Dr. Robotnik’s Lobotomy: The Return Of Pingas
An Interview With Twitter’s Gabe And Cake About Why YouTube Poop Is Trending Again
Brain rot, lobotomy, post-irony, hood irony, whatever you want to call it, this recent era, of chaotic video, intoxicatingly stupid, ever-changing, increasingly absurd (Join us, brave one, they attest; Join us, stupid one, they beckon), their creators want us to understand that they possess the joke. It’s in a garbled language, but if you bang your head a few times, it sounds like poetry.
We’ve gotten so used to registering a new joke. We see a chaotic visual motif and automatically see a joke. It’s a jelly bean, being pushed into the folds of your brain. (You don’t feel it. It just slides right in.) Pushed via text-to-speech voices, CapCut transitions, and TikTok captions (all modes that seem inherent, commonplace, to a modern shitpost-viewer). Then, an interjection: “Pingas!” you hear in all its glory. And a thousand dumber memories come flooding back.
In the current landscape of Twitter users are a few who (chalked up to stream of conscious nostalgia) have brought back Pingas, an early YouTube Poop sound that early internet veterans and truthers alike are familiar with.
The context is this: there’s an episode of the animated series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog during which Dr. Robotnik recites the line, “Snooping as usual, I see,” directed at his robotic underlings, too meek to respond. In YTP fashion, some genius (a YouTuber named Stegblob (who was actually interviewed by New York Mag in 2020)) heard “penis” in the phrase’s syllables, cutting and splicing it to fit their naughty joke.
Reupload of the original “Robotnik Has a Viagra Overdose.”
(Source: YouTube / youtubepoops)
See, in their ethos, YouTube Poops are “poops” meant to clog up YouTube’s search results, tricking noobies who think they’re clicking on an actual recording of SpongeBob but, instead, they get shat on, with a flow of nonsense, intoxicatingly stupid, ever-changing, and increasingly absurd. Then they’re hooked. They were baited, and now they’re hooked.
At some point, there was a line drawn in the poop, when YTPs became old and “lobotomy, brain rot” content became new and fresh. While “hood irony” was also originally meant to trick—in that, hood irony disguises itself as “hood content” only to devolve—the genre eventually morphed into the all-encompassing sludge that it is today, veering itself away from the parody of “hood” memes and into the parody of all short-form video content that exists. Think ASMR, self-help videos, sigma grindset, Reddit stories, and Family Guy clips. Subverting all of these understood genres by way of deterioration, akin to visual snow and peripheral hallucinations, is the new ethos of “brain rot,” designed to rot the brain of its viewer like YouTube Poops before them.
In the currently viral and ephemeral TikTok realm, this new YTP language called brain rot is written in different, more advanced and polished editing softwares. Pingas, somehow, has had a revival in this new world. Somehow, translating into the new language.
The two main culprits of the Pingas revival are named Gabe and Cake, who go by @chronakey and @NintendoGCN on the site formerly known as Twitter. Since December, the two have been on a Pingas tear. Their videos have spread across social media, seeping into the feeds of both normies and non-normies alike who, on their lunch breaks, scrolling through their apps, are being exposed to Dr. Eggman’s famous misquote. Why? Because it’s still somehow funny, inherently. (Or, at least, for Gabe and Cake, and the rest of the video creators in their Twitter clique, the humor of Pingas is inherent and evergreen because they’re nerds with well-flawed senses of humor.)
Read the full interview on the 65,000 Takes website.
“i got the pingas meal” tweet.
(Source: Twitter / @KirbyCheatFurby)