A MEME Triggered an International Incident | Nostalgia Nerd

1997 a dark year that marks the beginning of a torrent of hate and abuse a campaign forged by a once friendly and well-loved children's tv presenter known mainly by his extreme and unwavering monobrow it was in this year that the singular brown star would suddenly split from his long-term screen companion ernie and his little yellow ducky to go rogue what followed was perhaps the most evil ever witnessed throughout all of history all recorded on the early internet tonight find out just why bert is evil [Music] it's weird to think that bert started off in 1969 as a lovable hapless yet grouchy character on the children's tv show sesame street just meandering through his day in a way that so many of us can relate to would be somewhat imperious ernie to help him maybe it was that uneasy power play with ernie which made bert go of course i can hardly blame him but to be fair burt always felt a bit evil didn't he like there was something just beneath his persona something darker just waiting to creep out like a serial killing nightmare just look at him here driving those unwitting children to their doom they have no idea of the peril therein the poor idiots so a few months on when photos like this started emerging on the early internet maybe it wasn't that surprising he was bound to end up in the tabloids for something but march 1997 was really just the start of a slippery slope a slope so slippery that by the naughties bert found himself paraded around as osama bin laden's right hand man [Music] no wonder then that this whole thing was gagged by the sesame street producers the children's television workshop but that isn't how it began and hello fresh isn't how it began either but it's how this video is going to begin yes thank you to hellofresh for sponsoring this content now no matter what's happening in the world or on the internet we've all got to eat and hellofresh makes everything less stressful and more tasty with each box you get a selection of fresh ingredients all measured out and simple to follow recipes choose your preferences select the number of people and you're already halfway there there are options for everyone including family friendly quick fit and wholesome and veggie which is essential for plant munchers like me what's also essential for people like me is the wide variety of quick and easy recipes to minimize prep and make cleanup hassle-free hellofresh has more 5 star reviews than any other meal kit and what's more it's also the first carbon neutral meal kit company use my link or go to hellofresh.com and use code pog nostalgia july 16 for 16 free meals across seven boxes and three free gifts this slope starts with fractalcow.com you remember that right launching at the beginning of 1996 this early website was the work of one dino ignacio everything from the art design concepts and general content are all attributed to this one man this website had a scope much bigger than the sum of its parts held within were an array of links or leading to something exciting or progressively more obscure than the last for example random access is a bit like stumbleupon in fact you press the red button and get taken to a random website that was pretty useful in these early days of underdeveloped search engines through the eyes of a cow provides a list of images such as milk does your body good other stuff provided links to alien information the cia chris and mike's page hall of annoying buttons not only played this lovely ditty on entering but also provided an array of buttons which upon clicking would email the said person a message saying hello how are you this might have not been much of a problem apart from the fact that fractal cow was a pretty popular site the archived counter from march 97 is stuck on 367 217 visits but in reality it would have been a lot higher than this that's a lot of people back then and i'm sure wesley snipes would attest to that you can even see a directory of nasty comments submitted to the site most of which seem to actually be nice comments or you can pay a visit to laverne the virtual cow but amongst all this was that little face but [Music] the bertie's evil webpage didn't look all that different from your typical conspiracy theory site of the time red text on a black background a banner visit account even a mixture of disparate fonts but the content was very different from the norm to a point where it was almost was it believable we have reason to believe that bert of sesame street is evil and you should keep your children away from him here in these pages are collected incriminating images and documents that prove that bert is not the lovable harmless geek he so successfully makes us think he is a warning underneath informs us that this page has been brought to you by the letter h and the cia this mug shot is the o.g bert is evil image pulled we are told directly from the files of the san francisco police department but what's a mug shot without the evidence that put him there looking through the image archive the full horror becomes known here we find bert at the assassination of john f kennedy with sources claiming that lee harvey oswald and bert were friends in korea here we find bert pushing his seedy lifestyle onto ernie ernie is of course a gasp and apparently went home crying here he is standing right next to hitler apparently he was one of his most diabolical generals some say he was a clone or ancestor of birds rather than the bird we know and love of course there are many other photos some show deplorable acts others show connections with people considered problematic at the time then there's the image with mr hooper now mr harald hooper was one of the first humans to appear on sesame street making his first appearance in november 1969 he ran the local convenience store and cafe the main place for muppet interaction sadly the actor who played him will lee died in december 1982 at the age of 74. rather than recasting the role the children's television workshop decided to have the much-loved mr hooper pass away as well introducing the concept of death to many of its young audience for the very first time i'm gonna miss you mr looper however rather than suffering a heart attack has posited in the press here it was alleged that bert was the man responsible blurring the lines between bert outside of a tv show and his life within the story goes that richard pryor was a user of crack cocaine with bert acting as his supplier mr hooper found out and being a good man wouldn't tolerate it and so bert decided to hush him rather than face the consequences i told you this was dark and we are not even at the