Gay Fuel

These days, you go to any store and you have a million different options for an energy drink. Celsius, Bang, C4, Ghost. But just a few decades ago, the market for energy drinks was a lot smaller.

Although it was already popular in its native Austria, Red Bull only came to the US in 1996. And before then, Americans largely had no idea that such a thing existed.

Shortly after, you'd get other brands popping up like Rockstar and Monster. Around the same time that Red Bull came to the US, you'd also get Bawls energy drink. And while Red Bull's marketing was turning it into the Kleenex of energy drinks, Bawls found that they could comfortably grow their brand with a different strategy. They started targeting gamers. Their push was based around the idea that gamers need more energy to play more games.

Suddenly, you'd see Bawls cross-promoting with all kinds of gaming companies. It was sold at CompUSA, they sponsored events like PAX, and this push towards gamers wound up being a huge success.

Well, you know what other demographic famously craved stimulants? The gays! With the slogan "Get fired up," Gay Fuel was unveiled in May of 2004. Released by Specialty Spirits in Florida, it was designed to be best enjoyed as part of a cocktail.

Now, with a name like Gay Fuel, it was destined to get a lot of attention right away. And of course, especially with this being 2004, a lot of people thought this was just a joke, but it really was an energy drink specifically marketed towards the gay community.

But what could possibly make a drink "gay"? In one instance, a radio host, Mike Picozzi, who thought this was some kind of prank, called the number that was on the website. He would reach Gay Fuel's COO, David Syner, and David would explain to him this actually was a real energy drink designed for the gay community. The way he describes it, maintaining as much of the real juice flavor as possible, it sounds like it might have actually been pretty good.

When the drink was unveiled, the designer of the can, Andy Towle, wrote:

"Its ingredients include red currant juice, B vitamins, and a secret blend of sexual stimulant herbs. The can is an opalescent silver, and the drink itself is a bright pink. Yep, it's undeniably gay!"

Although people tend to view this type of marketing these days as a bit of a cynical marketing ploy, considering that David's YouTube channel is mostly Doris Day content, and Andy runs a gay news site called TowleRoad to this very day, it's clear these guys were genuinely about what they were promoting.

Of course, few people who know about Gay Fuel actually drank it. Its legacy for most people would largely be its status as one of the original fads on YTMND.com. It first makes its way onto the website in June of 2004, when it's posted by, you're not going to believe this, Peter Coffin. He posted a picture of Gay Fuel with a South Park clip over it, and the caption: "They Don't Approve."

That YTMND didn't get a ton of attention, but it was seen by another user named the Inkdrinker. A year later, Inkdrinker would bring us the Gay Fuel that we all know, with the song "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimore. From that point, Gay Fuel would enter the pantheon of classic YTMND fads. The song Tarzan Boy would become basically the official theme on YTMND of anything gay, which made Jungle Boy Jack Perry's old AEW entrances so much better for anyone who was very online in the mid-2000s.

It's been a while since I covered YTMND on this channel, and I've been in the mood to talk about it some more. So, for today's video, let's take a look at some old favorites from that website that I just haven't covered on the channel yet.

In 2012, a radio show in Virginia called The Z Morning Zoo did a series of prank calls live on the air. You've probably heard them before. It starts when the host calls a woman pretending to be a telemarketer. He's advertising a show called WWE Super Slam. Because, y'know, that's how wrestling companies promote themselves, just calling up random people like they are running for office. He's talking about the very real event, WWE Super Slam, as John Cena's theme plays in the background.

The woman declines the offer when he calls back, and he's promoting the show again. She says that she already said no, and now she's starting to get a little annoyed. But he keeps calling back, pretending to be different telemarketers.

Each time he does it, she's getting madder and madder. Then, finally, she picks up the phone one more time, and she's like, I swear to God if this is the wrestling people again. But instead, she gets a very soft-spoken woman asking if she supports the Marines.

Woman: I swear to Jesus. If this is the wrestling fucks again.

Radio Show: Okay. Good morning. Hi. I'm just calling this morning to ask if you're a supporter of the United States military.

Woman: Oh, my God. I apologize. We've been getting calls all morning. I apologize. Yes. Yes, I am.

Woman: Fantastic. Great. Are you a supporter of the Marine Corps?

Woman: Yes, absolutely.

Woman: Great. Because a former decorated member of the United States Marine Corps needs your support... and His name is John Cena!

Woman: You! Are you kidding me right now? Are you kidding me right now? I can't even handle this. I can not handle this.

Whenever I listen to this call, I picture how the Villagers in Animal Crossing, when you piss them off, they walk around. They just shake their head at the sky. It's an amazing series of prank calls, and these would go viral constantly over the next couple of years. But the calls don't reach their full power until 2015. That's when they evolve into the unexpected John Cena meme. All of a sudden, John Cena is interrupting everything.

