Aladdin Oracle

About

Aladdin Oracle, also known as Oracle Question, is an exploitable image macro depicting animated characters Jasmine and Aladdin speaking with the Oracle from the 1996 Disney movie Aladdin and the King of Thieves. The meme is typically used to pose unanswerable questions to various subjects and is also sometimes used in conjunction with unexplainable rules within a website or platform that no one knows the exact origin of.

Origin

The original clip that the meme is pulled from is seen during Aladdin and the King of Thieves, released on August 13th, 1996, specifically the scene where Aladdin and Jasmine visit the Oracle to ask about the secret of who his father really is. During the scene (featured below in a dubbed version), the two protagonists of the film summon the Oracle near a balcony of the tower and she appears in the sky above them. The Oracle explains that she can answer any question, but can only give one answer. He then asks where his father is and she divulges the answer, but at no point during the scene does she actually say the line from the meme, “Any question but that.”

The exact origin of the meme is unknown, but it is seen being used as early as 2017. One such example comes from a 9GAG^[1] post on October 5th, 2017, to the Ask 9GAG section. This variant was posted under the title “I just can't imagine having no voice in my head” and asks the question, “If a person is born deaf, what language does he think in?” The upload (shown below) received 415 points and 34 comments.

Spread

In the following months, the format was used on 9GAG and then spread elsewhere online as users began creating different versions with new questions. On December 27th, 2017, another 9GAG^[2] user uploaded a version posing the question “Does a straw have one or two holes?” This variant (seen below) received over 11,000 points and 358 comments.

Redditor^[3] King Of Brains posted a meme to the r/dankmemes sub on January 18th, 2018, with the title “Too yeet, or too yote?” asking for the proper past tense of the term YEET. The post (seen below) received over 2,400 upvotes and 39 comments.

On Facebook,^[4] the page Anti Memes used the format to create an anti-meme asking the question “That?” and was liked 47 times and shared another 4 times (shown below).

On April 2nd, 2018, Twitter^[5] user I Have A Meme tweeted another variant surrounding the mystery behind the word “building” being used to describe a completed structure. The tweet (seen below) received 10 retweets and 30 likes.

The format saw an uptick in usage on Reddit around early 2020 when users started posting several new versions of the meme alongside additional questions. Redditor^[6] Bala537 posted a particularly notable example on March 10th, 2020, asking how karma is calculated on the platform. The meme (shown below) received over 90,000 upvotes, dozens of Reddit awards and over 1,200 comments.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References