I Understood That Reference

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About

"I Understood That Reference" is an expression typically used in online forums and comments as an affirmative acknowledgement of a pop culture reference or technical jargon said by another. The quote was originally said by Captain America in the 2012 Marvel superhero action film The Avengers.

Origin

In the film The Avengers, the quote appears in a scene wherein S.H.I.E.L.D operative Nick Fury (portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson) rhetorically asks his team how the villain Loki was able to mind control two of his agents as if they were the winged monkeys from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. While most other superheroes are unable to process the dated pop culture reference, Captain America (portrayed by Chris Evans), whose canonical setting overlaps with the time period when the film was originally releases, smugly responds by saying that he "understood that reference".

Nick Fury: "I'd like to know how Loki was able to use [the Tesseract] to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys."

Captain America: "I understood that reference."

The earliest known fan art tribute to the quote was submitted by Redditor GeneralBacon in a /r/funny post^[11] titled "that awesome moment when" on May 22nd, 2014. The post received more than 1,000 points in aggregate prior to its archival.

Spread

On May 23rd, Redditor GeneralBacon's post was highlighted on We Know Memes.^[5] In the months following the home media release of The Avengers in September 2012, Captain America's response continued to gained online traction among the fans as a memorable scene exemplifying the comedic nature of the film. On December 18th, 2012, Imgur user Jpdahn posted the first animated GIF instance^[1] of the quote, garnering over 10 million views in just over two years.

Throughout 2013, the GIF became widely adopted as a reaction image when acknowledging a specific pop culture or internet meme reference by commenters in various online communities, including Reddit^[10], Imgur^[8], Tumblr^[3] and Pinterest.^[4]