- Joined
- Apr 24, 2017
- Messages
- 36,544
- Reaction score
- 108,572
On June 21, 2017, a comedian by the name of Nate Fernald posted the following on Twitter
Little did he know that he was setting off one of the most unusual internet mysteries of the last few years.
“I was looking for a pin of the band The Jam,” Nate explained in an interview with Atlas Obscura “I came upon this eBay seller who had thousands and thousands of pins from the ’70s and ’80s, and I went down this weird rabbit hole. I bought a whole bunch of them, because they were old and weird and made me laugh.”
Amongst this collection was the aforementioned "Geedis" pin.
“I didn’t really think about it at first, but then it just kept popping in my head, like, what is that?”
Internet searches provided no answers, making the mystery of who or what Geedis all the more enticing. “The more obscure the thing became the more it made me laugh,” Nate said “Then I bought it and became more obsessed with it.”
He contacted the seller to see if they had any information on the pin, with no luck. Soon, Nate came across 3 more Geedis pins from different sellers, but none could tell him anything about them or where they’d come from. This is what led him to post the question to his social media.
Nate’s Tweet caused a storm of replies. Many had the vague sense they had seen the character before. Comparisons were made to everything from Where the Wild Things Are...
...to Ninja Gaiden
One poster pointed out that alphadictionary recognized "geedis" as 90's slang:
Meanwhile, Urban Dictionary defines “geedis” as “"A word for money, like dollars, quarters, etc", a usage that apparently originated with The Three Stooges in the 1940’s.
None of this seemed even tangentially related to the character on the pin, however.
It wasn’t until someone found a sticker sheet featuring the character that things really took off…
Last edited: