Wait a minute, wait a minute, WAIT A MINUTE!!!
The word “meme” is being hugely misapplied here.
What everyone is talking about is urban legends. Since when is this the same thing as a “meme” as that term is used to refer to internet phenomena?
Memes are things like the lolcat, trollface, “all your base,” etc.
I was going to say that the “Kilroy Was Here” guy was an example of a pre-internet meme.
There were two I can remember as a kid.
One was razor blades left in a waterslide. That freaked me out a bit. Turns out it almost certainly wasn’t true.
The other was Coke dissolves a tooth overnight, which even at age 7 I thought was no proof of anything. If it happens at all, any sugary acidic drink is going to do it, including orange juice (which at the time was heavily touted as the healthy alternative).
Oh, there was something about swallowing chewing gum as being dangerous for your intestines, but that never panned out to be anything either.
I’m such a dyed-in-the-wool descriptivist that I feel terribly guilty pointing this out. But goddammit, “meme” is such a cool idea, and there’s no other word that remotely means “meme”, and I want to protect it. Unfortunately, its two main definitions as commonly used seem to be:
The original meaning of the word–of an idea that replicates itself similar to how a gene replicates itself–gets lost in the mix.
Thus my first completely smartass post in this thread.
I think it’s the title of the thread that is the problem. The actual OP is definitely asking for Urban Legends.
Well, an argument can be made that an urban legend is a subset of a meme. It certainly seems to fulfill many, if not all, of the properties of a meme. They are a unit of cultural transmission, they self-replicate, they evolve.
Weird how that one mutated from the truth. It starts with the banning of Amaranth (Red No. 2) as a food coloring in the US. Concerns over any red dye as a possible carcinogen caused M&M to stop producing red ones, even though they didn’t use Amaranth. I recall someone who had a stockpile of them (maybe as a collector’s item?) . Somehow that eventually shifted to “Blue M&Ms are poisonous” by the time it reached your neighborhood.
Also, Amaranth is not definitively carcinogenic, M&M never stopped using red dye (since they still used it to make other colors, and eventually they brought back the red ones, so it’s almost as if there was never anything to it.
An urban legend is just that, a legend; it has a narrative, if a simple one, and usually some kind of moral or lesson.
A meme - an “internet meme,” as we use this term nowadays - is not a story or any kind of point to be made, it’s just a thing, something that looks humorous and memorable, and then is usually altered by lots of people into many different versions.
An urban legend exhibits meme-like properties, and some sociologists (I don’t know if all do, I only remember “meme” from an undergrad sociology class in the mid-90s) do classify an urban legend as a type of meme.
I suppose if you want to be precise, you can say an urban legend is a way of transmitting memes (like “strangers want to poison your candy on Halloween”) rather than being a subset of memes.
Argent Towers - would the peace symbol, the Anarchy symbol or the “silence=death” logo count under your definition of memes?
As for the OP’s request for urban legends, I heard most of the already mentioned ones, but a few more that deserve repeating:
A plane is returning from the Carribbean to the States. The luggage handlers are unloading the luggage and notice a dog transport cage that was in the cargo hold. They realize the dog is dead. Fearing a lawsuit from the dogs’ owners, they rush out and buy a dog that looks exactly like it. (The dog just happens to be a remarkably common type of dog apparently.) They put the identical “twin” dog in the cage, and truck it out to the owner hoping she’ll accept it as her own. When the dog’s owner sees the cage with the dog in it, she shrieks. “That’s not my dog! When I boarded this plane, my dog was DEAD! I was taking it home to bury it on my land!”
A young couple take their toddler to Disneyworld. While walking through a crowded plaza, the couple lose sight of their baby girl:dubious:. The frantic couple tell a park employee that they lost their baby daughter. Within ten minutes, the whole of Disneyworld is shut down, all exits save one are sealed up, and every last patron of the park is made to leave through this one exit. Standing at the gate, the worried mother notices a woman carrying a sleeping baby boy (apparently), but the baby is wearing the one-of-a-kind booties that “grandma” had sewn! It turns out, the woman (sometimes with the help of a man) had snatched the kid, chloroformed the baby & attempted to smuggle it out of the park by cutting her hair short & dressing it in boy clothes.
Phil Collins was standing on a cliffside, looking through binoculars, and saw in the distance a man drowning - and another man in a nearby rowboat doing nothing to save him! The drowning man perishes, and the man in the boat rows away. This of course irked Phil’s righteous sense of justice, so what did he do? Call the police? No. Phil calls a Private Investigator, tracks down the man in the rowboat, and - sends him front row tickets to his next concert! Before the concert takes place, Phil writes a very special song “Something In the Air” that mentions the incident. And on the night of the concert, the lights go down, Phil takes the stage and says “I’ve written a new song, for one very special member of the audience.” All the lights go down, save two spotlights - one shines on the guilty Rowboat Man, and the other on Phil, who points at the man accusatively as he sings..
The last one is my all-time favorite.
Truck-sized catfish live at the bottom of the dam of ____ Lake.
Insane Asylum patient helps guy changing flat who’d lost the lugnuts by telling him to use one lugnut from each of the other tires. Then says “I’m crazy, not stupid.”
Marilyn Manson had ribs surgically removed so he could blow himself.
