In Tales of the Early Internet(opens in a new tab), Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.

From its earliest days, the Star Trek franchise has lent itself to parody, fan stories and all kinds of remixing. So it was only natural that its longest-running show would play a big role in the internet's oldest memes. 

The original series (1966-1969) was syndicated on roughly 200 TV stations in the 1970s. This led to an explosion in fan fiction, shared via snail mail before it migrated to early online message boards. The practice of calling erotic stories "slash" came from "Kirk/Spock" (as opposed to "Kirk & Spock," stories in which the captain and science officer were just friends). The humor potential was evident on Saturday Night Live, which poked gentle fun at the show from 1976 onwards(opens in a new tab). A parody song, "Star Trekkin'(opens in a new tab)," was a number 1 hit on the UK charts in 1987. And in 1992 an Oregon radio station(opens in a new tab) created "The Lost Episode(opens in a new tab)," splicing audio from the show to create a Kirk/Spock story that played endlessly on underground radio in the 1990s. 

By then, a new star had risen. Star Trek: The Next Generation (or as it is universally known, TNG) lasted for seven seasons from 1987 to 1994. It was the only Trek series to achieve mainstream success during its original run, with the first episode attracting about 27 million viewers and the final episode reaching more than 31 million(opens in a new tab). After that, TNG was syndicated on local stations throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was a starship captain to rival James T. Kirk in the popular imagination, but the rest of the ensemble (Riker, Data, Geordi, Worf, Troi, even Wesley Crusher) were household names too. 

All that provided fertile ground for denizens of the early internet. A show everyone knew (nerds who loved the World Wide Web especially); a show that was likely to be on TV as alternative entertainment when your 56K modem crapped out; a show where everyone took themselves very seriously but that looked hilarious when chopped into five-second increments: in retrospect, TNG was bound to become a meme-maker's paradise. One of its most popular episodes, "Darmok," unintentionally predicted a future where language is dominated by cultural references — and became a meme itself. 

Many of the earliest TNG memes were image macros and GIFs, which were all a pre-broadband world could handle, but you'd see the occasional Adobe Flash video too. They were collected on image boards such as Newgrounds, founded in 1995, and You're the Man Now Dog (YTMND), founded in 2001. Both were proto-Reddits, where memes could be upvoted or downvoted. When YouTube was founded in 2005, TNG parody videos such as the "Picard song" were already there, just waiting to be beamed up. 

Some TNG memes may have arrived too late to be considered early internet (did we really not notice the weird way Riker sits in chairs(opens in a new tab) until 2013?) But let's run down the best confirmed old-school ones, starting with the reaction image that has become synonymous with the stupidest moments of the 21st century.

1. The Facepalm(s)

Burying your face in your hand or hands to show disbelief: It's a signature Patrick Stewart move. When you've got that much forehead, why not use it? As the above compilation shows, Stewart was even doing it back in 1974, when he played Lenin in a BBC historical drama. But one in particular, from the 1990 episode "Deja Q," became the facepalm that launched a thousand memes. 

In the classic facepalm, Picard is reacting to the godlike entity Q appearing on the Enterprise bridge out of nowhere, claiming he has been stripped of his powers. GIFs of the facepalm(opens in a new tab) are reversed: Picard is actually lifting his head out of his hand when Q calls him "the closest thing I have to a friend." 

The neologism "facepalm" was used on online message boards as early as 2001, according to Know Your Meme(opens in a new tab), and made it to Urban Dictionary(opens in a new tab) in 2004. Given the Picard facepalm's popularity as a reaction to online stupidity, it's surprising to learn that we have no record of it being referenced in particular before 2007, when the "Deja Q" scene was first uploaded to YouTube. Not until Engadget used it in a 2008 story(opens in a new tab) did the Picard facepalm image take off, and it hasn't stopped since. There are now around 3,000 Picard facepalm memes made via Imgflip(opens in a new tab) every month. 

Also worthy of note: Picard was not the only TNG character to do a facepalm. Commander Riker also did a much-memed facepalm in another 1990 episode, "A Matter of Perspective." (Images of Picard and Riker facepalming side by side(opens in a new tab) have been photoshopped.) As of the virtual San Diego Comic-Con 2020, you can buy a bust of Riker facepalming(opens in a new tab) to live alongside your Picard facepalm bust(opens in a new tab). 

2. The scream 

Never let it be said that TNG bit-players could not chew the scenery as much as the series regulars. Case in point: Ensign Haskell, played by actor Charles Douglass in the 1988 episode "Where Silence Has Lease." 

Haskell is one of Trek's many redshirts who dies as soon as he is introduced,(opens in a new tab) collapsing courtesy of an alien intelligence called Nagilum. But the fact that Douglass grips his head much like the Edvard Munch painting "The Scream," vibrating like he's about to explode, gave Haskell's death a life beyond this forgettable episode. A GIF of this scene was much used on early image boards, and is still in use today as a hilarious reaction to questionable audio — such as Taylor Swift's 2018 cover of "September,"(opens in a new tab) above.

3. The Picard Song

Much of the old-school user-generated content on YTMND seemed to follow a kind of TikTok template: Find a chunk of dialogue, repeat it ad nauseam to a dance beat. That's the formula that gave us the Worf song(opens in a new tab) — bafflingly, the most upvoted TNG entry on the whole image board(opens in a new tab). There was a variation that layered beats over GIFs, with titles like "pull it, pull it down" over images of Picard and Riker...well, pulling their jumpsuits down(opens in a new tab). There's also A Night at the Hothberry(opens in a new tab), a freaky franchise mashup that mixes the song "What Is Love" from A Night at the Roxbury(opens in a new tab) with the Imperial March from Star Wars, over an image of Picard, Riker, and Data dancing in a VW bug on AT-AT legs. 

