Bowling alleys are the home of sticky shoes, broken arcade games and, lest we forget, those very, very dated videos that come on when you get a strike, a split, a gutter, or turkey. They’re peak ‘90s, with trippy, psychedelic colors, shapes, and weird cartoons that, on some occasions, have nothing to even do with bowling. That vaporwave aesthetic wasn’t about to go unnoticed by the online masses, and a new meme has evolved from its mere recollection.
It all began when someone posted a 10-hour video—yes, you read that correctly—of 1700s “sea shanties” with an animated pirate bobbing up and down near a boombox, like a preschooler at their music recital. Now, yes, this seems unrelated to bowling, but in the comments someone noted, “The screen at the bowling alley when you get a strike,” and the bowling alley screen meme was birthed.
As you can tell, it’s taken those wack, dated animations and turned them into, well, literally everything. You have old vines, weird animated parodies, and even animated characters like Spongebob and Pac-Man. There’s anime, manips, and weird edits of people dancing. As an added bonus, it brought to light the fact that Scott Gairdner, creator of the 2015 cartoon Moonbeam City on Comedy Central, actually honored the bowling animation to perfection years ago. As The Daily Dot points out, he made a whole thread of it on Twitter and, reader, they do not disappoint.