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It's remarkable to look back at just how much attention the film and its online following caught. In the pages of the New York Times, you could find assertions that the phenomenon lampooned Hollywood, tapped into biological biases towards hating snakes, and, most impressively, articulated post-9/11 fears of flying. But more striking now is the way that it was actually a sign of its times—those times being a younger, more-naive era of the Internet.

The hype started in 2005, with screenwriter Josh Friedman penning a blog post about how he'd nearly been hired on to help with the script. He'd heard that the studio was planning on changing the name from Snakes on a Plane to something like Pacific Air Flight 121. This, to Friedman, was distressing—it was the title that got him interested in the first place:

I ask Agent the name of the project, what it's about, etc. He says: Snakes on a Plane. Holy shit, I'm thinking. It's a title. It's a concept. It's a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It's perfect. Perfect. It's the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.

Samuel L. Jackson apparently agreed with Friedman and convinced the filmmakers to change the title back to Snakes on a Plane. The craze just accelerated from there. Fans of the yet-to-be-made film churned out jokey images playing up the camp appeal of the title, the concept, and the idea of Jackson delivering a line about "motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane"—a phrase that, according to some reports, wasn't in the script until fans became obsessed with it (New Line ordered a few days of re-shooting in order to up the film's gore and sex once it became a phenomenon). The mainstream media began noticing what was going on, and Finkelstein appeared in stories by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and others, as well as on Countdown With Keith Olbermann.

The idea of an Internet meme wasn't new in 2006. But it was certainly less widely understood than it is today. And so the attention paid to Snakes served as a kind of coming-out for all sorts of new-millennium cultural strains: the absurd humor of the message-board masses, the way content creation had become second nature for an entire generation (remember, 2006 was when Time named "you" its person of the year), the way lowly fans could now make enough noise for professional entertainers take notice.

And the film marked a shift in how Hollywood thought about courting its audience. A clip was screened at San Diego Comic-Con (where Finkelstein took part in a Q&A with Jackson), right as Comic-Con was beginning to attract huge crossover attention. And it came around the time that emo video blogger lonelygirl15 was outed as a professionally created fiction. Viral marketing and Hollywood's crashing of fan-boy events would quickly become cliches.