Find The Panda

Submission 20,823

About

Find the Panda is a series of illustrative puzzles in which the viewer is challenged to locate a panda bear among a crowd of uniform looking characters in the vein of the popular children's book series Where's Wally.

Origin

On December 16th, 2015, Hungarian artist Gergely Dudás^[9] (also known as Dudolf) shared an illustrated puzzle in which a panda bear is inconspicuously camouflaged in a crowd of homogenous snowmen on Facebook, challenging the viewers to locate the hidden panda (shown below).

Within the first week, the illustration went viral on Facebook after garnering more than 400,000 likes and 60,000 shares, subsequently getting picked up by several viral media blogs and news sites like BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and The Independent. By the end of the second week, Dudás' post had garnered more than 109,000 likes,183,255 shares and 37,000 comments.

Spread

On December 20th, Dudás shared another cartoon illustration with a cat hiding in a sea of owls on his Facebook page, which made another viral splash with over 20,000 likes, 19,400 shares and 5,500 comments accumulated within the first week (shown below).

Meanwhile on Reddit and Imgur, some users began uploading a handful of similarly illustrated puzzles inspired by Dudás' "Find the Panda" challenge, incorporating a variety of fictional characters from popular media franchises and pop culture caricatures in general (see examples).

Heightchew's Real Life Edition

On December 28th, Louisville, Kentucky resident Tracy Lynn Heightchew shared a sepia-colored photograph on Facebook from the late 1970s, which depicts a crowd of children holding a variety of stuffed animals at a Junior Achievers National Conference in Bloomington, Indiana (shown below). Heightchew's photographic edition of the viral Facebook puzzle meme also drew significant attention from the news media, including The Huffington Post, Daily Mail and Metro, among many others.