Jeffery or Jeffrey?
Let's look at both. This is a followup to a previous post, and another.
Let's start at WhatIfSports (credit jwelsh1023):
[S]ome creative people, we're not sure who was first - started the trend of doctoring regular Internet culture images with the phrase, and trading them among friends. Quickly, people joined suit, and a whole culture of image manipulators began designing their own versions. Some good, some great, some lame... but almost all, very creative image manipulation.
At some point, Kansas City computer programmer and part-time deejay Jeffrey Ray Roberts sampled the quote and added an annoyingly catchy dance track. "I did it for the sheer inside-joke value," he says. "Everyone was trying to one-up each other." Next came a two-minute music video, and soon "All your base!" was being yelled out of dorm windows on campuses around the country....
San Francisco State University weighed in several years ago:
Jeffery Ray Roberts of suburban Kansas has made $300 from selling 150 of his shirts. But it was his early AYB contribution that has really paid.
Back in December, the Internet developer launched the AYB soundtrack under the alias The Laziest Men on Mar. Put together on a Sunday afternoon, he looped a robot-voiced "All Your Base" vocal to a maddening happy hardcore beat and as with any dance track, requisite remixes followed. By posting his song on mp3.com, he as accumulated 1/5 of a cent per hit in playback fees, or $10,000. Now he's just hoping mp3.com doesn't go out of business before they can pay up. "They only have one advertiser," he notes nervously. If mp3.com comes through like they should, he will not only recieve $10,000 for the last quarter year, but he will continue to earn about $40 per day. With income like that, one can see why Roberts hopes AYB thrives as a modern day "Where's the Beef." And it looks like the phrase is well on it's way.
But let's look at a thesis:
For fifteen minutes in November of 2001, Greg Falcon was a memetic node.
His 'animutation' entitled "Irrational Exuberance" found itself included in the constantly changing compilation of "must see" websites. The website Memepool.com, one of the more popular weblogs (a site which posts links of interest), linked to Greg's short animated music video on November 27. Within five days, his website had been visited over 30,000 times....
The butterfly to Greg Falcon's brief hurricane of celebrity flapped its wings over a decade earlier. In 1991, a version of a Japanese arcade game entitled Zero Wing was created for the European Sega gaming platform....
More than seven years would pass before Zero Wing would begin to trickle back through the collective consciousness. In 1998, a website ("Rage Games") posted an animated GIF file of the introductory scene of the European Sega console version of Zero Wing....
From Overclocked.org, the AYB meme spread to the message boards at SomethingAwful. Throughout the summer of 2000, links to the animated GIF file as well as to the Overclocked QuickTime "Wayne Newton" dub were posted. On September 6, a poster to the SomethingAwful message boards created the first AYB photo edit. This user (going by the nickname 'Starscream') added a speech bubble containing the line "All your base are belong to us!" to a photo of Alf, an alien character from the 80s sitcom of the same name....
Interestingly, the next step in the AYB meme occurred not on one of the second generation sites (sites which were exposed to the AYB meme by way of the SomethingAwful boards), but yet again on the SomethingAwful message boards themselves. "JRR" (This was his nickname on the SomethingAwful boards. The artist of the song is listed as "The Laziest Men on Mars" on MP3.com. Do not be confused by the plural. "The Laziest Men" is JRR - Jeffery Ray Roberts.) posted a link to a mp3 file of a song entitled "Invasion of the Gabber Robots". This song is a techno remix that uses the spoken text of the intro as source material. JRR did not use the audio from Overclocked's "Wayne Newton" dub (which up until this point had been the only AYB version to have audio), but created his own....
Bad_CRC combined the original introductory images from the Zero Wing Sega console game with many of the better quality photo edits. He set this slide show to the audio of JRR's "Invasion of the Gabber Robots". On February 15, he posted this Flash animation to the TribalWar.com message boards (one of the second generation memetic carriers spawned from the SomethingAwful discussions). Although the animation contains no original work by Bad_CRC, his animation was the most successful carrier of the AYB meme....
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