First posted on YouTube in 2007, the viral clip known as Iron Mic: Eli Porter vs Envy is, at first glance, a rap battle between two teenage MCs of questionable talent. But it's also much, much more. Imagine a hip-hop special of Britain's Got Talent – if Britain's Got Talent had a production budget of £4.50 and was crewed entirely by high 16-year-olds – and you're starting to understand why the clip has won 3.4m views. It's also a treasure trove of amateurish camera angles, mic feedback and inexplicable editing choices. For hip-hop fans, it's either the worst rap battle ever or the greatest, depending on your point of view, and a source of endless online musings. The idiosyncratic delivery style of the clip's star, Eli Porter, led some viewers to assume he has learning difficulties (he doesn't), but that didn't stop him becoming a hip-hop folk hero, name-checked by Kanye West in his recent Jay-Z collaboration HAM.
Despite its popularity, the clip's origins remained shrouded in mystery. Until, that is, first-time film-makers (at the time) Trent Babbington and Walker Warren tracked down Porter and the other participants to a small town near Atlanta, Georgia. Now available via Vimeo, the first part of the resultant documentary, People's Champion: Behind the Battle, is gloriously detailed and also crammed with enthusiastic commentary. Part two is soon to follow, and the complete documentary deserves to reach an audience far beyond hip-hop trivia fans when it's released on iTunes, DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.
It might seem too wilfully niche for wider consumption, but People's Champion is not the only documentary to explore a viral phenomenon. The 2008 National Geographic film Caught on Safari: Battle At Kruger turned an eight-minute YouTube clip of a baby buffalo escaping predators into an hour-long documentary.
The original footage was captured by amateur photographer David Budzinski on South African safari in 2004. On his return home, he attempted unsuccessfully to sell it to National Geographic, but it wasn't until Battle at Kruger surpassed 30m views on YouTube that it bought the rights. The channel's bosses were pleased enough with the outcome to commission several more documentaries based on viral nature clips.
Since YouTube's 2005 launch, the site has helped create hundreds of similar internet celebrities, including a chubby teenager wielding a lightsabre, a cat playing the piano and a chipmunk shooting the camera a dramatic look; none of these have, however, prompted their own behind-the-scenes documentary. No one, for example, has yet made Charlie Bit My Finger: The Movie, in tribute to the current most-viewed clip on YouTube (music videos excepted). Baby Charlie chomping his older brother's finger then giggling has accrued 368m hits and counting.
It's not the popularity of a clip that makes it worthy of a further scrutiny, Warren says, so much as the backstory it hints at. "Most people on the internet – Tila Tequila, Tay Zonday, Rebecca Black – purposely set out to get notoriety. Eli just did this one-off school event participation and now Kanye West and Eminem's hype man will talk about him on stage. What's so cool about Eli's story is, this wasn't his destiny, you know what I mean?"
Jack Rebney, aka Winnebago Man, is another victim of the internet's destiny-perverting powers. Google "the angriest man in the world" and you'll find a compilation clip of Rebney ranting about flies and the heat (watch at your own risk) as he struggles to remember his lines on a the set of a 1989 Winnebago commercial. His Basil Fawltyesque rage and virtuoso command of profanities attracted more than 2m views on underground VHS tapes, and led to him being quoted everywhere from SpongeBob SquarePants to The Sopranos. It also led to his dismissal from Winnebago Industries.
Now living in a remote area of northern California, 81-year-old Rebney was only vaguely aware of the scale of his celebrity until he was approached by film-makers Joel Heller and Ben Steinbauer. Rebney's reclusive lifestyle turns Winnebago Man, which will be available on iTunes next week, into a part-documentary, part-mystery story, as detective-director Steinbauer attempts to track the man down and answer the most pressing questions for fans of the clip: who is this man? Why is he so angry? And, most importantly, what is 'accoutrema'?
But this isn't just about documentary-makers cashing in on already-proven popularity, Heller says. "We obviously looked at the fact that 20 million people had watched this viral video over the last 20 years. What we didn't know was whether or not those people would have any interest in going to see an indie documentary about it."
These days Rebney listens only to the BBC and is keener to discuss David Cameron's failings than his own fame, but he retains a passionate loathing for the editors of the original clip. He tells me: "I'm about 6ft 4in and I weigh about 245 pounds. I would so much have liked to have found them someplace and demonstrated what my feelings are in regard to what they did."
Solving a mystery is also the crux of the 2011 film Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure. Director Matthew Bate had his curiosity sparked by a CD of Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman covertly recorded by their long-suffering neighbours. The colourful arguments of an ageing gay man and his homophobic roommate became a pre-internet viral phenomenon in early-90s San Francisco. "The relationship of these two men is so mysterious, the hatred they share so bizarre, that the small space they inhabited and the things they fight about take on a Beckett-like absurdity," Bate says. "I think that humans are naturally voyeuristic and Pete and Ray's arguments precede reality TV and YouTube – so this was a glimpse into real people's lives, which was unique at the time. No Hollywood scriptwriter could write Raymond's great line: 'If you wanna talk to me then shut your fuckin' mouth!'"
Like their analogue ancestor the underground video, viral clips retain a sense of being both contraband and somehow more real and unmediated than traditional media. "There's no press release to go along with these kids on YouTube," says Warren. "It's just: 'Where the hell did this come from? This is crazy.'"
A popular YouTube clip may not (yet) be as culturally important as our favourite movie or song, but it's an equally fruitful source for hair-splitting analysis. The gleeful faces of the contributors to People's Champion as they cover every detail, from the potential homosexual subtext of the judges' body language to Porter's mispronunciation of "gat" for "cat" leaves no doubt of this. Warren says he felt duty bound to indulge them. "There are so many diehard fans of this clip that if we'd never dissected the original, we would have had a lot of angry emails. 'How comes the judge is rubbing against the other judge?' Or 'How come there's a heart shape at the end?'"
By celebrating the minutiae of cultural minutiae, directors also provide unwilling internet celebrities with the means to take back their dignity from the cyber-bullies who stole it. Whereas the clip Winnebago Man suggests Jack Rebney is a comical curmudgeon with a grudge against flies, the film Winnebago Man reveals a principled and witty man whose long career in news media affords perspective enough for justifiable anger. Similarly, People's Champion rebukes not only Eli's detractors, but those "defenders" who confused his physical impairment with a mental one and came to the patronising conclusion that he must be a victim of exploitation. "I feel like I got a lot of stuff off my chest," Porter says. He is still making music and wanted "to let people know I'm just as regular and normal as any other person. Just cos I got a limp, don't mistake me for my limp and don't mistake my intelligence."
Their experiences may be extreme, but the struggle of Rebney and Porter to come to terms with the way others see them, is not unique. You don't need 200m hits on YouTube to understand the anxiety associated with an indelible digital reputation that is gradually slipping out of control. These making-of documentaries are an attempt to turn the meme back into the man, and that's an endeavour that anyone with a Facebook page or a Twitter account can get behind.
Winnebago Man is out on iTunes next week. People's Champion: Behind the Battle can be viewed at peopleschampiondoc.com. Shut Up Little Man!: An Audio Misadventure is available on demand via www.tribecafilm.com from 25 August.
• This article was amended on 26 August 2011. The original referred to film-maker Josh Heller. This has been corrected.
