Origin

The meme "Dog Man" (also known as Vicious Dog Man, Psycho Dog Man, Rabid Dog Man and Barking Dog Man) started when an episode of the Australian News/Current affairs show: A Current Affair (the same show that brought us Chk-Chk-Boom Girl and Corey Delaney and his sunglasess) was aired on the 12th of April, 2010. The episode featured a story about an old man by the name of Ray Graham who talked about and did an extremely comical and realistic reenactment of his frightening confrontation with a neighborhood dog. The video was then uploaded to YouTube, entitled Psycho Dog Man on ACA. The video gained quick popularity on the interwebz, spreading to Break.com and Failblog.org, causing discussion boards to light up and attracting a lot of world-wide media attention for example like this CNN report which aired at 5:30am on Thursday 15th of April, this report aired about an hour before YouTube user Ray William Johnson uploaded this video: Psycho Dog Man. This allowed for the meme to then spread to a wider audience and allowing the Dog Man to become an international sensation.

Reaction

Shortly after the release of this video onto the net, many derivatives were uploaded, including remixes, mash-ups, parodies and re-enactments. Not to mention the creation of a Facebook page dedicated to the man.

Average worldwide traffic of "dog man"

From this you can clearly see the breakout in traffic on April the 12th.

After his overnight rise to fame. A Current Affair interviewed the Psycho Dog Man a second time, to see what he had to make of his online success. In this interview he does a second dog impression, even more realistic than the previous:

Now the Psycho Dog Man has his own Television Commercial in Australia for UltraTune:

Derivatives

As was mentioned before, many remixes, mash-ups, etc. were made of the Dog Man. One of the first and more popular derivatives include the mash up of the Dog Man clip with Baha Man's hit song Who Let The Dogs Out entitled: Who let the psycho dog man out? Parody of ACA REMIX.

Another popular derivative includes a terribly done Sparta Remix of the video, (an obvious signifier of a YouTube meme) entiled: Psycho Dog Man Sparta Remix. Funnily enough, this is the first Sparta Remix to be broadcasted on national television, let alone the international attention this video was receiving. There are many other derivatives that are below: