About

Donkey Kong's Sad Mine Cart Ride is a series of GIF captions from an episode of the Donkey Kong Country animated television series. It is often paired with captions describing recovering from traumatic events.

Origin

The scene comes from the eighth episode (ninth episode in the US) of the Donkey Kong Country animated television series titled Buried Treasure, which first aired on May 28th, 1997 in Canada.^[1] In the episode, Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Candy Kong, and Dixie Kong try to steal a treasure from each other that they found in an abandoned mine. However, King K. Rool manages to steal the treasure from them in the end, and it cuts to a scene where the Kongs stare sadly ahead while in the mine carts (shown below).

A GIF of the scene was made with the (shown below, left) and posted to Tumblr by 16bithoe on June 5th, 2015, with the caption "When you’re on your way home from the club but one of you almost died".^[2] The Tumblr post (shown below, right) received over 319,000 likes and over 378,000 reblogs in over seven years.

Spread

In the years since, the GIF has been used with captions describing leaving traumatic events. For example, on January 7th, 2021, iFunny^[3] user Flaky2electricnoon posted it with a caption about Jackie Kennedy driving away from the Kennedy assassination, gaining over 5,200 likes (shown below, left). On July 1st, 2022, Redditor nechdoesntno posted the GIF with a caption about watching a sex scene with your parents, gaining over 20,000 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

External References