Frank Davies claims that as his day started he hadn’t even
thought about 1999 teen romantic comedy She’s All That once this century.
But when one journalistic website offered him the chance to
see what the cast of She’s All That looked like now, Mr Davies said “I just had
to know.
“I knew that it would be unbelievable, because it said it
would right there in the link to the article, so how could it not be?”
Upon clicking the link, Mr Davies was disappointed to
discover simply a picture of what Freddie Thingy and
The-Woman-Whose-Name-He’d-Forgotten looked like on the original VHS cover.
After scrolling past the image and several adverts, he found hope for more with
a ‘next page’ button.
Mr Davies pushed the button only to find a brief summary of
the film’s plot, and all of the same adverts again. After closing the large
advert that covered the majority of the page, he uncovered another ‘next page’
button.
The following page just contained the same advert multiple
times over and a ‘next page’ button. “By now, my interest in what they looked
like now was well and truly piqued. This was a mystery I had to get to the
bottom of,” said Mr Davies. “Of course, it occurred to me I could have just
googled it at any point in the last eighteen years, but I was too deep now,” he
said so he clicked a ‘next page’ button again only to find a brief and
factually inaccurate summary of Rachael Leigh Cook’s career outside of the
film.
Mr Davies first became aware it was a problem when his wife
returned from work to find him glassy-eyed and tapping at an iPhone whose
battery had long since died. Mrs Davies took the iPhone from his hand and lead
him to bed. Only to find his hands doing the same series of motions in his
sleep.
“It was the perfect pattern,” she said, “Close the pop-up,
scroll, click next, close the pop-up, scroll, click next.”
A statement on New-Media Advertising Corp website reads,
“There’s one simple change that you can make to rid your life of clickbait.
“The simple change takes just two minutes [read more].”
The cast of She’s All That look around two decades older
than they did at the time of the movie.
