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Ah, the exploding whale. Every generation has touchstone events, happenings that can never be forgotten. They imbue us with purpose, meaning, and identity. For the greatest generation, World War II. For the boomers, Woodstock. For Gen-X, Kurt Cobain's suicide.

For us, a video of whale blubber raining down from the sky.

Asylum recently caught up with the news anchor who appears in the hit viral video. In honor of this occasion, Urlesque presents, for your viewing pleasure, a look back at the video that shaped our lives.

In case you need a refresher, here is the original timeless footage of a whale being exploded:



In the Asylum piece, the anchor who presided over the classic story, Paul Linnman, takes us through the details of that fateful day. First he evocatively describes the explosion that touched a generation:
"We're hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats."
Then Linnman seems to nearly break down when discussing the tragic implications the event had on his life:
"When it airs now, it's kind of tough for me to watch. I don't think it's that good and I've got four grown sons who are able to repeat any part of that story word for word and they do so frequently just to bug me."
Truly, the pressures of fame and survivor's guilt must be almost too much to bear. Hopefully Mr. Linnman can take solace in the fact that he is not alone in his struggle. In 1991, a similar event occurred in Denmark -- only this time, the whale was self-exploding:


However, let us never forget that -- even though the detonation of whales feels like a recent development -- cetaceans have been exploding for generations. Check out this archival footage of a whale blowing up in the '30s:


Everything old is new again.