptions of its larger neighbor, Katla. In the past 1,000 years, all three known eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have triggered a subsequent Katla event, often times within months of each other. Katla is one of the largest and more dangerous volcanoes in Iceland. On April 20, 2010, Icelandic President Ólafur Grímsson said “the time for Katla to erupt is coming close, we [Iceland] have prepared. It is high time for European governments and airline authorities all over Europe and the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption.” The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimated that the airline industry worldwide lost €148 million (US$200 million, GB£130 million) a day during the air travel disruptions.

Bedbugs are small parasitic insects that survive by feeding exclusively on the blood of warm-blooded animals. In many nations, bedbugs were largely eradicated as pests in the early 1940s, with the help of pesticides. The insects were common in the U.S. before World War II, but became rare after the widespread use of DDT. Beginning in the summer of 2010, a large collection of bedbug infestations began to spread across the United States. The national media conducted daily updates on the situation, and reports of the insects occurred in thousands of homes from New York to Ohio. Besides houses, the pests showed up in malls, restaurants and hotels.

Contrary to what many believe, the infestations were often reported in clean, upscale hotels. The 2010 outbreak caused the first-ever bedbug summit in Chicago, where experts convened to discuss the invasion. The tiny bugs are not only hard to get rid of, but their expansion is all but impossible to prevent. A few tiny bugs clinging to a piece of clothing can lead to an infestation of not just your bed, but your sofa, your closet and your carpets. A number of health effects can occur due to bedbugs, including skin rashes, psychological effects and allergic symptoms.

To make the situation worse, recent tests have determined that the insects responsible for the 2010 outbreak have undergone a genetic restructuring. The new bedbugs have developed immunity to many chemicals. They also have a better ability to protect nerve cells and thicker shells. All of this research has determined that we are being confronted with an entirely different species of insect. Bedbug infestations across North America haven’t spared London, where the city-run public housing agency’s pest-control budget has increased 10-fold for 2011. Officials are trying to find an effective way to track and kill the bedbug populations. Some of these methods include bedbug-sniffing dogs and a wide range of treatments that involve both extreme heat and cold.

Chile has a long tradition of mining, which began during the 20th century and has made the country the world’s top producer of copper. Since 2000, approximately 34 people a year have been killed in mining accidents in Chile. On August 5, 2010, a cave-in occurred at the San José copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert near Copiapó, Chile. The accident left 33 men trapped 700 meters (2,300 ft) underground, approximately 5 kilometers (3 mi) from the mine entrance. The initial rock fall caused a thick dust cloud that blinded the miners for up to six hours, and created lingering eye irritation and burning. The trapped miners initially tried to escape through a ventilation shaft system, but all attempts failed.

To find the miners, rescuers used percussion drills to make eight exploratory boreholes about 15 centimeters (5.9 in) wide. The effort was complicated by out-of-date maps of the mine shafts. While underground, the crew’s supervisor, Luis Urzúa, helped organize the workers meager resources. The men gathered in a secure room called a “refuge.” On August 22, the eighth borehole broke through a ramp, located 688 meters (2,257 ft) underground. Approximately 20 meters (66 ft) from an emergency shelter room where the miners were staying. The crew heard the drills approaching for days and prepared notes which they attached to the tip of the drill. The engineers thought they heard tapping on the drill tip, but were surprised to discover the notes, as the miners had survived for 17 days, which was much longer than expected.

The note read “We are alright in the shelter, the 33 [of us].” The words became an emblem of the miners’ survival and the rescue effort, appearing on websites, banners and t-shirts. Video cameras were soon sent down the borehole capturing the first grainy, black-and-white, silent images of the skinny, dirty, shirtless and unshaven men. The miners survived underground for a record 69 days. All 33 people were rescued and brought to the surface on October 13, 2010. After the last trapped miner was winched to the surface, the rescue workers held up a sign stating “Mission accomplished Chile” to the estimated more than 1 billion people watching on live television around the world. The event was one of the most watched programs of the 21st century.

