This is the latest installment of “See the Meaning,” which is a feature where I provide the context behind notable comic-related memes.
This one is a bit tricky, as the genesis of this meme didn’t specifically come from a comic, but it was coined by a cartoonist and the cartoonist later did a comic about it, so I’m willing to let it slide (in part…okay, in LARGE part because I really want to talk about milkshake duck).
Recently, a Los Angeles writer named Jensen Karp caught the attention of the online world when he noted that, while opening a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, he discovered two shrimp tails inside the box. That, in and of itself, would be interesting, but what made the story stand out more was that when Karp reported it to General Mills (the makers of Cinnamon Toast Crunch), a company representative tried to claim that the shrimp tails were actually just “accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended” and that “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp.” Karp then began to drag the company on Twitter over what he stated was, he believed, their attempts to “gaslight him” into believing that the shrimp tails were simply accumulated sugar and not, you know, shrimp tails.
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The story then got even more fascinating to the online world when, during the reporting on the story in newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, it was revealed that Karp was married to Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga, the main love interest of Ben Savage’s main character, Cory Matthews, on the 1990s hit teen sitcom, Boy Meets World (Fishel, amusingly, was originally cast in a whole other role on the series, which I wrote about a ways back). So a common thing tweeted the other day was “Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp guy is married to Topanga?!?” a seemingly nonsensical sentence that made sense to way more people than it should. Good times were had by all (well, maybe not General Mills’ social media managers, at least).
Then, of course, now that Karp (who people also marveled at the fact that he was once a burgeoning rap star by the name of Hot Karl) was EVERYWHERE, we soon discovered the negative side of Karp’s life, as various people who had bad experiences with Karp over the years came forward with their takes on his new internet fame. Here’s a helpful tweet collecting most (all?) of them…
You might notice that the tweet referenced that Karp was “milkshake duck’d.” So, what does that mean, exactly?
The idea behind it is a bit of a universal concept, but the specific inciting situation appears to be the “Chewbacca Mask Lady.” Back in May of 2016, Candace Payne stopped off at a department store and purchased an electronic Chewbacca mask. She decided to put the mask on in the car and then video record herself live on Facebook’s then-new Facebook Live feature and Payne laughing away as the mask goes off was so delightful that the video became a sensation. A month later, though, with Payne now having received over $400,000 worth of free stuff, people, as they are wont to do, began to turn on her a bit.
Enter cartoonist Pixelated Boat, the brilliantly hilarious cartoonist/humorist.
In June of 2016, Pixelated Boat tweeted about how often things that delight us online often turn out to have a darker side to them…
The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) June 12, 2016
He explained the origins to Esquire back in 2017, “I can’t remember, exactly, but my best guess now is it was probably the Chewbacca Mom. It was a thing that had happened a few times that seemed to be a trend. I was trying to come up with a joke that would sum it up because I hadn’t seen that joke done before, so I was trying to come up with the most absurd version of that that I could.”
It’s an excellent observation. The term began to be referenced a lot throughout 2017 (Esquire did the article on it in June), but it REALLY became part of the cultural conversation in late 2017, following a story about a bullied boy in Tennessee whose mother put a video online of the boy crying over the bullying. Everyone covered it (including us here at CBR) as Avenger star Chris Evans invited the boy to the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War. However, a little deeper digging showed that the little boy’s mother was more than a bit problematic in her online history.
So that story brought the earlier usage of “Milkshake Duck” to a bigger level, as it was the perfect example of it all. On one day, everyone is “awwww”ing over the celebrities reaching out to a bullied boy and then the next day, everyone is “yikes”ing over his mother’s past behavior online. The sudden shift was striking and it has led to people being really prepared for this stuff nowadays, as any time there is a fun story out there, people are more and more prepared for the story to be a “milkshake duck” reveal.
Pixelated Boat, for his part, did a hilarious comic for The Nib in late 2017 about the rise and fall of Milkshake Duck…
When Esquire asked Pixelated Boat whether he felt that the constant “milkshake duck” phenomenon was a bad thing, he explained, “It seems so inevitable that it’s not even worth making a value judgment on. It’s an unavoidable product of internet culture. It’s probably going to happen to be people where there will be a backlash and they deserve it and with some there will be a backlash and they don’t deserve it. It probably says something horrible about society, but… I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to say, ‘This is a really terrible thing that’s happening it shouldn’t be like this.’ It was more an observation that this thing is happening now and it will probably keep happening forever.”
That sure does seem to be the case.
I’m sure that there are plenty of other great examples comic-related memes (most of them out of context panels that I can give the context to), so feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com if you have ideas for future installments of See the Meaning!
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