Angry Splash Mountain Lady

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About

Angry Splash Mountain Lady is a photoshop meme based on a souvenir photograph of a woman frowning with her arms crossed while sitting alone on the Splash Mountain ride at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Since its upload to Imgur in March 2016, the photograph has gone viral on Reddit and spawned a series of photoshopped parodies.

Origin

On March 2nd, 2016, Imgur^[1] user Blackthorne519 submitted a souvenir photograph of his wife looking dour with her arms crossed on the Splash Mountain ride at Disney World, with the caption reading "Wife got a little perturbed that I wouldn't accompany her on the ride." That same day, he uploaded the image to Reddit's in a /r/funny^[2] post titled "I wouldn't go on Splash Mountain with her." In the next ten days, the image garnered over 3.1 million views on Imgur and more than 5,000 upvotes on Reddit.

Spread

Also on March 2nd, Redditor Laurenz1337 crossposted the original image from /r/funny to /r/photoshopbattles^[3] in a post titled "PsBattle: Unamused woman in splash ride." With the viral reception of the image on Reddit's photoshopping community came dozens of responses in the comments section of the post, including several mash-ups with other well-known grumpy-looking characters and subjects that have gone viral, such as Grumpy Cat, Mona Lisa, Sad Keanu and the wife of the farmer in the classic painting American Gothic, among many other instances.

News Media Coverage

By March 4th, numerous viral media blogs had picked up on the Imgur post, including Distractify^[12], Mashable^[13], Uproxx^[9] and The Daily Dot^[14] and BuzzFeed^[15], as well as over a dozen of additional articles published by both local and U.S. national news outlets like Syracuse.com^[16], CNYCentral^[4], ABC News^[6], USA Today^[7] and The Daily Mail^[17] throughout the first week of March 2016.

Identity

During this time, the woman depicted in the photo, as well as her husband who uploaded the photograph online, were identified as Jordan and Steven Alexander, a married couple from Syracuse, New York. According to various interviews, Jordan admittedly got upset after her husband bailed out of going on Splash Mountain together, her favorite ride at Disney World, and decided to pose for the grumpiest photograph of her life.

"It was a long day. I had Bronchitis, I had a crying baby, and my husband informed me that he doesn't have it in him to ride my favorite ride. […] I kind of practiced it the whole way. And, by the time we got to the last drop I didn't know where the camera was and so I just guessed and looked over and took the picture and that was that."

Upon seeing the souvenir photograph of his wife, Steven Alexander said he couldn't help but share the priceless image online.

"When she first showed me the photo, I just lost it. How could you not? I was like, did you coordinate this with them? Because it was so perfect."

Various Examples

Other notable examples of the photoshop meme include the 2016 United States Presidential Candidates edition, a Facebombed parody and a Creepy John Travolta mashup, as well as a few Fixed That For You (FTFY) renditions in which she is shown smiling, pumping her fist in excitement and sporting a pair of post-hangover sunglasses (shown below).