About

Harry and Ron Screaming, also known as Harry and Ron's Backseat or X Chasing Harry Potter, is an exploitable image macro taken from a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The image has been used in a comic context online for years, but its use as an object-labeling meme became more formalized and frequent after a 2019 derivative featuring the 2020 film version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Since then, the format has been used to show situations where one or more entities are fearful and powerless when faced with a separate entity.

Origin

The original image of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley yelling originates from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was released on November 15th, 2002. The image comes from a scene where the two have missed the train to Hogwarts, and steal Ron's father's magical flying car to drive it to school. The scene in the film (shown below, with the source of the meme at 45 seconds) features Harry and Ron realizing they are flying directly in front of the train.

The image was widely used online throughout the 2000s and 2010s, following the film's home media release, largely as a reaction image. The example below featuring Justin Bieber (created by an unknown source in 2010 or before) shows the image's use as an early meme format.

Sonic Derivative

The image found wider use after a photoshopped version of the scene, which showed Harry and Ron driving away from a leaked image of Sonic the Hedgehog's original live-action film design. This version was created by Redditor Jaxon__Lee, who posted a blank template to /r/memetemplatesofficial^[1] on March 12th, 2019. Hours after the template was posted, Redditor PFC-Snowflake^[2] created the first captioned meme using it (seen below). The image received over 4,500 upvotes from /r/memes in six months.

Spread

On March 22nd, 2019, Imgur^[3] user Turboners posted an example of the Sonic derivative about J.K. Rowling's tweets. The image (seen below) gained over 3,000 upvotes in two years and was reposted on numerous websites afterward.

On October 22nd, 2020, Redditor zakuria44^[4] created a derivative of the meme featuring Harry and Ron being chased by Tom (of Tom and Jerry), in an image from the cartoon "Kitty Foiled."^[5] The template received over 6,000 upvotes in six months on /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial, and an example of the meme (shown below) by Redditor ELIte3907 received over 28,000 upvotes in six months on /r/dankmemes.^[6]

Various Examples

Templates

Original

Sonic

Tom

Search Interest

External References