The GI Joe PSAs and the Birth of Internet Weird

Pork chop sandwiches!! 🫡 🏃‍♂️‍➡️

Gather round the interwebs young Gen Xers and Elder Millennials ... 

In this oddball solo episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt rewinds to the early 2000s and dives deep into the glitchy, glorious chaos of Fensler Film’s GI Joe PSA remixes — a series of bootleg web videos that helped shape meme culture as we know it.

These gloriously low-res VHS-rip remixes mashed up 1980s GI Joe cartoon PSAs with absurdist humor, surreal voice dubbing, and non sequiturs that burned themselves into our collective consciousness.

Before TikTok. Before YouTube. Before broadband was normal … we had burned DVDs, word-of-mouth weirdness, and lines like:

• “Pork chop sandwiches!”
• “Hey kid, I’m a computer!”
• “Stop all the downloading!”
• "It's the body message machine-GO!" 

In this episode, we explore:

• 🧠 The origin story of the GI Joe PSAs
• 📼 Why they were viral gold in a pre-social internet
• 💥 The art of deliberate absurdity and proto-memes
• 📺 Their influence on shows like Robot Chicken and Tim & Eric
• 🌀 Why chaotic creative energy still beats algorithmic content

So gather 'round, old-school internet nerds. This one’s for you. And knowing? Well… you know the rest.

🔗 Links & Credits

🎵 Theme by Ronnie Martin
🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns (Lemon Productions)
🎹 Interstitial music by Zach Malm
🎥 Video support by Isaac Chase

#PodcastAwesome #GIJoePSAs #InternetHistory #MemeCulture #FenslerFilm #DesignNerdery #TimAndEric #PorkChopSandwiches #AbsurdistComedy

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