My high school's "Und3rground" Newspaper was literally copied from the onion, but I had no idea because this was way before they had a website, just a rag of their own in Madison Wisconsin. So of course to the Freshman me it was the best thing ever. Then I turned out going to school at Wisconsin and was like "shit!"

I did my best to make my own articles for the paper that emulated the same style but were never as funny; turns out I was trying to compete with what was basically UW's alternative college paper and not high school stoners like myself. It was a big deal for me when they left Madison: Dan Savage and I worked at the same video store (at different times) and I was best friends with the gal who did the art, the AV club people, etc. so it felt like I was losing my friends, like when a band you really like hits the big time and forgets who you are.

If you want an idea of its influence though, I was talking with a friend of mine during a lunar eclipse and the moon landing came up, and he was like "have you heard the unedited audio?" He actually thought that the onion's moon landing article (later turned into audio) was real. And the guy is 39 years old and is a physicist.

The preload image made me laugh, so five stars for that. The video does not live up to it.

Not meant as a reply, sorry.

oops reply to infinite zest ^^^

Yeah. To be fair he grew up on a small island north of Seattle, then the rest of the time in either Seattle and Portland, neither of which have carried the paper version of the Onion like Denver, Milwaukee, Madison, I'm assuming NYC, and others do. So in Madison the fake article was all over the place, on T-shirts, coffee mugs.. but I'm pretty sure it kind of lost its steam around 2001 or 2002, when the onion still didn't have that much of a web presence (I believe they were just archiving their old stuff then) so he'd sort of have to know someone who read the paper to be in on the joke.

But yeah. In a way I didn't want to break the (fake) news to him. :(