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret and classified media from anonymous news sources. The WikiLeaks website was launched in 2006. An Australian journalist named Julian Assange is the founder, spokesperson and editor in chief of WikiLeaks. Since 2006, the site has published material exposing extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d’Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals and Guantanamo Bay procedures. However, WikiLeaks made international headlines in 2010 when they posted classified details surrounding the American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

The WikiLeaks website began to gain mainstream recognition when they released a video showing an American airstrike that occurred on July 12, 2007 in Baghdad, which still remains on the website. The classified U.S. military footage shows a series of attacks by a U.S. helicopter that killed 12 people, including two news staff, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. After gaining military clearance, the helicopter fired a series of 30 mm calibre cannon shells into a group of ten men alleged by the U.S. Army to be Iraqi insurgents. In fact, the American soldiers had mistaken a collection of cameras for guns. The video is extremely graphic, especially the initial shooting when a group of people are instantly killed.

The second airstrike, using 30 mm fire, was directed at a man who pulled up in a van and attempted to help the wounded. In the third airstrike, the “Bush” helicopter team deployed three AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which destroyed a building. An undisclosed number of civilians were killed in the explosion. It was the first time that the American public had been exposed to such a war video. After WikiLeaks released a series of logs surrounding the Iraqi War, the Pentagon referred to the exposure as “the largest leak of classified documents in its history.” Media coverage of the documents focused on claims that the U.S. government ignored reports of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

In October 2010, Assange told a leading Moscow newspaper that “The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia.” In 2010, Assange told Forbes magazine that WikiLeaks was planning another “megaleak” for early in 2011, which would be from inside the private sector and involve “a big U.S. bank.” Following the announcement, Bank of America’s stock price fell by 3%. During the interview, Assange commented on the possible impact of the leak. “It could take down a bank or two.” In December 2010, Julian Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, told The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC, that WikiLeaks had information that it considers to be a “thermo-nuclear device” which it would release if the organization needs to defend itself.

On October 4, 2010, approximately one million cubic meters of red mud was released from an alumina plant near Kolontár, in western Hungary. The ecological disaster occurred when the northwestern corner of the caustic waste dam at the Ajkai Timföldgyár alumina plant collapsed, releasing liquid waste from the red mud lakes. Red mud is a solid waste product of the Bayer process, which is the way industries refine bauxite to produce alumina. Alumina is then used in the production of aluminum metal. The toxic material presents one of the industry’s most challenging disposal problems. In most countries where red mud is produced, it is pumped into holding ponds, which need to be contained with large dams.

Due to the Bayer process, the red mud is highly basic with a pH ranging from 10 to 13. During the 2010 Ajka accident, the red mud was released as a 1–2 m (3–7 ft) wave, flooding several nearby localities, including the village of Kolontár and the town of Devecser. The high pH levels of the mud caused severe chemical burns to humans and animals, killing life in rivers and contaminating soil. At least nine people died and 122 people were injured. The chemicals extinguished all life in the 100 km (62 mi) long Marcal River.

On October 7, 2010, the red mud reached the Danube River, prompting countries, such as Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine to develop emergency plans in response. The Danube is Europe’s second longest river. It is notable for being classified as an international waterway. On October 11, the Hungarian government announced that the managing director of the company involved with the disaster had been arrested, to be charged with “criminal negligence leading to a public catastrophe.” After the spill, emergency teams began pouring plaster and acetic acid (vinegar) into the Raba-Danube meeting point to lower the pH value.

After a government inquest, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán released a statement that indicated the cause of the spill was, presumably, human error. The Hungarian government has also said that the mud is “not poisonous” to humans. It has been suggested that the heavy metal concentrations are not continuing to impact the environment. On the hierarchy of industrial wastes, red mud is not as toxic as most. However, recent studies of the soil have indicated that a high level of salt in the ground is negatively impacting plant life. The ecological disaster remains one of the worst in the history of Hungary. Following the accident, a second dam was build directly behind the original to prevent the weakened wall from a complete failure.

Since the middle of 2010, the world has experienced a series of bizarre events surrounding the mass death of various animal species. Large groups of wildlife, predominately birds and fish are dying off in large numbers. The isolated events have received a significant amount of media attention and created internet buzz. The scientific world is yet to release information describing the potential cause of many of the strange occurrences. However, it appears that a wide range of potential factors are disturbing the world’s animal life. The mass death events are alarming because they might indicate a problem in the Earth’s natural cycle, possibly stemming from the global climate disruption we are experiencing.

