About

Green Man Hits Dee With a Volleyball refers to an animated GIF based on a memorable scene from the American TV sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wherein the character of Charlie Kelly, dressed in a green lycra suit as his alter ego Green Man, tries to ambush a burly man with a volleyball, but gets intimidated by his physique and instead strikes his friend Sweet Dee in the face before fleeing the scene. Online, the GIF has been used as a photoshop template to illustrate various situations in which a third-party gets scapegoated for the failure or misdeed of another.

Origin

The scene was featured in Episode 3, Season 4 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model Contest."^[8] In the episode, Charlie and Sweet Dee attempt to forcefully stage a viral video in the style of the "Grape Lady" newscast as a way to promote Paddy's Pub by going out in public as their alter ego characters, "Green Man" and "Martina Martinez," during which Charlie derails from the original plan and throws a volleyball at Sweet Dee's face before running away from the scene (shown below). The episode originally aired on September 26th, 2008.

One of the earliest known GIFs of the scene was submitted by Tumblr user IHeartFamke to the official Tumblr blog^[1] of the TV show on October 17th, 2009 (shown below).

Spread

In October 2010, Tumblr user Sirgoodtoaster posted another animated GIF instance of the scene, which was subsequently reblogged by the fan blog FuckYesItsAlwaysSunny^[2] on October 22nd. However, the GIF didn't quite take off until it began circulating on Reddit a couple years later, with the earliest known instance submitted by Redditor Acidyo^[3] on February 12th, 2012 and the first notable instance submitted by Redditor Scopolamina in a /r/funny post titled "Choose Wisely"^[4] on August 8th, 2012. Meanwhile, one of the first photoshopped variations based on the GIF was submitted to /r/gaming by Redditor Linone in a post titled "DRM for Dummies"^[5] on July 1st, 2012 (shown below).

In the following two years, the DRM edition of the animated GIF was re-submitted by various Redditors in at least 17 unique posts^[6], with many of them posted during the onset of the controversy that arose over Electronic Arts' digital rights management (DRM) restrictions implemented in the 2013 edition of SimCity. On December 21st, 2013, Redditor Psada re-submitted the original GIF to /r/unexpected in a post titled "You Dare?"^[7], garnering more than 1892 votes prior to its archival.

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References