April 17th, 2012Top StoryHow A Lamborghini Fire Fueled An Internet MemeBy Matt Hardigree
That man's name is Jason Schultz — but now with the video of the fire reaching almost half a million views in just two days, an entire website devoted to him, and hundreds of photoshops springing up across the Internet, he's now better known as "Aventador Guy". Here's the story of how a meme was born. No one yet knows how the Lamborghini Aventador caught on fire, only that the vehicle, owned by a local dealership, was being test-driven by a man now identified as venture capitalist Jason Schultz. A man who dresses very casually for a test drive of a $376,000 supercar. Since the Lamborghini was not his, we can presume then that the sudden conflagration of the expensive exotic didn't phase him and thus he was ok posing next to it as the supercar's carbon fiber composite body flaked away from the heat of the flames. But the reason this became a meme is not just his pose, or his casual dress, it's the whole casual attitude in the picture. It was that casualness that caused Jalopnik commenters to quickly jump at the chance to photoshop him. And what started here was quickly picked up and ran with by the creative denizens of forums like VWVortex. But it didn't stop there. What took this from mere minor meme to full-on Internet memgasm was when a new website popped up — AventadorGuy.com. We don't yet know who set up the website, but they seem to have used a mix of photoshops from here on Jalopnik as well as from other various forums — and for purposes of both hilarity as well as to show what we mean, we've included a selection of the photoshops we found here in our comments. We reached out to the man who inspired the meme. Schultz seems as relaxed about his sudden fame as he was about the fire, telling Jalopnik: "I just need an Aventador-Guy tee shirt." I'm sure one of Jalopnik's readers can probably Photoshop that for him. |
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