How the perfect Vikings meme came to be
Sitcom writer and producer Chuck Tatham, a lifelong Vikings fan, captured Vikings fandom in one scene on How I Met Your Mother
By Matthew Coller
Over a Zoom call it was hard to tell at first whether Chuck Tatham was amused, confused or honored by my request to talk to him about authoring the scene in the show How I Met Your Mother that has the most prominent and perfect GIF in the history of Minnesota Vikings fans on the internet. Probably a combination of all three.
I emailed Craig Thomas, the show’s creator, because I figured there had to be a Vikings fan involved to write a scene that grasped the crux of following the purple. Indeed, that is the case. He passed me along to Tatham, who explained that he grew up in Ontario, Canada, as the son of a sportswriter for the Windsor Star. At the same time he was reaching the age where children can start to form their own opinions about which sports teams they like or dislike, the Vikings were becoming a powerhouse.
“Canadians have to do it arbitrarily,” Tatham said of his process for picking an NFL favorite. “Vancouver, they like Seattle and Winnipeg follows the Vikes but in the middle of Toronto and Ontario, you are just making it up.”
Tatham was around six years old when the Vikings reached their first Super Bowl to conclude the 1969 season and then they went 12-2 and 11-3 the following two seasons before reaching the Super Bowl again in January 1974 against the Dolphins. He was into the Vikings’ winning ways. Forget the more closely located franchises like the struggling Detroit Lions or Buffalo Bills. He wanted to see a team that was going to win championships.
“I figured that I should get on that band wagon and start raking in those rings,” the comedy writer said with a sigh.
Throughout his formative years Tatham had plenty of reason to think that the Vikings were on the doorstep of immortality. They went to the Super Bowl when he was 11 years old and then Drew Pearson committed an uncalled pass interference against Vikings defensive back Nate Wright when he was 12 and then they lost the Super Bowl again when he was 13 and lost in the NFC Championship when he was 14 years old.
“That kind of stuff sticks with you,” Tatham said in between rattling off old Vikings like Chuck Foreman and Mick Tingelhoff.
Like all Vikings fans, he refused to give up on them. He stuck by the purple through the leaner 1980s as he was beginning a career in the marketing industry. He had a degree in English and had learned from his dad to “write on a clock,” which meant to develop the skill of writing on a deadline. It was a career but not exactly his career of choice. His claim to fame at that point was writing commercials for a furniture store called The Brick.
“I was driving to work one day and the [radio[ DJ said, ‘if I ever get my hands on whoever wrote the most recent Brick ad I’m going to murder them.’ They were really annoying,” Tatham said.
He and his brother, also an ad man, got some opportunities to write comedy in the Toronto area, in particular a show called Maniac Mansion. But they found that writing in Toronto had its limitations. Michael Short, who is Martin Short’s brother and a writer on many shows including Schitt’s Creek, told them that if they wanted to make it as writers then they would need to go to Hollywood.
So that’s what they did. Packed up their stuff and hit the road heading West. Tatham didn’t expect his time in Los Angeles to last very long. Maybe a year or two. But he landed a job writing for the uber-successful TV show Full House in 1991. It was there that he met fellow writer and producer Tom Amundsen, a Minneapolis native, and they bonded over Vikings fandom. Every Monday morning Amundsen would greet Tatham by saying, “Vikes blow.” Sometimes he would do it even when they weren’t playing.
“If I ever thought I might bail out [on cheering for the Vikings], working with Tom solidified my fandom,” Tatham said. “If you moved to LA [in the 90s] it’s not like there’s anything solid you can sink your hooks into. I was watching Bo Jackson with the LA Raiders and then the Rams moved to St. Louis. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to glom onto whatever the local team was that month.”
After Full House, Tatham wrote for other 90s hit shows Living Single and Suddenly Susan until he hit a run of shows that were canceled fairly quickly, including the critically acclaimed Arrested Development. Rather than start a banana stand or take acting lessons from Carl Weathers, he felt there was still plenty of meat on the bone and carried on through the 2000s until he was hired in 2008 to begin work as an executive producer on Season 4 of How I Met Your Mother.
