

“I was just putting random clips together like I always did, and noticed the character Scratch doing this goofy face.

Mari was more focused on the visuals than on the audio when she produced it. The genesis of pingas, like many memes, is inauspicious and completely accidental. Midway through “Robotnik Has a Viagra Overdose,” Mari inserted a short clip from a Sonic episode called “Boogey-Mania.” In the original clip, two of the Robotnik’s henchmen are caught eavesdropping, and the villain (played by singer and voice actor Long John Baldry) remarks, “Snooping as usual, I see.” Mari cut this line down to the now-iconic phrase: “Pingas.” They have titles like “Robotnik Becomes Prime Minister,” “Robotnik and Mama Luigi get Naked and Watch Countdown!” and “Robotnik Overules a Banana.” Her most famous work, however, is called “Robotnik Has a Viagra Overdose.” Like that mysterious vandal, Mari’s YTPs often focus on the villain of the Sonic franchise, Doctor Robotnik. The only real thought process that I have is ‘If it doesn’t make me laugh, it won’t make anyone laugh.’” In short order, her YTPs started garnering attention.
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“I will normally just throw a bunch of Sonic episodes into my video-editing software and then just see where it takes me. “When it comes to creating a video, I don’t really plan anything ahead,” Mari says. “Someone had vandalized a Wikipedia article to say something along the lines of ‘Check out the video Robotnik on the Toilet,’ and of course me being a curious teenager I decided to do exactly that,” she recalled. Mari’s introduction to the format is a tale as old as time.

Her work almost always uses the Sonic series, which is a potent source of material thanks to its “over-the-top” voice acting and “great and incredibly lazy animation.” The YouTube Poop artist Stegblob, otherwise known as Mari, describes her videos this way: “An episode of Sonic but every time something happens, something else happens instead.” Clips often stutter or repeat, swapping between video sources with little internal logic, and often recontextualizing cheaply produced childrens’ entertainment in confusing or profane ways.
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Many YouTube Poop videos have common sources: old cartoons or commercials, among them, the mid-’90s animated TV series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. They can often be disconcerting and aggressively alienating (the use of intentionally harsh-sounding audio in YTP is known as “ear rape”). The videos often lack plot or story arcs, and instead are more like freestyle video remixing - creating a work that evokes a feeling more than a coherent narrative or thought.

YTP videos are difficult to define, but the general mode is to take existing media and distort it, editing clips so that it appears that characters are saying things that they did not or altering the meaning of scenes. In the mid-aughts, one of the most popular types of video on YouTube, alongside vloggers and makeup tutorials and comedy skits, was known as YouTube Poop. Nowadays, YouTube is a meme’s last stop before the graveyard. It is one of the best-known Sonic memes and a genuine YouTube-born phenomenon, from back in the days when YouTube could launch a meme. Pingas is the end result of a more ancient internet-content cycle, one that chewed up pop culture and mashed it into something unrecognizable and inexplicable.
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Will the movie be any good? Will the newly redesigned Sonic, which forced the film to be delayed for a couple of months, be worth the wait? Are we going to get to see iconic sidekick Tails? Perhaps most crucially, fans are wondering: Will Jim Carrey, as the evil Doctor Robotnik, say the word “pingas”? When the Sonic the Hedgehog movie lands in theaters this Friday, longtime fans will have many questions on their mind.
