Weegee

Confirmed 735,939

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

Featured Episode

About

Weegee is a photoshop meme based on the avatar of Luigi found in the DOS version of the educational video game Mario Is Missing! Placing Weegee in an image creates awkward situations and a sense of discomfort. He is also often a subject of facebombs, as his stare will turn anyone into a replica of himself.

Origin

Weegee is based on a playable character in the DOS game Mario is Missing^[1], released by Software Toolworks in 1992. It was the only game to feature Luigi as a starring character until 2001's Luigi's Mansion. A version of this original game is currently available to play on Nintendo8.^[2]

The character's awkward posture and unwavering stare was first pointed out by a user named MonkeyInCloset on LUElinks forums, now known as End of the Internet^[3], on August 11th, 2007. He also posted a vectorized version that would eventually become the exploitable that day.

The name "Weegee," is an Engrish mistranslation of Luigi's name due to the lack of equivalent character for pronouncing the alphabet letter "L" in Japanese. One of the earliest instances of the exploitable appearing with this name was in a thread on 4chan's /b/ (random) forum on December 13th, 2007^[4].

Spread

4chan creater Moot declared Weegee his favorite 4chan meme in both the December 13th, 2007 thread^[6] and in a 2008 interview^[5] at ROFLCon. After that original thread, several more threads with Weegee across different 4chan boards were archived.^[7]

Weegee spread through deviantArt^[9], Newgrounds in both the portal^[10] and the forums^[11], and personal blogs^[8] in 2008. The next year, Weegee appeared on FunnyJunk^[12] and in a short video^[13] hosted on MIT's Scratch site. He even got in the fangame Super Smash Bros. Crusade^[15] as a joke character.

Notable Examples

Photos

Video

[This video has been removed]

Search Interest

Search interest for Weegee can be hard to gauge since it is also the pseudonym of the American photographer Arthur Fellig.^[14] When paired with the word meme, search for Weegee peaked in September 2008 before dropping off the radar for most of the next year. Search volume became significant again in October 2009 and has been on the upswing in 2011.