He was thrilled that the character Marshall Eriksen was from Minnesota.
“I said to somebody, ‘Oh, he’s a Vikes fan?’ and they said, “I dunno, maybe.’ I said, ‘what? If he’s from Minnesota then he’s a Vikings fan,” Tatham explained. “That’s a full-body thing to add to the character. I worked with some people who were sports fans but not degenerate Vikings fans.”
In the 11th episode of Season 4, Tatham got to use all of the pent up Vikings fandom that had been bubbling in his soul since childhood in the episode “Little Minnesota.”
Marshall, played by actor Jason Segel, goes to his favorite Minnesota-themed bar with Canadian character Robin (played by Cobie Smulders). Everyone is dressed in purple and there are Minnesota references everywhere, from the establishment being called the “Walleye Saloon” to a beer called Bemidji Pale Ale to a Prince name drop. As an easter egg, the bartender has a “Tatham” Vikings jersey on. Marshall’s jersey, Jim Marshall’s No. 70 of course, was loaned to the show by the Vikings. Tatham wanted to keep it but they had promised to give it back.
In the now-famous scene amongst Vikings faithful online, Robin curiously reads a sign that says, “I’m drinking until I forget the 1999 NFC Championship.”
Marshall explains: “The Vikings were two minutes away from going to the Super Bowl when our kicker, who hadn’t missed all year, shanked a field goal and we lost in overtime.”
And then, the immortalized moment. Overcome with rage at the sheer thought of Gary Anderson’s wide-left miss against the Atlanta Falcons, Marshall slams down the table and exclaims, “DAMN!”
With that, the perfect meme was born.
“That was somewhat autobiographical because if someone mentions it to me then I go, ‘DAMN!’” Tatham said. “That might be the pasteurized version.”
As the writers were developing the episode Tatham tried to explain what the missed field goal meant to Vikings fans. How it was the most pained moment in fans’ existence and how they will never let it go.
“I recall saying to the writer’s room: ‘I cannot overstate how profoundly shitty this is in the history of the Minnesota Vikings,” Tatham said. “Think of things from your own life like your favorite aunt dying or your house burning down, this was a little worse. ‘Oh, really?’ Yes, trust me on this one.”
Segel nailed everything about the emotions of the moment. His face, the pounding of the table, which Tatham remembers being adlibbed.
“People like Jason are so good at naturally coming up with spontaneous stuff,” Tatham said. “Every actor can take something and do it in a way that you never imagined and you say, ‘that’s why they get the big money, that’s why I’m sitting here and he’s over there.’”
“I don’t think [Jason Segel] had a clue as to the Vikings history but he was a great sport,” Tatham continued. “What I think he did appreciate was when I said, ‘oh, this was big,’ he went, ‘got it, got it.’ This was life altering for people in Minnesota and he got that.”
Putting his pain on screen didn’t unjinx the Vikings. The episode aired in December 2008. Little did Tatham know that about a year later he would suffer Brett Favre’s cross-body throw in the NFC Championship against the Saints. The Vikings also missed another wide-left field goal in the 2015 playoffs and then had their starting quarterback suffer one of the most bizarre and traumatic injuries in recent NFL history in 2016. At least they reached the NFC Championship again without any kicker snafus but lost 38-7 to Philadelphia’s backup quarterback and then watched the Eagles win on their home turf at US Bank Stadium.
Right around 2008 social media was starting to catch fire. Sports fans began gathering online with each other in ways that were never possible before. It wasn’t too long after that Twitter implemented a button for GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format, if you were wondering) that featured thousands of clips from movies and TV shows. It wasn’t long after that Vikings fans started using Marshall Eriksen’s “DAMN!”
