Cuca the Alligator

Submission 34,128

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

About

Cuca is an anthropomorphic alligator villain in the early 2000s Brazilian children's television show Sitio do Picapau Amarelo. In mid June 2017, animated GIFs of the alligator were widely circulated on Twitter, along with captioned jokes written from the perspective of the character, with many claiming she had overtaken The Babadook as the new "gay icon."

Origin

From 2001 to 2006, the children's show Sitio do Picapau Amarelo aired in Brazil, which featured the character Cuca as a witch with the body of an alligator. On June 10th, 2017, a user on the Brazilian Pandlr Forums^[8] posted several GIFs featuring the character (shown below).

Spread

On June 15th, 2017, Twitter user @MrVicks posted a GIF of the character along with lyrics from the 2010 hip-hop song "Check It Out" performed by American rappers will.i.am and Nicki Minaj (shown below).

"Now bitch you know I ain't one to gossip so you didn't hear this from me let's be clear on THAT" pic.twitter.com/Xl2x3D0hft
— Demi Lobotomy (@shookshack) June 16, 2017

That day, other Twitter users began tweeting GIFs of the character along with humorous mock quotes, depicting the witch as sassy and confident (shown below, middle, left). Meanwhile, others began referring to the character as a new "gay icon" (shown below, right).

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the Cuca GIFs, including Refinery 29,^[1] PopCrush,^[2] Teen Vogue,^[3] PaperMag,^[4] CollegeCandy^[5] and BuzzFeed.^[6] On June 17th, Redditor MikeFiuns submitted a photograph of the character to /r/MemeEconomy,^[7] claiming the meme was "very normie friendly" and suggesting that meme investors avoid the meme.