Shooting Stars is a meme that uses the 2008 song “Shooting Stars” by Bag Raiders as background music as a character, typically a person or animal, falling eternally “into space”, usually with outer space as a background or a variety of random backgrounds.
This meme gained popularity in 2017 however, the first trace of this meme goes back to an animation with “Shooting Stars”playing in the background that was created in December 2015 by a YouTuber named “Glaceygirl”!
In July 2016, because of the existing Harambe memes that were dedicated to the fallen gorilla back in 2016, another YouTuber named TheN00bNinja created a video with “Shooting Stars” playing in the background of animated gorillas dancing.
Half a year later in January 2017, this meme really blew up after YouTuber All Ski Casino created the video of a man jumping into water with “Shooting Stars” as background music along with changing the background display. As of February 2018, this video has 2,844,613 views!
Below is a video created by Behind The Meme that discusses what we talked about above and more:
According to Behind the Meme, this meme may have became popular because it has a very calm intro into the music and a few seconds in, the drop becomes more energetic and techno. Maybe this allows the calm intro build up into a “troll” drop, which makes it very meme-like and funny.
No one is sure why Shooting Stars suddenly became a viral meme, not even Bag Raiders themselves. Pedestrian.tv had the chance to interview the musical duo on February 14th, 2017 in regards to their road to meme-dom.
We had seen a couple of videos I guess, but not a lot at first. There were a couple of times people had made videos that we saw but it’s only really lately people started tagging us in things and we discovered it all. Past two weeks is when it’s been really massive.
At first we were like, ok this is funny I guess, but I didn’t really get it so I thought “alright whatever”. Once I started seeing a common theme though, such as the big guy jumping off the bridge into the river, that was the first one of the more recent stuff that really got me. So good! That and the Lady Gaga one is so funny.
It is such a weird but amusing meme, it just reassures the world that the Internet is an extremely odd place, without a doubt, and that humans have developed an odder sense of humour as we continue to evolve.
People falling and then flying off into weird stock footage of space and… oh man it’s so weird. And the thing with the underwater and the fish tanks and Spongebob keeps popping up? Man I don’t know. Even just explaining what a meme is… like “So there’s this whole thing on this thing that didn’t really exist five years ago, but imagine it like people inventing their own postcards. Imagine if people just printed out their own postcards but they did it a rate of like a million a day.”
Here’s a few more Shooting Stars if you haven’t already gotten the song stuck in your head for the rest of eternity!