https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AHg3_OGDls

Hello. You're on the air. Oh, okay. I was just wondering, Steve-O, can you tell me how to shot Webb, please? Can I tell you how to shot Webb? Yes, please. How do I shot Webb? What the fuck is shot Webb? Just tell me how to do it, please. Who the fuck is this?

If this is the first time you've ever seen him, you probably won't believe me when I say that Tom Green was absolutely one of the most influential people of his time. When the Tom Green show came to MTV in 1999, he almost immediately became the biggest thing on the planet. Part sketch, comedy, part talk show, part prank show. A typical segment involved things like going to the store and buying condoms.

I'm just going to buy these condoms because I'm planning on making love to a woman tonight, and I'm really excited about that.

Okay? All right. Or waking up his parents by putting an actual decapitated bull head in their bed while making godfather references. Luca Frazzi sleeps with the Fishes. It was a relatively short run, but over the course of about a year and a half, he changed the course of comedy forever. For better or for worse, I mean, I just saw someone say that he was Logan Paul for millennials. I don't know how to feel about that. But there's no denying that he did pave the wave for things like Jackass or Tim and Eric. It's not funny. For Eric Andre. I've even seen people point out similarities to Nathan Fielder's work, and his influence doesn't just stop there. You see, years before Twitch or even its predecessor, Justin TV, he'd go on to be one of the first people to do a livestream talk show from his own home, Tom Green Live, later known as Tom Green's House Tonight, a show that Joe Rogan has cited as the main inspiration behind starting his own podcast. But when I think of Tom Green's Internet show, I don't think of Joe Rogan nor any of his other celebrity guests like Steve-O or Tony Hawk.

No, when I think of Tom Green's Internet show, the guest I think of is this guy right here. No, not that guy, this guy. You see, Tom Green was a Trailblazer in another very important way. Before the Church of Scientology, before Chris Chan, before Hal Turner, Tom Green was one of 4chan's very first targets, an experiment that would set the stage for decades to come. For today's video, let's take a look at Tom Green versus 4chan. This is the Tom Hink show.

It's not the Green Tom show. This is my favorite show because it's my show. If this was your show, you'd probably like it more than a movie. That's just because it was your show. But it's that first show. It's the Tom Hink show.

1996 was a strange year. You could sense that the overall vibe of culture was shifting in an edgier direction, but it wasn't quite there yet. Jerry Springer was a year out from hitting his highest ratings peak. Wwf was a year away from the Attitude era. We're a ways away from Dave Correa's generational defining drawing of Slipnaught Crucifying Fred Durst. I remember that summer, MTV started airing this show called Buzzkill. It was a prank show with these three guys, Dave, Travis, and Frank, who would get sent on these Mission Impossible style quests to fuck with people. Sure, prank shows have been a thing since the '40s, but this felt different. It was a little more like a reality show. In some people's opinions, it was also meaner. For a lot of people, a big sticking point was that they never actually brought the victims in on the joke. They never did the whole, Hey, guys, you're on camera. They never did that. Whenever the prank was over, they just get in their van and dish their costumes, and that was the end of it. And a lot of critics were put off by that. But despite what critics thought, the show was an instant hit for MTV, being out only by the dating show singled out before ultimately becoming the top show on the network.

And then after just 21 episodes, the show just mysteriously vanishes. Never to be spoken of again. Most TV networks would kill to have a surprise hit like Buzzkill. So what could have possibly happened? The truth wouldn't be revealed until 17 years later in a piece by Sean Manning for The All, where he spoke to the former cast members. They had already gotten fired after a segment for the second episode. Frank dresses up like Isaac Mizrahi for a fake fashion show. After explicitly being warned not to, he accidentally tricks Whitney Houston. His Isaac Mizrahi impression was just so convincing that she came up to him completely unprompted. And after she learned what happened, she swore she'd never work with MTV again. Well, ultimately, this wasn't his fault, and the show was a smash hit, so they forgot they fired them. But there was a bigger ongoing problem. In 1996, more people were just starting to get cell phones, so now they'd be filming a prank and people would call the cops. This had MTV worried about legal trouble. The final straw came when they were giving samples of a steak smoothie outside of Whole Foods. While pretending to be a customer, one of the boys faked a seizure.