Let’s examine some of the mass death events that have been reported in 2010 and 2011. The U.S. Geological Service’s website has listed 90 mass deaths of birds and other wildlife from June through December 12, 2010. On December 29, 2010, 100,000 freshwater drum were found dead across 17 miles (27 km) of the Arkansas River bank. The fish were reported along the Ozark Lock and Dam downstream to River Mile 240, directly south of Hartman, Arkansas. The exact cause of the mass death is yet to be determined, however, state officials have suggested that a disease may be at fault. Residents have been advised not to eat the fish.

In research on the Arkansas River incident, it has been noted that earthquakes may be a contributing factor. In 2009, the state of Arkansas registered 38 earthquakes. Since September 20, 2010, the area around Guy, Arkansas, has been plagued by more than 500 earthquakes. The temblors, ranging from 1.8 to 4.0, have been described as abnormal for this area. Beginning in early 2011, the string of unexplained animal deaths began to be referred to in the media as the “aflockalypse,” provoking comparisons to a cataclysmic event such as the apocalypse.

On New Year’s Eve, 2010 more than 5,000 dead red-winged blackbirds and starlings were found in Beebe, Arkansas, USA. The incident has been attributed to mass collisions and stress caused by fireworks. On December 30th, three young whooping cranes and hundreds of grackles, cowbirds, starlings and red-winged blackbirds died in Kentucky. The cranes were first seen flying low and crashing into objects in the streets. It appears that in many of the various descriptions of bird fatalities, the animals are becoming confused and running themselves into poles, signs, buildings and other objects.

Between the dates of December 28 and January 3rd, 100 tons of dead fish washed ashore the Brazilian coast, near the port of Paranagua. On January 3rd, an estimated 2 million fish died in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. This event has been attributed to the cold weather. On January 5th, thousands of dead turtle doves were found in Faenza, Italy. The birds were discovered with a noticeable blue stain on their beaks. The Italian government was shocked by the deaths and noted the rarity of the event. On January 8th-9th, thousands of dead gizzard shad fish turned up in the harbors of Chicago. During the month of December, more than 100 pelicans died under suspicious circumstances along the beaches of Topsail Island, North Carolina. The list goes on, spanning many areas of the world.

Beginning in late 2010 and early 2011, a series of floods have devastated certain areas of the world, most notably Australia and Rio de Janeiro. In December 2010, a great flood hit the state of Queensland, Australia, including its capital city, Brisbane. The floods forced the evacuation of at least 70 towns and over 200,000 people were affected. The December 2010 Gascoyne River flood was the one of the most severe floods to ever take place along the Gascoyne River in Western Australia. It was triggered by record-breaking rainfall, amounting to over 6,000% of the monthly mean in just four days. The flood caused widespread damage in the region, most notably the coastal town of Carnarvon.

A high intensity of rainfall between January 12 and 14, 2011, caused major flooding across much of the western and central parts of the Australian state of Victoria. The question has been raised. When will the rain stop? Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser said it is not possible to put a figure on the damage, but a rough estimate is currently putting lost revenue from Australia’s GDP at about A$30 billion. The floods damaged a large portion of Australia’s coal mines and cotton plantings, among other resources. The 2010 La Niña weather pattern, which brings wetter conditions to eastern Australia, was the strongest since 1973.

Record or near to record sea surface temperatures were recorded off the Queensland coast in late 2010. The month of December, 2010, was Queensland’s wettest on record. 2010 was the Australian continent’s third wettest year ever. Communities isolated by floodwaters have experienced food shortages, and a rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables. On January 11, the Wivenhoe Dam in South East Queensland filled to a level equivalent to 191% of its supply capacity. The dam can hold the equivalent of 225% of its supply capacity. As of January 14, 2011, 30 deaths have been attributed to the Australian floods, 15 of which are from the Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley area. Additionally, 14 people are listed as missing.

