Grandpa Simpson Walking In and Out

About

Grandpa Simpson Walking In and Out is a famous scene from the animated television series The Simpsons, in which Abraham Simpson enters a house and exits it immediately after spotting his grandson Bart. This scene was used by many people online as a basis for reaction GIFs where they illustrate people or groups backing out of tricky, toxic or alarming situations, and similarly used as an exploitable image macro in a two-panel variant.

Origin

On November 24th, 1996, The Simpsons episode "Bart After Dark" aired for the first time on TV. In this episode, Bart Simpson ends up working as a doorman in a burlesque house. The most famous scene is when his grandfather Abraham Simpson, in a single uninterrupted looping motion, goes through the entrance door, puts his hat on the hatstand, notices Bart's presence, takes his hat back and exits the door. This scene was first uploaded to YouTube on July 29th, 2012, receiving over 192,000 views, 1,100 likes and 100 comments in eight years (seen below).

The exact first use of the scene as a meme is unknown, but early examples date back to at least 2010. One such example was posted to Something Awful by user Andrew "Garbage Day" Miller on February 19th, 2010.^[1] Uploaded under a thread titled "Frog Blog," the post swapped out an image of Bart with a frog saying "get out" (shown below).

Spread

Over the years, this scene was used for various GIFs and image macros to describe situations where certain people or groups choose to back out from other various predicaments. On August 21st, 2012, an Imgur^[2] user posted an edited version of the GIF replacing Bart with one of Minecraft's Creepers. The GIF received over 14,600 views in roughly eight years (seen below, left). On May 28th, 2013, another example was posted to the imageboard Derpibooru depicting Twilight Sparkle in place of Bart, which received 210 favorites, 334 upvotes and 14 comments in roughly seven years (seen below, right).^[3]

On February 26th, 2018, YouTuber^[4] 20fadhil: Revolution uploaded a 10-hour version of the scene, receiving nearly 5,000 views, 188 likes and 66 comments in almost three years (shown below).

In December 2019, Imgflip^[5] user theexplodedninja posted another example to the site using the two-panel version of the meme, receiving over 4,400 views in one year (seen below, left). On October 10th, 2020, Redditor Jordz0_0 posted a variant to the /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[6] sub showing an example of the meme, receiving over 160 upvotes in roughly two months (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References