What are equivalents of "the dumbest song we made became our immortalizing hit" in other media/professions, or even your own life?

This isn't actually the case but imagine the dippin dots inventor was a chemical engineer working for fifty years trying to extract minute improvements to increase fertilizer yields to help end food scarcity, and on his tombstone it just says DIPPIN DOTS DUDE.

Robert Pattinson. dude has left the Twilight universe behind for years, has been the best thing about many movies he's been in since then, and still has to face "sparkly vampire" quips every time he's cast in any film that hits the mainstream

Walked into a door at Wimpy aged 8, nobody forgot it

i am worried that my only legacy will be inventing dippin dots

I'm worried that my legacy won't because voodoo beat me up and stole the recipe right out of my kitchen

xp if you could just lower the cost of your dots to $2 or $3, the increased sales would more than make up for it, i will believe that to my dying day

Seeing a pre-Office Ellie Kemper in some old Conan vids this morning reminded me of how around the same time she did the Derrick Comedy 'Dry BJ Girl' video, which went viral, and how for years afterward guys on the street would yell, "Hey BJ Girl!" at her.

When I was a child I used to attend art classes at the weekend and painted all these pictures of animals and the like (I was only eight or nine). Anyway at the end of the summer they had an exhibition and the teacher chose our best work. When we showed up I didn’t recognise any of mine, and then the teacher showed me “mine” - it was a piece of paper that had been folded over by me in anger after botching whatever I’d been painting. One of those fold-over paintings? Anyway the teacher was like, I thought this looked like a creature and the colours…? I was so angry. I found a picture of myself in the local paper at this event and I looked like I wanted to die of embarrassment. Anyway I gave up those classes after that.

OH, and Goo Goo Dolls, although they've intentionally perpetuated this.

made quality power pop/pop punk for a decade, scored a hit with an acoustic ballad, and decided that was their new route, and as years passed, pared down or outright removed these older songs from their setlist, so now they're known as the adult contemporary group that did "Iris" and nobody remembers "Don't Beat My Ass with a Baseball Bat" or "Just the Way You Are"

I have made many things on the internet over the years, but far and away the most successful is a silly thing called "Chinese Map of Europe" which I made with my wife over the course of about half an hour one day in 2012. I see it all the time (often with someone else's watermark on it) and hate it, it was just a fun way for me to learn the names of countries in Chinese but people of course have taken it literally from the start, there are also several stupid mistakes on there and it's just an ugly, trivial thing that does not deserve anything like this level of attention.
Also there is a band called Grapetooth who I suspect took their name from it.

Todd Field can make as many dramas as he wants but can never outpace Big League Chew.

When I was in high school I wrote a dumb sub-Dave Barry humor column; one especially stupid column was slightly more memorable. One line from it became a thing that everyone in my social circle knew about me. Then I went to college and wrote one dumb thing that got published in a literary magazine and THAT became the one dumb thing everyone in my social circle knew about me.

On the last day of a creative writing seminar, the professor staged a reenactment of a moment in my one dumb published story, and I wanted to cringe into a corner and never be seen again.

Then I formed a band to play my stupid songs and OF COURSE the most tossed-off facile novelty song became what everyone in my social circle remembered, and requested.

I have learned my lesson now and will not ever do anything except keep my head down and mutter misanthropic musings to a cat, thxbye

also, in my busier acting days, I was once in a production of South Pacific with an egomaniac who was a baritone singer with the Dapper Dans at Disney, but had zero acting ability. He was also a creepy shit and would often violate boundaries onstage (not in any shows I was in, but I heard manyyyyy stories, and he was actually kicked out of the Caroling Company I was in for his creepy behavior towards women). He would put a plastic bag over his head while he put shirts on or took them off, as he was paranoid about mussing his hair.

