Patrick Star's Wallet

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Part of a series on SpongeBob SquarePants. [View Related Entries]

About

Patrick Star Wallet refers to a scene from Spongebob Squarepants in which the villain Man Ray attempts to teach a lesson about morality to Patrick Star. The scene has been parodied and turned into an exploitable in which the characters and dialogue are altered.

Origin

On September 14th, 2001, the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III" premiered in the United States.^[1] In the episode, Man Ray roleplays giving back Patrick's lost wallet. However, Patrick denies that the wallet is his despite Man Ray's logical reasoning, angering him (shown below).

An image macro of the scene appeared online in the mid-2010s. An example was posted on Imgur on July 21st, 2013,^[2] though the image had been circulating online prior.

Spread

The image began to grow into an exploitable in the summer of 2016. On August 1st, one of the earliest examples was posted to Imgur, ^[3] in which Patrick is represented as an Xbox and Man Ray is represented as a gamer. The post has been viewed over 40,000 times (shown below).

The exploitables soon adopted a political tone, as people satirized their frustrations with opposing viewpoints by representing the opposing viewpoint as Patrick. For example, a popular edit satirizing Not My President Democrats has Patrick agreeing to all the conditions that would make Donald Trump one's president, then staunchly denying that Trump is his president^[4] (shown below, top). From the other side, a GIF of the scene in which Patrick represents the Alt-Right gained over 139,000 views on Imgur (shown below, bottom).^[5]
Political edits have made up the majority of the edits, though there have been examples featuring different topics, particularly video games.