Late last week the internet had a bomb dropped on it courtesy of Apple Inc in the form of a shiny piece of plastic and circuits that had fanboys experiencing Jesus, haters finally popping an embolism, and people who were ambivalent deciding that they really need to get off the damn computer and go for a walk.

And amongst the shit-flinging monkey fight that was the internet’s reaction to the iPad was, of course, the jokes. They started almost immediately- people latched onto the name of the device and made the  obvious connection to feminine hygene products, provoking the brain-scraping mental image of a sanitary pad with some kind of user interface to check RSS feeds. Girl Clumsy, The Wah and I were hanging out when the announcement hit the net, and on hearing the name all three of us made the same joke, at the same time. Apple must have known that was going to happen. The scary thing is, it looks like they just didn’t care. And hey, people thought the Wii was a dumb name, until it turned around and owned the console market like a Chihuahua humping a table leg.

People also made jokes about how it’s basically an oversized iPod touch, how it’s sort of like a computer for special people, how Apple may have their heads so far up their own asses they form some sort of douchebag tesseract. The jokes were flying think and fast.

And then, some one went and did it.

They made a Downfall parody video about it.

I think it’s safe to say at this point that if I see one more Downfall parody video I’m going to track down the person who made it and shank them. Far be it from me to try and stifle someone’s creativity, but I think if you’re making another Downfall parody video you’re not being creative. You’re shitting into the open mouth of the internet.

If you don’t know what these things are, basically there was this really awesome German movie called Downfall which was all about Hitler’s final days in the bunker in Berlin. It was an incredible movie, and an incredible performance from actor Bruno Ganz as the nazi leader. One of the most powerful scenes in the film is a briefing between Hitler and his generals, where the terrible realisation sinks in that the war is lost, the Third Reich is in ruins, and his time is growing very short indeed.

So of course some guy switched out the subtitles and made Hitler rant about how his Xbox Live subscription was cancelled.

Now, that’s a funny idea. The execution is a bit dodgy, and it’s not as hilarious as it might be. But it gets by on the fact that they’ve taken this powerful scene and made it about something trivial. Seeing the leader of the Nazis rant like a schoolboy about Microsoft game points is funny.

Of course like any good idea around 50 thousand unoriginal tards then descended on the meme, making their own rants about everything from the Half Blood Prince delay to Kanye West crashing Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. And that one already had a damn meme. That’s just greedy.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of the damn things floating around the net now. And that number grows daily, as every time something happens that makes news some tedious arsehole fires up windows movie maker and farts out another ridiculous Downfall dub.

Now that’s not to say there aren’t some funny ones in the bunch. Hell, with that many out there, it’d be a statistical miracle if there wasn’t. Mortal Wombat made a very funny version-

I love that one because it actually tries to tie in with what’s happening on screen, matching the speech to the actions. A lot of the Downfall vids just write subtitles, without any sort of care about what’s going on on screen. This one tries to justify everything that the characters do and it makes it instantly funnier. From the finger pointing discussion to  “And who put these pencils in my hand?” it plays perfectly with the form while actually doing something new.

And then there was even the one where Hitler himself rants about how there are so many damn Downfall parodies.