Buzz Lightyear Outruns Spikes

Submission 19,158

Part of a series on Toy Story. [View Related Entries]

About

Buzz Lightyear Outruns Spikes is a series of object labeling image macros featuring a frame from the 1999 animated film Toy Story 2. In the image, the character Buzz Lightyear is seen running from an encroaching wall of spikes. Online, people label the spikes and Lightyear things that the meme's author hopes to avoid.

Origin

On November 24th, 1999, Pixar animation studio released the film Toy Story 2.^[1] In the film's opening sequence, the character Buzz Lightyear is shown attempting to confront his adversary Emperor Zurg. At 2:04 in the sequence, Lightyear enters a silver corridor, when Zurg activaes a wall of spikes, which chases him down the hallway. Uploaded to YouTube, ^[2] on July 9th, 2013, the clip (shown below) has received more than 19 million views as of January 2018.

On January 2nd, 2018, Redditor ^[3] Rihnola posted a shot of Buzz Lightyear outrunning the spikes in the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit. They titled the thread "Label the spikes and label buzz and you have a potential new format?" Within two days, the post (shown below) received 30,400 points (85% upvoted) and 600 comments.

Spread

Shortly after the original post made the front page of Reddit, others on the website began posting variations on the /r/dankmemes and /r/meirl (examples below, left and center, respectively).^[4]^[5]

On January 2nd, Imgur ^[6] user Storm7789 posted a variation featuring 2018 Me "outrunning" 2017 Me's Problems. The post (shown below, right) received more than 2,500 views in less than two days.