The 11 Most Important GIFs in History

According to Steve Wilhite, an inventor on the original team that created the GIF format, the very first GIF was of a plane. That GIF, though, seems to be lost in the mists of time, so here is another GIF of a plane.

Anyone who was on the internet in the late '90s will be familiar with this useful little yellow-and-black GIF. It often graced the websites of web newbies who were trying to build their Geocities homepages and, well, just didn't finish the job.

The Hamster Dance GIFs, a.k.a the stuff of nightmares, haunted every Internet user who came across them. Essentially, the Hamster Dance webpage existed simply to show a bunch of animated hamsters dancing to an infernal sample of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop." Click here to see what I mean, if you dare.

The Dancing Banana GIF was originally part of a Flash animation accompanied by The Buckwheat Boyz' "Peanut Butter Jelly Time." Now it's just a great way to tell your friends and coworkers that you're ready for the weekend.

This creepy dancing baby, also known as the "oogachaka baby" because of its origins—a video set to the introduction of "Hooked on a Feeling" by Blue Swede—made an even bigger dent in pop culture when it appeared in Ally McBeal as the title character's recurring hallucination. It's obvious why this baby became such a cultural fixation. What is it doing? What does it want? Our souls?

There was no more tempting use of the GIF than excerpting an iconic bit from one of your favorite movies. Usually, video files are huge and take up a lot of space, but with the compressed image format of the GIF, movie snippets became as easy to drop into a website or message as a typed message. You can even watch whole movies made up of GIFs.

People quickly caught on to the fact that GIFs, while entertaining in and of themselves, could be used for their emotional content as well as how they looked. Instead of responding in text, why not include a moving image charged with the extra oomph of celebrity and cultural meaning? Now, with reaction GIFs, if an email fight breaks out over who should be in charge of the hire car, instead of typing, "LOL," we can rely on Michael Jackson to convey our amusement.

This one gets its own category, and it's obvious why.

What could be more Internetty than using the endlessly customizable GIF format to put one's own stamp on existing imagery to make something totally new? Mash everything up! Make it your own! Be a smartass online!

Also its own category. Praise be to Jennifer.