About

Barbie and Ken Mugshot Redraws is an exploitable meme format taken from a trailer for the 2023 live-action Barbie movie. The meme was popularized on Twitter and Tumblr following the trailer's release in late May 2023, in which artists redraw Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as different characters, often using best friend characters from pop culture media like video games or anime.

Origin

The meme comes from the trailer from the 2023 film Barbie, which was posted to YouTube by Warner Bros. Pictures on May 25th, 2023.^[1] In the trailer, Barbie and Ken go to the "Real World." Barbie punches a man in the face after he slaps her butt, and both she and Ken are taken to jail where they get their mugshots taken (scene shown below).

Screencaps of the mugshots were taken from the trailer and posted to Twitter by kojironanjo with the text "babe wake up. a new draw your ship prompt just dropped."^[2] The tweet (shown below) received over 212,000 likes, 34,000 retweets and 22,000 quote retweets in roughly two days.

Spread

On May 26th, 2023, Twitter artist @Kocinhsalak^[3] uploaded a variation of the Barbie and Ken mugshot that used the characters Ghost from Modern Warfare 2 and Soap, earning over 5,000 likes in two days and showing that game characters are easy to use for the format (shown below).

On May 27th, 2023, the Twitter artist @Junnixw_^[4] used the template to draw the characters Xiao and Venti from Genshin Impact while giving them outfits that were similar to Barbie and Ken, earning over 12,000 likes in one day (shown below).

Templates

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References