Yes, you know the one--or at the very least you have a pimply 15 year old relative who does (trust me).
If I may wax poetic a bit, I've always been keen on using animation to be slightly subversive. I look back on the golden years of early Flash animation as a time of experimentation & pushing things. Sitting through hours & hours of short cartoons on Newgrounds helped develop a sense of appreciation of the unexpected & weird.
I realize now, as someone who's worked in both the animation and marketing industry, that weird is often a turn off for the gate keepers who'd often fall back on safer territory. This has often led me to bump heads with said keepers, but I've always believed that without a little risk there's no big reward. So not to over glorify 20 seconds of meme-level buffoonery, but I think that's partly why this thing got over 5 million views. It's both familiar and different.
To be honest though, I didn't expect this thing to go as viral as it did, so it's easy to look back and over analyze. In either case, it's cool to see so many people be amused.
Roughly three years after I uploaded this, DC made July 23rd the official "Batman" day. What's so interesting about this choice is that if falls on the same day as National Hotdog Day. I'll never know if this was intentional or not, but clearly this magic combination reared it's head again in more than one way:
For any of your hard core animation fans out there, you can see the rough animation on my old deviant art account assuming you have the Flash plug in. (Having Windows 95 might help too)
http://el-cid-84.deviantart.com/art/Batman-Eats-a-Hotdog-WIP-258026821
I'll be back with another upload from my archive later on. See you later, Steemians!
--Rodrigo