It's a Trap!

In 1983, a fish-headed alien in a military uniform shouted three words that would echo through the internet for decades. Admiral Ackbar, leader of the Mon Calamari rebels, warned the Rebel Alliance of Imperial treachery: "It's a trap!" The Death Star battle continued. The meme was just getting started.

Sometime in the early 2000s, Something Awful administrator OMGWTFBBQ slapped the quote onto an image macro. FARK picked it up. Photoshop Phriday ran with it. By 2002, Admiral Ackbar had become the internet's official oracle of warning—deployed whenever someone was about to click a suspicious link, fall for obvious bait, or trust something too good to be true.

YTMND made it an art form. By 2004, hundreds of pages featured that lobster face and that urgent warning. MultiKoopa's 2005 video hit 313,000 views. YouTube spawned over a thousand variations. For a golden era, no rickroll was complete without an Ackbar counter-warning in the comments.

The phrase entered the lexicon so deeply that it transcended the meme itself. Politicians quoted it. News anchors dropped it. Your dad texted it. And that, inevitably, was the trap—when everyone's parents know your meme, the meme is dead.

Admiral Ackbar saw the ambush coming. We didn't listen.

It was a trap. The trap was immortality's cost.