Watch a documentary on the infamous Techno Viking
Find out the story behind dance music’s most infamous meme.
Fifteen years after first appearing in a viral clip titled ‘Kneecam No.1’, Germany’s much-loved Techno Viking has been immortalised in a new documentary.
Director Matthias Fritsch filmed the clip at Berlin’s Fuckparade in 2000, and now he has successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign to tell the story of how the bearded, shirtless internet icon came to be. Fritsch overcame a lawsuit from the Techno Viking on the way to making the film, but was forced to ensure the musclebound dancer’s identity remained a mystery.
The story of the Techno Viking goes something like this: the footage sat on Fritch’s personal website for six years, until he finally uploaded it to YouTube in 2006. It continued to exist in obscurity on YouTube, until it took off the following year. Fritsch has traced the origins of its viral path to an obscure Central American porn site, where it first appeared in 2007. From there it jumped to a variety of blogs and at one point racked up 2 million views in a single night. The rest, as they say, is history.