The Surprised or Shocked Pikachu meme has been floating around for a while now, but how did the viral hit meme get started in the first place?
Depicting a surprised-looking, off-model Pikachu from the early days of the Pokémon anime, the Shocked Pikachu meme has been around for years at this point, but just how did this meme catch on in the first place?
The Shocked Pikachu meme got its start on Tumblr in September 2018, according to KnowYourMeme. It spread quickly, hitting Facebook and Reddit not long after, and then began making appearances on Twitter. The image is always accompanied by text structured in a very particular way; typically, there's a line of dialog from the poster, stating some action that should have an obvious outcome. The poster then follows through on this action, and the event ends in a predictable way. Shocked Pikachu is then shown as the reaction to the obvious, taking advantage of Pikachu's off-model appearance to convey surprise (but not too surprised; the outcome was obvious, after all).
The image of Pikachu is taken from season 1, episode 10 of the Pokémon anime, in the episode entitled "Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village." This is, as the title suggests, the episode in which Ash catches Bulbasaur. The scene occurs about 3 minutes and 45 seconds into the episode. Ash and Misty had been trying to battle and capture a wild Oddish, but a wild Bulbasaur appeared and interrupted the fight. Bulbasaur immediately takes out Misty's Starmie, and then Ash sends out his Butterfree to use sleep powder. Bulbasaur breathes in and then blows all the sleep powder back at Butterfree, putting it to sleep with its own attack. The episode then cuts to the group reacting to this turn of events, with Pikachu visible in the bottom right corner of the screen, making the face from the meme. Obviously, within the context of the episode, Pikachu is meant to be experiencing genuine surprise, but due to being out of focus in the shot, his animation wasn't given as much attention, creating the iconic meme face.
Shocked Pikachu's Popularity
Pokemon: The frame of the original anime from which Shocked Pikachu was first taken.
The meme caught on largely because Pikachu's expression perfectly captures that "I shouldn't be surprised, but I am" feeling that one gets when a likely but unwanted outcome occurs. It's particularly ironic since the circumstances in the episode are quite surprising; there's no reason for any of them to expect Bulbasaur to be capable of reflecting sleep powder. Since the Pikachu face makes up such a small part of the frame, it's usually pretty low resolution, a fact that often helps the meme to land. Still, it's sometimes replaced by a vectorized redraw of the scene, which occasionally edits out Brock's legs as seen in the background of the original frame. The meme is also often stretched, making Pikachu's face wider and his ears angled lower, which also enhances the comedic value of the image. Because of the meme's specificity and Pikachu's almost universal recognizability, it rapidly grew popular and has more or less stayed that way, even 4 years later.
The Shocked Pikachu meme probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it doesn't hurt to know the Pokémon meme's origins and how to use it properly.
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