The word “meme” didn’t exist when Paul Linnman and Doug Brazil—a KATU-TV reporter and cameraman, respectively—chartered a flight from Portland to Florence one cool November day in 1970, and the notion that ideas or images could propagate like viruses wouldn’t become part of mainstream discourse for at least a couple of decades. So they had no way of knowing they were on their way to make one of the first viral videos.

They were simply a couple of up-and-coming young TV journalists acting on a tip that the Oregon State Highway Division (now the Oregon Department of Transportation) was planning to blow up a beached whale with dynamite. But as Linnman recounts in Oh Whale , a documentary short by filmmaker Winslow Crane-Murdoch showing at the Tomorrow Theater on Nov. 12, KATU’s clip of the

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