I heard this one too, only it was about the cable company. They could tell if you were stealing cable. They could also tell if a minor was watching an R-rated movie on HBO (this was at a time when HBO was brand new, uncensored, R-rated movies on TV were a shocking novelty, VCR’s didn’t even exist yet, much less the internet, and 12 year old boys were drawn to the allure of HBO boobies like moths to a flame).
I also remember the McWorm burgers, the pop rocks, Rod Stewart/Elton John getting their stomachs pumped, either Frank Zappa or Alice Cooper eating a shit sandwich on stage, and Ozzy Osbourne cutting up live cows (or sheep or pigs) with a chainsaw in concert.
I think memes are generally lighthearted or sarcastic, not serious or heartfelt. The smiley face is sort of a primitive meme; the people who put it on shirts accompanied by phrases like “go fuck yourself” were definitely turning it into a meme by inverting its intention. The marijuana leaf symbol might be a meme. Parodies of well-known advertising images were definitely memes.
Version I got was old lady who alternately either dries her dog in the microwave, or attempts to “pre-heat” her microwave.
Or we became the source of them…
HONEST TO GOD THIS IS A TRUE STORY BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE A THING TO DO WITH BOOKS/MOVIES/ETC
As y’all know, back in 1978 two Popes died within a month, month-and-a-half of each other, Paul VI and John Paul I. During this time, I had a friend who lived on my block, Lisa Hunter (not her real name), and she and her mom read and totally believed such tabloids as The National Enquirer, The Sun, etc… and this was back in the days when they were photographing corpses, driving up hysteria about the Chariots of the Gods, the Bermuda Triangle, and Miracle Cures of Cancer Just Discovered by Norwegian Scientists.
And Lisa and her mom just believed this stuff, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I tried to reason with her about it, but we were in the seventh grade and I wasn’t the smooth persuader that I am today.
Regardless, the Popes died, and a day or so later after JP1 goes, an idea pops into my head: What if I tell Lisa and her mom that there’s a Catholic prophecy that says if two Popes die within 35 days of each other, the world will end the following week, at noon, on Friday?
So I told Lisa. And Lisa believed it and ran home to mom to spread the “prophecy.”
I didn’t think much of it after a day or so, but the next Wednesday, some kid (can’t remember who) comes up to me on the playground and asks if I heard the news that the world was going to end this Friday during lunch. Not believing what I just heard, I asked the kid “Why?” “Oh, something about the Popes dying” was his response.
I was at lunch when Friday rolled around, and by then I had heard about the prophecy from a couple of other kids (a sense of self-preservation, rarely listened-to, told me to keep my mouth shut on this one). The lunchroom was typically ear-splittingly loud, and by this time of the year the tables in the lunchroom had already been claimed by the various “student organizations” - the popular kids, the black kids, the shop kids, the asshole kids… we had the option of eating in the hall, which I occasionally chose - but not this day.
I got my food and grabbed a seat near the teachers (who sat on a stage - the Midvale Elementary lunch room doubled as the school auditorium), and kept an eye on the clock, placed above the serving line.
As we neared noon, starting around 11:57, the noise peaked and then started dying, as more and more kids stopped talking and started looking at the clock. Most of the kids had heard the story by then, and those who hadn’t were brought up to speed by their seatmate. The teachers noticed something was up (I have no doubts that some of them had heard of the prophecy), and they, too, grew quiet as their interest sharpened on the roomful of now-silent kids.
The clock slowly rolled past 11:59… Lisa started crying, causing a teacher to rush down to comfort her. Looking around, I saw that the majority of the kids were looking at the clock, the others looking around, but nobody was talking in a normal tone of voice.
It was damn eerie, and I kept thinking I f*ing started this! The clock finally went past noon, and after a few seconds I started hearing breaths being taken, voices coming back online, and the general hubbub start up again.
Looking at the teachers, I remember seeing Miss Bowen (" ‘Mrs. Bowen’ was my mother", was her tagline) lean over to the principal and ask “What the hell was that?”
People will just believe any damned-fool thing, and you don’t need the internet to spread it.
A couple I remember hearing (late 70s, early 80s):
…
A woman sits down in a train carriage opposite a sleeping girl with a man either side of her. At the next stop, another man sits next to her, and starts doing a crossword. After a few minutes, he asks the woman for help with a clue. She looks at the crossword, and sees that he’s written, “Get off at the next stop: that girl is dead.”
That was told to me by a girl who would go on to be my main source of chain emails, until I was incredibly patronising about her belief that a picture of a floating girl couldn’t have been doctored in any way.
i guess. i was introduced to the word “meme” by my econ prof about 5-6 years ago when we were discussing socialization, and how culture affects actions, and that behavioral econ is a fascinating though “fuzzy” study.
anyway, the use of “meme” in that context was within the context of meme theory, and how ideas were memes rather than just viral photos. i applied that definition to… urban legends since they are ideas that stick around and to some degree make themselves fact. i don’t check phone booth change slots anymore, i still don’t drink mountain dew, and every time i bite into a taco bell bean burrito, i get uneasy even though rationally i know that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
so i feel justified in using the word meme, but if some Mod changed it to “pre-internet urban legends” i wouldn’t raise a fuss over it.
And of course somewhere in this wide world of ours is a dog who faithfully walks to the bus/train stop to wait for his master every day… the master who has been dead for 5 years.
Poor doggy… :sniff: 
Not urban legend. My daughter loves the statue in Shibuya.