Starting on January 11, 2011, a series of floods and mudslides struck the Mountainous Region in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. The floods have caused at least 763 deaths so far, including 367 in the Nova Friburgo area and 310 in the city of Teresópolis. In a 24-hour period between January 11 and 12, 2011, this area of Brazil registered more rainfall than was expected for the entire month. Following the downpour, many areas in the region flooded. The disaster caused widespread property damage. Around 2960 people had their homes destroyed. The Brazilian local media has claimed that the combination of floods, mudslides and landslides in Rio de Janeiro has become the worst weather-related natural disaster in the country’s history. However, a similar flooding event occurred in 1967 when 1,700 people lost their lives.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit experienced a large explosion and fire, while drilling in the Macondo Prospect oil field about 40 miles (60 km) southeast of the Louisiana coast. The blast caused an underwater wellhead to erupt and started a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which flowed for three months. The environmental disaster is considered the largest in U.S. history. In all, the event resulted in the release of approximately 4.9 million barrels or 205.8 million gallons of crude oil. It is the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The spill continues to cause severe damage to marine and wildlife habitats, as well as the Gulf’s fishing and tourism industries.

By late November 2010, 320 miles (510 km) of the Louisiana shoreline was closed because of the spill. In January 2011, eight months after the explosion, an oil spill commissioner reported that tar balls continue to wash ashore, wetlands are fouled and dying, and crude oil remains visible off the Gulf of Mexico coastlines. Scientists have reported immense underwater plumes of dissolved oil not visible on the surface, as well as an 80-square-mile (210 km) “kill zone” surrounding the damaged BP well, where it looks like everything is dead on the seafloor. The disaster has put hundreds of endangered animal species at risk.

The North Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, prized for sushi and sashimi, regularly travels across the Atlantic seaboard to spawn in the Gulf of Mexico. Five of the world’s seven sea turtle species live, migrate and breed in the Gulf region. Kemp’s ridley is the world’s most endangered species of sea turtle. Ten days after the accident, scientists recorded 156 sea turtle deaths, most of the victims were Kemp’s ridleys. The grass beds south of the Chandeleur Islands are very close to the oil spill. These grasses are a nursing area for a large number of shark species. Oil spills pose an immediate threat to marine mammals because they need to surface and breathe. Some other notable creatures at risk are Louisiana oysters, shrimp, blue crab, and a huge collection of birds, including the Brown Pelican.

One of the biggest unknown factors surrounding the spill is related to the dispersants BP used to fight the oil. Dispersants are a collection of chemicals that rapidly disperse large amounts of certain types of oil from the sea surface by transferring it into the water column. The oil is effectively spread over a larger volume of water and taken off the surface of the ocean. Dispersants can delay the formation of persistent oil-in-water emulsions. The problem is that laboratory experiments show that dispersants have increased the toxic hydrocarbon levels in fish by a factor of up to 100 and may kill fish eggs. Some people believe that BP used these chemicals because they wanted the oil out of sight and mind.

BP didn’t want people to see the oil collecting on the surface of the water, so they made the premature decision to use the dispersants. A dispersant was used in an attempt to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. During that spill, fisheries didn’t see a dramatic decline in business right away. However, four years after the disaster, the herring market made a strong decline. Since that time, there has been a steady downward trend of the salmon fisheries in the area where the Exxon Valdez spill occurred, which is Prince William Sound, Alaska. This has concerned environmentalists who have predicted that the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is only beginning to impact the world economy and sea life.

We take the internet for granted. Seriously, imagine having to fill out tax forms by hand and mail them or look at an actual map to travel to unknown destinations. What about spreading humor? Today, memes are the main currency of the internet, providing humor and virality in often unpredictable ways, but it was not always that way. When the internet hit the mainstream in the 1990s, users were met with the idea of being able to create and share their own projects outside of the confines of major media outlets. It was content created by the everyman for the everyman.

A popular vehicle for spreading humor in those days was animation. Typically created in Adobe Flash, these animations were crude, profanity-laced, and often violent. They were also surreal, funny, and highly quotable. They also managed to intertwine juvenile humor with dark subject matter and often had a finger on the pulse of what the ordinary person in that era found both humorous and frightening.

The feelings generated by these animations, followed along with the infectiously quotable dialogue, created a one-two punch of virality that helped to usher in the meme-age. In fact, some of these early internet animations were so viral that they cracked through the computer screen and made it as far as the silver screen. So if you’re here to learn about the early days of the internet or just looking for some nostalgia from a bygone time, here are 10 influential early web animations.

