About

Daft Punk's "Epilogue" refers to a viral video posted by the French electronic duo Daft Punk in February 2021 to announce their disbandment. The video uses final scenes from Daft Punk's 2006 film Electroma. In late February 2021, the video gained virality as source material for humorous edits in memes where it was used as an exploitable.

Origin

On February 22nd, 2021, French electronic duo Daft Punk uploaded an eight-minute video titled "Daft Punk – Epilogue" to their YouTube^[1] channel, indicating that the band split up. The clip contained final scenes from Daft Punk's 2006 film Electroma^[2] in which the silver robot slows down and stops behind the gold robot, takes off his jacket and reveals a self-destructive switch to him. Gold robot pulls the switch, with the silver robot then walking away and exploding (shown below). The video accumulated nearly 22 million views in four days. On the same day, publicist Kathryn Frazier^[3] confirmed that the band officially split up.

Spread

In the following days, the video gained popularity as source material for edits among content creators on YouTube and Instagram. On February 22nd, YouTuber^[4] Pink Boi posted the earliest found edit of the video, a Macaroni With the Chicken Strips meme, that gained over 62,000 views in four days (shown below).

On February 23rd, YouTuber The House of the Dank posted several edits of the video. A "Change the World, My Final Message" meme posted by the YouTuber on that day received over 1.3 million views in three days (shown below, left).^[5] Also that day, a Joker edit accumulated over 200,000 views in the same period of time (shown below, right).^[6]

In the following days, more viral edits of the video were posted on social media platforms, primarily on YouTube and Instagram.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References