One of the bystanders gives him CPR and he pukes in their mouth. While this is going on, a concerned citizen calls 911, and that's the end of the show. Picture Marnie McFly going, I guess you guys aren't ready for this yet. Because according to Travis, MTV would very quickly go on a mission to explicitly find a buzz kill replacement. Mtv would find this replacement in Tom Green. At the time, Tom Green was an up and coming comic in Canada, and over the past few years, had produced over 75 episodes of his show for various networks, starting on public access. He clearly had solid work ethic and a ton of upward momentum. And this all goes parabolic in 1999, when the Tom Green show makes its debut on MTV. And it's funny that for all the shit MTV gave Buzzkill, Tom Green pushed things so much further. Please speak more. Please speak more.

Can you speak more? No, I don't want you to do that. You're not allowed to do that. But if you want to do it, just pick up the phone, hit the button that says, Page. Mom, mom, where are you, Mom, I'm lost. Mom, Mom, I'm lost.

In a lot of ways, Tom Green was the precursor to the modern internet troll, with segments just built around seeing how far he can push people before they snap.

Have you heard of any illness or death caused as a result of people ingesting the mustard? You don't want to buy bad mustard. Anyone ever come in the store and got mustard in their eye? I got mustard in my eye. All right, thanks very much.

Like a lot of Tom Green's pranks at this point felt more Frank Hassel than they do candid camera. My favorite example of this is undercutters. Hop, hop, undercutters. Where he gets in his car and follows a pizza delivery driver, and he tries to sell a slightly cheaper pizza to the customer. This ends up with Tom getting chased by a guy with a hammer. There's also the time he paid for everything in pennies.

I should just pay with something smaller since it's only $5. It's okay.

It's good.

It's okay. It's good.

Or narrated people's lives with a megaphone.

Some people have commented we don't do enough observational humor on our show. You have purple hair. You're drinking some juice right now. I'm following you. You're going somewhere really fast. You have to get there quickly because if you don't, you're going to be in big trouble. You're waiting for the bus right Oh, and who could forget the time that he gave away his co-host, Glenn Humplick's actual phone number on the show.

A big part of it was also gross-out stuff, like when he famously sucked the milk right out of a cow's udder. Unsurprisingly, the critics hated the show even more than they hated Buzzkill. But nobody cares what the critics think, and this show is a massive success. It's hard to overstate how famous he was at the time. He's in commercials. I broke it.

You made me break my banana.

He's putting out music.

My bum is on the rail. Bum is on the rail. Look at me. My bum is on the rail.

He's in movies. He doesn't. He's such an idiot.

You are a psycho.

And then everything is dragged to a screeching halt when he's diagnosed with testicular cancer. This is effectively the end of his show. Spare for a cancer special where you see them take his ball out. It also delays his own movie that he had been working on by six months. And even then, he was still apparently in agonizing pain throughout the whole production. Of course, I'm talking about the infamous Freddie Got Fingered, which would hit theaters in April of 2001. Bbc's Danny Graydon summarizes the film, caning a disabled person's legs, falsely accusing someone of child molestation.

Well, at least I don't touch Freddie. Freddie what? Yeah, he touches my little brother. He fingers him.

Swinging a newborn baby by its umbilical cord, spattering walls with blood. Oh, and lest we forget, wagging a horse's genitals. Welcome, one and all, to the things that ex-MTV shock comedian Tom Green believes constitute polarity. Although the divide between critics and fans was massive for the Tom Green show, the movie was a different story. There were a rare few critics who saw the movie for what it was, but basically, nobody knew what to make of it at the time. It was nearly universally panned by both critics and fans alike. It's a vomatorium of a movie starring Green as gored and obnoxious retard who makes it his life's work to freak out his dad, play with teeth-nashing scorn by Ripp Thorne.

Oh, look, honey. Our boy is a genius. He's rigged a police system so he can eat sausage and work on his stupid droids. I'm being creative? Now, if you'll excuse me, I still have some work to do. Daddy, would you like some sausage?

