In each edition of web_crawlr we have exclusive original content every day. On Saturday our Video Producer Kyle Calise explores the origins and history of the most iconic memes online in his “Meme History” column. If you want to read columns like this a day before everyone else, subscribe to web_crawlr to get your daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
To date, astronomers have discovered over 5,600 planets outside our solar system, and if our 8-planet solar system containing 288 moons is about average, one could expect there to be over 205,000 moons among those planets.
But what does this have to do with Doggo memes?
On April 5th, 2013, a post on Tumblr blog “Kitchiki’s Hangout” gave us our first instance of the phrase Moon Moon. It was part of a werewolf name generator—and by the rules of the generator, the poster’s werewolf name is Moon Moon.
That’s very silly. So much so that it reached 158,000 notes in two weeks, and over the next decade, ultimately reached nearly 900,000.
Moon Moon as a doggo-related-phrase was quickly recognized as being nearly as cute or derpy as earlier Cheems or Doge memes. So silly that it inspired other internet people to post their own wolf images accompanied by derpy Comic Sans captions in the vein of those earlier Doggo memes.
To prove the point, 10 days later the first meme visually tying it to the idea of a lovable idiot wolf was created. It was a reply to the original Tumblr post in which a pack of wolves ask each other why the dummy Moon Moon was invited along on their hunt. In line with the Doge that came before it, its text was written out in Comic Sans.
Moon Moon images differ from their canine relatives Doge and Cheems in that Moon Moon memes tend to tell a character-driven story—i.e. look at dummy Moon Moon ruining our hunt with his surplus of enthusiasm, whereas Doge memes are more often than not immediate and purely about the cuteness.
Moon Moon may have gradually faded into obscurity, but for an unrelated (at first) Gizmodo article.
Five years after Moon Moon was first created they published a story about astronomy generally, and exomoons—very large moons outside our solar system—specifically. The astronomy community had decided that, in theory, if a planet’s moon is big enough, it could have a sub-moon of its own.
You know where we’re going with this. They’re called Moonmoons.
This breathed new life into the idea of Moon Moon as a meme, and Moon Moon is showing no signs of going away. It has its own subreddit where there’s seemingly always a new meme ready for consumption, and cute cat and dog memes have always been and probably always will be a staple of internet comedy.
There’s really not a ton to overthink here, and luckily for Moon Moon himself, there really doesn’t have to be—he’s just cute.
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