But the award for most earworm-filled TNG tune has to go to The Picard Song, created by a mystery user called DarkMateria. The version uploaded to YouTube in 2006 boasts 4 million views. The chorus, a funky version of Picard announcing his name and his ship, was so memorable that it is used on the TNG recap podcast "Greatest Generation." A similar but less catchy tune that used repetitious Picard quotes was "The Picard rap(opens in a new tab)," made and shared by a 1990s garage band named Frantic Dogpaddle. 

4. The Sexed Generation 

The Kirk/Spock "Lost Episode" from the 1990s showed how Star Trek could play as a sex comedy if you splice together bits of its earnest dialogue taken out of context. The same is true of "The Sexed Generation," a glorious 9-minute riff on the same theme. (Don't worry, all of the content is taken from the show and hence PG-13 — it's just the editing that is suggestive.) Over the last 13 years, a number of commenters have described the video as literally the best thing they've seen on the internet. 

The origins of "Sexed Generation" are obscure, but its first YouTube uploader claims it was built on the foundations of a gag reel privately commissioned for early seasons of TNG by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry himself. There's no absolute proof for that, but reportedly(opens in a new tab) Roddenberry was delighted when he heard an early tape of so-called "audiofic" similar to the "Lost Episode" — and some of the "Sexed Generation" scenes were cut together in the last minute of the official Season 1 gag reel(opens in a new tab).

5. WTF?

Speaking of suggestive TNG titles, another episode from 1990 was named "Menage a Troi." It is less remembered for its main plot, however, than for one scene(opens in a new tab) where Picard is declaiming Shakespearean sonnets in a half-hearted attempt to woo Counsellor Troi's mother, Lwaxana. (Don't ask.) 

A still taken from the scene — right where Picard is quoting "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" — was uploaded to Flickr(opens in a new tab) in December 2006. The caption "WTF is this shit?" was added. The "WTF" meme(opens in a new tab) took on a life of its own from this point, generally added to any image where a character is raising a hand or two in apparent frustration. 

The picture also took on a life of its own, known separately as the "Annoyed Picard"(opens in a new tab) meme. As with the facepalm meme, it became an all-purpose tool to express frustration on the internet over...well, anything, really. 

Of course, the irony is that Picard wasn't annoyed at all in the original image. On the whole, you can rely on Picard memes to be more fabulous than frustrated — such as his shoulder-shimmy with a blanket covering the captain's chair(opens in a new tab), apparently from an outtake, or his sexy dance(opens in a new tab) from the otherwise forgettable 1998 movie Star Trek: Insurrection.

6. Geordi's epic maneuver

Another classic from the YTMND image board, first uploaded in 2006, the "epic maneuver" video loop poked gentle fun at a scene where Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) performs a crucial escape by rolling under a door that is taking its sweet time to close. The uploader, known only as "airbornebryan," added epic action movie music from a Finnish metal band(opens in a new tab), and the first "epic" meme was born. "This might be the first meme I remember," says Mashable art supremo and TNG fan Bob Al-Greene. 

Geordi's epic maneuver inspired a wave of YTMND memes showcasing other "epic" maneuvers(opens in a new tab). Some were intentionally hilarious, like a sketch with Hugh Laurie accidentally dismantling his gun, and others were just born of the fact that TV shows couldn't always afford to pull out all the stops on their stunts. 

We enjoyed simple pleasures in those days. Some of them still hold up.

7. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Many shows have catchphrases that are indecipherable to non-fans, and TNG is certainly no exception. 

Take "there are four lights!", for example — a reference that separated the Trekkies from the non-Trekkies in many an old-school chatroom. It's from a 1992 episode, "Chain of Command," where Picard is tortured to the point where he almost sees five lights, as his gaslighting captor insists, instead of the four that really exist. (If you think that sounds a little like Nineteen Eighty-Four(opens in a new tab), you're right; the homage was intentional). 

The "four lights" meme is a prime example of another TNG meme, one of the oldest, that is in itself all about inscrutable memes.

The highly-rated, much-loved 1991 episode "Darmok" involves an encounter between the Enterprise and a ship full of aliens, the Tamarians, with whom our heroes simply cannot communicate. It isn't that the Enterprise's universal translator is busted; it's that the aliens speak entirely in metaphor and cultural reference that isn't shared by the Federation. "It would be like us saying 'Juliet on the balcony,'" explains Troi. 

The Tamarian sayings, not all of which are explained in the show (but which were of course fully catalogued(opens in a new tab) online), quickly became memes in themselves. The best-known are:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Temba, his arms wide.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered. 

Mirab, his sails unfurled.

This is what the internet does best: It takes mythical nonsense and invests it with a new layer of nonsense, one that both celebrates and laughs at the original. And so we can now buy "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra 1991" tour T-shirts(opens in a new tab), featuring Picard on lead guitar. The memes of an invented alien culture are overlaid over all our popular modern memes — woman screaming at cat, the American Chopper guys arguing(opens in a new tab) — and it works the other way around too. Our modern memes sound like science fiction babble when you say them Tamarian-style(opens in a new tab). 

And thanks to the efforts of Star Trek nerds who pioneered our online behavior more than a decade ago, many of those towers have a Next Generation foundation.