He went on to do community theatre for decades at a very small level, though he liked to imagine he was a big draw, but during one performance, the entire cast, him included, was in complete left field. And dude decided to take a dump before a fairly crucial scene with him and Luther Billis, like mere minutes before, as he forgot where we were in the play.

so we all leave the stage and he's supposed to come and join Billis, and nobody shows up, so my friend, who is playing Billis, is trying to fill time on stage by himself. The sound people largely based when they would turn the mic volume up or down on the actors mic pack on the script they had, regardless of whether the actor was on stage or not. so....they turned the mic on as he was flushing the toilet, and the entire crowd got to hear the latter half of his dump amplified. and that has been his legacy as an actor since, and I'm glad, as he's a shit. i'm also glad people finally kicked him out of groups/stopped casting him for his bad behavior towards women on stage.

xpost aw :(

Relatively successful musician of my acquaintance was in an advert for Fruit Pastilles. Next time I saw him, after I'd predictably said "Oh, I saw you in the ad for Fruit Pastilles", he was bemoaning the fact that of everything he's ever done, all his numerous life achievements, people will just remember this.

20+ years on ilx and "bosom manor" will be my enduring legacy

As a child, I had no idea that Buck Owens had ever done anything in his life other than host Hee Haw... likewise with Dionne Warwick on Solid Gold

Would you rather die surrounded by solid gold or psychic friends?

maybe the real solid gold was the psychic friends we made along the way...

when I grew up I had no idea Dom Deluise was an actor because all I saw him on was food-related commercials/cookbooks etc.

I thought when he did the voice in All Dogs Go to Heaven it was weird to give a guy who messed with meatballs a lead role

^^^^^ Same with Orson Welles for me - turns out he did a couple things beyond cheap wine commercials

Richard Dawkins is probably gonna be best known for inventing the term "meme". which isn't even being used as he intended it

I sort of wonder what the legacy will be of people who became famous for one thing, but later became a supervillain on Twitter-- i.e. Dawkins, Dilbert guy, Neil Degrasse Tyson

there was a time when the Dunkaccino clip was really blowing up everywhere and getting meme'd ad infinitum and it occurred to me that there could be an entire generation who just knows Al Pacino as "Dunk"

I remember David Cross talking about how every time he got recognized in public it was for his guest spot on "Just Shoot Me."

co-worker: Vanilla Ice in the conference room.
ILXor: Yeah, I'd like to suck on some of that!
co-worker: o_O

<ILXor goes to conference room, sees it's Vanilla Ice not vanilla ice cream>

ILXor: Noooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

― a great poke for Jet Set Willy (snoball), Tuesday, October 2, 2012 11:47 AM

The dumbest things I’ve done are justly celebrated

President K., Victor Davis Hanson was a pretty respected historian and teacher before slipping into the right-wing deep end.

Richard Dawkins is probably gonna be best known for inventing the term "meme". which isn't even being used as he intended it

― frogbs

You mean the little pot of honey guy?

dundridge did not catch on in quite the same way it has to be said

I have a cousin whose son used to love watching the training montage from Rocky and imitating everything Stallone did. He was 2 I think. Not only is it very impressive for a small child it's also very adorable. Lookup "Baby Balboa" and you'll find it. So he put this on YouTube to show some people in the family, and someone found it, uploaded it under their own account, and got a ton of views. idk how many but it was in the millions before he got it taken down. Supposedly a bunch of ad revenue from this just went to someone else.
Apparently people were contacting him, like the folks from Jimmy Kimmel wanted to have him on, but they decided it wouldn't be good for the kid so they didn't do it. Anyway this video still manages to pop up on Twitter or Insta every few months. Someone just recently sent it to my wife out of the blue and she was like "yeah I know this kid, we're family, here's a picture of us"...it's wild. Curious how he's gonna feel about it when he's older. Must be weird to know the one thing you achieved internet immortality before your first memories even formed.

That reminds me... I knew the guy in the 90's who first made "Mean People Suck" stickers, at a shop north of San Francisco (Cotati, if anyone knows where that is). He never trademarked it, never thought it would be more than a small local thing - then came a glut of knockoff stickers, patches, t-shirts, which continue to this day.

