Surprised Pikachu is a reaction meme built on a low-resolution frame of Pikachu with its mouth wide open in shock. Know Your Meme describes it as an image “paired with captions where a set-up leads to a predictable outcome that nevertheless leaves one surprised.” In other words, it mocks people who act shocked by the obvious consequences of their own choices.
Origin
- June 3, 1997: the episode. The frame comes from episode 10 of the Pokémon anime, “Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village”, which first aired in Japan on June 3, 1997 and in the US on September 21, 1998, per Wikipedia’s episode list. TheGamer describes the scene: Ash sends Butterfree against a wild Bulbasaur, which “easily deflects its attacks and knocks it out,” and the camera cuts to the heroes’ shocked reactions, with Pikachu in the lower right-hand corner.
- 2017: the screenshot. The meme’s creator told Know Your Meme in 2020: “Back in 2017, I was rewatching the original Pokemon anime.” She had been screenshotting scenes where Pikachu was off-model or just looked funny, for a Tumblr compilation.
- September 26, 2018: the first meme. According to Know Your Meme, “The first post to use the image as a reaction appeared on Tumblr on September 26th, 2018,” by the user popokko, and gained more than 223,000 notes.
- Autumn 2018: the spread. Know Your Meme records the image on Reddit’s /r/MemeEconomy on September 30 and on the Facebook page Meme Extreme on October 2.
Format
The standard layout is a short text set-up followed by the image (illustrative example):
- A line describing an action (“Me: eats a whole pizza at midnight”).
- A line describing its predictable result (“My stomach: hurts”).
- The Surprised Pikachu frame as the punchline.
The Daily Dot notes that people post it “either to tease someone or to self-deprecate” when an outcome was obvious.
The Detective Pikachu Theory
Wired published a piece suggesting the meme was a stealth marketing campaign for the film Detective Pikachu; Know Your Meme quotes the Wired author as “95 percent confident that this meme was the most successful stealth marketing campaign of 2018.” The creator told Know Your Meme, “I don’t take offense to anyone thinking there might be ulterior motives behind its origin,” and explained the screenshot’s 2017 origin. The Daily Dot reports that the official Pokémon X account later “leveraged it to promote the first trailer for their 2019 film.”
Recent Developments
- March 2019. Users reported that posting the image triggered automatic account suspensions on Twitter for “depicting gratuitous gore,” the Daily Dot reported; Know Your Meme records that by March 18 posting it no longer led to a suspension.
Sources
- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/surprised-pikachu
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon:_Indigo_League_episodes
- https://www.thegamer.com/surprised-pikachu-pokemon-meme-origin/
- https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/surprised-pikachus-creator-tells-us-the-story-behind-the-meme-and-debunks-the-theory-that-it-was-a-stealth-marketing-scheme
- https://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/meme-history-surprised-pikachu