The Subservient Chicken
The archive has not found a surviving copy.
2004·Early web, before YouTube·unexpected
A website for Burger King on which a person in a chicken costume, in what looked like a webcam feed, did whatever a visitor typed.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2004
- Began as
- Something you played
- Where it started
- subservientchicken.com
- Made by
- The agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, for Burger King; the site was built by The Barbarian Group
- Recorded
- More than 300 commands, each filmed in advance
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
A man in a chicken suit stands in a shabby living room facing a webcam. You type an instruction — jump, dance, sit, moonwalk — and he does it. There were hundreds of pre-filmed clips behind a text box, and the illusion held long enough that people spent hours trying to find the edge of it. Burger King's agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky built it with The Barbarian Group in 2004 to sell a chicken sandwich.
Burger King kept the character for a decade of follow-up campaigns and brought him back for a tenth-anniversary film in 2014. The site itself is long gone, taking its clip library with it — the form it invented outlived the thing.
Why it matteredWhat changed
It looked like a live feed and was not: more than three hundred responses had been filmed in advance.
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asA person was responding live.
ActuallyEvery response was recorded beforehand.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on subservientchicken.com.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on subservientchicken.com.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things