When told they were selling related merch at the Great America theme park, his only response was that they should probably let him in for free. It's now been used for a movie title, books, NOFX songs,etc.

aw man that sucks that people ripped off his idea

I think he was just kind of a stoner dude that ran a silkscreen shop, and he did initially make a little money selling the decals to local record stores and head shops. But once it caught on, he just sort of waived his rights and god knows how many millions that might have been generated

one of my best friends, I actually met working at the company I'm at now back in 2005. I've been a heavy part of his life and vice versa since then, but it wasn't until his bachelor party that I actually connected with his other friends. I was, prior to that, the quiet kid who left parties early.

so I finally became friendly with all of his friends, which was great, and over the years, I held his kids the week they were born, his kids call me Uncle Neanderthal, some of his friends have come seen me perform in musicals, I starred in his music video, etc...

and yet, until TWO YEARS AGO, I was called (jokingly) "puke kid" because on NYE 2012, I went to a new years party w/ him, and, stressed out about my first project as a project manager, which was going live in two days, so I was stressed. I got positively ripped and threw up all over myself, and everrrrrrrrybody saw the aftermath. my friend, who was on molly, cleaned me up. it wasn't even a typical thing, my drinking was almost non-existent back in those days (compared to now) - I just overdid it that one day.

it was always good natured but I LOLed that I finally connected with the group and then very quickly became that guy.

ya my cousin has kind of the same story, I know my little brother was contacting him and saying "you gotta do this and this and this right now because you could make a on of ad revenue from this" as soon as it started going viral, but he was like "ehh I don't really have time for that" and now apparently this could have made him a pretty substantial sum which would've made a very nice college fund

same as Andy that is. I have not barfed all over myself yet. However I do have plenty of friends who still have nicknames given to them based on something they did half a lifetime ago. there are people I still hang out with whose real name I legitimately don't know because they are not on Facebook.

President K., Victor Davis Hanson was a pretty respected historian and teacher before slipping into the right-wing deep end.

― Auf Der Martini (Ye Mad Puffin),

I read one of his early books around 2004. He already had a hard-on for men in gladiator sandals defending masculine values, but the way he revealed himself as a turd in hiding surprised me.

xpost my brother once had a co-actor have a bout of diarrhea creep up while onstage, so he had to run offstage and deal with it mid-scene, and put the show on pause (it was a kids show, so they riffed for a few minutes), and they called him "poop kid" for at least 5 years

lol I have a couple fun school play stories, idk if they really belong here but I'm gonna tell 'em anyway.

The play we did I was a plastic surgeon whose job it was to keep doing surgery on the main villain so the cops wouldn't recognize him (this was written in the early Cary Grant era btw). Apparently I was screwing it up and at some point the villain gets mad, hands me a picture and says "this is what I used to look like!". well in rehearsal we'd always mimed that part, but for the actual play we had to use an actual picture. The photo they had on hand was the official school photo of the principal. Who was a very goofy looking fellow. So he says "this is what I used to look like" and hands me a picture of the principal of the school doing this weird half-smile - I had no idea that was coming, and it was so funny to me that I could not hold it together...you know when you're laughing and everyone's staring at you which makes you want to laugh harder??? It was like that but with an audience of like 500 people. And I couldn't explain what was so funny! It stopped the play for a good 30 seconds. As soon as it was over like half my class was rushing over to me to ask "what the hell was on that photo??"

But that had nothing on the second night - everything was fine for like 3/4 of the play, until the end which is a particularly complex scene with people coming and going, mostly characters who didn't appear in other scenes and therefore weren't part of most rehearsals. Anyway, I'm in this scene, in the middle of the stage no less, and one character picks up the wrong cue and says the wrong line, which causes another character to say the next line, and so on, effectively skipping like three pages of dialogue, during which MY character is supposed to be out of the play for good. So there's a pause, I think because everyone's confused, and I just yell out "Ahhh!! I'm having a heart attack!!" and run offstage...I don't know why exactly I chose that, what can I say, I panicked.

Anyway both those stories followed me around for a while - my old classmates still mention one or the other