Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

I have no idea how it started, but even though Cars came out in 2006, Lightning McQueen's catchphrase "Ka-Chow" appears to have taken off as an ironic meme last month according to Google Trends (though the phrase with a hyphen reached a smaller peak in 2013 for some reason).

[direct use of the Google Trends embed code is no longer allowed]

A notable derivative is this "Croc-chow" image of a pair of Crocs, especially in this context in which someone was removed from a group chat.

This seems like it might have come from or been popularized by the me_irl subreddit, but I wouldn't know because I don't browse it.

This is the Google Trends graph I tried to embed, but it isn't showing up.

I can at least get how the Shark-boy and Lava-girl "I ded Nawt!" somewhat took off with this, but this just appears to have come out of no where. Memes are of a sporadic nature.