I don't know what it was about this meme in particular, but I remember it being so much more mainstream than any other meme I'd seen at that point. It got so popular that Cena himself even remarked that he was honored to be accepted as a part of pop culture in this way. And yet this format was nothing incredibly new. It's not too dissimilar from the RKO Out of Nowhere meme or the Fresh Prince of Bel Air meme that I spoke about in the Perfection Girl video.

In fact, before John Cena, before Randy Orton, this type of meme, or should I say Fad, belonged to one Mohamed Hassan 10 years earlier on YTMND. In 2005, Mohamed Hassan, portrayed by an Italian-American wrestler named Mark Coppani, was flying to the top of the card in WWE, playing the role of an Arab-American who was pissed about the treatment Arabs had faced in 2000s America. He was on the fast track to becoming a main event heel. A lot of times, he would piss off the crowd by interrupting their favorites to talk about his grievances. When they were talking, they were cut off by his iconic entrance music, which I'm literally just finding out is actually called the "Arab-American."

I don't know if WWE is going to claim it if I play this or not, I know they like to do that, but it's the one that goes [mimics song]. If you know the song, you know it. So Muhammad Hassan keeps pissing off WWE fans by interrupting Smackdown. A YTMND user named Caine Robot asks, what if he interrupted the OJ verdict?

And with that, Hassan starts interrupting everyone on YTMND. He's in Earthbound, he's also in Batman.

The Hassan character, of course, comes to an abrupt end in July of 2005. That was when a gang of masked Arabs beat and strangled The Undertaker at the behest of Hassan and his manager, Daivari. SmackDown at this point was prerecorded, and when it was set to air, it just so happened that there was an actual real-life terrorist attack. WWE airs the segment anyway, and it gets a ton of mainstream attention with people outraged over how offensive they felt this was. WWE at this point in time has already fallen from the heights of the Attitude Era. They don't want to deal with this. Thus, that's the end of Hassan.

A few months ago, he would actually go really in-depth about his time in WWE on Maven's [YouTube] channel, which honestly might be the best YouTube channel by a retired wrestler. What's extra frustrating about this whole story, he notes that he was warning them, especially because they were on network TV, that they were pushing this character in an edgier direction, and he was warning them that something like this is going to happen.

Coppani: So this was filmed on a Tuesday. The London bombing happened, I believe, on a Thursday morning. SmackDown was set to go on air Thursday evening. They made the decision to air it in its entirety with this match with Sean acting like the Muslim martyr being carried out of the ring with a crawler at the bottom in England just talking about this might be sensitive to some viewers. When this happened on SmackDown, it was in the local newspaper in Syracuse, it was in Time magazine, it was everywhere. It's insensitive, and it's frustrating that we went that way. But we went that way to try to get more heat, but we had plenty of heat.

Maven: You had heat.

Coppani: Right. We didn't need to. I promise you, I was very vocal against it at the time, but you know the business.

Maven: What are you going to say?

Coppani: They literally were like, I literally-

Maven: "We don't give a shit. Go do it."

Coppani: I got heat because I was like, this is not where the character needs to be.

Maven: They don't give a shit.

Coppani: Why are we doing this right now?

But [WWE] didn't listen to him, and he's the one that ultimately paid the price for it. It's a shame because he was such a talented guy. I have no doubt in my mind that if things played out differently, that we'd be thinking about this guy like a Hall of Famer. Despite all that, though, he seems like he's completely at peace with how things worked out in the end. He would go on to leave wrestling altogether, becoming a history teacher, and eventually a school principal and administrator. He would also co-author a comic book entitled Assassin and Son with his now deceased WWE colleague Shad Gaspard. Muhammad Hassan is often cited as one of the biggest what-ifs in wrestling history, and I agree, but he's rarely given the credit he deserves for his role in internet history.

All right, so how about the DingDong song by Gunther and the Sunshine Girls? You might not remember the title, but you'll remember it if I go, "Oh, you touch my tra-la-la." This song was part of one of the biggest YTMND fads of 2004 and 2005. Inspired by the 1984 song, Tralala, by the Dutch band, Phil & Company, the song took off pretty quickly, in part just due to it being a catchy Europop song with a vaguely sexual hook, but also because of the striking image of its singer, Gunther, with his short mullet, sleazy sunglasses, and John Water's mustache. It was a very distinct look. I mean, sure, now you could probably find 50 guys who move to Bushwick and look exactly like that. But back in 2004, it was something you did as a joke.