Daddy, would you like some sausage? It's a barely coherent series of events loosely tied together like you're watching a dream.

What the fuck is going on? I'm underwater. Look, I found The treasure. Get out of my goddamn scuba gear, you imbécil. Oh, no, the treasure. It went into that underwater cave.

Get out of the toilet. But when you take a structure like that and you apply it to comedy, it almost feels like it's a parody of movies altogether. It's like Tom made this while all the while saying, I can't believe some idiot paid me to do this. The films enjoyed a bit of a reappraisal in recent years, and at the time since, Tom's more or less said as much. He was famously the second person to accept a Razzia Ward in person for the movie, and in 2024, he'd speak to Uprox about it. It just seemed like the thing to do. I mean, at the time, the word trolling didn't exist, but making the movie was a massive troll. What are we trolling for? We're trolling for that, right? So of course, I'm going to accept my awards. This is what we were doing. Again, you want to talk about things being a little ahead of the curve or whatever, you can say that or not about this movie, but that's what we were doing. We were trolling the entire industry. Tom, of course, would wind up being one of the first mainstream celebrities to learn all about that.

But before he could, MTV tried to revive the Tom Green show in 2003 as the new Tom Green show, leaning more into the late night talk show aspects. This was a very short-lived show, but it did give us a rare glimpse of an actually mad Tom Green. For the show, he had a custom desk made that was designed to resemble Johnny Carson's desk from the 1960s. It cost $10,000, and he had to fight MTV to get them to pay for it. Then one episode, he had Jesse James Dupri of the band Jackal. One Jackle's most popular songs is this song, The Lumberjack, in which Jesse plays a chainsaw solo. Jesse brings the chainsaw with him to the new Tom Green show, and the first thing he does is take it to Tom Green's $10,000 Johnny Carson desk that MTV didn't want him to have. Tom spends the rest of the show seething with rage and taking sarcastic jabs at Jesse whenever he can.

Tell me about your little ranky-dink show that you do. Are you all right, Bird? Are you okay? What should I do here? You're a producer. You've television a long time. You produce the Jerry Springer show. What should I do here? Should I act like this is cool, like this dude came out here, he got to his upper desk and I don't care? And then go and have some ball of interview where I'm really nice to him about his little rock and roll band? Or should I just move on and do what we were supposed to do?

This, of course, would not be the last appearance of angry Tom Green. In June of 2006, Tom Green would partner with Mania TV for an internet call-in show called Tom Green Live, later renamed to Tom Green's house tonight. Now, any call-in show, no matter who's hosting it, no matter what platform is on, is going to invite prank callers. Usually, they'll try to prevent this with call screeners and tape delay, but sometimes they make it through anyway. Tom Green took pride in not having a call screener. He thought it made for a better show. So he's getting this dream going with frequent appearances by celebrity friends like Steve-O and Tony Hawk, and they're enjoying the ability to say and do whatever they want without network executives or the SEC breathing down their necks. There's the occasional prank call as expected, but it's mostly people just excited to get to talk on the phone with these guys. A few months later, though, the show gets the attention of 4chan, and this, of course, is where it always gets a little murky when talking about early 4chan history, because I'm really certain I would see the show getting posted to be before the big raid, but most sources seem to mark the very beginning of the pranks as August 16th of 2006.

But the coverage of events on Biblioteca Anonymous seems to agree with my memory of events, saying that about 10% of the colors were 4chan pranks at first. In any case, though, August 16th is when the actual big raid begins. There's very little that still survives of the actual event, aside from a few clips on YouTube, some obscure forum posts, and accounts of it on Encyclopedia Dramatica and Biblioteca Anonymous. But essentially, on this day, you got a mix of people posting about their pranks on B and organizing an IRC, and the whole thing snowballs until essentially, 4chan has taken over his entire show, mostly just spamming him with memes like, Do a Barrel Roll.

A Barrel Roll? Yeah, a Barrel Roll on air. A barrel roll? Yeah. A barrel roll. A barrel roll? A barrel roll. A barrel roll? A barrel roll. A barrel roll? A barrel roll. A barrel roll? A barrel roll.

