Roku City

Submission 37,563

About

Roku City refers to a screensaver on Roku smart TV devices and televisions that shows a pink, blue and purple cityscape replete with various film references. As Roku's products became more prevalent in the late 2010s and early 2020s, exploitable memes and commentary about the viral screensaver began to emerge in 2021.

Origin

Roku introduced its "Roku City Stroll: Movie Magic" screensaver on May 2nd, 2018 (shown below). The screensaver pans across a diverse city skyline that is peppered with movie references in a magenta, blue and purple color palette.

The screensaver was widely well-received online, as comments on the video praise the atmosphere and creativity of the screensaver.^[1] On May 7th, 2018, a deleted Redditor posted a tally of all the film references they discovered in the screensaver thus far.^[2]

Spread

Memes and commentary about Roku City began appearing more commonly in 2021. On February 28th, 2021, Kotaku^[7] posted an article praising the screensaver. On April 24th, 2021, Redditor foxbrb posted a What If We Kissed meme in /r/okbuddyretard,^[3] gaining over 1,100 points in roughly nine months (shown below, left). On August 5th, Twitter user @Humanstein^[4] posted an I Shoulda Never Smoke That Shit parody featuring Roku City, gaining over 50 retweets and 200 likes in five months (shown below, right).

Media outlets began posting jokey commentary about Roku City in summer 2021. For example, on August 18th, Gawker^[5] made a post joking about what life is like there. In September 2021, satire site Flexx^[6] posted a satirical article about how Roku City got gentrified.

Roku City continued appearing in new meme templates throughout the rest of the year and into 2022. For example, on January 3rd, 2022, Twitter user @orchidcamp^[8] posted an Oh Shit I Took Both Pills meme, gaining over 18,000 retweets and 184,000 likes in one week (shown below, left). On January 10th, user @pinksad^[9] posted a Kramer, What's Going On In There meme featuring Roku City, gaining over 90 retweets and 1,300 likes in less than 24 hours (shown below, right).