In 2006, Volkswagen produced a series of TV commercials that became a sensation in the strange new thing called social media.   

If you’re a close follower of the advertising biz, you know the Volkswagen Group has hit a rough patch recently. We suppose it’s only natural that the carmaker that pioneered modern auto advertising, teaming up with New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach to create the famous Think Small campaign, among others, might also hit a sour note now and then. That’s the price of pushing the envelope: Edgy ad writing is risky ad writing.

In 2006, Volkswagen and Crispin Porter + Bogusky produced a series of three commercials for the VW GTI Mk5 that everyone could enjoy. Even the targets of the unsparing parody—denizens of the then-hot import tuner craze, fans and creators of the hit MTV show Pimp My Ride—had a good laugh. The VDub campaign featured Swedish actor Peter Stormare, a master of characters and dialects, as a mad VW engineer named Wolfgang, and German model Sonja Wöstendiek as his assistant, Miss Helga. VDub was one of the first corporate ad campaigns to go “viral,” as we say nowadays, drawing millions of views in 2006 on a curious new social media platform called YouTube. Here are Wolfgang and Miss Helga in all three original commercials.