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Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animated GIF of a cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space, trailing a rainbow, set to the endlessly looping Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP. Artist Christopher Torres created the animation during a Red Cross charity livestream on April 2, 2011; three days later YouTuber saraj00n paired it with the song, and the combination quickly became one of the biggest viral memes of the early 2010s. The original video pulled in over 205 million YouTube views and sparked games, merchandise, a Webby Award, and a landmark NFT sale worth nearly $600,000.

Doge is an internet meme built around photos of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, overlaid with colorful Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English. The format took off in 2013 after years of quiet spread across Tumblr and Reddit, earning Know Your Meme's "top meme" of the year[3]. Kabosu's sideways glance launched a cryptocurrency worth billions, inspired an NFT sale of over $4 million, and gave its name to a U.S. government department, making it one of the most consequential memes in internet history.

"It's a Trap!" is a catchphrase and reaction image based on Admiral Ackbar's famous line from the 1983 Star Wars film *Return of the Jedi*. The image macro version first appeared on Something Awful in the early 2000s and quickly spread to FARK, YTMND, 4chan, and YouTube, making it one of the most recognizable and long-lived memes from the early internet era. The phrase is used as a humorous warning about anything deceptive, misleading, or suspicious.

Caturday is the internet tradition of posting cat images and LOLcat memes every Saturday. The practice started on 4chan's /b/ board around 2005, spread through communities like LiveJournal and I Can Has Cheezburger, and turned into a weekly internet ritual still observed across social media. The hashtag #Caturday trends on Twitter most weekends, with users sharing photos and memes of their cats[1].

"All Star" is a 1999 rock song by Smash Mouth that became one of the internet's most enduring memes after its prominent use in the 2001 animated film *Shrek*. The song's iconic opening line, "Somebody once told me," launched thousands of remixes, mashups, covers, and parodies across YouTube, Reddit, and beyond. Written as an anthem for outcasts by guitarist Greg Camp, the track found a second life online in the 2010s through creators like Neil Cicierega and Jon Sudano, and the band themselves leaned into the joke.

Big Chungus is a meme built around a screenshot of an overweight Bugs Bunny from the 1941 cartoon *Wabbit Twouble*, typically presented as a fake PlayStation 4 game cover. The meme went viral in December 2018 after a GameStop employee shared a story about a customer trying to buy the nonexistent game. It became one of the defining absurdist memes of late 2018 and eventually received official recognition from Warner Bros.

Pepe the Frog is a cartoon frog character created by artist Matt Furie for his 2005 comic *Boy's Club*, best known for his catchphrase "feels good man." After 4chan users turned Pepe into one of the internet's most versatile reaction images in 2008, the character exploded into mainstream culture before being co-opted by alt-right groups during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leading the Anti-Defamation League to add him to its hate symbol database. Pepe's story is one of the most complex in meme history: an innocent stoner frog that became a political flashpoint, a legal battleground, and a global protest symbol.

Surprised Pikachu is a reaction image pulled from a 1997 episode of the Pokémon anime, showing Pikachu with wide eyes and an open mouth in a look of shock. First used as a meme on Tumblr in September 2018 by user popokko (Angela), it became the most-used meme of that year by pairing the image with scenarios where someone is "surprised" by a completely predictable outcome. A WIRED investigation into its viral trajectory raised questions about whether its November 2018 popularity spike was connected to the Detective Pikachu film marketing, though no definitive link was established.