Arthur's Headphones

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Part of a series on Arthur. [View Related Entries]

About

Arthur's Headphones refers to an image of Arthur from the animated series Arthur wearing headphones like a human being would. The image became notable as people realized that the headphones were not covering his ears at all, as they are on the top of his head. It grew into a reaction image used in reference to situations where one is not listening to something.

Origin

The image comes from the season 17 episode of Arthur, “Binky’s Music Madness," which first aired in Australia on May 2, 2013.^[1] The scene was first uploaded to YouTube on May 8, 2014. It is the same scene that sparked the Binky Listens To meme.

On June 21st, 2016, Twitter user @javeauriel^[2] uploaded the image and captioned it "EXPLAIN THIS," gaining over 20,000 retweets and 25,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

On June 28th, Buzzfeed^[3] covered the spread of the tweet as well as the penchant for Arthur's characters to wear headphones without covering their actual ears. Around the same time, the picture began to grow into a reaction image paired with applicable captions. On June 27th, the picture with the caption "when ur pretending to listen to music but u really listening to people talk shit" was uploaded to Imgur ^[4] (shown below, left). On July 28th, Twitter user @jacobryanortiz^[5] posted the picture paired with the caption "Yeah bro I'll listen to your mixtape just shoot that soundcloud link" and gained over 960 retweets and 1,100 likes (shown below, right).

Over the course of the following year, the image spread with various jokes and in popular posts. On March 1st, 2017, it was uploaded to /r/funny^[6] where it gained over 6,500 points. On April 23rd, 2017, it was uploaded to /r/hmmm^[7] and gained over 10,000 points. Some popular captions paired with the image include "me trying to listen to my own advice," which was tweeted by @FreddyAmazin^[8] on April 18th, gaining 5,600 retweets (shown below, left), and a dig at Ubisoft's relationship with its fans that was posted to /r/pcmasterrace^[9] and gained over 23,000 points (shown below, right).