Skull Trumpet / Doot Doot

Confirmed 1,146,546

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About

Skull Trumpet, also known as "Doot Doot" or Jazz Skull, is an animated sprite and GIF of a skull-faced character playing the trumpet with a skeletal hand, created by a woman named Cathy Jarboe sometime in 1999. Due to its low-res, outdated quality of graphics, the image has spawned a variety of remixes and parodies in both video and GIF formats on media-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Tumblr.

Origin

Before 2023, the "Skull Trumpet" sprite was first thought to be from 3D Movie Maker, a computer graphics software program developed and released by Microsoft's "Microsoft Kids" subsidiary in 1995, and spread through various websites around the same time as when the Dancing Baby animation became popularized. However, online interest in the sprite image reached its peak after it was uploaded by YouTuber Piepuppy89 in early 2011 (shown below), though it has since been removed after the account was deactivated in August 2012.

On December 22nd, 2023, YouTuber Jeffiot^[21] uploaded a video titled "no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)" in which he long-form documents his efforts in successfully sourcing the skull trumpet, called "jazzskull.gif," to the creator Cathy Jarboe (shown below, left), who originally had the GIF uploaded to her personal website cjarboe.com^[22] in 1999. This video quickly went viral within meme circles, culminating in over 500,000 views in one week (shown below, right).

Spread

Throughout 2011, the 'SKULL TRUMPET' video was shared on a number of websites and forum communities, including the gaming forum PlayStuff^[4], the Something Awful spinoff site BYOB XP^[5], the Call of Duty board on GameFAQs^[6] and Steam's forum community.^[7] Additionally, a Facebook fan page^[2] dedicated to Skull Trumpet was created on March 8th, 2011 and that November, video remixes began appearing on YouTube.

In December 2011, the first single topic blog dedicated to Skull Trumpet was created on Tumblr.^[8] On July 11th, 2012, the Tumblr blog Skull-Trumpet^[10] was launched with a back up archive of all the videos from Piepuppy89's YouTube channel. Although PiePuppy89's YouTube account was closed during the first week of August of 2012^[11], a handful of YouTubers uploaded mirrors of the original videos that were hosted on the channel prior to its deactivation, while Tumblr bloggers began sharing fan art and videos under the "#Skull Trumpet" tag.^[1]

Doot Doot

"Doot Doot" is the onomatopoeia for the sound of the trumpet played at the end of the original "Skull Trumpet" video.
According to Urban Dictionary^[15], the term initially gained traction on Tumblr^[19] as a subtle reference to the "Skull Trumpet" meme, with its earliest known iteration dating back to a fan art post submitted by Tumblr user Preo*Prix^[21] on May 11th, 2014. From there, the onomatopoeia quickly grew into a popular synonym for "Skull Trumpet" across other media-sharing platforms, including YouTube, 4chan and Reddit.

On July 5th, 2014, Redditor RobosapienLXIV created the subreddit /r/ledootgeneration^[13], as a parody of another popular subreddit community /r/LeWrongGeneration, which quickly became an unofficial hub for the fans of the "Skull Trumpet" image macros and photoshopped parodies. On October 31st, Gawker^[14] ran an article titled "In Praise of Skull Trumpet, the Internet's Spookiest Meme" spotlighting the longevity of its lifespan since its beginning in 2011.