Blinking White Guy

About

Blinking White Guy, also known as Drew Scanlon Reaction, is a GIF of Drew Scanlon, video editor and podcaster at video game website Giant Bomb. The GIF of Scanlon is used as a reaction image to express incredulity. In August 2019, a multi-panel format based on the GIF known as First Guy To gained popularity.

Origin

On December 6th, 2013, an episode of GiantBomb series "Unprofessional Fridays" premiered.^[5] In the episode, Drew Scanlon performs a "double take" reaction when Jeff Gerstmann says "farming with my hoe" while playing Starbound (shown below).

The earliest known post to use the GIF of Scanlon was a comment by Tokubetsu responding to a comic about Kanye West and Future posted to a NeoGAF thread on July 27th, 2015.^[1]

Spread

The GIF had been around for nearly two years, but it was not until February 2017 that it spiked in popularity on Twitter. On February 5th, user @eksbl^[2] used it in a tweet describing his reaction in biology class, gaining nearly 50,000 retweets.

In the coming week, several other tweets employing the GIF would gain tens of thousands of retweets, turning the GIF into a meme. Meanwhile, fan threads on GiantBomb's forums^[3] and NeoGAF^[4] discussed the transformation of Scanlon into a meme.

First Guy To

In August 2019, Blinking White Guy regained popularity in memes as a multi-panel format, also known as First Guy To, usually illustrating the passage of a short amount of time in a similar vein to some of the Surprised Joji meme (examples shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References