Related: 10 Of The Most Bizarre Modern Internet Trends

10 The Dancing Baby

Perhaps the most ’90s thing to ever exist, the dancing baby, was an early 3D animation of a baby doing a cha-cha style dance. The origins are a little murky, but the animation is credited to a group of animators (Michael Girard, Robert Lurye, Tony Morril, and John Chadwick) who were working on a project called Biped that involved the popular 3D animation software Character Studio. From its inception in 1996, the animators knew they had something that was both spooky but impossible to stop looking at. Eventually, the animation was paired with the intro to Blue Suede’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” and the Dancing Baby exploded in popularity.

The Dancing Baby blazed its way through all corners of the internet before appearing on news channels, in commercials, and ultimately in the hit comedy Ally McBeal, where the Dancing Baby appears to Ally as a vision representing her ticking biological clock. The spread of the Dancing Baby was unprecedented at this point and is arguably one of the first examples of something going viral. The Dancing Baby has popped up here and there over the years, mostly as a form of nostalgia for the ’90s, but the original gif has been treated to a hi-def upgrade and developed into an NFT. As for me, I credit the Dancing Baby with reinvigorating Robert Downey Jr.’s career via Ally McBeal. ^[1]

Memorable quote: Oogachacka!

9 I’m the Juggernaut B*tch

Two main staples of early internet humor are profanity and randomness. Both make a strong showing in the video “I’m the Juggernaut B*tch.” Uploaded to YouTube in 2005 by Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes of My Way Entertainment, the video was a dub of an episode of the 1992 X-Men animated series. In the video, we see Randy voice the titular Juggernaut character as he fights Charles Xavier and friends while uttering profanity-laced and sometimes nonsensical lines, including the oft-quoted “Do you know who I am? I’m the juggernaut, b*tch.”

Per their website, the parody dub was created in 2005 to kill time and wasn’t unleashed to the internet until 2006, when they posted the video on their YouTube channel. The video quickly went viral and was so popular that it made it to the silver screen. In the live-action X-Men film X3: The Last Stand, the Juggernaut says the line while fighting Kitty Pryde. By the end of the year, however, the video was removed from YouTube due to copyright issues with Marvel, but it was later uploaded in 2007 by another user, where it has garnered 8.8 million views. As for My Way Entertainment, they are still active and posting on their own channel.^[2]

Memorable quote: what else? “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the juggernaut, b*tch!”

8 The End of Ze World

It may seem a little counterintuitive, but the crudeness of early internet animations is what made them so endearing in the first place. This is because these animations were homemade with whatever equipment the artists could find. It was primitive, but it was also for the average Joe just surfing the net. The End of Ze World is a perfect depiction of that.

This short animation features a hypothetical situation of what would happen if all the countries with nuclear weapons started firing them at each other. A dark topic for sure, but this animation was created in 2003, just after the U.S. had invaded Iraq, so war was on almost everyone’s mind. Like all great comedy, though, the video takes a tragic topic and presents it in a comical way by including funny voices, stereotypes, and highly quotable lines.

The video was created by Jason Windsor of Albinoblacksheep. According to him, the animation was conceived with a group of friends reenacting how each superpower would react to nuclear missiles being fired at them. He then went home, created a basic flash animation and voiceover, and sent the video to his friends. At some point, it made it onto the Albinoblacksheep website and then began making its way across the web. While the video was pre-YouTube, the video was uploaded to the site in 2008 and has reached over 14 million views. Jason Windsor didn’t receive much for the video, but it did help advance his career as an animator.^[3]

Memorable quotes: “H’okay, so here’s the Earth.” “Fire ze missiles!” “But I am le tired.”

7 Homestar Runner

You had to be living under a rock or had never even seen a computer at the turn of the millennium to not know about Homestar Runner. Even then, you likely heard a Strong Bad quote at some point. That’s just how popular the web series was. The series focused on the life and adventures of the titular characters along with a cast of other interesting personalities. It is hard to give a good synopsis of the show, given that the content was surreal and often parodied various pieces of popular culture. The idea of Homestar Runner was conceived by Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel when they created their own children’s book. While the book was never picked up for publishing, the character lived on when Mike and his brother, Matt Chapman, decided to work on Flash animation and thought it would be a good idea to revive the character of Homestar Runner.

On January 1, 2000, the Homestar Runner website was launched, and the brothers began releasing shorts. It took about a year, but Homestar Runner started gaining traction in 2001 with the release of their first Strong Bad Email episode. Strong Bad, the main antagonist of the series, would boot up his computer and read fan emails, often making fun of their names and grammar while rarely answering any questions directly.

