Revealed! TV Insider’s Priceless Collection of ‘Alaskan Bush People’ Memes (PHOTOS)
Have you seen the new official title art for ABP Season 9? It looks like a design for a T-shirt that a superfan would sell on Etsy. It just depicts Ami and Billy merged with forest, mountains and a wolf. None of the Brown kids are in it, so I decided to re-create it with the goofiest looking pics I could find of the kids, teepees and and old pic of Sabrina the cow. Fun fact: The animal in the official ABP art is not a wolf, but a coyote!
I grew weary of ABP fans commenting with “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it!” or some variation of that ridiculous argument, so I made this meme of an Alaskan Bush People-branded dumpster fire. It was, and still is, my editorial policy to use this meme in reply to anyone who fails to understand that this show is still on the air because of its significant hate-watching audience.
During Alaskan Bush People summer seasons, we could count on the show to take a week off during Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Back in the day, I celebrated the bye week with a whole slew of shark-inspired ABP photoshops. My favorite of these is the poster inspired by Jaws.
One of my earliest ABP photoshops, this simple creation was inspired by Bear claiming that Brownton Abbey “will probably look like some sort of gnome village.” This family makes it too easy.
The Browns were once foolish enough to have their photo taken with a sign that read “Ask us anything” for a supposed Q&A with the family on Facebook. Of course, only the slow-pitched softball questions would be fielded. But this photo could be used for countless memes, and I used it whenever Our Dear Narrator told us the number of days Billy had gone without suffering a seizure.
Another early work, this one was made for my recap of “The Ballad of Billy Brown” episode in which the family takes Billy panning for gold on his birthday. No disrespect intended to the great Yukon Cornelius.
I groan every time the Browns invoke “The Good Lord,” and I imagine the Almighty rolling His eyes at them and their hypocrisy. The animated cranky God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail worked wonderfully to express this.
The Browns took a road trip down the West Coast in “Surviving the Lower 48,” and Bear spent some time playing among the cacti. I took a pic of Bear climbing a tree and manipulated it enough to make it look like he was climbing a saguaro cactus. This photoshop predates Bear earning a fourth X in EXXXXTREME.
Rendering the Browns in LEGO form was labor-intensive, but I’m incredibly proud of the final product. LEGO had an online Christmas-card generator that allowed you to customize minifigures to look like your family. Fortunately, there were just enough spots for nine people and one dog. I customized the minifigures as closely to the Browns as possible through the app, then I went into Photoshop and drew all the fine details, modifying the clothes, teeth and hairstyles as needed. Billy required the most work, while Mother Ami required absolutely none. Fun fact: Some superfans actually contacted Discovery Channel wondering how they could purchase these LEGOs! My work here is done.
I’d been trying to work Bear into a cheesy metalhead meme for a long time, and a good opportunity finally arrived when Bear was teasing Bam about how he filed his fingernails with “dainty sandpaper” while Bear filed his fingernails with a “MASCULINE ROCK.” And so was born Solomon Brown’s debut album MASCULINE ROCK. After finding a good heavy-metal font, I put Bear against a fiery background. Bear was only showing one hand in the screenshot, so I had to photoshop his other hand in for symmetry and AWESOMENESS.
In the same spirit as the ABP Dumpster Fire, I made this ABP Trainwreck. I loved when someone posted an accusatory “FAKE!” comment to this meme, as though I were trying to pass off an Alaskan Bush People train as something that was real.
You know why some superfans will believe anything about the Browns? It’s because some websites will report anything about the Browns. Here’s a parody I made of one such website’s misleading, sensationalistic clickbait.
There was a slightly unhinged superfan who photoshopped Rainy into a picture with her son and tried to convince people that her son and Rainy were pals. Of course, that led to photoshops of Rainy appearing in lots of absurd times and places. Here’s Rainy at the Yalta Conference with Churchill, FDR and Stalin in 1945.
Gabe didn’t appear a whole lot in Season 7ish, and the reason given was that he was too emotionally distraught over his mother’s cancer. Gabe was not too emotionally distraught to text lewd stuff to women, however. Anyway, when the Browns made us think that they were going to settle down in Colorado, Gabe wasn’t filmed with the family in the season finale. Maybe we’d seen the last of Gabe on the show. Or maybe they’d replace Gabe with a CGI version like the one I inserted into this scene. I realized that I put Gabe on top of Cupcake’s leg or tail. Sorry about that, Cuppy.
Matt was in rehab when Noah and Rhain got married in August 2018, so he didn’t appear in any of the wedding photos. I know how close the Browns are and how they always stick together, so I thought it would be nice to add Matt into some of the photos. YOU’RE WELCOME, BROWN FAMILY!
Remember Nike’s “Believe in Something” ad with Colin Kaepernick? It was something that people got really upset about for a few days in the fall of 2018. It inspired lots of parodies and memes, including this one I made for Alaskan Bush People. I loved how naturally “Just Do It” translated to “Dadgummit.”
Ah, “The Noah Lisa.” I break this out whenever Noah compares himself to Leonardo da Vinci. This version is the second one I made, and Bam and Allison really seemed to appreciate it. The original painting hangs in a recap on ChannelGuideMag.com.
When I heard that Gabe was getting married, my first thought was “What would he wear?” The only correct answer is a tuxedo T-shirt and the bug zapper top hat that Noah made last season.
Noah and Rhain leaked their honeymoon gift registry on the web so fans could give them money to pay for their various newlywed escapades. I ran with it and made this “GRIFT Registry,” in which the couple asked for bizarre, random stuff. The Trot Nixon autographed poster of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad actually exists, and the ’72 Pinto hubcap is an homage to the movie Clerks.
I was a little grossed out when Rhain and Noah were talking about “letting nature take its course,” and then I conceived (ZING!) of this photoshop. I borrowed a little from Homer Simpson’s graphic explanation of how daughter Maggie came to be.
Here’s one creation I would rather not have made. When The Skiff died in “Winter Watch,” I needed to memorialize it. I thought of those baroque paintings or Renaissance frescoes depicting the heavenly host. I snagged one of them from the internet and added The Skiff. The result is not too blasphemous.
What happens when you put the worst show on television into the hands of a wiseass with rudimentary Photoshop skills?
You get a whole bunch of weird Alaskan Bush People memes, parodies and other visual art that mocks the absurdity of the show and its easily duped hardcore fans.
In the gallery above, I’ve curated a collection of some of my favorites that I’ve made since Alaskan Bush People Season 2. I’ve also provided some background on the inspiration for the works, how I made them and what happened after I put them out on the interwebs.
Enjoy!
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