We're saying desu over and over again, which is a meme that was from the anime Rose and Maiden. And of course, with the Habo reads only just having happened the month prior, you also get a bunch of people saying, Pools closed. And while most people would start their call just by yelling the meme right at Tom, other people would try to lure him into a false sense of security first.

Hello, you're on the air. Hey, Tom, what's up? Oh, pretty good, man. What's going on? Not Too bad here. Just going out watching your show on the internet here. First time I've ever seen this thing. Awesome, man. So what are you doing today? I'm not doing anything. Just going out here in Red Deer, Alberta, actually. Oh, my gosh. Red Deer. I love Red Deer. You know I've been to Red Deer many times. Oh, yeah? Yeah. You're a fat man.

Tom Green as a fat N-word would, of course, become a staple of these rates. At the end of the show, Tom says, thanks to you, assholes, this will no longer be a call-in show. Of course, the show that followed him couldn't function without callers. It was a women's advice show called Girl Talk.

How are you? I just like to say show tics or get the fuck out. Bye. Shame on you. Hi, I'm George Zimmer, CEO and co founder of the Men's Warehouse. Hi, my name is Alex. Hi, Alex. Well, I don't know. I like this girl at school, but I'm always real shy when I try to talk to her. And I asked my mom about it, but she got scared and said, You're welcome to your Nancy and uncle to Bel Air.

Now, an important part of 4chan rates at this point in time, some people are very intent on keeping a 4chan, a super secret club. Rules one and two, you don't talk about B. If anyone asked, you got to say you're from E-Bom's World, which that would eventually get E-bom's World sued, but that's for another video. That wouldn't happen this time as someone called up Girl Talk and gave the game away.

Are you familiar Is there a fight with 4chan by any chance? No. What is it? It's a site on the internet, which is the reason why you guys get to make prank calls.

At the time, there's a bit of a divide over the rules. Some people adhered to this stuff religiously, while others are like, The rules are just a joke. It was never meant to actually be taken seriously. There's already thousands of people on 4chan, you absolute larping morons. So whoever that collar was, he was essentially trolling that side of 4chan, and I can only imagine how butt-hurt they were listening to that. Of course, Tom Green wouldn't entirely go through with his threat to end call-ins. He'd do shows both with and without calls, and these pranks would persist throughout the next several years, often embarrassing Tom in front of his celebrity friends. It was a love-hate relationship. Tom, of course, was made aware of 4chan from day one, and as time passed, he would gradually develop more of an understanding of what was going on here. For example, you got this clip that seems to only still exist on a 10-year-old gamer from Mars video of Tom Green explaining 4chan in the Tony Hawk.

Hey, what's going on? You're on the air. Hey, Tony Hawk, what's up? Yeah, what's up? Hey, I want to ask you about a character on the new game you're going to be. I was wondering if you're going to put any mud kips on it. Does this mean anything? I don't know. I don't even know what that means. Probably not. I don't know what that means. Okay. Hello, you're on the air. I don't even know what that word means. So did you say something horrible there that I have to edit out? No, I don't know. No, it just makes no sense. No. Okay. Just makes no sense? There's a kid. Yeah, it's a little thing about... It's a 4chan thing. It's kids on the internet, they have this group of kids, and they like to say funny words like barrel roll or video game move from Star Fox. Star Fox 20? Yeah, and they've been dogging me for a year. Got to tell you, driving me nuts, actually. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I scream, 4chan.

Tom Green was actually the first person I would ever see attempt to the word meme in real life. I think he said meme. That clip, though, like a lot of other clips, is long gone. It's been driving me crazy for years. At times, he'd even played directly to his newly found 4chan audience, like the time he recreated the gentleman meme, or one show where he asked his audience to play the game, during which he promised to keep taking calls as long as his view count didn't drop. Of course, to keep him on forever, they just boughted his views. Eventually, he'd get pissed off when people kept on yelling slurs at him, and he'd end the show by yelling, Phones are bullshit, and ripping up his phone cable. And then after the show ended, his server got DDoSed, which is a bit extreme, I guess, in comparison to things like the time they got him to put meat spin up on all his screens. Then there was another episode that was his way of trying to counter Troll the Trolls. He announced as a call in episode and people are getting ready to get the business.

