The drawn-out Wassup greeting took off in the late 1990s with a Budweiser beer commercial where friends greet each other on the phone with an increasingly ridiculous wassup, tongues out and voices stretched. The 2000 parody film Scary Movie pushed it further into mainstream culture, and the phrase became a universal shorthand for a dumb, affectionate hello. Shortened and respelled online as wazaaaaa, the shout survived long after the ad through chat messages, early soundboards and meme edits, and it is still used whenever a plain hello feels too flat.