VIRAL LIKE SARS 10 YEARS AGO: The N-Word Dropping Tokyo Breakfast

Ten years ago, in 2000 — when the Internet was “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US”, YouTube was just the gleam in a douchebag’s eye and watching videos consisted of downloading weird file names for seven minutes, a little video called Tokyo Breakfast hit the Internet: touted as a pilot for a Japanese television show, a presumably Japanese family drops the N word in a parody of American culture, to the horror and/or delight and/or hysterics of college students with Internet access everywhere (okay, me.)

After years of debate as to whether this pilot was Japanese or Chinese (the newscasters are speaking in Mandarin!) thanks to the invention of Wikipedia several years later, we can finally put the issue at rest: Tokyo Breakfast is American, a short film by Filmmaker-turned-music video director Tom Kuntz as “a parody of the Japanese perception of day-to-day doings of an American family, with an emphasis on the skewed emulation of a perceived black culture.” And chances are, you’ve definitely seen some very recent work of his: he directed Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Can Smell Like campaign. NIGGA GONE FISHIN, indeed.