Poorly Prepared Polar Bear

Submission 30,338

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Poorly Prepared Polar Bear is an advice animal image macro series featuring a picture of a polar bear in a helmet made out of a garbage pail and various captions characterizing the bear as an absent-minded individual. Upon its introduction via 9GAG in late October 2016, the advice animal character spawned a handful of jokes illustrating humorous situations for which the bear is hopelessly unprepared.

Origin

The still image of the polar bear comes from a video posted by Mmovies21^[1] on August 30th, 2015 that finds a polar bear playing with the bucket on its head. Buzzfeed^[2] covered the video on September 24th, 2015.

On October 29th, 2016, screenshots of the story was tweeted by @RelatableQuote^[3] and gained over 8,000 retweets in two days. The following day, 9GAG user stroop_wafel posted it as an Advice Animal with the caption "Brings a Knife To a Gun Fight."^[4] The post gained 22,155 points in one day.

Spread

Following stroop_wafel's post, Poorly Prepared Polar Bear became a popular trend on 9GAG, as users debated the quality of the meme and what it should be called. Many users claimed the meme was forced, ^[5] while others debated if it should be called "Noob Bear" or "Bearly Prepared Bear."^[6]