Meme People Then and Now

Disaster Girl, Success Kid, Scumbag Steve, Bad Luck Brian, Hide the Pain Harold – they’re all here! They’re back to show us how they have changed since they began to rise at the beginning of the 2010s. Memes are temporary, but Harold & Co. are forever!

Read more about some of them below.

Okay, now here are some stories:

Disaster Girl

Remember that young girl with a devilish smile in front of a burning house? The photograph appeared online in 2004, to be picked up by Buzzfeed and then go viral. She is called Zoe, and her face has since been doctored onto a multitude of disaster scenes ranging from WW2 to modern sinkholes and natural disasters.

Success Kid

Success kid (also known as “I hate sandcastles”) first became popular around 2008 as a smug baby at the beach, to be first used as personal profile photographs across the Internet. He then got badly Photoshopped and turned into a myriad of memes in the animal advice style or referencing his apparent hatred for sandcastles. His real name is Sammy Griner, by the way, and he has now aged a few years, but still seems just as pleased with himself in the recent photo posted above.

Oh, one more thing. The fame he garnered has helped to pay for his father’s new kidney after a plea for funding for his transplant going online in 2016. So yes, maybe he’s successful after all!

Scumbag Steve

The original photo of Scumbag Steve featuring a young man with a baseball cap appeared on Reddit in 2011 and quickly went viral as a popular meme. Captions often feature Steve as a bad buy who’d happily steal medication from his own grandparents or borrow money without ever paying people back. But then, the real subject of the photograph is Blake Boston a rapper from the group “Beantown Mafia” who purports not to be a bad guy after all.

Bad Luck Brian

This meme of a teenage guy with braces wearing a tartan vest and a cheeky smile originally appeared on Reddit in 2012 and was used with an accompanying caption to describe various embarrassing circumstances. Later on, the photo was revealed to be of Kyle Craven who rose to some level of Internet fame after revealing himself in a Reddit AMA.

Hide the Pain Harold

Hide the Pain Harold is actually a retired Hungarian electrical engineer and model called András Arató. Best known for becoming an internet meme, he has been in and out of the stock photo and advertisement industry as a model since disclosing his identity. After retirement, he worked as a DJ for a local radio station for 5 years. And, of course, he’s been living the life of a meme.

Sources: 1, 2, 3