It's Still Real to Me Damn It

Confirmed 154,614

About

It's Still Real To Me Damnit is a viral meme video and catchphrase spoken by a wrestling fan named David Wills. The passionate emotion that Wills demonstrates in his voice while talking about wrestling, a sport that is by all means known to be fake and choreographed down to the stories and fight winners, and his belief that it truly is still real made the video an early meme gem.

Origin

In November 2005, David Wills went to a Wrestling fan event called "A Tribute to Starrcade" in which he took part of a Question and Answer section and subsequently broke down crying on camera. This event, summed up with "It's Still Real To Me Damnit" was quickly shown on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show, with it then being uploaded to YouTube on January 8th, 2006. This upload was later copystruck by Disney, which owns parent company ABC, with re-uploads^[1] being posted to YouTube by various other accounts (shown below).

Spread

The incident quickly spread after it's appearence on Jimmy Kimmel Live, with Tosh.0 doing a web redemption for the fan, which aired on February 15th, 2011, with part of the episode being uploaded to YouTube by the channel batmanfreek^[2] on February 21st, 2011, gaining over 69,000 views in 12 years (shown below).

In the years after the incident, David Wills continues to associate himself with the video and wrestling as a whole, as seen in his multiple writings about the event in question as well as follow-up YouTube videos he's been featured in. On January 25th, 2019, the YouTube channel Frank Zarrillo^[3] uploaded a review of a film called The Wrestler that David Wills was interviewed as part of, with the catchphrase "It's Still Real To Me, Damnit" being prominently used (shown below).