Past the mirror image of Gunther, though, the song itself becomes a YTMND fad based around people having their "tralalas" touched. Your Tralala, of course, being... [your 🍆]. Of course, you can't have a YTMND fad about forced touching without Brian Peppers. This fad would eventually break YTMND containment, make its way onto aggregation sites like YTMND's best friends at eBaum's World, and eventually, it make its way to YouTube. Fans that are introduced to him these days tend to say he looks like Dr. Disrespect. But back then, his appearance was so novel that people were making their own parody videos, dressing up like him with fake mustaches, growing out real mustaches, even recruited their own Sunshine Girls. Gunther himself was well aware of the videos and had a section on his website, GuntherNet, where he would showcase all the fans impersonating him. And unlike a lot of meme songs to that point, Gunther was actually charting and building a fan base that was looking deeper into his catalog.

Although a lot of people who have a hit meme song run into the ground and then they disappear forever, Gunther has actually managed to hold on to a sizable fan base throughout the years. Like, I literally cannot think of any other musician whose had this successful of a 20-year career that was basically kicked off from a viral hit.

All right, let's talk about one more - let's do "Tender Crisp, Bacon Cheddar Ranch." Burger King has always been known for insane ad campaigns. Obviously, you think of The King with his plastic unmoving face that he gets thought of in the same category as slasher villains. You have to wonder if it was a deliberate choice for them to make these Elden Ring enemies that look like the Burger King. But Burger King's surreal marketing sensibilities at that time didn't end with The King. In 2004, Burger King introduced Tender Crisp Chicken, which had a number of insane ad campaigns attached to it. One of them was honestly kind of ground-breaking: The Subserviant Chicken.

So, you would go to this website, subservientchicken.com, and you got what appeared to be a live feed of a giant chicken man standing around in a living room. The idea is you type in your request, then the chicken man does it. Obviously, though, there's no actual chicken man on a live feed. If, like, they did this campaign now, there probably would be, but back then, that just wasn't happening. It actually worked like an old-school text-based adventure game. You type in the commands, and if there was something recorded, the chicken man would do it. They had over 300 different actions recorded. I know that Burger King, these days, they tend to find themselves at the bottom of fast food tier lists, but I remember the Tendercrisp Chicken actually being pretty good. Financially, it was a huge success for Burger King, so they would wind up expanding the Tendercrisp offerings.

Probably most famously was the next year in 2005. That was when Burger King introduced the Tendercrisp Bacon Chedder Ranch Sandwich. They did this really trippy commercial featuring not Hooty, but Darius Rucker of Hooty and the Blowfish. He's in a colorful world that looks like the Wizard of Oz. You got a yellow brick road paved with cheddar cheese, rivers of ranch dressing flowing on a mountain, and sandwiches growing on trees. And while we're watching this all go down, Darius sings a country music song about the sandwich.

It's actually a parody of the song Big Rock Candy Mountain. And despite this being a goofy song for a goofy commercial, it's also a bit of an earworm. It's the kind of thing that you're sitting around at work and you just think it to yourself, or you're just like, "Tendercrisp Bacon Chedder Ranch," and somebody hears you and then it's stuck in their head. And like a lot of these silly pop culture moments, this one immediately made its way onto YTMND.

While I wasn't there this particular night, I do remember a lot of late nights on YTMND. You'd see something like this hit the up and coming or the recently created sites, which caused a bunch of light bulbs to go off in the community and then other people start ripping on it. Usually, these didn't have any lasting power, it would just keep people entertained for a couple of hours. But the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch is an earworm. Possibly the most popular one was by Rykar 174, and it worked the add-in to the Darth Vader force choke scene.

Then you have this one by Thor Burnanator with Michael Moore dancing to the song:

Actually, I haven't thought about this in a long time, but there are a lot of really good Michael Moore YTMNDs. I got to do that if I make another one of these.

You have this one where the chicken sandwich has replaced the plane chasing Cary Grant in North by Northwest. That one's by a username, Darth Wang, who I swear is not me, he spells it different. According to the YTMND wiki, he was making several of these Tendercrisp sites long after everyone else considered it to be a dead fad. Who cares if it's dead if you make something good with it. Also, apparently, that guy has the record for the most sites ever made on YTMND. Actually, now that I'm looking at his profile, he's literally active commenting on sites right now in 2025, and he made this one two days ago.

Still making YTMNDs in 2025. You love to see it. As a testament to the staying power of this fad, in October of 2020, Sensei Ireland uploaded the Simpsons one.

What I love about having made this video, I know that a bunch of you are going to be stuck with th song in your head now.

But anyway, that's all for now. I'm probably going to do more of these in the future, so let me know what other YTMND fads you'd like to see covered.

If you like this video, turn on notifications and check out my video about YTMND versus eBaum's World.

I'm out.