bottom because this repository of stories and evidence didn't end here it grew it grew month on month until it got out of control but before we get there let's go back to this guy dino ignacio he kindly agreed to speak to me during the making of this video to fill in the blanks and correct some misconceptions dino was a 21 year old fine art student when he first conceived of fractal cow in 1995 armed with the html editor hotdog you remember that and a pirated copy of photoshop 4 the premise which really came to fruition by 1996 was quite simple he just wanted to make a couple of friends laugh but that idea quickly grew larger into a place to share art and stories on a web that badly needed an injection of comedy remember this was before frog in a blender hamster dance and anything else like that after the initial start a few other collaborators joined dino including victor j zulun ross gilbert route rainders and jasper holschoff pole this entertaining site then quickly became a doorway to other sites and content a home page if you will to combat the insipid dryness of offerings from the likes of aol and compuserve remember this was way before we all bundled onto a search engine to find what we needed this was an internet navigated by links and discovery things were more exploratory back then it was also before lawsuits were commonplace everywhere companies were just a bit more relaxed in fact the children's television workshop had no problem with the burt is evil parody site and actually found it funny or at least they did at this point dino told me that they even sent him a photo of the cork board from their office break room featuring an image of bert is evil across it everything was in good humor although dino had joked about the worst case scenario right from the start when first creating the burt is evil page he wrote this message a message to the children's television workshop dino is good hello ctw if you guys have seen this page you must be at this very moment gathering all the information you can about me and preparing your lawyers to sue me let me make your job a little easier and tell you about myself my name is dino ignacio i'm a 22 year old freelance graphic designer i come from the philippines i run a design studio called fractal cow studio i design websites and album covers and stuff it pays good money but it's not as fun as playing around my personal site bert is evil is my current favorite of all the stuff i have made it exercises my skills in graphic manipulation and it's a damn great way to release frustrations i don't really hate bert or think he is evil in fact he's my favorite sesame street character i grew up on this show i do hate elmo though if you're wondering why i'm doing this well it's because i was greatly affected by the death of mr hooper how could you kill him i was seven years old it hit me harder than the death of my grandma a year before you scarred me for life and i will forever be lost so go ahead sue me just know that there was a reason for my madness i am not evil just disturbed dino ignacio in the making of this video dino told me that aside from mr hooper mr t ate my balls one of the original internet memes and the tabloid the weekly world news inspired him to create burt is evil has he loved to be reality distorting stories it dished up [Music] by the end of 1997 the site had already gained some notoriety from papers writing about wacky web pages such as the sydney morning herald and featured on sites such as tui and beyond weird but things started to shift dramatically in 1998 when bert is evil won what was regarded as the oscars of the web the weird category of the 98 webby awards sponsored in part by cool site of the day what a sight that was fighting off competition from the onion the crash site museum of dirt and blair this is really the point at which bert is evil entered the mainstream internet and the cost of running the site became critically expensive anyone who remembers the 90s internet will know that links are important we found sites through links from other sites that meant going to places like internet underground and trawling through all manner of horrendous sites until we found one we liked the early internet might have been fun but good god it was also a cesspool it's like every depraved person came out of their corner and went hey now i can finally express myself but the point is more news more links and more sharing via email the social media of the day equated to more traffic more traffic of course costs more money to run and you have to remember dino wasn't making cash out of fractal cow or bert whatsoever by his own admission he didn't even know how to at this point the internet was still this quirky playground of interest and expression rather than the capitalist hellscape of today well unless you made money from gif porn banners that is shortly after the awards dino would post a statement over the past two years bert is evil has been the highest hitting part of fractalcow.com we have received tons of mail both negative and positive we have been featured in other websites radio shows tv shows and newspapers the world over we received countless awards including the webby award for weirdest site of 1998. the support from all of you has been tremendous thank you all this exposure has generated so many hits that we can no longer afford to keep the site up simplenet.net the server fractalcow.com is sitting on is now charging us two hundred dollars a month to keep the site up instead of twenty dollars they say this is due to the fact that we are using their resources too much berta's evil alone generates an average of eight thousand hits a day simplenet.net can no longer host bert is evil at the low-cost plan we have maintained for close to three years so fractalcow.com has to bid farewell to bert from now on berta's evil will be sitting on mirror servers and so you might think that this is the point where bert finally finished being evil but it was not supplying the whole site as a zip file really made burt is evil a proto meme being shared far and wide across the pre-social media web this of course meant it wasn't just an image being shared this was an entire website being duplicated and duplicate it did being mirrored everywhere soon after dino's message was updated to read since we put the site up for adoption we've received over 60 mirror sites thank you so much for all the support to the other people who have offered mirrors i'll put up your links later we seem to have enough but feel free to list them on search engines as a registered burtis evil mirror and so following in the footsteps of its inspiration mr t ate my balls bert was now