Official seals (2004)

added Nov 08, 2009 at 07:23PM UTC

15 Comments
Suggest Changes

part of a series on Pedobear

This submission is currently being researched & evaluated!
You can help confirm this entry by contributing facts, media, and other evidence of notability and mutation.

About

Official seals are, on the Internet, image macros expressing the official status of something valuable or, in the contrary, completely useless in its utmost way, depending on the “reward” in status allowed by the seal.
They can be created and used for different situations: to mark an approval, a disapproval, an epic win or even an epic failure from a post, a topic, a picture, anything.

Origin

In real life, seals are used to signify an image of authenticity or credibility of an institution, whatever it can be.
Different types of coats of arms exist since the predynastic Egypt and the Heraldry as a profession according to Wikipedia.

In the late 2004, a website, SealCreator was created to promote and sell a program called “Seal Maker” while offering a free trial version of their product here.

Sealing trend

That program was meant to be useful for working purposes at first.
But then, a new trend of parodying existing stamps and seals, or creating new ones from Internet great icons began to spread.

One of the first characters to be part ot that trend was Pedobear with this “seal of approval” from the first half of 2005:

This seal began to be widely used in any situation where a loli picture or anything related to pedobear was judged enough worthy to be reward with that picture, giving a higher meaning than mere approval pictures to it.

Evolution

Official seals began to gather derivative pictures concerning approval/disapproval, but also many other subjects.

- On YTMND
The same year, YTMNDs being about seals started appearing, mainly reusing the “seal of approval” terms:

But then, it became a joke to play with the meanings of the “seal” word:

The most popular, with more than 8,000 views, is a pedobear one from 2006 talking about Stephanie from Lazy Town :

- On other media

2 flash versions of the “4chan’s Seal of Epic Failure” have been made circa 2007 (beware, it’s a little flashy):

There are also some Youtube videos featuring seals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtZU85unCRc (embedding deactivated)

In 2006, another Official seal maker, entirely free this time, has been created, helping the meme’s spread even further.

Showing 1-63 of 63 photos

Add Photo

Login or Sign Up to add photos.

15 Comments

Jostin Asuncion
Nov 08, 2009 at 09:27PM UTC , Jostin Asuncion wrote:

Oh man, Tomberry. You beat me to it.

Great work on this article anyways! You really deserve to be made an admin on this site. You’re the best non-admin researcher on KYM and Chris really likes you. You deserve it.

Keep up the excellent work, my friend.

Tomberry
Nov 08, 2009 at 09:37PM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

Ha ha thanks.
I think the best reward I’ve ever had is the fact that someone used one of my entries as a costume for the Hallowmeme party (Clippy guy, I like you, even if your explanation of the meme in your interview with that lioness wasn’t really complete).
I don’t need much more after that.

Hector Hessy
Nov 08, 2009 at 09:40PM UTC , Hector Hessy wrote:

good god!
they’re all here!
Good work sir.

Tomberry
Nov 08, 2009 at 09:54PM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

Hum, now that I’m at it, I’m not 100% that the pedobear seal was the first.

I found one seal marked from 1999 but hosted on a 2007 article from a blog (strange), and another seal from 2004.
Yet, I didn’t find any clues from the seal of approval trend before 2005, so before Pedobear…
Actually, I couldn’t find the real date origin from the Pedobear seal so I had to rely on what I found on a hosting website that said 05/05/2005 for the earliest instance.

I think I need a little help on this one…

Nickoliavich
Nov 09, 2009 at 12:53AM UTC , Nickoliavich wrote:

Meme

Steven R.
Nov 09, 2009 at 07:43PM UTC , Steven R. wrote:

Meme

Tomberry
Nov 10, 2009 at 04:09AM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

Fixing some date mistake concerning the seal generator.

Matt Hopper
Nov 10, 2009 at 03:33PM UTC , Matt Hopper wrote:

confirm this pl0x

Tomberry
Nov 10, 2009 at 05:09PM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

As I’ve already said, I still don’t really know if the Pedobear Seal was the first (even if it gladly helped the meme in its spread). If you want this to be confirmed, please, help me to complete this article.

Tomberry
Nov 11, 2009 at 04:24PM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

I think I found the correct origin back in 2004. I’m fixing the article. From what I found, the seals aren’t part of the Pedobear entry. He was just one of the common figures that have been made into seals.

Chris Menning
Nov 19, 2009 at 01:38AM UTC , Chris Menning wrote:

That’s a nice collection of novelty seals, but I think we’re going a bit too broad here if we call this a meme.

I’m sure that novelty seals go back at least to the first political cartoons.

Maybe this article should be adjusted to only cover 4chan seals specifically?

Tomberry
Nov 19, 2009 at 02:38AM UTC , Tomberry wrote:

I don’t know, Chris.
I think that if we get rid of all the “non-4chan related” seals, the content will be very small to talk about.
Apart from the joke on the seal word that has been reused with the singer as well as the animal.

I can clarify that most of the seals I came across were created after the pedobear one. But, here, it’s difficult to say exactly if there influenced by it of it was a parallel trend and, actually, it’s as difficult to know exactly if there were more than 1 or 2 seals that I found prior to 2005.

The seal theme may be finally too broad to be a meme in the first place.

Jostin Asuncion
Nov 29, 2009 at 12:19AM UTC , Jostin Asuncion wrote:

I think I’ll have to agree with Chris on this one, Tomberry. Sorry about that. No verdict shall be placed as of now.

inventoroflies
Jan 30, 2010 at 10:51PM UTC , inventoroflies wrote:

The ones I just uploaded were created by me and some other individuals a few years back around ‘05 or ’06 in the myspace Religion and Philosophy forums to combat the pagan fluffies (aka newfags) posting all the “love and light”, “all gods are good gods”, whitelighter bullshit. CPIA and RPCPIA mean Central Pagan Intelligence Agency and Religion & Philosophy Central Pagan Intelligence Agency respectively. There were also other branches for facebook and hi5, but nothing really came of thos so far as I could tell. The group shortly closed after and orchestrated attack perpetrated by a user named Batman and others saying we were fluffy bashing. Ironically, he acted the same way we did. It’s also alleged that he worked closely with the mods to unfairly ban some members of the group from the forums. I remain banned to this day.

inventoroflies
Jan 30, 2010 at 10:53PM UTC , inventoroflies wrote:

after an* orchestrated attack against the group perpetrated by a user named batman and some others.

Login or Sign Up to participate!