This series, in particular, was so popular that if the Chapman Brothers were late posting any Strong Bad Email episodes, they would end up with a bunch of strongly worded emails asking where the next episode was. The site continued to grow, and from about 2001 to 2009, millions of visitors viewed the website, eventually gaining interest outside of the internet. Joss Whedon often featured references to the web series in his TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and the video game Guitar Hero 2 let you play Strong Bad’s song “Trogdor the Burninator” as a bonus song.

Another interesting thing about the series was that it never made any money from advertising. The website maintained enough money to support the brothers with sales of their Homestar Runner merchandise. To this day, the site is still running with plenty of animations, games, and other content to enjoy, all without advertisements. These guys were the real OGs of early internet animations.^[4]

Memorable quotes: too many to list. Just go watch it!

6 The Badger Song

Depending on who you ask, this is either one of the greatest or worst achievements in internet animation. It is a 30-second song that, when viewed on the original website, would loop infinitely. If you’re getting vibes of Lambchop’s “Song that Doesn’t End,” you’re on the right track… only more nonsensical. The video features a bunch of badgers with cutaways to a mushroom and a snake in the desert, all the while a dance beat and voiceover provide a song that just describes what is onscreen. It seems silly to try and describe what the video is, considering how simple and ridiculous it is.

The video was created by Jonti Picking of Weebl and Bob fame, and it was released in 2003. The video became so popular that it helped to earn Picking’s website a People’s Choice Award. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Picking in 2008 and has gotten more than 28 million views since then. The video also inspired many fan-made videos of people reenacting the dance that the badgers perform, one of them being mine.^[5]

Memorable quote: “Badger (x12), mushroom (x2), a snake, a snake, ohh, it’s a snake.”

5 Salad Fingers

So far, most of the animations discussed have been bright and silly, even if the subject matter has been a little dark. Salad Fingers is the opposite of all that. It’s visually dark and dreary and covers equally dark and creepy topics. Salad Fingers is a thin, green man with a creepy disposition and possibly mental issues. I mean, in the introductory episode, Salad Fingers tells the audience that the feeling of rusty spoons against his salad fingers is almost orgasmic. So yeah, he’s an odd fellow. As of now, 12 episodes follow Salad Fingers through life in the desolate, post-apocalyptic world he inhabits.

Salad Fingers is definitely an outlier on this list, highlighting the creepy and disturbing over humor. Still, we have to look at the time it was released to understand its virality. The first episode was released in 2004. Hot Topic was exploding in popularity in malls across America, emo music was surging, the Nightmare Before Christmas was experiencing a renaissance, and works like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac were becoming cult classics. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Salad Fingers’s disturbing dystopia has been viewed over 110 million times on YouTube and screened at multiple international short film festivals. The creator, David Firth, has even created a new episode this year, so the creepiness is still going strong.^[6]

Memorable quotes: “Hubert Cumberdale, you taste like soot and poo!” “I like rusty spoons.”

7 Happy Tree Friends

Disturbing, but in a totally different kind of way, Happy Tree Friends takes the concept of a children’s cartoon like Tom and Jerry or Tiny Toons and moves the needle from cartoon violence to bloody gore. Think Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons but with cuter characters and more cruel depravity. The series relies on the cognitive dissonance and shock value of cute cartoons committing and receiving extreme acts of violence. Most episodes begin with the mundane lives of these adorable woodland creatures until an event, like a balloon popping and triggering a bear’s PTSD or a beaver tripping and falling onto his lollipop eye first, causes violence to ensue.

Created by Rhode Montijo, Aubrey Ankrum, and Kenn Navarro of Mondo Media, the first short was released in 1999. The cartoon quickly grew to the point that they were viewed 15 million times each month. The success was so exponential that Happy Tree Friends even got its own television series that premiered in 2006. The show has also won numerous awards, and some of the characters were also featured in a Fall Out Boy music video. Currently, there hasn’t been an addition to the series since 2016, but the show hasn’t officially ended either. So there’s still hope to see a cute woodland creature get mutilated, thank God.^[7]

Memorable quotes: the sounds of cute creatures getting mutilated.

