{"id":10166,"date":"2017-10-30T06:45:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T14:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/30\/news-3939\/"},"modified":"2017-10-30T06:45:08","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T14:45:08","slug":"news-3939","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/30\/news-3939\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Skeleton Memes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Credit to Author: Roisin Kiberd| Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2017 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you been spooked by the spooky skilenton? The poorly-spelled copypasta<\/a>, accompanied by a dancing ASCII ghoul, has been knocking around online since roughly 2012<\/a>, appearing on Steam’s forums<\/a> before migrating to YouTube and Twitch.<\/p>\n

The Spooky Skelinton is only one of an army of undead memes which populate the web. Today skeletons are no longer hidden in closets, or confined safely to the grave. They’re all over the internet, singing, dancing, and acting as memetic memento mori<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Skeletons are a meme in the purest sense: They continue to self-replicate without growing outdated. But why is it that they keep coming back? Do they address our fears of mortality, in a culture fixated on youth and everything new? Do they reveal that the one thing which unites us online is our mortality? Or could it just be that skeletons look really cool as ASCII art<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Popular far beyond the Halloween season, what follows is a brief timeline of the meme which refuses to die (and likely never will\u2026after all, it’s already dead):<\/p>\n

90s-2000s: <\/b> The Skeleton Dance<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

1996 saw the release of the ‘Spooky Scary Skeletons’ song, performed by musician Andrew Gold on a children’s album titled Halloween Howls.<\/i> The song lives on today as a viral YouTube clip, often accompanied<\/a> by ‘the skeleton dance’, a gently weird, oddly hypnotic cartoon produced by Disney in 1929. <\/p>\n

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