The Black Taco Meme - Phillies Fans Find a New Mascot

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Alex Moaba
– Oct 28th 2009 7:00PM

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phillies black taco In their quest to repeat as baseball's World Series champs, the Philadelphia Phillies and their fans have apparently found perverse inspiration in the power of the Taco Bell Black Jack Taco. We got word today that a highly awesome meme-in-progress was happening at the Philadelphia media & culture blog Philebrity, where crazed Phillies fans, after three psychologically grueling weeks of being force-fed this commercial on repeat by TBS, have now embraced the Black Taco as something of a spiritual guru. They've built it a photoshop-shrine and ascribed it mythical and pseudo-religious baseball powers. At this point the Black Taco may literally be willing the Phillies to victory. How did this all happen? After hours of exhaustive research, we've been able to piece together some of the story of how the Phillies Black Taco meme came to be.

Two weeks ago, the Phillies were playing in the opening round of the playoffs vs. the Rockies, and their fans were in a slightly worse mood than usual. TBS and Major League baseball had conspired against them to schedule the team's two home games to be played during the day, a decided annoyance to the many hundreds of Philadelphia residents currently holding steady employment. Then the team was forced to play Games 3 and 4 in sub-freezing Colorado weather, and nobody likes cold vibes, man. All the while, as Phillies fans were made to suffer these dual indignities, the Black Taco (with Jack Sauce!) was there, taunting them, the commercial playing over, and over again, taking up residence in peoples' psyches and refusing to leave.

It wasn't until the Phillies dispatched the Rockies in a dramatic come-from-behind win in Game 4 that things pretty much went through the looking glass. The next morning someone named J.M.M. Sweeney Jr. wrote into Philebrity with this "poem," entitled "Black Taco," which we shall excerpt here:

That Sunday night game made zero sense! Neither team deserved to win! No human beings deserved anything after that game! What a display! Oh, the humanity! But it gave way to last night's amazing ballgame! Which I deem, here, now, and forevermore "BLACK TACO!" For it was the BLACK TACO that is our new talisman of victory! Say it with me! BLACK TACO! BLACK TACO BUFFET! The Gods of Win shall know what you mean!

The seed was planted, and would grow and mutate from there into an epic photoshop meme fusing the Black Taco with images from the Phillies' playoff run. Some of the results are fantastic. See them all in Philebrity's first round up, second round up and the Philebrity Flickr group. Only the baseball gods can predict where this thing goes from here, but it promises to get weirder before it dies out, which is only fitting for a World Series matchup with the Yankees. The Black Taco and October baseball... it's as American as apple pie.