Surprised Patrick

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About

Surprised Patrick is a photoshop meme in which a cut out of the SpongeBob Squarepants character Patrick Star from the animated television series is superimposed onto different base images of various humorous contexts. In the images, Patrick always appears to be in a state of shock or bewilderment with his mouth agape.

Origin

In a scene from the 2004 animated adventure comedy film The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie, the protagonist SpongeBob and his friend Patrick Star are shown sitting next to a ledge wearing exasperated expressions after losing their Patty Mobile car in an abyss. On January 29th, 2008, an animated GIF of the scene was submitted to the graphics website Glitter-Graphics^[14] (shown below).

Spread

On January 3rd, 2010, YouTuber chadfaceproductions uploaded a video featuring a slideshow of Patrick wearing the shocked expression edited with several different image filters (shown below, left). Within three years, the video received over 1,400 views and 7 comments. On September 5th, YouTuber K1ngC0rND0G uploaded a video of Patrick reacting to the song "Baby" by Justin Bieber (shown below, right), gaining upwards of 50,000 views and 100 comments in the following three years.

On October 23rd, 2011, Tumblr user Lexcali^[9] published a post listing the "10 best SpongeBob facial expressions," ranking the "shocked Patrick" face at number six. For the remainder of 2011 to 2013, there were no known postings of the Patrick Star screen capture. On February 9th, 2013, Redditor SeannyOC submitted an animated GIF of the surprised-looking Patrick appearing inside of a chocolate dessert (shown below) to the /r/pictureswithpatrick subreddit.^[2] Within one month, the post accumulated more than 1,100 up votes and 15 comments.

On March 10th, the same GIF was reblogged on the Cheezburger site Memebase,^[10] where it received over 700 up votes and 100 reposts in the following three weeks. On March 27th, the Surprised Patrick Twitter^[3] feed was created, which garnered upwards of 19,000 followers within 48 hours. The same day, notable examples from the series were posted on the viral content site BuzzFeed^[11] and a Facebook fan page^[15] was created, gaining nearly 2,000 likes as of July 2013. On March 28th, the "Surprised Patrick" Tumblr^[4] blog was launched and the Internet news blog UpRoxx^[11] posted a slideshow of examples. On March 29th, the tech news blog Mashable^[5] published a post about the meme, crediting the /r/PicturesWithPatrick subreddit^[12] for spreading the images. In April 2013, compilations of Surprised Patrick images were featured on Queerty^[16], Funny or Die^[17], Smosh^[18] and Bite.ca.^[19]