Hey, you have internet access. You've been on YouTube. I bet you're familiar with popular internet phenomenon like Potter Puppet Pals. Even Alan Rickman was a fan before he passed away, no doubt you've at least hear some reference to it.

Maybe you're meme-savvy and visit knowyourmeme often enough, you've probably come across Brodyquest or maybe this silly little comic based on The Little Mermaid popular for the line “seven vagánias”. If you were on the internet over a decade ago in 2005 and 2006, you most likely came across a violent cartoon where pop culture icons fought each other to the death in one big glorious battle called “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.”

Meet Neil Cicierega (pronounced siss-er-ee-gah.) He is the man behind a long list of things that are or once were popular on the internet. He created Potter Puppet Pals, animated the first Brodyquest video, wrote and voiced that Little Mermaid comic, and wrote the “Ultimate Showdown” song that inspired the cartoon. This man is responsible for some of the most popular internet media and so few people are aware he exists. He's also recorded over twelve full-length CDs, some of them being solely comprised of mashups of popular music, mostly Smash Mouth's song “All Star” with songs like John Lennon's "Imagine." He's made a web series (New Kids on the Rock) and several other shorts for Hollywoodeast.com. On top of that, he also made a short film in tribute/parody of “The Wizard of Oz” complete with musical numbers he wrote himself all when he was about 22. He's known for his unusual twisting of things that were popular in the 90s into... strange things.

His sense of humor is very absurdist. Very strange things happen with little to no explanation before being taken to some sort of logical extreme or twisting into something else entirely. This kind of surrealism I like to call the “uncanny valley of humor” where a joke strings you along with a thread of logic that barely makes sense until it unravels into utter nonsense with a punchline. The kind of thing you're supposed to look at and wonder what the hell someone had to be thinking when they created it.

Neil is still making content to this day, having released his latest album in February. His production of videos seems to have slowed down with his most recent being this one short. I don't know much about what he's been up to, I imagine still writing music and making mashups of Smash Mouth. If wikipedia is to be believed, he was married last year and is has been working for over a year on an adventure game.