We Gotta Save This Dog Gone Earth / No Time for Dat Goku

Submission 2,917

Part of a series on Exploitables. [View Related Entries]

About

We Gotta Save This Dog Gone Earth or No Time for Dat Goku is an exploitable DM conversation between a man with a Goku profile picture named Songoku Ssj and a man named Joey Gilligan Griffin in which Griffin tells Goku they have to save the "dog gone earth," Goku asks him to speak Spanish and he responds, "no time for dat Goku." The original meme was posted to Tumblr in 2015 and gained viral spread over the following years, inspiring photoshops and recaption edits depicting each speaker as a different character.

Origin

Sometime in 2014, now-deactivated Tumblr^[1] user TheJory posted a screenshot of a DM conversation depicting a man named Songoku Ssj with a Goku profile picture talking with a man named Joey Gilligan Griffin. Griffin writes, "We gotta save this dog gone earth." Goku replies, "Saven ablar espanol?," which translates as Goku asking if Griffin speaks Spanish. Griffin responds, "No time for dat Goku." The post gained over 141,370 notes in nine years and was uploaded to Know Your Meme^[2] on October 11th, 2015, by MeeM, marking the first archive of the post.

The earliest known edit of the meme was posted to X^[3] by user @RottingVale on June 15th, 2018, and replaces the chat profile pictures with Splatoon characters, garnering over 190 likes in five years.

Spread

The original meme gained significant spread on Instagram^[4]^[5] starting in 2019, also becoming the further subject of photoshops. On July 27th, 2020, Redditor u/Trilllenium posted a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure version of the meme to /r/shitpostcrusaders,^[6] garnering over 10,000 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). On March 6th, 2021, Tumblr^[7] user mokubaskaiba posted a Yu-Gi-Oh version of the meme, garnering over 15,000 notes in two years (shown below, right).

On January 12th, 2023, the Facebook^[8] page Videogame screenshots out of context posted a Pokemon version of the meme, garnering over 3,000 reactions and 700 shares in 10 months. On October 12th, X^[9] user @SonicCDMoments posted a Sonic the Hedgehog version that gained over 5,000 likes in a month (shown below).

On October 13th, 2023, X^[10] user @xenomorph247 posted an Oppenheimer version of the meme that gained over 1,900 likes in a month (shown below, left). On October 15th, Instagram^[11] user coolandfuntimes posted a version of the meme featuring Peanuts characters Snoopy and Woodstock, garnering over 35,000 likes in a similar span of time (shown below, right).