all over the internet the original page then went offline for a brief period of time before resurfacing in the latter part of 1999. the mirror sites had provided some respite for the simple net server breathing room if you will so once the traffic had been diluted and dissipated the original was resurrected once more but with this solution came a new problem but was now something unwieldy and huge something with many tentacles and some of them were worse than the monster that spawned them now faced with hundreds of mirrored sights each one began taking on a persona of its own one which dino couldn't control each mirror differed in its content some only slightly but others were much bolder it's hard to pinpoint exactly where the darkness spread from most but perhaps the most famous of these is bert is evil dot tv featuring a huge array of photographic and anecdotal evidence if it is indeed photoshopping or paint shop throwing for the shareware devotees but it had now reached a point where it was completely and utterly undetectable i mean is he actually with pamela anderson there impossible to tell in fact a lot became impossible to tell things had taken a step further and got so out of hand that ernie also found himself in on this evil action and in fact had apparently been in right from the start we just didn't know ernie in an apparent jealous rage killed olive bird's pigeons he then went down to mr hooper's market and attempted to sell them to mr hooper as capen chickens but it was here where things also really started to get weird this image from october 2001 just one month after 9 11 depicts bert with osama bin laden this top secret picture obtained by the msnbc and now in sole possession by the u.s government was intercepted by my man in the field j rowan the thing is bert is evil.tv was really just an aggregator site pulling in all the evil images from past sites and this image was actually originally found on mirror site 001 back in 1998 back then its evil context still related to the twin towers but not 9 11. rather evidence that surfaced in 1998 that bin laden may have had ties to the 1993 parking garage bombing but his evil dot tv just happened to be front and center as the horrors of 9 11 broke and this image resurfaced for all the wrong reasons emotions were naturally raw anger levels were high and this image was perhaps taken too literally by sun pakistan foreign tv quickly updated with this message appearing on the site newsflash this picture has been in the news a lot lately but now it has been used by pro-taliban demonstrators something we've never anticipated it was major news in all the big news sites want to know where the fuzz is about check this page the mystery of the bert bin laden connection evolves with more images coming in every day is this a big hoax has somebody got too much time or is somebody in bangladesh trying to confuse the world or is the answer to be found at reuters fact is that more and more photos of pro taliban demonstrations show up around the world posters carried by demonstrators clearly show birth with osama bin laden it's reuters that are selling these bert photos while associated press have photos of the same poster without bert this could imply that reuters have been set up with manipulated images but it could be the other way around yes seen at an anti-american protest in bangladesh this is an actual poster used by pro taliban demonstrators showing bin laden with bert you couldn't make this up it propagated many prominent news outlets at the time including in europe and america and really forms the nexus point for the whole bert is evil debacle here an internet proto meme had been sensationalized by the mainstream media for the very first time and it did not go unnoticed by dino or anyone else involved but is evil tv goes on to state the poster was most likely thrown together blindly by someone with images nicked from the web whoever did this either had absolutely no idea who bert was or had an evil sense of humor the first known bert bin laden posters appeared on october 5th in dhaka and photographs of them were printed by the dutch news service the associated press and reuters news services the posters recently could be seen at demonstrations in bangladesh indonesia and even palestine reuters spokeswoman felicia cosby said the photos were authentic i don't know if they're mass producing these posters but what i can say is that it is definitely our policy not to doctor photographs associated press spokesman jack stokes said the ap photographs were also untouched we haven't changed the photo at all he said we have very strict editing guidelines a spokesman from the official bert is evil dot tv portal who wants to stay anonymous because of possible repercussions from the al qaeda network says they distributed the image of bert and bin on purpose on the internet hoping for stupid mistakes like this well that worked out just fine the exact reasons for bert's appearance on the poster were initially unknown but a snopes investigation found that the posters were printed by a shop in dhaka called azad products mustafa kamal who ran the shop said we did not give the pictures a second look or realise what they signified until pointed out to us it was reported that around 2000 of these posters were printed off for demonstrators angry over the u.s led attacks on afghanistan with footage of those demonstrations making its way onto news outlets worldwide so what seems to be absolutely crazy to sesame street viewers in the west actually turned out to have quite a simple answer really it's an incredible example of convergence culture of information flowing across the internet and media outlets meeting different audiences who extrapolate it in different ways and in 2001 it really began to demonstrate how much of an impact the internet could make it also led to two things the first was a resurgence of a story about bin laden in fact being an out of work puerto rican actor who was just manipulated by bert into the role of a terrorist the second more expected was the wave of absolute panic and fear which whipped through the once calm children's television workshop offices it was like the penny had finally and brutally dropped for them about how influential this new internet thingy could be and the last thing a children's tv company wants is to be associated with the world's most evil villain i mean bin laden not bert in this case a statement was rapidly issued sesame street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding we are outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner this is not at all humorous the people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves