Holy Crap, A Meteor!

About

"Holy Crap, A Meteor!" is a YTMND fad that involves creating an illusion of an approaching object by utilizing 3D text over a background image. Most variants on the fad are accompanied with music from the 1995 video game Chrono Trigger, which contains a leitmotif that is associated with the threat of an approaching meteor.^[1]

Origin

On April 26th, 2006, YTMND user cdawg82191 uploaded a YTMND entitled "Holy Crap, A Meteor!" featuring a period punctuation mark that resembled a meteor that would imminently impact into Columbia, South Carolina.^[2] The site was originally made as a joke^[3], but it was met to a degree of acclaim from users, allowing the site to accumulate over 7,200 votes (with a site average of 4.40/5.00), over 290 favorites, over 1,700 comments, over 131,000 views, and a $0.01 sponsorship from another user.^[4]

Spread

The first variant on the site would be user WhisperXBA's follow-up YTMND, "OMG MORE METEORS", which featured a meteor shower instead of a single meteor.^[5] However, this site was not nearly as successful as the original, only scoring 1.63/5.00. The first variant to reach a level of success comparable to the original was binturong's "Meteor Command", which attained a score of 3.62/5.00.^[6]

The fad was met with some criticism from within YTMND, as made evident by Father-McKenzie's own page, "Meteor Fad – R. Lee Ermey's Comments".^[7] The only successor to include the meteor and earn a higher score than the original was AskAak's "TaunTaun Trouble", where the meteor has a cameo appearance.^[8] The search terms "holy crap" and "meteor" warrant hundreds of results on the website.^[9][10]

External References