He starts the episode by a badly and obnoxiously playing the saxophone. Then he keeps playing, and then he keeps playing for hours, and he never opens up the phone lines, and that's the end of the show. And he does this again the next day. May those guys waste time. March of 2009 was a particularly tumultuous time in the relationship between 4chan and Tom Green. On the second of March, Tom had married with children's David Faustino and Corin Nemek of Parker Louis Can't Lose on his guests. He ordered some pizza from a local spot called Pizza Land. The IRC server decides that they're going to cancel his order and instead have $79 worth of pizza from Pizza Hut sent to his house. Make him question his sanity a little bit. Be like, Oh, did I order from the wrong place? A little bit of classic gaslighting before people started overusing therapy words in real life. However, they didn't succeed in canceling the original order. The Call to Pizza Land is actually on YouTube, and you can tell the caller starts to feel bad as the old pizza man is on the verge of tears. He's not going to pay for your pizza.

No, I don't know.

It's going to be-I mean, we love Pizza Land. We order from you guys all the time, but-I know.

I know, and you love my pizza, but why did you do this one today? For me, I don't understand.

Well, but the Pizza Hut order does arrive first. And as Tom realizes what happened, he admits that he actually thought the swim was pretty funny. He pays for the extra pizza and enjoys it. This stunt would be repeated months later with $450 of sushi. Despite his enjoyment of the pizza prank, though, I guess a little while later, he realized the implications of having something sent right to his house. His address had been linked a while ago, but I think this was the first time anyone actually made direct contact like that. So a few days later, he makes a blog post noting that he likes the attitude of the prankers, but anyone who takes things too will be reported to the FBI Cyber Crimes Division. We have a very serious computer forensics team on the case starting today. You will be found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Keep it cool. Go prank C-Span and send me the tape. And they did. Next call from Oneida, New York.

Republican Line. Not too long ago, I met a woman from Iraq. She was a citizen over there, and she had to leave her family behind because over there in Iraq, everyone was getting bear rolled.

You guys rock, all of you. Even the guys at B. I love you guys. Funny shit, Tiji. Ultimately, I think all things considered, Tom Green handled the pranks pretty well. Although obviously, his Ha Ha Love You Guys demeanor in that blog post wasn't how he was feeling all the time. What he was experiencing was completely unprecedented. I mean, sure, 4chan didn't invent prank calls, but I don't think there had been a situation like this before in all of human history, where you have literally hundreds, if not thousands of people gathering to prank one specific guy in real-time for years. And I don't think Tom Green ever actually went through with a lawsuit, unlike certain other people who will be covered in a future video. Looking back on some of the old footage, some of the few clips that have avoided deletion throughout the years, it seems like he did what he could as a performer to try and make it work.

A barrel roll.

A barrel roll. And I have to imagine that on some level, especially now with this situation so many years behind him, that he might have felt some kinship towards his prankers, being that in some way Tom Green was the original troll, and then he has the next generation taking it and turning it around back on him. But I think some insight into the approach he took here can be gleaned from his 2020 appearance on Legion of Skanks, where he speaks about the chainsaw incident. I got mad.

But while I was getting mad, to me in my head, I was thinking, this is fucking awesome. Comes up on Facebook, and all the people are in the comments are, why are you mad? You used to cut desks, and you can't even take it when someone comes to your desk. They didn't understand that there was this entire dialog going on in my head where I was happy that I was mad because it's funnier if I'm mad than if I'm not mad. So that's all. Yeah, makes a situation. I'll tell you what- But I've been trying to explain this for 15 years.

Whether or not he's being honest here is up to interpretation. But you look at the interview after the guy chainsaw at his desk, and you look at a lot of the 4chan clips, and it seems like this is actually the case to me. But anyway, that's all for now. This video actually started as a smaller segment in a video I was working on about Hal Turner. So if that interests you, you're going to want to subscribe. And if you like this video, check out my video about Scooby versus 4chan. I'm out.