3 Charlie the Unicorn

Another divisive entry on the list is Charlie the Unicorn. Like the Badger Song, people tend to either love Charlie the Unicorn or absolutely hate it. After losing almost all his possessions in Hurricane Katrina and moving to Orlando, Jason Steele did not have much to give his mother on her birthday, so he created a unicorn-themed Flash animation. The animation features Charlie, a pessimistic, rough-around-the-edges unicorn who gets approached by two overly cheerful unicorns that tell him they have found a way to get to Candy Mountain. The adventure becomes increasingly nonsensical until the end when Charlie is double-crossed by the two unicorns and wakes up in a meadow where he realizes his kidneys have been removed.

The proud mother posted the animation to Newgrounds, where it gained a lot of traction and was eventually released on YouTube, where it currently has 68 million views from its original upload and 37 million views from its official release. While many people were annoyed by the falsetto-voiced, overly cheerful unicorns, many found themselves identifying with Charlie as he is often annoyed by his compatriots and ends up getting taken advantage of.

The video achieved such a high level of popularity that it even made its way into the music video of Weezer’s song “Pork and Beans.” It is wild to think that such a work of surreal and nonsensical humor could result from such a tragedy as Hurricane Katrina, but given the dark undertones of the plot, maybe the evidence was there all along.^[8]

Memorable quotes: “Charlieeee! Heeeeey, hey Charlieee!” “Shun the non-believer!”

2 Gröûp X

This one is more of a collaborative effort among Gröûp X and various online animators. The group bills itself as a Saudi Arabian rap rock group from the fictional town of Cramshananteen. Their music can be described as joke songs featuring vocalists with silly accents over basic drum beats. Unfortunately, that is about all I could really dig up on the group because what really made them blow up were the fan-made music videos that were uploaded to sites like Newgrounds and Albinoblacksheep. Three videos, in particular, managed to go viral: “Bang Bang Bang,” “Schfifty Five,” and “Mario Twins.” Each video was stylistically similar, portraying the band as stick figures and roughly acting out the lyrics to the songs.

Currently, each video on YouTube has over 500,000 views, with the video for Schfifty Five having 10 million views over 15 years. The combination of funny accents, basic drum beats, crude animations, and silly lyrics about only looking for carnal love (Bang Bang Bang), counting all the way to Schfifty Five (Schfifty Five), and how the Mario Bros. are difficult to tell apart (Mario Twins), make the videos quirky, quotable, and extremely accessible. As a testament to the popularity of these videos, the spell check on my computer does not mark the word schfifty.^[9]

Memorable quote: “I know how to count all the way to Schfifty Five, and I can do it faster than you can say ‘poopty peupty pants.’”

1 The Spirit of Christmas

The Spirit of Christmas is very similar to the Dancing Baby animation in that the virality of the animation wasn’t about how many people saw it but who saw it and spread it. The Spirit of Christmas is a 1992 animation short made from construction paper and depicts four boys reenacting the Frosty the Snowman story. However, once Frosty comes to life, he begins a violent rampage and ends up killing two of the boys. The remaining boys seek the help of Jesus, who uses his halo to cut off Frosty’s hat. The boys then reflect on the true meaning of Christmas: presents.

The animation was discovered by Brian Graden, a Fox executive who commissioned the creators of the short to make a sequel that he could send as a video Christmas card to his friends. The follow-up featured Jesus and Santa Claus physically fighting over the true meaning of Christmas until the four boys intervene. The video ends with the boys deciding to be Jewish in order to get more presents over the eight nights of Hanukkah.

I have left out a key detail of this story that will give you an idea about why this animation was so influential: the creators of the Spirit of Christmas animations were none other than Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. The interest from Fox led Trey and Matt to further develop the characters and themes and pitch the show to the network. Unfortunately, the network denied the pitch, notably because of a character that was an anthropomorphized piece of feces.

The animations began to spread via bootleg copies throughout the internet and eventually made their way to Comedy Central, which picked up the show. The first episode of South Park premiered in 1997 and immediately took off, becoming the behemoth it is today. Currently, South Park has 318 episodes, one film, and multiple video games and is still going strong. In many ways, the Spirit of Christmas was a harbinger of the early internet animations discussed above: crude artwork, vulgar but extremely quotable dialogue, and dark humor.^[10]

Memorable quote: “Oh my God! Frosty killed Kenny!”