In the subsequent years, the GIF has become a universal Minnesota sports fans to display their many years of frustrations on social media. The clip is used non-stop on Vikings gameday with every miscue (particularly missed field goals) as well as when they lose out on a free agent or fire a coach or any other event that falls under the umbrella of general calamity. Furthermore, the GIF has expanded out to the rest of Minnesota’s men’s sports teams, which have cleared well over 100 combined seasons without a championship since the Twins apparently sold Minnesota’s soul to the devil for a World Series.
Lifelong Vikings fan Eric Thompson, who spent years writing online for the Daily Norseman from a fan perspective about the team, summed up the GIF’s meaning in a sentence:
“It perfectly encapsulates the Vikings fan experience in a 0.5 second loop,” Thompson said over the phone, sounding exasperated by even thinking about anything related to Anderson’s wide-left kick. “It fits so well with so many things, you can use it right after a play, you can use it after a story, basically any kind of disappointment, it’s the perfect way to sum it up.”
Thompson, whose repeated usage of the GIF was part of the inspiration for this article, was a fan of How I Met Your Mother when the show was on TV and remembers texting his brother after he first saw the episode on DVD, “you have to see this!”
“He was like, ‘I already saw the episode, holy crap they did it perfectly,’” Thompson said.
Thompson and his brother agreed that the essence of their plight was captured by the entire sequence.
“Unfortunately it fits for so many things in Vikings fandom,” Thompson said. “Getting your hopes up repeatedly and getting the football taken away from Charlie Brown in the end. It had to be a Vikings fan that wrote that part. All you can really do is say, ‘DAMN!’ I use that in real life that reference of pounding the table and saying ‘DAMN!’ because everyone who has ever seen the episode agrees with it. It’s a universally shared pain.”
When I explained to Tatham how much the scene and GIF had resonated with Vikings fans like Thompson, he had slightly mixed feelings.
“On one hand I’m delighted that it continues to carry such a wallop but I will admit that even discussing it makes me queasy, it makes me want to burst into tears and use my Fran Tarkenton night light,” Tatham said.
In seriousness, Tatham loves the way in which sports fandom connects people. He once wore a Hamilton Tiger-Cats jersey when he knew Martin Short was going to appear on How I Met Your Mother. The fellow Canadian Short saw it and yelled, “Where did you get that?!?!?!” when he saw the jersey.
“The language of sport can transcend barriers,” Tatham said.
And characters like Marshall can be transcendent too. For Minnesotans everywhere, he was a strong representation of what it means to be from Minnesota and cheer for the Vikings. Minnesotan is a language that only the fluent know how to speak and Tatham’s writing made Segel seem like “one of us,” as they say in Minnesota.
“Marshall is very special to me,” Tatham said. “Marshall is probably the most autobiographical character that I was ever associated with. He was created with Carter [Bays] and Craig [Thomas] but if tasked with writing a Marshall scene — I can say that I didn’t relate to too many characters in Arrested Development.”
The man behind the meme struck the right chord and created something cathartic for Vikings fans. That’s a better contribution than many of the team’s kickers. So before we logged off the Zoom call, I offered him the toughest question: Will the Vikings ever win the Super Bowl?
“Maybe you and I won’t be around my friend but they will win it all at some point,” Tatham said. “I’d rather not see much more expansion. If they are one of 71 teams it could be tricky. Damn, we’ll win it this year! Some day Sam Darnold will captain the ship that is the heaven that is Super Bowl victory.”
Oh yes, Tatham is definitely a Vikings fan.
The 1999 game was a classic experience for me. My wife and I were staying at the Hilton hotel which was the Vikings game day hotel in 1999. Met Denny Green's brother in the exercise room. Sat next to Red McCombs and his family in the restaurant and saw a man with a large golden chain neckless draped around his neck in the hotel lobby. Evander Holyfield, a diehard Falcon fan. Jesse Ventura was holding a big victory celebration across the street the night before the game. Lots of excitement. The game was exciting too, we were on our feet nearly the whole game, but DAMN it didn't end well. The next morning upon leaving for home we rode down the hotel elevator with Denny Green. Denny wasn't happy as you might expect.
Great article, Matthew. Thanks!