we are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future so what had been a light-hearted joke was now deadly serious an image from 1998 had come back and bit everyone's ass in an unexpected way behind the scenes dino reports that he was incredibly scared and began getting threatening calls and emails now given he was just an international student in the us at the time he wasn't really prepared for any of this ctw very politely asked him to take the site down of course and from dino's perspective this was a no-brainer but he only really had responsibility over the original page still which didn't even have the bin laden image on it by october the 11th 2001 bert is evil disappeared replaced by this message i have taken down the berta's evil site from my server i would like to thank sesame workshop for their patience and restraint all these years i implore all fans and mirror sight hosts of bert is evil to stop the spread of this site too this is not selling out i was not bullied i am not being a [ __ ] i am doing this because i feel this has gotten too close to reality and i choose to be responsible enough to stop it right here i want to thank all the fans who laughed with me all these years thank you to the mirosites who continued the legacy beyond what i started thanks to victor j zwielen n ross gilbert walt reindes and jasper holschoff pol who helped me build the site back in the early days thank you to tiffany shlain and the webby awards team for believing in me many thanks to the press who have helped me get my site noticed specifically the now defunct magazines internet underground and the web thank you to lloyd kaufman and the dot-com staff who brought fractal cow back to life i hope my other projects will receive an ounce of the appreciation you all showed bert is evil thank you very much dino ignacio dino hoped that this would be the end of the matter but flooded with messages he would soon find himself having to post an update just four days later in response to all of you who have emailed me criticizing my decision to kill the site i post this email i wrote to one of you i really appreciate you writing to me in all honesty it was a very hard decision to make i literally killed a part of myself today if fractal cal represents different parts of my psyche i just killed the rebellious part of my soul today in lieu of the part that dictates to be responsible my main motivation in killing the site is that i hope it helps stop the idea from germinating any more into the mainstream i fear that it may destroy the character's credibility with children i cannot allow that to happen i myself grew up on sesame street and it was an important part of my childhood birth is evil and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media this issue throws it out in the open with articles emails and news websites referring to it children are bound to hear about it i think i had to draw the line there it really sucks i hate part of myself right now you actually are giving voice to that rebellious punk in me i appreciate you doing that but the punk boy has to succumb for the moment don't worry there's more where it came from dino and so ended burt's evil reign at least in an official sense many of the mirrors also went offline out of respect to dino's request however some remained including the infamous bert is evil dot tv one of the longest running of the mirror sights probably due to making so much money from aforementioned pawn banners still the gesture seemed enough to appease children's television workshop and the message distanced sesame street from the depraved reality of bert's evil deeds after all who would they sue anyway the people carrying the protest sign i'm sure that will go down well with a group of anti-american protesters other mirrors would go on to posit other characters as being evil barbie is bad being one of the forerunners seemingly imagining barbie as the borg queen alongside a depraved catalogue of her sex life with ken spelt with an h for clarity and to avoid the legal shenanigans of the past it didn't take long after that for all manner of other kids tv characters to get involved in this evil action either the original bert may have gone but it sent a wave around the web but still lapping our shores today besides these mirror sights evolving bert's evil had made its impact in other ways by 2003 the brilliance musical comedy avenue q premiered off broadway at the vineyard theater featuring parodies of sesame street characters but with real world problems including roommates rod and nikki who are very clearly takes on bert and ernie yep bert is evil had definitely made its mark well outside the confines of the internet but it had also changed how the internet was perceived by the world it was no longer this frivolous playground it was a place of consequence and potentially dire consequences ignore it at your peril as for dino oh he went on to achieve greatness in many fields i asked him what he's been up to and he told me i have since been working in the entertainment technology industry i spent about a decade and a half in video games vr and metaverse companies i am currently a senior design manager at roblox dino considers that bert is evil was one of the first attempts to use the internet as a medium for fake news and i totally agree with him on that because this was much more than a meme it was much more than humor this was a whole new world created before our eyes and just another facet that made the internet such a wondrous and exciting place back then it was also certainly one of the very first memes and to prove it he sent me this image from a youtube meeting room called bert is evil yes that's the name of the meeting room apparently youtube have an array of meeting rooms named after the very first memes i don't know about you but i for one would love to block out mr t ate my balls for a day i'd like to say a big thanks to dino for helping me make this video he tells me that there may be scope for a burt is evil revival at some point in the near future so stay tuned for that if you're interested in checking out bert's past there are even still mirrors up today or if you're into it check out fractalcal.com on archive.org and whilst you're there donate to their course because the work they do is absolutely critical in maintaining our history and for videos that i make until next time i've been nostalgic nerd this guy has been bert and this one he's ernie toodles [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 116,551

Keywords: bert is evil, memes

Id: nReknkEB5qo

Length: 34min 54sec (2094 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022